W3C - Game Update Oct. 25, 2019

Natural resources

The feature is now completed.
The missing page allowing you to find where resources are is completed.

You can now click on any of the natural Resources and get a list of all countries where the resource is located and the amount of product in the ground.


Changing corporations to produce a different product

The possibility to change the output product of a corporations does not extend to natural resources.

A corporation producing oil, cannot switch to producing Aluminum.
This is now corrected.

The "remaining material" data block in corporations is now showing on the pages of mining corporations only.

Before, it was on all corporations pages.


Enterprise Building Corporations

An error is fixed that was introduced with the Natural Resources update.

When choosing a group to build a corporation, the entire list, of all corporation types was shown.

It is now working correctly.

The Natural Resources system is a major change to Simcountry and may still have some bugs we do not know of.

The important functions all work correctly but if you see anything wrong, please let us know.


Corporations

We have made some changes to the corporations model to ensure they keep making healthy profits despite a possible higher price of mining products.

We will keep monitoring corporations and may introduce more small updates while allowing mining products to become more expensive if shortages increase.

Already found a little bug.

On the list of countries showing where a resource can be found, the link to the country does not work correctly.

It always links to your own country.

It will be fixed next week.

Thanks for the update,

I did notice a rebound in Chemical profits.

From the number of counties listed for each resource, it appears that new resources are proportional to world demand.

The list for Oil is really long. I'm wondering if it would be possible for you to make a datasheet available for Resources?

Probably too early to see a rebound in profits but possible.

It will not be very large and the downside is the increase in the cost of mining products.

The list is indeed proportional to current use.
and proportional to the size of the world.

For now, you can copy the list on the page.

The data sheet may be added later.

anther change is not reported yet:

we now have 24 war levels (was 22)
the 2 new war levels were inserted between war level 3 and 4.

levels 5 to 7 are also updated.

It is now easier to win wars against C3 countries in war levels 3 to 7.

If you need to have a country somewhere, for a strategic reason, there are now two ways:

1. conquer a country without a president (C3 country)
2. purchase one, it is now 30 gold coins.

The wars in these levels are easier but as we discussed before, there is not much of a financial gain as the aim is strategic.

War levels require offensive weapons, maybe it is now the right time to decrease prices of them?

evan if you lower the price off offensive weapon i think defensive weapons should still be cheaper the there off counter parts

Of course that should always be the case.

Andy,

Thank you for keeping us informed, the players really appreciate it :D

lowering the price of weapons doesnt solve anything, just creates profit problems for corps building them

if its a financial brake (there is another risk adversity brake but thats not financial) on wars its not the cost of weapons, its the cost of maintenace of them

if you want to encourage wars lower the weapon government maintenace costs

if you have a army fielded on 1T you pay another 1T as maintenance over the next 10 real life days, and again in another 10 days , and ...

I don't know if your calculation is correct but it sounds like too much, maybe you are overpaying by high salaries or by buying resources at too high quality

no, for 500B worth of weapons, all deactivated, monthly cost jumped 3B, thats 160 game months (some 25 days IRL)

so with all deactivated you pay their price again in 25 days, activated it goes to like 10 days

this create a lot of unnecessary unnatural micro , and for people without enterprise its not even possible to hide

thats why people dont get found on the war game, also you cant hoard weapons, cant create a bond with your army, cant have a feeling of growing the army

probably lowering costs would cause inflation in C3 countries (as they stay little negative profits now) so a bandaid solution would be to decrease the costs of deactivated weapons a lot

a better solution would be a feature to put active units in reserve (and they pay small deactivated weapons maintenace without disbanding), so players can see their army grow

also the reactivation in 2 real days needs to be reworked, it does not create fun gameplay. maybe reactivation should be instant if you are at war ONLY with a C3 country

short story is that war weapon losses are nothing compared to what you pay keeping them over time. lowering the cost of weapons will not solve much.

