List of Stealth Changes (Golden Rainbow)

So far, this is the list I've come up with:

1) Products can NOT be sold for over 300% of market price. I believe this has been in effect approximately 2 real life months now, just no one had figured it out until I did about a couple weeks ago. People were aware SOMETHING was going on, but the exact problem was unknown.

2) Elementary Schools, High Schools, and Universities use more workers now.

3) Salaries in some areas are actually INCREASING instead of decreasing as originally stated (soldiers is a noticable one).

4) Corporations can no longer be given more than 50 Billion in Cash. This has been reduced from 75 Billion previously. This has made IPOing next to impossible for most corporations.

5) THIS IS A BIG ONE. Corporation production has been REDUCED about 5% on average for certain corporations. So far the list (and I haven't checked all corporations) includes FMU, and most weapon/ammo corporations. No decrease in raw material usage has been made in these corporations, only a reduction in production. This further is reducing profits.


These changes are all combining to continue to hurt profitability. If these changes continue, no one will be able to turn a profit soon. I'm sure there are more stealth changes which I and others have not discovered as of yet.

Q

does it do any good to lower offering price below 300? i've tried and it doesn't seem to help.

ebby, if you offer for less than 300%, you just sell for less than 300%. What you want to do is reduce the quality of your supplies so that your corporation's goods are only worth selling at 300% and not more

Thanks Q for being a watchdog. I noticed that my many FMU corps weren't making the usually profit. The lower production levels of my corps would explain it. I dislike the increased difficulty to make and keep a profit in both countries and enterprises. But I'll still pay to play this silly addictive game. However, the continuous slight changes will make me leave SC sooner.

I'm happy that Treasurer was allowed back. He has a grasp of the SC economics and is eager to share it with other players. T is another watchdog.

With the planned changes we had been aware of from the gm's, its possible, given the size of Q's list, someone's cocked the coding up.Would maybe explain why there is no apparent reply from the game gods.

Just a thought.

I'm sure there are still other changes which have not been found by me or others yet.

I am happy to announce though they did fix the executive pay bug a few days ago.


With regard to FMU's, I believe they raised the price of these to compensate for the lower production. I've noticed a decent price increase on the graph the last couple months, and its now at its highest point in probably 2 game years. So I think the idea here, was to RAISE MAINTENANCE COSTS while keeping the FMU corps steady in sales.

With regard to Ammo/Weapon corps, it seems as though the prices here also increased a bit. Which would explain the recent defense cost increases I've noticed.

So I think stealth change #5 I listed above, only tells part of the story. Consider this an update.

These changes do however, all point to W3C wishing to further increase costs across the board in one way or another.

Q

For the first time ever my slave went into the red last month. Although I'm sure it wont be the last. This was due to a massive increase in defense costs. There was a 50% increase in defense costs, 50%, to a slave I'm building up the military, slowly but steadily, in. This is not due to a sudden large purchase or activation. A few % with the increase in cost of arms maybe, but this is ridiculous.

I wont be re-newing if this continues.

I don't get. On FB, now there is a MASSIVE oversupply of fmu's, even with the reductiuon in output, and not much increase in the number of corps. How is this even possible? There will no profit left in this market.
.
The game god is true to his word about reducing the amount of money in the game.

Noproblem, what you're seeing is likely to be the result of a player 'playing the market' .. if you investigate, FMU demand hasn't really changed, what has changed is the supply.

It's not unreasonable to conclude that a President or CEO (or even a re-setting country) has just dumped a load of production onto the market.

Well speaking as a complete newb just starting on this game on White Giant in order to get a handle on things I have noticed a rather dramatic drop in the efficiency of corporations as a means of making money. Just as I was getting the hang of them too.

My main bug bear ties in with Q's Point 1)although it seems I can set my market strategy a shade above 300% if the market under supply is high enough, this has absolutely NO effect on the actual price I sell the item for. This means that I am still paying(in that it is now showing up on the balance sheet)way over the odds for supplies brought back when these price adjustments still seemed to work while making making negligible returns even on the sale of goods with a five year back log (i.e the market is 60 times demand over supply).

The production drop in point 5) is not exactly helping matters either.

