W3C - Two Recent Upgrades - Last upgrade on May 9, 2023

Both upgrades involve similar issues.

Larger Corporations and max values

Corporations continue to grow gradually and in the process reach higher turnover and higher profits.

Some values on corporations are crossing max values that were in place to help us discover potential errors.
We have now made another round of checking of these values and made many corrections.

The Energy Market

There are now more wind turbines and more wind farms are functioning in many countries.
We have made several corrections to the current energy producers. The traditional electric power corporations now use both oil and gas and we are making a slow transition towards natural gas.
The corporations are using more gas and will increase the use of gas while reducing the use of oil which is also the general trend in power stations.
We are also correcting the capacity of such power stations, and have reduced their capacity to a more realistic production levels compared to wind farms.
After this upgrade, a power station using gas and oil, will have a production level that compares to about 8 or 9 wind farms.

Energy Reporting

We intend to add a new energy page to each country that will show energy production in the country from all possible sources and will also show the current energy use in the countries and in the corporations that are located in the country.

Corporate Profitability

We see more gains in the profitability of corporations. This is a long term change that has resulted, over a long period, in much larger profits in corporations in general.
At the same time, corporations become a bit larger, they also need more workers than before and as a result, the number of corporations in each world remains stable or might even decline a bit.

Changes that are needed before the start of the new Tiny Atlas World

Tiny Atlas is a new type of world that requires some updates to the current data structures in Simcountry. One reason is that tiny Atlas has very small population numbers that are far lower than the minimum numbers in the other worlds. This requires some updating for the two types of worlds to exist next to each other.

We are also introducing a way to transfer population from the existing worlds into Tiny Atlas, once a country is ready and able to accept migration.
The transfers will always include 100.000 people that can be transferred each game month.
The transfers are free. No cash or gold coins are required.

We are currently testing Tiny Atlas, running many game months on it and are searching for possible errors. We think that that world will be ready to start very soon.

Playing Tiny Atlas

We will publish a detailed document before the Tiny Atlas world becomes operational.
Playing on Tiny Atlas will take place in several stages:

1. A player who has a country/empire on one of the current worlds, will be able to get a country on Tiny Atlas, You will be able to look around and make a choice for a country. Once you decide, the country can be reserved for 30 gold coins.

2. The country must be prepared to be able to accept new population. The initial population will be around 1.000.000 and declining. The country will have no food, no corporations and in fact no economy to speak of.
At this stage, the presidents priority will be to transfer food and materials to the country by use of cargo shuttles, from other countries.
Everything must be moved over. There is no market to purchase anything and with lack of food, people will not survive.
Players will have to find out what the population uses based on what they use in other countries they have and transport large quantities of supplies into their country.
They will need many cargo shuttles and enough supplies in their other countries to be able to build sufficient supply levels in their country on Tiny Atlas.
You are advised not to start moving people as they might not survive without sufficient supplies.

3. Once supply levels can support the existing population, levels must increase further to support more population.
Population transfers can start and at the same time, more supplies must be brought from the existing countries to prevent any shortages. Shortages of food, but also other shortages, will result in disastrous death rates and decline of the population.
Increasing the numbers of the population is essential if players want to be able to start corporations and mainly, the production of rare metals that can be found on Tiny Atlas.

Once a country on Tiny Atlas manages to support its growing population, players will have to build a health system, education and transportation. Once in place, the country could start building corporations and create local production to be able to grow the population and reduce the dependency on transports from other planets.

4. Each country on Tiny Atlas will have at least one deposit of a rare metal and will be able to mine it and transport products to the other planets.
The rare metals that can be mined on Tiny Atlas will be essential in the production of advance products, including several types of weapons and ammunition that have capabilities that are currently not available.
More information on these products will be published when Tiny Atlas becomes operational.

Hi,

Before introducing more weapons please consider fixing the current state in war engine and address the multiple issues reported by different players.

Regards

The energy production overview page was really needed

Regarding making corporations larger, I think you have overdone it. There are massive shortages and not enough corporations are being built to address it, so if you want to keep the same corporation numbers you must increase production levels. Profit remained more or less the same but much more people are hired.

I have to close hundreds of corporations in big countries but doing this with limit of 4 is pain.