I agree and support this opinion, I also think that war costs are too big to compare with little income from corporations

scratch that , the upkeep for army is at "ludicrous speed" ridiculous levels

you pay again the price of an active weapon every 25 game months or so, my initial calculation of 60 game months was overly optimistic

no wonder practically nobody is keeping armies active and nobody is interested in doing wars

i tough of doing a test war but by the time i activate a 500B army i will have paid already 125B in just 2 days of reactivation and at full activation i will pay around 125B per day for a 500B army

my numbers are a little off but not by much

i think would make for a more fun gameplay experience if the army upkeep will be lowered somehow without messing the C3 countries economy

The price of war is reduced in the past months to much lower levels than before.

Offensive and strategic weapon cost was reduced significantly.
We said so in the game news many times, when it happened.
I am not sure anyone checked before claiming it did not happen.

Lower weapon and ammunition price also reduced the cost of maintenance as army maintenance requires ammunition.

The profitability of weapons corporations was not reduced at all when the cost went down.

as we said many times, we make sure profitability remains and there are many ways for us to do so.

Such statements are not based on facts.

Weapon and ammunition corporations employ about 40% of the number of employees in other corporations while their profitability is 80 to 90% of other corporations.

this means that their profitability per worker is about twice higher as in non defense related corporations.

We have done so to stimulate the setting up of such corporations but I am not sure this happens and certainly not understood.
Maintaining this huge advantage for defense related corporations may not achieve what we intended it for.

We do have a problem, game wide with the total number of corporations.
we are now at 668.000 corporations.
Increasing the size of corporations is in fact the only solution for the excessive numbers.


I understand the call for cost reduction on all fronts.
Reduce the army and defense cost, increase profitability of corporations, and make profits go through the roof.

and then what.
This can trivialize the game.

I am fine with the current cost of military deployment.

Hello there,

I have to agree with John here. I've got a substantial military spread out acros 4 ceo's and multiple countries and I am in the process of increasing these numbers.
So far I have not seen any problems with the (maintenance) costs.

Even my defensive and offensive corporations are (very) profitable despite the volatility of the market.

Hello there,

I have to agree with John here. I've got a substantial military spread out acros 4 ceo's and multiple countries and I am in the process of increasing these numbers.
So far I have not seen any problems with the (maintenance) costs.

Even my defensive and offensive corporations are (very) profitable despite the volatility of the market.

I agree with Andy about direction in general, I just don't feel that balance of profitability and military cost is right. I am checking many countries of new players daily and I see that military costs are the main ones, they are much higher than the rest. One of the examples is below and the country is rated 4th in FB. There are hundreds countries like this one.



Maybe this is because new presidents overspending and they get into the situation they cannot control. maybe spending limit needs to depend from income of the country to balance the spending.. or maybe the income/war cost balance is not good enough.

MNDZ

If people are spending to much on their military wouldn't the right option be for those players to reduce their army size?
15B per game month on defense is much more then what you spend on your starting army. Those cost around 4-6B per game month.

A common mistake that new players make is that they think that they must have an army that is as large as possible. Especially newer players need to learn to balance the army size vs costs.
Another common mistake new players make is that they take quantity over quality. You are much better of with 660 interceptors of 330Q then with 1800 120Q interceptors.

These are all things new players need to learn and I don't see any problem with that. Some things just take time...

if they are supposed to fight wars why they should reduce their military? I understand that they are making mistakes but game should try to prevent and limit them to make these mistakes smaller.

Players are now allowed to buy 700B worth of military per game month, so adding quality effect you will spend 1400-2100B which is insane amount to compare with their profit.

Let's say you are making 10B per game month so saving 1500B will take 150 game months which is 25 real days. One click and wait for 25 days to recover.. I think this is huge.

Maybe people should not be allowed to spend more than 6 times of their income per game month. that would prevent overspending and reduce impact of mistakes..

They are allowed to purchase a lot.
it might be needed sometimes.

in general, they should not spend at that level.

For peaceful players there is already plenty of profit. For war players, there is never going to be enough profit. They are engaged in an arms race with one another. Every reduction of military costs, enables the average military to get bigger, in turn causing costs to rise again.

If military costs were halved, chances are, many players would double the size of their military. So the cost of defending a country wouldn't actually get cheaper. War is a pit in which to throw money, there is never going to be enough money to fill it, haha.

Very true Daniel. I buy as much as possible all the time. If the costs were halved I would buy double haha.