W3C - Simcountry Upgrade August 24, 2022

User Interface Updates

The top of the page menu is now shorter.
It was too long after the last upgrade and was too wide for some mobile devices.

We have now removed the corporations option from the menu.
The corporation option is, and was available on the left frame of the country page.

The Trade option in the top of the page menu is now moved to the left frame.
It replaces the Loans command which is part of the finance option in the menu.

More work is underway to improve the menus, and more pages will be replaced by multiple tabs that will make the entire user interface simpler and reduce clicking.

Work will continue in the coming weeks and changes will be gradual.

The unemployment tab on the labor page

The calculation of the social security payments on that page was wrong. we were alerted to the error by a player and corrected the page.
There are similar errors on the pensions and investment pages. These will be corrected with the next game update, asap.

Tuning some types of corporations

We were alerted on the forum to possible issues with very large corporations.
In some cases, these corporations that are usually very profitable, suffered losses because of a very large increase in the cost of raw materials.
when the cost of raw materials amounts to a large portion of the total corporate cost, fluctuations in the cost of materials can diminish the capability of these corporations to maintain their profitability.

We have improved the profitability and stability of these corporations by slightly reducing their total size and in parallel reducing the cost of raw materials.
we will follow these changes as they kick in and find out if these changes are sufficient.

Some corporations become slightly larger

Several types of corporations are becoming a bit larger. These changes are on going for some time and will continue.
The aim is to prevent a large increase in the number of corporations game wide and prevent the need for increasing numbers of corporations in all countries.

Andy,

Thank you for the changes. I will keep an eye on corps and if I notice anything, I'll let you know. Again thank you for addressing the issue(s).

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Side note,
It does not look like "Country assets" are listed or calculated properly at all. The game seems to either not take quality of products into account or does not include all products into the "Assets" listed in a countries report and I feel this also carries into enterprise miscalculation as well.

For example,
I calculated all the ammo in one country (Ammunition * Quality * Market price). I put the number of ammo, quality, and market price into an excel spread sheet to get an precise value.

The game cites a total of 1.2T "Value of all Ammunition". However, the country maintains 1.6T in defensive ammo only, meaning once you add all offensive and strategic the prices are fair higher.

I also feel this carries over into Value of All Materials "Total Value of all Materials"
"Value of Government Assets"

This really is not a major issue, I know it seems like the GM is moving toward better transparency, figured I would at least let you know.

Assets have always been calculated minus quality. That's why. In fact, I believe everything counts as if at 100 qua. Has been this forever. My Player Power Rankings I suggested and used to post player examples I always understood to be as if 100 qua. Actual value was always likely triple any counted assets, except cash, of course.

Oh, and 2 clicks from the country's main page to get to be able to buy products is a major downgrade. Please fix this in the next update. Trade, which was removed, was the button I used most at the top of the page. It is, at least, more important than most of the remaining buttons that remain at the top of the page.

Edit: Another observation. Inflation has happened. Everything costs more, but my spending limit is the same. I'm placing some of my usual orders, and I am getting less stuff. Perhaps, spending limits need a comparable boost to keep with inflation?

The total assets value might indeed not reflect the true value but it is not a major issue.
the main point is that when you grow your assets the number on the assets page become proportionally larger.
I think it is close enough.

I will look into the trade option.
we do not like the drop down menus at the top of the page and are trying to replace then by tab pages that are easier.
we would like to replace the trade page by one with tabs.

As to spending limits, we will look into it.
In general, prices are not increasing.
some did, others are declining a bit.
The spending limit should depend on the population numbers. It does already but maybe not enough.

Quantity has a quality of it's own.

I usually go the other way. I am building my armed forces on this new account, and investing heavily in upgrades. It is somewhat demoralizing, sinking 10s of trillions into upgrades and not seeing a corresponding reflections in military assets, but I understand it, and I definitely prefer a smaller, high quality military, than a larger lower quality one.

Okay, speaking to Spending Space/Cap. I don't think I am going crazy. At least, I hope not, but I swear enterprises seem to be refreshing their spending space cap more than once per game month since the update.

One of the final things I do to check I manage everything is to check my current spending caps, under "boosters". Typically, I see some activity here, since I've placed orders for something, but, since the update, I have done this and my enterprises are back to $500B cap, though I swear I ordered something with them, making me question myself.

Edit: Wait, maybe my orders are even being cancelled without my permission, looking at my trade screen. Something is definitely off.

I'm with Aries, that Trade removal from the top menu is pretty annoying. Now there's a lot more words to read before realizing what page the buy/sell is on. I'm sure muscle memory will help eventually, but right now this is definitely not an improvement.

