Andy

Babying defensive weapons maintenance weapons corporations on LU is becoming tiresome.

Can you look into the supply situation before they all go bankrupt?

Thank you.

A big problem is the over ordering of supplies when the market is low. If not micro managed the corps / countries go into debt and then bankruptcy occurs. Now corps and countries just keep re ordering each month until the supplies come in. Allow us to put in a max order stop. Example order (no more than 40 months of supplies per corp / Country.) I think this is why so many new players walk away from the game.
Rob

I don't think Rob and Johanas are talking about the same issue. But I too have been babying the weapons/airforce maintenance for some time. This lag is 3 years of supplies and basically you can't get weapons for regular price unless you make them yourself. It gets to the point where they wait so long the orders are changed to immediate. The cash situation is untenable then because they need billions to fill the orders. They need to be able to buy market priced products within a reasonable time.

there is a good side of this - weapons market is growing and players simply are not utilizing it fully yet. when due to natural resources update mining market was closed/limited game lacked other options, so now all military maintenance and weapons corporations are really good. we just need to work together and build more corporations that are mostly needed to improve the supply.

if countries and corporations are ordering without a limit then this is a bug clearly. could it be that additional orders are added when materials get negative value in stock?

If partial contracts were possible, the babying would be far reduced thanks to Common Markets. As it is, I have to check once a day to replace all orders with immediate orders. The profits are worth it, I suppose.

I'm on KB, and having similar issues with all of the various Maintenance industries.

The only way to get Offense, Defense, Airforce, and Military Base Maintenance units for my nations is by using Buy Immediate. This has a tendency, especially with Military Base Maint, to suck up my entire spending cap for the month.

A similar issue with with Asset Maintenance. Everything on KB that uses Asset Maint is constantly running short of it. Between having to regularly use Buy Immediate to obtain Asset Maint units, and production stoppages when those materials are missing, my Road, Rail, and Water Treatment Maint corps can't make money.

I have managed to acquire a number or Asset Maint corps, to try to fix my issues, but they are constantly running short of materials to actually build "Asset Maintenance" units. I can't obtain Cargo Shuttles at all for my Asset Maint companies. Between having to regularly use Buy Immediate to obtain Cargo Shuttles, and production stoppages when those materials are missing, Asset Maint corps can't make money.

And folks that are far more knowledgeable than I have stated elsewhere that Cargo Shuttles simply cannot be built profitably, so no one makes those corps.

As possible solutions:
1. Can Military Base Maint be redone so that the cost per unit is similar to the other Maint types? That way the existing spending space isn't completely taken up when I have to use Buy Immediate?

2a. Can Cargo Shuttles be redone so that they can be built and sold for a profit?
2b. Can Cargo Shuttles be removed as an input from Asset Maint entirely?

Regards,

Banedon Runestar
President
Etar

The fastest and most lasting impact on this is making all corps use supplies in whole numbers or allowing less than monthly contracts. Currently if you contract to your own corps its a minimum of one unit per month, many corps use less than a unit monthly.

I feel adding custom contract that are manually scheduled could add in interesting factor to the game, though would benefit experienced players over new players

The Maintenance companies for weapons in my country, (Bella Donna WG) like
Osanko Airforce Maintenance, have orders stacked up for over 10 years without getting filled. This corp has years worth of orders for over 10 products at the moment on order. Yet I still have to hit fill immediately every so often to get the products so the company can actually make some money. When it is making money, the corp is great, but the fact of the matter is it needs to keep 7+ years worth of supplies on hand so that it can wait to get its orders filled. This means the corps has hundreds of billions of dollars worth of supplies. I have had to transfer billions to the corps too. Early on they were in threat of closing with 200 billion in loans because I didn't go back through and cancel the stacked orders (click 7+ times to get to 1-2 orders only for 10 + products!) This isn't how I want to spend my time on this game, and it is not sustainable. I would keep these companies going if I didn't have to do so much work for them, but I'm at the point now of closing mine.

TM

Same.

I have shut down 35 so far as they fall behind/accumulate loans.

The spending limit for corporations limits how many I can save.

TM, as you said there are two problems being discussed.

About the demand for country needed maintenance products, I'll repeat what I've said before. Quality for all products should matter.
Look at country consumed Construction, the higher the quality the less you use, while with the other country consumables you just pay more for the higher quality.
If the formula used for construction was used for all the country products there would be less demand, incentive for presidents to manufacture and sell to themselves. This would free up space for other corps and make countries more profitable.

Also, if corps produce in fractional amounts and other corps demand in fractional amounts you should be able to contract fractional amounts.

The other problem is the stacking of orders. If an order can't be filled it makes no sense for corps to place more orders that won't be filled.

TM, use the orders page to toggle many orders at once. It will save you so much time.

Banedon, I find cargo shuttles to be extremely lucrative. The one problem, from an enterprise perspective, is tax rates. If you own the residing country though, then it becomes a moot point.

