W3C - Corporations Offering Products on the market

This subject caused a heated discussion in the past days and the "problem" is based on a misunderstanding.

Corporations production numbers show on the corporation page.
The amount produced is in virtually all corporation not a whole number.

When corporations offer products on the market, they offer a whole number of products, no fractions.

Cargo shuttles are produced at a rate of 0.3 or 0.4 each month and are offered on the market only when the corporation accumulated 1 complete cargo shuttle.
it never tries to sell 0.4 cargo shuttles.

The number of available products in the corporations shows as a whole number.
It is a rounded number.

Many times, when you look into any corporation, it might have one product that was not offered on the market.
The true number remaining unoffered is less than one.

It is larger than 0.5 and smaller than 1.0
it is rounded up and shows as 1

If the remaining fraction is smaller than 0.5, it is rounded down and shows as 0. There are 0 remaining products.

All this of course if the corporation does not have manual reservations and contracts. These could result in more products that are not offered on the market.

This means that in about 50% of all corporations, there might be 1 product remaining that was not offered on the market.

This is true for all types of corporations and all products, large and small.

The number, provided there are no manual reservations of products and no contracts, will never be larger than one because the corporations offer all their products on the market, except for a remaining fraction.

I must say I always did think the one remaining un-offered was odd, but it was never enough it bothered me. Interesting to know its a rounded number and not actually one, thank you for the clarification.v

I now think that for the sake of clarity, we should show the number with an additional digit.

The monthly production number at the top part of the corporate page, do show the number more precisely and if you check, they are nearly never whole numbers.

Should be easy to do.
I will look into it.

The amount of anger my earlier explanation caused with this one player keeps amazing me.

I do agree showing the decimal would be preferable.

Many people do get really angry when they do not like that their "issue" is not a real issue but them not managing things well.

I know but in this case, the text was unbelievable.

Is there any hope of ever getting contracts for decimal amounts?
Seriously helpful in those low-volume Asset Maint corps. The only alternative is manual contracts, which is exceptionally tedious.

We do not see any good reason for someone to have 0.45 of a school.
What happens then? you buy another 0.55 school somewhere else?

It will introduce complexity we never had and do not need.
Only corporations can have fractions.

Fractions in corporations mean that the production process is not finished yet.
It is being produced.

Once production is done, you have a whole product and you can sell it.

There are some exceptions where we could not avoid it and these are strange enough.

Yeah, but you can use half a school to make 100k asset maintenance? We can't contract those.

I get it doesn't make sense in some situations, but it makes setting up a purely self-contained economy impossible without player intervention and (lots) of tedium.

There's a good number of corporations that use fractional amounts: most military, space and maintenance corporations.

Or add contracts with periods, instead of every single month. That would keep your realism while alleviating the problem.

Say you only deliver a school every 3 months, or a production plant once a year.

I support Hern's second idea. While complex, less than monthly contracts when utilized correctly would reduce a lot of pointless clicking in maintenance corps.

Hern's prior idea is not realistic enough for me.

Isn't Hern's second idea how it is already, though? Andy basically said a product won't be delivered until it's complete, so it wouldn't make a difference to explicitly specify how many times it should be delivered each year. It'll just get delivered in whatever month it's completed in.

We think that the current move into larger corporations, increasing their production, will make it gradually easier.

first because the product fractions will become bigger and contracts will deliver more frequently.
also because larger corporations will purchase more raw materials and these too will involve larger fractions.

The idea of larger corporations is as old as the game.
There are more reasons to do so now than there were before, mainly because the population levels are now higher than they used to be.

We already have some types of very large corporations and they will keep growing and become more significant in the game, also delivering very large profits.

The best candidates for growth are corporations that deliver very large items or consuming very large items.

These are some types of weapons corporations, bases, nukes, cargo shuttles, space centers, and all the maintenance corporations.

In some of them, contracts now deliver once in 3-4 months, or less if production levels are less than 100%.

It will become much easier if they start delivering once in two months, or for some products, once a month.

We agree that this is an important issue and are eager to move and make it all easier.

We also think that having more types of very large corporations that are functioning a different way compared to much smaller ones and require higher levels of financing will add a dimension to the corporations game, corporate profitability, public corporations etc.

In preparation, we have already increased max cash levels in corporations and the maximum loans a corporation can take.

Emerithe, the current system is fine if you just want to accept all of a product. But if you're trying to contract out half of a space shuttle corp to one asset maint, it's impossible. The asset corp will lose all of its money buying too many space shuttles because it can't use them as fast as the space shuttle corp creates them. There is no "half to one corp" with these large, single item producers.

Well, it functions fine except for the warning you get on the months a product can't be delivered. Those are annoying too.