W3C - Some news, preannouncement

Things will continue along as normal, since none of the markets will be disrupted, this has to mean that the supply fairy will magically create the supplies to keep the industries going.


So nothing will change, and I expect unless selenium is worth in the hundreds of thousands, per unit and it translates to a 1 unit of product to 1 cargo unit. It will be ignored. Though that assumption is going purely on memory, since I don't know what the current costs would be. It's been awhile, but I take it that things are no longer free.

I'm not even going to get started on FMUs. I understand the logic of their creation, but I have my own opinions on their application.

First and essential in the discussion:

all products, independent of place of production and trading, can be bought and sold on all worlds between players and in contracts.
This remains true for everything, including nuclear weapons, Selenium and all future new products.

Most products used by the population and products used in the production of most used products will continue to be traded on all the markets in all the worlds.
This will allow players who are not interested in the space trading, space mining or space war to continue and play as they do now.

In addition, there will be products that are produced on one world only but can be traded everywhere.

Players who are interested in additional functions, will be able to participate in the space trading, mining etc.
It will give them more game functionality. The products that are involved will in general be used in industries that require high game levels.

some products will be produced on one world only and traded everywhere.
If such products are in short supply in any of the worlds, we are quite sure that they will be moved around and be sold on all the markets.
If not, we might move such products ourselves. buy them in one place and sell them elsewhere.

Selenium is one of these products. the quantities will be small in comparison with the capacity of a cargo shuttle and if no player is interested in making money on selenium and move it to a different world, we will indeed as long as needed.
We do not need to create products out of nothing, we can just move them.

There are and will be more products that are produced in one or more worlds and traded on space stations only.

Nuclear weapons are in this group. These are not traded on any world for a very long time.
If you want a nuclear weapon you already need to make the effort.

In addition, as is said before:

All products can be traded between players and in contracts on all the worlds. This include all the nuclear weapons, selenium and all future products.

You don't need to go anywhere, just purchase these products from another player.

Our interventions in the markets:

These are as old as the game.

If services are in short supply to a level that corporations stop production, the entire world market can be disrupted.
We added small quantities from time to time to ensure nothing bad happened but we never made a shortage into a surplus.
Most time, no interventions are needed and we never do it manually. we measure and if needed, add a small percentage of the shortage.

We also added product if it was new and there was no corporations making it. these interventions are usually stopped within a week or two as many new corporations are created to produce it.

example: Factory Maintenance units.
After the introduction, we had to supply product or everything would stop. Now it is probably the largest product in the game and a very profitable one.

All well and good, but how those interventions have appeared on this end to players are as follows:

Shortages have no meaning or bearing. The only time I remember a shortage of a commodity actually halting production was either due to database issues where some weapon corp had a call for the same supply commodity twice and only filled the need once or pre-Factory Maintenance Unit, where upgrading corporations causes a Services/High Tech Services see-saw effect. I distinctly remember in 2003 having to frequently immediately order services or high tech services, or build my own corporations to supply them and then manually cut contracts to my other corporations. Thus the common market was born. To keep many of them operational, whereas now, I don't experience shortages

The Factory Maintenance Unit, I would consider one of the poorest examples to cite for a thriving economy, since if you run out of Factory Maintenance Units the production doesn't stop. You can go negative in quantity and they have no meaning except costs start to rise. As it currently stands, the "economy" of these worlds is not dynamic, most players build a very narrow subset of corporations via CEO accounts to function. Factory Maintenance Unit, Electric Power, Oil, High Tech Services, etc. I don't remember the full list. I don't pay attention. From there, they depend on your actions to maintain their function, either via the automated activities of the computer controlled countries/corporations, or the ongoing supplies that just magically appear from the aethers.

I assume that part of the impetus behind corporations having level requirements to build was an attempt to force people to diversify their holdings. A more effective method from my view would be to force people to address shortages. If there's a consistent shortage in something, production should halt, forcing people to address the problem. If my chemicals corporation stopped production because there's a shortage of sulphur. I'd think about going out and getting a sulphur corporation active. Whereas, if I did take steps to monopolize the sulphur industry and then witheld the production, no one would notice.