Overall I like the Market System that SC has set up which means unlike most world sims it is impossible to set things up so autarky (complete independence from imports)is achieved without a vast empire and I am not sure it would be possible then. This seems very real world and I like it a lot. I feel the market is the wrong place to tamper.

The big unreality problem seems to be the way defence is calculated. I have a feeling that some of the countries out their with def index of say 15 but ammunition have a better chance of fighting off an attack than countries with a nominal index of 150 but not one missile between their 36K anti-missile batteries.

Maybe the way to improve the game is to go back to letting Corps make money "too easily" and instead make people actually pay attention to maintaining real armies rather that the white elephant gamesmanship brigades you see all over the place. As newbies need every help they can get to catch up with and challenge the big guns and functional armies might make more people actually have a go at the war game.

Yeah, I definitely noticed a *large* spike in defense costs between last night and this morning in both of my countries. The hits just keep on coming.

If they wanted to reduce cash levels, it seems to me that a basic "reverse split" on the money supply and all associated prices would have been a lot more straightforward...everything would be the same in a relative sense, just with half the cash flowing around.

seems their extensive mucking about with the code is producing a lot of (hopefully?) unintended consequences beyond reducing cash.

Cost of military shouldn't have a long term effect on profitability. A military is only as good as the competition. Once the huge armies cut back you will be able to safely hold profitable countries with a smaller force.

You set salaries.

Gosh, you make disarmament sound so trivially easy. Makes you wonder why if its so easy for everyone to shrink their armies it took many treaties and many decades before the US and USSR finally reduced their weapons count.

Oh wait, it wasn't the treaties at all, it was mainly because one of them financially imploded, to a large extent due to military costs, and lost a good chunk of its territory and nearly all of its influence in the process. Nearly 20 years later its just finally starting to recover.

Sounds exactly like what I want to see happen to our player base and the game :P

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

As newbies need every help they can get to catch up with and challenge the big guns and functional armies might make more people actually have a go at the war game.<!-/Quote-!>

/me shakes his head.

Ok here is an example of why this current situation annoys.

Defensive Missile flogged at a nominal 347% of market price but now the market is oversupplied by about 145K units which works out that supply is roughly 115% of demand and yet my missiles still sell.

An element of care and attention has vanished from managing my corporations. The opportunity to exploit market shortages in best price gouger fashion is gone as is the punishment for excessive greed when the market turns.

I'm still finding my feet with this game, but this thread, amongst some others covering different points, are quite disturbing.

The developers seem hellbent on reducing cash with what appear to be ill-conceived plans and structures. I might not run the best economy, but I think I'm doing okay, yet struggling to make more than a couple of billion each month.

If this struggle and apparent disregard for paying players continues, I'll just quit and find something else to play.

"Yeah, I definitely noticed a *large* spike in defense costs between last night and this morning in both of my countries. The hits just keep on coming."-slare

I've noticed that your defense cost and cost of Gov't will do this from time to time. It will also plunge about every year or year and a half.
I guess it's just the cycle.

Great list!
1) Products can NOT be sold for over 300% of market price. I believe this has been in effect approximately 2 real life months now, just no one had figured it out until I did about a couple weeks ago. People were aware SOMETHING was going on, but the exact problem was unknown.


This was explained on another part of the forum.
The reason is that C3 countries are not buying any quality that is offered.
To sell at a high price you need a buyer.
W3C is not buying products.

The max we have seen is not 300. It was even lower last week and we have seen an increase in the past two days.
It will probably fluctuate.

2) Elementary Schools, High Schools, and Universities use more workers now.

Schools have become just a little bigger indeed. (Less than 10%). They also have more kids in each school so the number you need is lower.
If you keep the same number of schools, your education index will increase.

We will write about it in the game news. We want to continue the trend a little further but as I said, the number of schools you need is decreasing proportionally.

The reason for that is the growth in world population and the huge number of schools in our databases. There are millions and we want to reduce a little to prevent a performance problem. This will be only one of many parameters that could cause a performance problem.

3) Salaries in some areas are actually INCREASING instead of decreasing as originally stated (soldiers is a noticeable one).

Salaries are decreasing. Also in the army. There can always be some little bumps, or errors, short term, there are country parameters involved too.
I just looked atcurrent setting for the 100% level and they are much lower than before.

We expect the cost of the army, including salaries, to decline.

