W3C - Simcountry Upgrade October 17. 2023

Game documentation

The game documentation now includes a more detailed description of Tiny Atlas.
any comments, questions or suggestions are welcome.

Activating some changes from the previous upgrade

Some functions that were described in the previous upgrade, including decline in costs of maintenance were in fact not included in the upgrade procedure.

Alll these functions are now active as part of the current upgrade.

Targon in Enterprises

It is now possible to store Targon in enterprises.
The functions should have been included in the previous upgrade but did not make it during the upgrading procedure.

Windfarms income and cost

The income from wind farms was already visible on the financial reports while the cosat of maintaining the wind farms was added to government cost.
We have now separated the maintenance cost of wind farms. It shows separately on the financia page. It is removed from government cost.
Government cost will of course show a decline (if you have wind farms) while a separate cost item is added.

New Document

The worlds document now included a much more detailed description of the Tiny Atlas world, its features and some advice on how to participate.

Major restructuring of the Simcountry Database

While not visible to players, this change is the largest item in this upgrade.
we have restructured some parts of our database. The change will allow for easier additions of features and products.

Thank you Andy,

That solved my issue.

You made my day.
It was a trivial error, but it took several rounds of updating.

Thanks Andy. I like the costs of wind farms broken out in the finance index.

Question - what all changed with game levels? They're not the same as they were. Requirements around population have been changed. On WG, I've previously made level 9, but my population is now only good enough for level 4. Did anything besides population requirements change?

In the restructuring of the database we bumped into some old definitions that are not relevant today.

It was based on the assumption that players will reach levels 5-6.
They are now able, with much higher profits, larger numbers of population, to easily move much higher which is great but the level of effort needed is much lower than before.
Start conditions for many indexes are much higher than before and some game levels are reached with very little action.
What you describe seems a bit overdone.

Most changes are in the higher levels. Smaller changes in the lower levels.

In the future, we will make such updates more frequent and very close to other changes in the game, to follow closely on the efforts needed to move up the game levels.

The situation was similar to the first war experience that became trivial in time.

Sounds good. I agree - the effort required for me was not as much as it should have been. The population restrictions in particular will slow players from climbing as quickly.

Perhaps this will make the levels that include defense index more relevant. They previously were so much more difficult to achieve that it wasn't worth trying to go that route - even as a militarized player.

As I show with the three arrows I've drawn, I previously made level 9, but now the population requirements are so much higher than before that I am level 4.

My other indices have dropped since I was level 9, but my point stands. My population prevents me from reaching even level 5 now.

I don't think this is a bad change, I'm just commenting that it's a fairly big one.

Here's some proof that I don't just bring up things that impact players negatively, if I find something unintended that helps players I'll bring that up too.

The separation of Wind Farm maintenance cost from government cost - the wind farm cost isn't currently being added along with the other costs so the total monthly government costs is currently misrepresented allowing Financial Index scores to skew higher than they should be. When you do correct this I do hope you will reconsider factoring in Electric Power production quality from Wind Farms on the Finance Index P&L page. It's not an unreasonable ask for values that are impacted by quality to be properly represented on the income side just as they are on the cost side for the sake of an accurate Financial Index given its importance in Game Levels.

in reguard to the GL reqs changing. over all, i'm ok with it. but i did fork over GC to start a second LU ceo, for GLs. and i got some GC, but the couple hundred that held back from, (to adjust for other changes,) i might not ever get.

maybe higher game levels should be more difficult, wish this had been announced ahead of time. i have no intent to cash out, i'm interested in investing in space, when targon and targon defense can be sold on stations. with the hope that i can float what i do on that, and then the GC that i still intend to purchase, can go into pop, for GLs, or what ever else i feel like doing.

Andy,

Thank you for the updates.

For the future, any changes to game level requirements should be included in the update notes. It's important to players, and shouldn't need to be discovered by accident.

Any changes (not just game level requirements) made should be added to update notes. It's strange they're not, but they're commonly not.

We have in resent months, increased the profitability of virtually all corporations and we did not provide a detailed list.

No one disagreed or complained about lack of details. profitability increased and this is where it ended.

I do not think that all the details matter and there are thousands of formulas in Simcountry that remain part of the model and not detailed.

Once in a while, the model requires a correction that changes some numbers DOWN, to bring back a shifted balance. Sometimes we need to correct conditions to become a bit HARDER, after a long period when they became nearly trivial to achieve.

Tuning is in most cases not even detectable.
we might have made an update that was a bit larger. in most cases the steps are tiny.

You may not think all the details matter.

It seems many players have suggested they feel differently and have requested more detailed updates. No one requested formulas. We requested basic updates.

No one complaining doesn't mean no one in interested. No one on this thread complained about the details making the game harder. We simply request that if you make changes, say something. "Game level requirements were updated. See documentation for details." <--- Plenty for me.

Many players base their entire strategy around game levels, and you shifted them without saying anything. As I illustrated, I went from being able to make level 9 to not being able to make level 5. And you don't think that's worth a mention?

Your stance seems very confusing to me.