Weapons and asset maintenance corporations are total shit now.

Mndz,

We have increased production in many corporations.
more than was needed to compensate for the (very small) increase in their size.
We are very careful with such changes and they remain very small. we are looking for absurd shortages and try to tune slightly without disturbing the markets.

We think that shortages became very large, but not to the point where industries collapse.
There is probably more need for immediate orders but profits of corporations remain very high.


Myers,

There was an issue raised by a player about the number of destroyed weapons on the offensive side, compared to the defensive side, suggesting an error in the way the fighting takes place.

we have looked into it many times and did not find such an error.
we did not make any changes, for a very long time, in the way the actual fighting takes place.

A strong defense is hard to destroy. This was always the case and we have advised players, for years now, that building a strong defense will convince attackers to find other countries to attack.

we think that there must be a way for players to prevent destruction of their countries and if they set up a very strong defense, they will survive.

Before attacking a country, players should try to find out if there is a possibility to win.

Well, let's see. Some shortages i simply cannot understand, like missile interceptors missiles is billion in shortage, how this is possible

Mndz the problem is weapons are using ammo even when not a war. I think the amount of ammo used should be decreased or eliminated completely

True. The same with supply units, some of them like supply ships are super expensive to maintain even if they sit outside supply units doing nothing. All this extra cost of war is just preventing ppl having fun and enjoying game.

@Andy,

By the way you talk , you are either no longer Andy or many people are using "Andy" account to response, which could explain different behaviors accross different responses.

Not because you did not change something in years, it does not means there is no bug at all.
I insist on asking you (whichever you are today) to stop replying with generic response and debug this for once in many years.

I've provided you with sufficient details to notice that the mini-rounds were wrong. You finally admitted that there are 10 mini-rounds instead of 16. Documentation was not updated yet neither, even though you said it was automatically updated with every code changed.

I've provided you with sufficient details to debug the war engine versus decent defense.

I've provided you with sufficient details to debug the war engine versus WEAK defense.

I've provided you with sufficient details to debug why conventional missile batteries are meat shield over other weapons.

I've provided you with sufficient details to investigate why defensive helicopters are destroying two to three times more enemy batteries than their ammunition capacity would suggest. Even though the attacker's weapons are of significantly higher quality.


Yet, you did nothing but ignored us, and ocassionally a generic response.

Well, the end of my previous message wasn't good. I apologize for it, sorry.

Rest of the message remains, we (not just me) have provided lot of good with too much details examples to investigate.

Have a nice day,
Regards

Its like DeJa'Vu, all over again

Like Lord Mndz "Weapons and asset maintenance corporations are total shit now."

I set up a bran new CEO, tried DWM for my first corp. I was stunned at how good it was. Then it ran out of supplies. Being freshly back, I can't really afford allot of purchases, to manually supply. So I sat there, with my best corp, doing nothing. Tried to set up common market supply, but that was a head ache. But I got 7ish going. Now, they are crap corps, until they upgrade.

Josias

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

Weapons and asset maintenance corporations are total shit now.<!-/Quote-!>

We said this months ago.

I still have a few and they annoy me.

I just closed asset maintenance corp that had 400B loans, 360b negative cash and 700B worth of materials in stock. This is insane inbalance, not even talking about supply nightmare and low profit. Robotics are bought for 32000 game months etc.

Just image a new player who tries to build such corporations, closing one ruins enrire country.

Since the introduction of the windmill plantations market conditions have been steadily declining. What I've seen on WG was electric production was cut to about a fifth of what it was but demand in corps was only reduced 10 to 15%. The shortage of electric for corps is causing shortages in other products. Just look at the trade page for utilization or look at some C3's and see that countries don't have power and a 1/4 of their corps are in shortage, mostly because of power.

This wind power thing should have been created like normal corps that can offer contracts and put their product on the market. When they were first introduced I looked into buying some but since you can't control their supplies or sales I decided against investing in them. I figured I would need just over a hundred to supply a country if their produced quality was around 330. There are players who built hundreds of these, stockpiling power and not offering it on the market. At the very least some kind of auto sell function should have been added when a country's stock reaches a certain amount.

weapon maintenance corporations are using ammunition and there are many such corporations.