As it stands, there is a nice little cycle going where you are yearly or more often "increasing the size of corporations" to reduce overall numbers. Invariably Factory Maintenance Unit production and consumption increase. The Factory Maintenance Unit corporation has been the highest quantity of the bunch since 2009 that I'm aware of personally. I wouldn't be surprised if this corporation had been the largest since its inception. But since these things are one of the few items that most people build, and everything else will magically appear, there's really no impetus for the player community to alter their dynamic. All the other things appear by magic. Why bother with anything else?

Should there be some interference to keep things functioning? I would have to say yes. But on the flipside, should the interference be so dramatic that the continuous average shortfall of air transport of 2.5 billion units on Little Upsilon be meaningless? If shortages have no effective meaning to the players, then why should I build anything besides the Factory Maintenance Unit?

@Green "Not to mention click, click, click, click. Endless, boring, clickity clicking. Just to move commodities around. Utterly dull."

I agree 100%

Like regular trading on individual worlds, we need the same simplicity in space trading.

When trading on any world we don't load trucks, railcars, ocean liners with products. We offer the goods on the world market and magic the products are sold.

We need the same magic for space trade. Any country with a space center should have the ability to directly trade on the space market. Instead of using cargo shuttles, just charge each trade a percentage fee and be done with it. Also, CEO's should be allowed to space trade as well.

This cargo shuttle thing is way to much micromanagement.


*****
And a little reality would be nice here.

Space trading should be cost prohibitive to most if not all current world products.

Think about it. You can build cars in China today for $10,000, add shipping cost and sell it anywhere in the world. People are buying these cars.

but

Build a car on "Mars" for $10,000 add $1 million per in shipping costs and you'll not find many buyers.

Thoughts, suggestions?

You will probably find the space shuttles are needed for space wars.

How else am i gonna pirate your goodies being transfered round the worlds

Yeah? well I hope it goes the same way as the Apollo program and the series of shuttles. i.e. in the bin.

There are shortages on the market and as a result, the products increase in price.
none of our interventions reversed any of these shortages or caused a decline in the price.

A very large number of corporations, are not producing at 100% because of these shortages and we never intervene.many corporations are bankrupted every day because of this. They cannot produce due to the shortages, they get into debt and bankrupt when production remains very low for a prolonged period.

factory maintenance units are not produced in sufficient numbers although the situation is improving.

once a sort of a balance will be in sight, corporations will stop production if they do not have the product.
if we do it now, many corporations will stop or we will have to intervene.

with new space trading functions and more diversity in the way products get to the markets, we will allow wider price ranges and possibilities to create very profitable corporations on one hand and easier bankruptcy when oversupply drives prices very low.

example:
Check the price of quality and efficiency upgrades in the past two or three days.

also, check PE ratios for public corporations in the past 18 game months.

That is my main concern with this specialist products thing. Sure, with Strat bombers, I understand (having built 2 strat bomber corps + 1 strat bomber bomb corp before the cutoff) with the world trading, but for normal items?

Maestro is right in saying that it would not be cost effective to move smaller units. Say you sell 100,000 units of computers. How do you make up the cost of transport by doing that?

This is the reason when I built my country, my refusal to go the let the CEO handle things route was to diversify my corps, so if one corp goes into prolonged green spells, other corps will cover it. Keep my portfolio protected from oversupply, and wait. Classic case was when Industrial Equipment was in a massive greenspell, I kept it going, and now it's back in the black.

One thing that no one has picked up on is exhausting natural supplies. I understand that this is realism, makes perfect sense. What is concerning however, is that when you have a trillion dollar company, they shouldn't just suddenly close down. They move elsewhere. And it also would be a bit mean to lose all the money you've spent to upgrade that corp. My opinion would be for the owner, CEO or president, to pay money, like $100M SC to magically discover more resources in their country. It isn't exhausting in the corps closing sense, but it will be a 'move on to another area' cost.