I'm seeing a problem with auto ordering for Weapon Quality Upgrades corporations as well. They regularly order products they don't use: Airforce, Off Weapons, and Str Weapons maintenance. They use 0 per month, have 0 in stock, but still requesting order after order.

I started a 3rd CEO just to build cargo shuttles and defensive weapons for my DWM corporations.

The shortages in some products and in maintenance products are too large.
We hoped that players will jump into it and produce more.
simply adding products is trivializing the market process.

As all corporations become larger, we expect these maintenance corporations to grow, short term, by 5% to 10%.
Their profitability will improve and we will make it significant.

We hope that when these corporations produce more and become even more profitable, players will build more of them and start reducing the absurd shortages.

Andy, they are almost impossible to keep running without contracting supplies, and for most maintenance corps the supplies are fractional so you can not run fixed contracts.

Running maintenance corps is all clicking, maintaining them supplied must be done manually for all but defensive weapons and even there still requires every couple day manual intervention.

Either the contract system must improve to allow fractional or less frequent contracts (maybe an option to custom organize contracts) or the maintenance corps need to start using supplies in whole number increments.

Agreed.

Seems like a simple fix

Juggle is right several players myself included have attempted to jump on these shortages. However there isn't enough contracting in the world to help out unless there's a global effort to build defense weapons corps

Jiggle is right several players myself included have attempted to jump on these shortages. However there isn't enough contracting in the world to help out unless there's a global effort to build defense weapons corps

The problem must be resolved and it will.

Resolving it should be done by increasing supplies, not by changes to the game.

We have already increased production a bit.

The next update will include a further increase in the output of the maintenance corporations.
there will be a decline in the cost of defensive weapons maintenance that will help reduce the cost of the defensive army.

The increased production will improve the profitability while the number of people working in these corporations keeps increasing gradually.

The problem won't be solved by increasing production of weapons corps until the point where the shortages aren't years long and the corporations can fill orders without having to make immediate orders at double the price. The other issue is that these corps have a huge list of very expensive weapons to buy. The list of weapons makes little sense with 25 of this type and 1 of another. The supply needed numbers are random. On top of that there are simply too many of them. the companies should be divided into smaller companiues so they don't have so many things they have to buy. They frequently run out of money and have to either load up on loans or get a state bail out because they have 10 different weapons to buy. I disagree that simply building weapons is the way out of this problem. Tweak how many weapons they need, divide them, and make them able to contract on the fraction is the better solution.

The shortage in maintenance corps is driven by the shortages in their supplies. But if the supplies go into surplus they very quickly go into losses making them risky to run unless the shortages are extreme.

Just one short supply for a maintenance corps, as is typical for assets maintenance, stops all production. Yet supplying that one material to yourself is difficult to contract to the corp as the usage is fractional, and risky to do on market scale as when it does go surplus the corps go to massive losses rapidly.

Nobody is about to become less profitable.
Supplies are not going into a surplus unless players increase production very substantially.

If you know the numbers, you will see that shortages in some products are declining.
Increasing the output of the maintenance corporations will surly reduce the shortages.

we have seen this before and it was resolved.
it will be resolved now.

The only issue is that we do not want to magically resolve shortages.

Players should do that and we should not intervene.

Now, shortages in several products are so high, it is unlikely players will resolve them, and they did not for a prolonged period.
A fix requires a structural increase in the output of some of these products but not in a way that will flip into a surplus.

we will watch what happens and you can too.

we expect some progress in the coming days but we might need more increases in the output.

New update.

I am just allowing them to go bankrupt and paying off the debt.

The reasons are simple fixes.

Allow us to shut down failing corporations without an additional penalty.

Create a simple way to determine what orders relate to materials in shortage without multiple back and forth checks.

Then we can quickly update orders to immediate to stop the bleeding.

Change the supplies needed for maintenance corps to full amounts instead of partial so contracts work correctly.

I have started a new armaments CEO and am working to fix the issue but the problem just keeps getting worse.

Thanks Andy.

Shortages continue but they are less severe than before.
we will see where it goes from here.
The number of immediate orders needed is much smaller.

The orders tab on the corporations page shows all the outstanding orders, in all corporations, that could not be executed because of shortages.
You can replace them by immediate orders, all at once.

the supplies for the maintenance corporations are sometimes big items.
you cannot require 12.

there are now more supplies available, shortages of these products are lower and production levels are increasing.

corporation debts must be paid when they close. There is no additional penalty.
Otherwise, as you well know, it would be a great way to make a lot of money.
take money out, gat loans, more money out, then close the corporations.

We have been there before.

Johanas,

All this reasoning is based on a strange case of severe shortages in some products.

You do not start making big changes because of a case you don't like.

I hope for everyone that shortages will continue.
if we get surpluses instead, everyone starts shouting as product prices go down and corporations will make losses.

Surpluses, losses and a massive loss of corporations will make everyone poorer.

What exactly do you hope for.