Totally Confused ?? <IMG SRC="https://www.simcountry.com/discus/clipart/sad.gif" ALT=":&#40;"> (White Giant)

Start at 210% of the market price and lower by 10% every month that the product remains unsold.
The offered price is updated when the produced quality changes. { and yes i am a paid member }

Latest Market Price: 3.56M SC$ per unit
Previous Month Estimate 3.49M ( FMU's)
Production Last Month 861
Products Sold Last Month 5,126.18M SC$


Market Situation for Factory Maintenance Units


Product Offered but not Sold yet 0
Product in Stock but not Offered on the Market 1
Product Retained Each Month For Contracts 0
Maximum Production Capacity Per Month 750
Estimated Production This Month 750

No sales contracts in place!!!

So all 860 sold at full price in month.

SO sales should be about ....

6,182 M $SC

but I received sales of

5,126 M $SC


I accept that I cant be 100% sure what the quality figure was for last month sales, but i would not expect it to reduce the 210% by much... maybe 4%..so i used 206% as my factor above..

Hope someone can clearup my confusion

Darkone, it's just one of things you are going to have to accept. I have seen myself and heard many players tell of similar nonsensical things. It's just the way the game functions now.

Check your figures like you did there over a few months to see if you get the same result. There's just a small chance that if all product wasnt sold every month for a while previously then you received a knockdown payment due to your reduce by 10% strategy.

Yes well, as i used to be a coder, systems analyst and roflmao bug finder in my earlier life then I don't really accept that this sort of problem cant be found and eradicated.

This game is so good in so many ways that it is a shame to be let down by these sort of obscure results

And this was just one example of numerous ones that have happened.

But as far as i have seen the market price option seems to work right. Wonder if thats because so many peeps are using it.. hmmmmmmm... bit cynical that thought.

Dont know what you mean by market price option...

You have to accept that a problem cant be found and eradicated if its existance is denied.

There may well be some form of sense behind the coding that makes things appear wrong to the end user (us) but it's certainly not intuitively understood nor has it been explained to me to end my suffering in ignorance.

I guess what I'm saying is I used to understand most of how things worked and if I didn't I could get it explained, or email the gamemaster, nowadays I don't and can't. So either I am becoming distressingly senile (which is entirely possible) or the game is.

Unfortunately it appears to be on the game end. I think they are holding back explaining things while the bulk of transition is taking place with corps workers, products and supply quality and so on. It could be that they do not fully understand what the results of these changes will be until they actually implement them. So they too are in a period of understanding how the base programming is responding to the new inputs and watching the outcomes rather than expecting a particular set of them.

The mode of operation should be Problem - Reaction - Solution, in theory.

But it looks like this today in practice, Problem - Solution - Wait for and monitor reaction - Rinse and repeat. Someohow this is moving us very slowly towards whatever end result the Gms want to see without making huge mistakes or causing any seriously fatal errors in favor of small fixable inconsistencies and bugs.

Like the blind leading the blind. Sooner of later the leaders hit a wall and then can report where a wall is, but not a moment sooner. From a management standpoint, I would be embarrassed if this were the case.

My guess is that the addition of some code has had an unpredicted effect on their previous code...

Hmmm Microsoft reborn....

Also it seems to me that the monthly processing is taking longer now.... or could just be i was impatient waiting to buy weapons when my budget was used up.

Also on another point i really dont think that the reduce price if not sold by 10% works. I feel that they only sell if the market price moves up through the existing... but cant prove it.

I have though shown than if you buy a product at quality 350 from one of your corps and sell it using the fixed price through offer on world market you make a HUGE loss on the product. Only selling at market price seems to work correctly with this option for me.

Really wish I had that section of code to look through, then could stop feeling so curious about why it doesn't seem to work.

Ok now I remember why i got out of computers.. too frustrating...

It's all about quality. I've never been a fan of it as there's too many unanswered questions and little demand for high quality.

The GMs have said that the price we actually get for higher quality goods is likely to be lower as there is a lesser demand for high quality goods. In the matching process, the goods are actually reduced in quality to meet demand.

Many countries are buying at 120 quality and corps buying about 175. It will generally mean we pay more for supplies and get less for sales.

This makes a mockery of the common markets, international trading and the quality upgrades.

They have slightly offset some of the drawbacks by giving a little extra welfare (thus higher production) for buying higher quality goods and introduced a need for high quality in weapons and ammunition.

This in no way makes up for the problems with quality and I have long argued that different products should have different quality limits allowing them to feed in to production chains to meet the end user highest quality limits, which should be given a clear reason to be in demand. Unless this or some other radical solution, I would be happy to see quality scrapped.

well if it is about quality then it is a mistake in the code. I set a % of market price and this is not dependant on quality just on the market price.

Maybe simple solution for high quality goods, change system of population increase so that it increases faster when the country buys higher quality goods.

David if your correct on that point, i'm going to slaughter someone, with a frucking tissue!

Lo, we are all just beta testers for the coders, planners, and other gods.

DUH, WINNING!!!

Currently, we do have an issue here.
As nearly nobody wants to purchase products at quality 210 but rather at 150, the trading procedure tries to average between the buyer and the seller and produce a deal now.

We will look into the procedure and possibly make it less accommodating.
if the price you ask for is too high, the product should not sell at all. It should wait for the price to decline to the asking price or for the asking price to increase and the two will meet somewhere.

