W3C - Market Shortages

Many products are in short supply.
As a result, the support index can fall but also production plants might not be available and in general, the industry might suffer.

Click on Trade in the top of the page menu, and then on Trade overview.

You will see the list of products that were ordered and not delivered yet.
You can force delivery by changing the orders into immediate orders and they will be delivered immediately.

the cost is higher but a sinking supply index might create more damage.

On the corporations page, you may see corporations that are waiting for deliveries.
there too, you can intervene and force immediate purchases.

The cost for the corporation is higher but a corporation that cannot produce because of shortages is losing you more money.

Andy,

Looking at the 'Products in Stock; Buy and Sell' page for LU. Most products seem to have large shortages, and very few have surpluses.

When shortages are focused on specific products, players can close Corporations in surplus, to open ones in shortage.

But when it's a market wide problem, for nearly all products, that usually indicates it's a problem with the underlying balance of the game.

Are there any plans to make changes to address these structural shortages?

most of the corps are profitable only at max price

so addressing shortages must be accompanied with a complete redesign of prices

I'm a little confused on how exactly the shortages work.

While most products (virtually all, actually) seem to be negative, none of my corporations reflect a shortage unless I'm just completely missing it. The only shortage my country has ever faced was asset maintenance and I haven't seen that problem crop up in like a week or two. Some products, like oil and gasoline, have always been in the negative from what I can remember. Yet I've never had an oil shortage. In fact, if I were to go on the market and purchase 1,000,000 barrels on White Giant I could buy it and probably receive it within the hour, if that. Without the Immediate order, that is. On the flip side, there is a noticeable shortage of weapons in general. So wait times on 330 quality gear can take awhile. But I've never noticed this apply to anything other than the weapons. Not sure if the quality has to do with it, but military products and regular products seem to operate differently.

Do corps automatically "Immediate order" when there is a shortage? Or have I just been missing something?


@Vlad

Most of my corps are profitable. The ones that are not are still in the process of upgrading. What corporations have you mostly been building? My lowest profit-generating Corp that isn't spending cash on upgrades is still like 0.40b.

@Andy - I get what you're saying about supply index etc. That's fine.

Have you considered what the perma-shortages are doing to corporations (as opposed to countries)? Are you suggesting we need to log into each corporation with shortages and immediate order supplies? I have asset maintenance corps on FB that haven't had any supply of cargo shuttles for several game years now. The current shortage is 40 game months long based off supply/demand (and I imagine if people are immediate buying ahead of me, the shortage will last longer). Are you saying I need to manually immediate order supplies there for each corporation or micro manage supplies for corporations?

Corporation shortages are unrelated to the supply index but these shortages are harmful too.
corporations stop production if they are short of raw materials.

In my corporations, in test countries we run, we offer 4% more for products and usually get everything.

Used to set it at 8% but 4% works too.

The market balance is currently a problem but we try not to intervene.

Even a slight change in one of the parameters governing the process, can flip the market into surplus.

Currently, I see some worries comments about shortages.
In an oversupply situation, everyone starts shouting.

I will look into it.

Thanks for taking a look, Andy. I'm just curious what strategies I will need to employ if some of my corporations can go a real life week or more without adequate supplies.

I have seen corporations experience shortages before (and generally resolve themselves over time) but they seem more extreme recently. I appreciate the quick response.

It seems that shortages are directly linked to C3 countries.

The population of such countries is growing lately.
The number of corporations in these countries is limited.

A growing population results in an increase in the use of all products (direct or indirect).

The shortages caused a rebalance of the number of corporations.
everything with a surplus resulted in the closure of corporations and the resulting space was immediately taken by new corporations.

at this point it seems that nearly everything is short.

Enterprises can create many more corporations, mainly in C3 countries and create high profits.

Hi andi I emailed you
Could you please take a look