Market Price

How come the market price doesn't move? I read that's because some products will always be in a shortage and thus the restriction is to reduce manipulation. So, do prices move? And if they do, under what conditions?

Thanks!

Market price moves with shortages and oversupply within some range.

It it reaches the maximum price, it will not move up any more.

If it reaches the minimum price, it will not decline any more.

The reason for this is that there is not enough reaction from players to create more corporations that produce products that are in short supply and control the market.

If we allow the price to continue to move up or down, the market will collaps as some raw material prices will go out of control.

yep, gm controls upper and lower prices

How does the fixed price function work?

There is a base price, and prices can fluctuate about 50% above the base price and down to 50% under that price.

Players cannot decide on the price, they can decide what they want to pay and hope that there is someone who wants to deliver at that price.

If players would react to shortages and start new corporations or close some that produce products noone wants, we could have let controls go away.

Andy most of the economies are controlled by you the GM (C3 corps).... i can see how price fluctuations would hurt people as it takes alot of time to setup a fully upgraded corp and a sudden fluctuation that hurt value would be hard to deal with... conversion of corps would help with this... still havnt figured out how to do it though..... "players not responding to shortages".... every corp i have produces products that are in demand so im not sure where you get that.... maybe you have to go through your game and check that there arent unrealistic production numbers in corps that cause everything to be in shortage..... all i know is regardless of shortage the prices of services never change which makes for a pretty boring game

people should decide at what price they should sell products at.... a jeep company is going to sell their product at a certain price depending on the cost of inputs (salaries, raw materials, fixed costs) regardless of shortages or surpluses.... having a system like this would make contracts and CMs relevant...... shortages and surpluses should affect the difficulty of buying and selling making diplomacy and finding trade partners relevant..... shortages and surpluses should not affect price..... the law of supply and demand state that price affects supply and demand.... NOT that supply and demand affect price.... see what im saying?

I do not agree.

Jeeps price is set at a huge margin above production cost. Including the US market.
They sell in Europe at a price that is 30 - 50% higher than in the US (excluding taxes) and people buy them.

there is no reason to reduce the price as long as they buy them.

once there is competition, and there are others, selling for less, the price will decline. Including the price for Jeeps.

The best way to create such a situation in the game is by adjusting the price, depending on the amount of product available.
everybody wants to sell, an the price declines.

These comments here, do not take into account that for every seller, there must be a buyer.

We are not buying nor selling. we are not in the market.
Orders and offers are being matched and transactions are sometimes exact matches and sometimes, mainly because of quality mismatches, the transactions are "forced" a little bit.

If the difference is too large, there is no transaction.

In the current market, there is no way to let the price fluctuate much more.
you hope to get a much higher price but you do not realize, that you will pay a much higher price for the raw materials.

we had some errors in the past when a single product was not held within the low and high limits but went out of control for a prolonged period.

In all these cases, it caused major trouble in the market and it was corrected when players complained about absurd pricing for their materials.
there were no more than 3 such cases, all causing a prolonged price increase.

Nobody ever asked for these absurd prices to be left alone.

my posts have been deleted, so either they are too true or w3c don't want to hear about anything that will make sc better.

again, if every product has consumption, then players will either have to buy or produce the product.

gm already control the material costs, the number of workers, the max production for the product. controlling prices that players can buy or sell means there is no free market in this game. might as well just watch on the sideline, since everything has been decided already?

the beauty of this game is you have to guess what others are doing in order to make money, but if gm/w3c already decided how much money you can make already, then why bother doing anything but set everything on automatic?

you do not agree with basic laws of supply and demand? o well i give up

the reason to lower the price of jeeps is so more people buy them.... if the demographics do not suit the lowering of the prices then they will not lower it. for example a price reduction of 5000 dollars in europe may not attract new buyers because this puts people of a lower pay scale into the market..... these people will not buy the jeeps regardless of them being a target market because gas prices in europe are high while in the US they are lower and these "poor" people may still be able to afford long term costs of a jeep.... this is just an example... im not sure what reality is

i concur with xon he is elegent with the keyboard as he is rational

@thewhy,
this game needs to be challenging in a logical/rational way

at the moment, it's kindda shoot onto the walls and see what stick then keep that?

supply and demand are inversely proportional to each other, wherever they have equilibrium then there is a price agreement

if there is too much supply, then price has to fall in order to make a sale?

there is no demand for a product because it is not needed or has no consumption requirement.

isn't the purpose of the game/life is to create product that sell and make money?