This will be a return to the past and it caused more bankruptcies of corporations waiting some times for 6 months before their products are sold.

The resulting price may be the same as now, but it could be many months later before the transactions take place.

It can also have some consequences for the processing time as hundreds of thousands offers and requests will be reviewed many times before they are executed.

Thanks for your time on this Andy..

In consideration of your very valid reasons for this creating problems and the solution also creating problems I would make a couple of suggestions both of which are probably bad but u never know.

1. As a product quality of 300 sells at twice the value of a product value of 150 then if an offer asks for 2000 of quality 150 this could be satisfied by changing 1000 of quality 300 into 2000 of quality 150 and in my quick opinion would not have a detrimental effect on the economy. OK your supply and demand charts would have to take quality into account and use value not items but processing time would be helped and sales would always happen until no products left each month.


Ok 2nd idea can wait as i like this one so much more and this one saves a significant amount of processing time, storage space, and bankrupt corps.. So i am sure this has been proposed before and i await the reasons it dont fly...

Actually a change to this method could allow for an interesting change to the common market structure allowing the common market to build up a stock of products for its members and offer them out at common market prices as opposed to the world stock prices.

Yes i'm bored so thought of another problem or advantage to this change..

Contracts would need to request the quality wanted when signed between corps.. common market, local or world.. then the supplied qty would be different than the ones received and could be fractional.. so could cause a few probs in your data structures but as hospitals already use decimal places may not be a problem.

Major advantage for me as a player to this change though would be being able to setup my corps with contracts to my own corps and common market corps for the exact quality I want and no longer have to micro manage them on a daily basis...

Also would not have to keep some corps without quality upgrades so as to provide 120 quality product for my other corps.

Win Win Win

I completely understand what you are saying Andy. And thanks for having a re-visit of it.

At the end of the day, if a corps selling strategy is set so high that it doesnt sell product until demand price increases or its supply price drops then that is the responsibility of the corp owner. Isn't that what the game is all about, managing corps, countries etc? Don't try to mollycoddle players too far or there will be no challenge left.

Final thought... well maybe...

If you did change to a system that allowed supply of lower quality items by 'splitting' high quality and the supply of high quality by 'adding' together lower quality ( Yes similar to the quality averaging that happens already but extended ) then to keep a proper measure of the real market position then you would have to change from viewing the market as a quantity supply to a 'quality point' supply :-

Where a quality point is the quantity multiplied by the quality.

I quite like DarkOne's idea of using quality points to meet demand of low and high quality goods.

If implemented with quality settings in the common markets, it would make them viable too.

"As nearly nobody wants to purchase products at quality 210 but rather at 150, the trading procedure tries to average between the buyer and the seller and produce a deal now.
We will look into the procedure and possibly make it less accommodating... "

How about adding a "average quality" to the demand and supply graphs? Or even introduce a new market demand segmentation chart to show how much of the market demand a particular quality band?

If the market demand is for 150Q and supply is 210Q then it would be up to the corps to adjust their quality to match demand = providing what the customer wants. If a corp doesnt hit its target, products will not sell and corp will fail (as it should).

In addition to aid corps to match demand, why not introduce a upgrade target for corps? This would give control of output quality in both corp upgrades and supply quality; currently the option is to upgrade to max or not unless micromanagement of every corp is your game.

Product quality is the only means available to differentiate in this game, I hope it is enhanced in some way in the future by creating demand for higher quality products similar to that required for weapons and ammo.

Fingers Crossed.....

Thanks for your support David

Arccuk - some good ideas there I think, but if the market calls for quality 150 items as a majority then upgrading your company past 133 becomes impossible, and at a guess as a consequence then 120 would become the new major quality needed so that then would mean no corps upgraded above 100... except the military products....

So that brings me to your final paragraph and i agree without a demand for high quality there is no drive behind the market.

But that was an advantage behind my suggestion of using quality points to satisfy different quality requirements. It is i believe cheaper to produce 1 item of quality 350 than 2 items of 175 quality .. thus an ongoing drive towards quality production...including keeping the benefit for an IPO'd corp being able to upgrade further.

Also it has the advantage of reintegrating the supply and demand within each product instead of fragmenting it.. and it is the volume of transactions within each product that creates the market forces and market prices.. less volume more erratic movement..

As a growing enterprise then the thought of managing over 200 corps to me means making it relatively easy to keep a company running in an optimized format once obtained, and for these companies then to continue profitably with minimum input as i find and build new corps. So please any changes and suggestions would hopefully take this into account

Just for a bit of fun...

A change to this structure could allow the creation of a new type of corporate entity to play with...

Commodity Trader

Where you would get access to orders and offers to supply in the market place and be able to take them over to facilitate the exchange.. and make a profit on the deal... or not...

OK prob a bad idea but my thoughts was :-

If person A offers his product under market price
and Person B offers to buy his at over market price

Then they should get priority on being first in line for sale / buying

But further A would get paid under market price but B would pay over market price so where would the difference in cash go ?

I like that one but...

Give the cash to the seller and forget the commodity trader!

Wouldn't this mean that it would be more likely that products in high demand would sell for more and additional corps would be built to cash in? Those in low demand would make little money and these corps more likely to fail?

sorry, couldn't resist. I've built too many corps that should be profitable based on demand and, well, just aren't!