Also I don't understand the point of doing anything on the Pension page when it's essentially useless and broken because it's always stuck at 8T.

There's also some weird choices with the top menu, like why have Population? You can always get immediately to that screen by clicking the pop number for the country. And social security is basically useless, once you set it you almost never need it again, while something vital like transportation is still super difficult to work with. Build roads/rails/water is still one of the few screens you can't return to the main screen from, so you have to go all the way around again (country -> transport -> build). The top menu is helpful for that, but just adding a return to main page link to the build pages would be good.

Also why the removal of "Setup new corporation" link on the corporations page? Now we have to click the weirdly large button. I'd prefer the link to the tacky button, IMO. The buttons are almost always not helpful, so suddenly being needed is weird.
Sorry for spam, there's just a lot of things I keep noticing.

I mentioned elsewhere, the top menu items I use are "Trade", "Army", and "Empire" in that order. All allow quick shortcuts to things I often need to update or view. I very rarely click anything else up there.

Thanks for the update! It's easier to navigate this time.

The last changes in the top of the page menu were triggered by a complaint by a player who explained that the menu became to long and the last two options are not visible on his phone.

we should have looked into it ahead of time and felt we need to resolve the problem quickly. We unified the two nearly identical Corporations functions, one in the menu and one on the left frame and this is the result.

We are working on the menus and left panel option to improve functionality and make it easier to use. we will gradually get everywhere and the pages will be improved much further.

we are clearly not done.

The trade page will be changed and tabs will be added to clearly show all functions.
The same with the transportation page. It will end up with tabs.

the pension and investment pages are indeed not important but should not show data which is wrong. This was reported, found to be wrong indeed and must be fixed.
Please find more errors and help us to go fix them ASAP.

The possible error with spending space seems to me unlikely. changing it twice in a game month seems very unlikely and would require a lot of programming.
we did not reprogram anything inside these functions when this option was moved. But we learned never to say never.
wonders happen.

Please recheck and give us some specifics and we will look into it.

It might have been the change in the trade tab location that threw off the order I do things. I haven't noticed it since the early days of the change. I am still missing the trade tab though. Multiple clicks are necessary, where it wasn't before, to get to where I place market orders, where I trade with my own corps, to where I accept contracts etc etc.

Also, may I suggest a way to adjust settings to what type of transactions get sent to Simcountry messaging? The place on the main landing page under "home". Every time I offer a direct trade from my enterprise to my own country, or setup a contract from my corporation to another corp, or country, it automatically throws a message there. Then, each one of those messages requires several clicks to delete, individually. I've setup dozens of contracts at once a few times, and need to round out all the clicks I already completed by spamming clicks in "messages" to clear all the spam I sent myself.

On the corp changes, my observation is that Defense Weapons Maintenance and Military Bases Maintenance corps can do very well, though a asterisk my be required next to Military Bases Maintenance, as the market for forts has crashed on WG. I am not sure about Airforce Maintenance though. Andy, the ones you run on WG are still not able to get their heads above water.

As for the buttons on the top I use the Education button a surprising amount.

Though it doesn't much matter Andy should be able to tell the frequency each button is used (running the stats for the page) and act accordingly

Yeah, but the Education button at the top does the exact same thing, take you to Education Priorities, that the Education button under your map does. The more useful buttons up there save you clicks to reach a page you, otherwise, could not reach directly.

So one click from any menu OR one click from a specific menu.

I often use it from the Important Things menu

Andy,

https://sim05.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgiw?tbl&miEntityNumber=3464040&miEntityKind=b

It seems that "Asset main corps" and some others are still massively overstocking products. My corps took another 250b in loans to cover the 21 shuttles they bought over 2 months.

I've been checking the data, what seems to happen is when the corps can't buy shuttles it puts another order in each month.
I buy 12 months worth of supplies(4 shuttles per order), so when it can't fill one month it places a new order and this over many months creates a snowball effect.

I think the simplest answer is maybe putting something in place where corps will not place new orders of supplies if there is already an order pending, that should completely halt the snowball buying of larger more costly items.

To add to SuperSoldiers's post if the wild over ordering was stopped it would also stop or minimize the massive sudden shortages we experience.

I agree that the choice of where to put menu options, at the top or on the left frame, is not optimal and should be improved.
as I said, the last change was in haste, because we created a problem making the menu too long.

we will rethink and try to improve.

The "massive" ordering of products has to do with two factors:

1. the size of the corporations and the numbers of products used in production and their quantities.
2. The setting you can choose for the number of months stocks the corporation should have.
You can set supply numbers in months on the supply tab for corporations.

Aries
I am not sure i understand the issue with
"what type of transactions get sent to Simcountry messaging?"