@andy,

would you say that "players complained about absurd pricing for their materials" because these players just want to buy instead of producing?

i have always known that's how things work on earth, if i am the only one making a specific product then i can price it at whatever price i want? until these "dumb" buyers realize they can produce that product much cheaper than they are buying from me---isn't this called competitive advantage?

competitive advantage is having something or knowing something that others do not have or do not know....and take advantage of the situation?

i have posted else where on this forum that perhaps the products at higher game levels should be made to be more profitable to encourage players to climb the game levels.

what i'm experiencing so far is that oil, chemicals, etc at game level 1 are much more profitable than advanced effectivity products which is a game level 5 product? at the max upgrade level for these products i'm comparing, i'm still lossing money on higher game level products---why is the design this way so that players will stick to the easy lower game level products?

also as i have kept on and on about strategic bombs, that in order to make profit on this product you must produce it at least Q173, and most of the times you will make a loss on this product, and once awhile you made 12B profit per year on this product if you're very lucky that your supply chain don't choke up so you're able to produce one unit per 12 months, and that the product is at almost max Q273. why would a player want to produce stragetic bombs, when he can produce chemicals that makes him profit of 1.26B per month?

please elaborate so i (and maybe others) would see the logic of these products and have more fun playing this game. thank you

i'm wondering if demand could ever be met by supply for any product

say fb oil at the moment has about 17B tons shortage, and if an oil corp can max produce at 2.5M tons per month, then 6,800 oil corps should produce enough oil to meet this shortage at an instant?

though the complexity is that an oil corp consumes chemicals, and a chemicals corp consumes oil...so basically it's similar to a dog chasing its own tail?

ive asked the GM if they have a model that represents the perfect amount of corps needed in the mosaic of the economy to ensure there are no severe shortages or oversupplies but they never answered so im assuming they just winged it and made corrections to problems as they arose.... probably explains why some products are always in demand

@thewhy,

i'm theorizing that of the current 222 products in sc, these are 222 variables.

every country, corp, and enterprise you have is one equation each.

if you can mathematically solve these equations and variables, then you may have your answer in an instant of time.

i'm working on a spreadsheet that has all the products of sc as the columns and all my countries, corps, and enterprises as rows. if every thing do not change significantly, i think there will possibly an equilibrium, or when consumption is equivalent to production ===> this is what i would call self-sufficiency as i posted in another post on this forum.

though, with the added dimension of a product's quality ranging from 100 to 273in this game...it becomes more challenging

well good luck and let me know what you find

Yeah I'm looking for some price movements but the market in this game is so stagnant with the lack of price fluctuation. There is almost no room for opportunities to jump into certain sectors of the market to capitalize on the MASSIVE shortage. I understand some products will also be in a shortage, the price fixture makes sense here. But I have seen no movement in products with massive shortages and that's just frustrating, bad economics.

@thewhy,
with this game's injection of its "quality" concept into the equations, it's like a different price for each different color of the product

perhaps this game is not designed for countries to be self-sufficient but nothing more than players just to buy and sell products.

if only if some concepts of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" would be included in this game, it would greatly improve the game....

simple concepts such as ""The value of any commodity is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities" and "that the price of any product reflects wages, rent of land and 'profit of stock' which compensates the capitalist for risking his resources."

or even a simpler concept such as "when demand exceeds supply, the price goes up. When the supply exceeds demand, the price goes down."

i have not seen any earth economist said that every color/quality of a product has a price. it's about quantity, supply and demand that influence the price of a product?