Some players are buying ammunition in very large quantities.

There are no interventions at all by the gamemaster on the ammo market.
we are not selling or buying ammunition.

The energy market

There is an increase in the production of wind energy.
it is growing slowly and replacing some of the traditional sources of energy.

Very frequently we see nuclear energy oversupply and a very low price while the electric power market shows a huge shortage.

Countries with a lot of wind energy can sell their products on the market, contract them.

we have promised to create an energy overview page to show both production and use of energy.

we will do so ASAP.

Maintenance corporations

the weapon maintenance corporations are among the largest in Simcountry and by design, are very profitable.

On the other hand, we have seen that the largest corporations are more dependent on the cost of raw materials and on shortages.
production levels and profits can fluctuate.

to stabilize, we have slightly reduced their size several times while profits remained high.
we have also, in the past several upgrades, tried to reduce shortages.

shortages destabilize the market.

for example:
I have a country with a population of 570 million.

The country swings from a profit of 600B per game month to a loss of 100B in a mater of 6 game months.
when I look into it, it has 600-2000 orders outstanding and many corporations are losing money because of it.

The next upgrade, in the coming days, will try to reduce extreme shortages.

About energy
Could you explain how increasing wind production will help electric shortages if the players who built 1000's of farms do not log on every day and sell their excess.
Why isn't the nuc power surplus immediately converted to regular electric? I had to reduce production in nuc power because the corps started selling at a loss yet corps stil have reduced production because of a shortage of electric.
About shortages
It seems that every few months we go through this and you tweak the numbers again.
From what I see there are a few flaws in the world market and the destruction and creation of corps.
First is the stacking of multiple orders when the original is not filled within a year or so. This makes the shortage seem worse than it is causing more corps to be built.
When corps are not producing at full capacity due to shortages, creating a shortage in their product the game creates more of that corp making the shortage of their supplies even worse.
When a product goes into surplus the destruction of corps is sometimes extreme. I've seen where the number of corps for a product drop to a third of what it was and then in a week or two there is a huge shortage in that product.
Thanks for reading this,

Can we instead refine the common market trading page so that we can properly inner-source the necessary materials to the maintenance corporations? Right now, especially as an Enterprise, it's very difficult to use the common market trading pages due to the repetitive nature, HUGE amount of data, and inability to automate or easily specify things.

This is how I make the CM thing work

In my enterprise, i can choose what corps to except contracts from. easier to do a group, like all your EP corps.

the second step, i click on corps on the left, in the tabs at the top, "Accept/Cancel Contracts." Go to the group, check the stuff you don't want, and cancel.

Its usually easier to just look at the buying, or selling, rather than both.

on another note. is their a way to reduce the number of wind farms, if you get to many?

also, i just noticed that if you click on the line "ave...." it'll give you the option to pick what supplies, for each spefic corp. one at a time, but i could go thru that fast if i wanted

We do not tweak the numbers except for a very gradual reduction in oil/gas production of electric power.
this takes place once in a couple of weeks.

nuclear power generators sell their products on the market and many times, when noone buys them, there is a surplus and the price is low.

some players then buy the surplus at a low price.
then either use it themselves or they sell it on the market for a much higher price.

I do not think that there are players with 1000 wind farms who do not login.

what we see is a growing number of countries that have reduced their purchasing of electric power and produce more of what they need in their own wind farms.

In normal times, and for a very long time, the market adapted itself to what was needed.

new corporations build automatically in C3 countries. C3 countries cannot build many corporations but they did most of the market tuning.

C3 countries do not wait for a very long time before they close corporations that show a surplus.
We need the flexibility. C3 countries also quickly build new corporations if, after a closing, they have workers for a new corporation.

All this becomes more difficult when the markets are in severe shortages.

Corporations should probably produce a bit more and reduce the shortages but be careful with what you wish for.

such changes could flip some shortages into oversupply that then can spread into many corporations and product prices and profitability will decline.

We do not like to intervene but we currently think that:

1. maintenance corporations should be more stable and have an improved profitability. this will be achieved if they become slightly smaller and keep the same profit capabilities.
2. several types of corporations, where shortages are skyrocketing, should produce a bit more.

We have already made some small updates. more will come.