4) Corporations can no longer be given more than 50 Billion in Cash. This has been reduced from 75 Billion previously. This has made IPOing next to impossible for most corporations.

This was in the game news just very recently and many times before.
Cash needs are declining, numbers are down and corporations too do not need these high cash levels as raw materials become cheaper.
Cash levels in private corporations used to be much higher at 200B and are declining too. People used corporations to “hide� cash. They should hide cash in gold coins instead.
We received a complaint about the IPO problem and updated the IPO conditions, lowering the requirements.

5) THIS IS A BIG ONE. Corporation production has been REDUCED about 5% on average for certain corporations. So far the list (and I haven't checked all corporations) includes FMU, and most weapon/ammo corporations. No decrease in raw material usage has been made in these corporations, only a reduction in production. This further is reducing profits.

This kind of changes occur as long as the game exists only these days the changes are minimal.
Reducing the general cost, we try to achieve a new balance, 1 or 2% lower at a time and sometimes corrections are on the price side, and sometime on the production side.

In recent months, with huge shortages of products on the market we have INCREASED production at a lower price to keep the multiply (revenue) at the same level.
Just recently, we have increased the production of ammunition per corporation and reduced the price per piece of ammunition because this will bring down the cost of the army. Another such step is planned for coming Tuesday and ammunition cost will decrease while production of some items will increase.
The changes are however small and they do not damage the corporations producing these items.
Profitability is not damaged. If income and cost per corporation is going down by 5%, profit will do the same. The value of the money in the game is also increasing however and this is exactly what we try to achieve. Exchange rates went from 2 to 4T per gold coin to 470B per gold coin now and will decrease even further in the future. The value of game money is 5 to 10 times higher now than before these rate changes.
We expect this process to continue for several more months.
There are only very few examples where production was reduced.
Uranium is one where we did not want to reduce the price of the product to rebalance for the new situation as we do not think that nuclear weapons pricing should decrease much more. (it went down a lot already).
There were fluctuations in FMU. This product is used by all corporations and has a major influence on the general profitability. It was used several times to rebalance.
FMUs are in shortage ever since they were introduced with little hope for a solution. We have recently concluded that production in these corporations must increase and the price will have to come down. The corporations will have the same conditions. Also here, the increase is very small.

The process is driven by a model that checks balances between all corporation types and their relative profitability, use of raw materials, theoretical profitability, advantages to the countries etc.
When changes are made, the model is used to test and the production model is always brought back to balance. This can have some small fluctuations but we have no interest at all in changing this balance. It is even dangerous for the game model and any errors could cause massive corporate failures.

All products with a quality over 296 are being sold. All products with a quality over 296 are being sold precisely as if their quality was 296. A product of 330 quality isn't a product of 296 quality. A product of 350 quality isn't a product of 296 quality.

Their quality when purchasing, not their purchase itself, is the issue.

Thank you John, that is a much easier and simpler way of stating the problem than I did. Products over 296 quality are selling as if they are 296 quality, therefore the price received is as if they were 296 quality (or somewhere in that area).

We are not receiving the correct price for higher quality products when they are sold. I detailed this in several emails to the gamemaster.

Though Tom, I do agree, the maximum I've seen has actually been about 298 or so, I used 300 as a round number.

Tom, there are two things wrong with what you stated:

1) FMU production has DECREASED twice in the last 2 weeks. It has went from 600 to 575 to now 558. The base price increased both times. This is making the FMU shortages worse.

2) Ammo and weapons also decreased in production per corporation over the last 2 weeks.


The logic behind the schools/universities/hospitals, I agree with, and have noticed this with the last update (the education index rising with same school amount).

The salaries of soldiers did go up in one of the updates, as did other workers. However, others (like officers) did decrease. Overall trend is lower, yes, but sometimes certain areas are rising instead of falling.

The IPO and cash reduction was noted in the game news, I appreciate that as I'm sure do many others.

I thank you for reading this list and giving a detailed reply to each item. There are many others, who are silent, who also appreciate your efforts in clarifying things.

Q

Forgot something.

Common market and Contracts are NOT being done correctly. If the quality is above about 290, the price given is for about 290 or so. They are supposed to be market price adjusted for quality. This further implies a market cap is in place, whether intended or not.