W3C - Next Upgrade May 26 or earlier

1. The EP produced by WFs will be added to the country stock at Q150.

2. The numbers of HLW will increase. Last tuning was a small improvement but shortages remain too large.

3. The health system will reduce its use of Electric Power. The EP component in the health system is too large.

4.Additional tuning of some production levels and pricing, trying to slightly reduce the continuing shortages on the markets. (Shortages are now much smaller than in previous months but remain too high).
Reducing extreme shortages will reduce the need for immediate orders.

This is awesome Andy. Thank you for the communication. With the health are you going to increase other factors to keep health costs similar or allow the health cost to reduce?

Socialist method of controlling production levels and pricing. Can prices reflect actual demand and supply not capped? It's absurd to have +1bil shortage and market price is a flat line. No it won't make everyone bankrupt if you do it slowly so that countries can adjust accordingly and the result would be worth it since there would be (no) shortages effectively, or greatly reduced.

Thanks for the updates, Andy!

@spycorp - the game won't work if prices are only based supply and demand. Not even close. Markets would crash constantly.

In the last year, the GMs have explored some additional price fluctuations and perhaps they will explore that further.

@Eeeee - I'm not saying "only based", but there should be some price volatility that correlates with supply and demand. When you reach the "only based" stage by then, markets won't violently calibrate (crash). At least let's explore a halfass of that

Well it used to have at least a semi supply and demand market years ago. When the trade strategies acutally worked there were fewer problems. The C3s always bought and sold at best price, and in shortages the players would simply offer 20 to 50% more. There was always enough to supply the players, the C3s just suffered. I surplus the players would set there prices lower to ensure the C3s snapped them up. Worked great, not so much now.

Can you at least fix wind farm reporting in the finance index then as I've been asking about pretty much since wind came out. Now that you're having wind farms generate electricity at a specific quality level, have the income sheet in the finance index reflect that. My game level has been artificially held down specifically by finance index level for a long time now because of your erroneous reporting of wind farm income and expense.

@Spycorp - there is. There just isn't big enough market right now to impact products too regularly. Prices do change when demand shifts from red to green or vice versa.

I'd second what James said as well about how trade strategies do add flavor and additional opportunity to work the market.

The price ranged is capped to prevent the price from going up (in most cases) without a limit.

allowing that, would bankrupt many corporations.
Imagine EP price going up 20 times what it is now.
everything else will die.

it could be possible if many players would react to shortages and produce more.
checking the market, long term, you see that it does not happen.

hence the limitations.

recently we have allowed a much wider range for several products. (120-180% above the standard price)
Profits in those corporations shot up.
market values shot up.
production did not go up. The number of corporations went up a bit but it was insignificant.

Strategies work but much better when the markets are balanced.

We should have more balanced markets.
it becomes more interesting when some products are showing oversupply
and the market prices dive. More corporations close and other corporations are being created.

In the past we had many complaints when there were some oversupply situations but it is probably better than constant shortages and a guaranteed profit.

Also in the next upgrade:

Many corporations will produce a bit more in a more serious effort to balance the markets.

@Andy - "Imagine EP price going up 20 times what it is now." This is basically a straw man argument. You can easily fix these issues by actually thinking about changing game dynamics properly. Here, I'll propose a solution: Make demand volatile! When a country does not afford full EP demand, reduce the country's demand to adapt but also decrease supply and welfare indices. That way C3s and other countries can still work low-power with lower costs but the quality and score of these countries and corporations would be damaged, and as the cash flow and revenue grows, the demand capacity grows gradually to 100% so that all scores are higher in general (eg. FinalScore = x*FinalScoreBeforeDemandCapacityAdjustment). Coupled with the gradual conversion to lassiez-faire price volatility, countries will adjust along gradually.

I think that this is a very complex solution to a simple problem and we have this problem with many products.

If EP is short, produce more EP. It will resolve the problem.

Trying to find complex solutions and reduce consumption is complex and nobody will understand what is happening.
the countries will gradually shut down.

Instead, just build corporations that produce the products we need.

I think that a more balanced market, were there are also products in oversupply, will reduce the problem.
We have been in severe shortages too long and now start to think about complex solutions.

Spycorp,

I mean this very nicely and am not trying to be mean.

However, you clearly lack the higher level understanding of both the economics and game programming required to make a "simple solution".

In the real world, people can make power from several ways, they can reduce demand, or even stop buying something all together.

Within a game those random calculations are not possible.
Unregulated prices are not even seen in the real world.
Business's and Governments regulate and control costs/products all the time to prevent these issues from happening.

If you want to work on a suggest, as someone who has been here 15years, I would be happy to give my 2 cents.

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Andy,

I want to say I am happy the direction the GM is taking with game, however, I have noticed an issue that I believe you could address without any major issues and it would help with the wind turbine situation.

First,
Asset maintenance companies use:
.01 wind farms
.02 wind turbines
Since windfarms already use wind turbines in the production, why to remove the wind turbine requirement. It would only save a few dozen monthly, but it help to slim down the requirements..

Second,
Please consider my suggestion. I propose reducing wind farms consumption for production from 30 to 25 monthly, while dropping the cost of windfarms by about 5 billion (this reduce is based on the cost of materials).
The reason for the reduction is if you check the trade records, even with 1500-2000 wind turbine corps on the planets, they don't even produce enough to supply WIND FARMS production. players would need to build 1000's more corps across the worlds to meet basic demand.

I do not believe the issue with turbines is production, but a manufacturing over requirement issue.

Third,
If that suggest is not a valid suggest to the GM's, might I recommend a increase in Wind turbine production?
I did the mathematics and if you increased production from 240 to 300 per month (5 additional turbines per month) while decreasing the price by 10% and increasing material costs by 15% it would keep the current income and profitability at the same level it current is now.
However, this change would increase supply by around 8,000 to 10,000 turbines per month based on the worlds. This would not only mean every world would now produce enough to cover all demand for "Windfarms and Maintenance corps", but would also start supply players thus reducing the high demands.

In response to the claim that players do not respond to shortages and build more of those corps.

It is true. But the reason why is this:

Currently there is a small subset of corporations that make a lot money. Players know this and only build those (savvy ones anyway). Most corps don't make as much money as those few. Some corps barely scrape by even when the market in full red.

It should be no surprise that players will not build these low yield corps. But even that doesn't really matter, there are not enough players playing for this concept to work. The C3s should be doing this and that should be an easy fix.

I only build corps that can average an annual profit of more than 12B. If I can't get an average of more than 1B per game month, I won't build them. I try different corps in countries and let them upgrade fully and then periodically check their profits. If I see the annual profit is below 13B+, I get rid of them and mark them down as do not build.
It's also easier to concentrate on building corps that use similar numbers of the same workers so you can set your education priorities to match this. That way, you don't end up with tons of workers in one category that you don't need and shortage in categories that you do need.