My final thoughts on this special products thing is this. It seems to me that I should start thinking of setting up empires on other worlds, because I think that either no one will bother trading world-specific items (unlikely), or that there would be a very expensive cost attached to them (very likely).

I'm all for cargo shuttles being part of space wars and space exploration.

Yes, the price of quality and effectivity products has hit the ceiling on Little Upsilon. Nothing new there. Things hit the ceiling all the time. P/E ratios are moving around based upon whether their product is flagged as in a surplus or shortage, nothing new or exciting there.

Factory maintenance units will never go into surplus. The community is now brainwashed to instantly snap these up if they see a surplus, even though there is no actual need.

I will agree with you on your interventions not reversing a situation or affecting a price. But pricing, I don't care about. That should move with whatever the commodity is flagged as, shortage or surplus. I do however fondly remember air transport going from a 4.x+ billion short fall once to a 1.x billion short fall. Nothing else was affected by this.

But if you do have intentions to actually cause the situation where a shortfall in a product has meaning, then the whole concept will be more worthwhile.

Until then, I'll be building more Factory Maintenance Units corporations, just like everyone else.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

I assume that part of the impetus behind corporations having level requirements to build was an attempt to force people to diversify their holdings. A more effective method from my view would be to force people to address shortages. If there's a consistent shortage in something, production should halt, forcing people to address the problem. If my chemicals corporation stopped production because there's a shortage of sulphur. I'd think about going out and getting a sulphur corporation active. Whereas, if I did take steps to monopolize the sulphur industry and then witheld the production, no one would notice.<!-/Quote-!>

This used to be the case in the very early years of the game, and it was indeed alot more fun.

Like logging in to find everything ground to a halt because there's a 4 billion unit services shortage for the world. Those were the days.

i agree with White Darkness

Failures need to be added.
Make CM worth while, make buying higher Q worth something.

A Wheat corp uses 106FMU monthly
A Sub Nuke corp uses 96 monthly

WHY DOES FOOD NEED MORE FMU THEN A NUKE!?!?

"A very large number of corporations, are not producing at 100% because of these shortages and we never intervene.many corporations are bankrupted every day because of this. They cannot produce due to the shortages, they get into debt and bankrupt when production remains very low for a prolonged period."

Missed this part from you earlier,Tommi. The only time I've seen a shortage actually interfere with production for any of the corporations I've had in my possession since 2009 was due to either database issues, or my setting ridiculous trade strategies that just wouldn't work. Otherwise, that 4B shortfall in air transport as an example has been around since '09 when I re-signed up and has had no impact, though at the time when my empire was intact it did cause me to build 4 air transport corporations per country, because there was a guaranteed sale. A guaranteed sale, because most people don't bother.

The number of FMUs used by corporations, depends mainly on their quality level.

As I said, PE levels are falling because of a change in the way we compute PE ratios.

this is why we are tweaking the conditions for an IPO.
we hope in fact that there will be more IPOs in the future and a smaller number of state corporations.

public a private corporations contribute more to the countries where they reside. we have done this to stimulate these types of corporations, not to block them.

The price of upgrading products did not just hit the ceiling. you probably did not look.
the ceiling went way up and their profitability increased.

we think that with the current functionality, and added space functions including the automation, there is a lot to improve in the trading and economy of Simcountry.

quality is a factor in an increasing number of products.
weapons, ammunition, space industry, and all raw materials as they influence the output quality. This represents by far, most of the products.

When natural resources become limited per location, corporation market value will also depend on the unused reserves.

The economy of such corporations will have to change and they will have to become more profitable to compensate for their expected demise.

The countries will be compensated by the sale of the concessions to mine and the corporations will have a different cost structure.

Aye, I'll agree with you there. The number of FMUs depends on their quality level. A more stable scenario than High Tech Services consumption increasing.

2009, FMU consumption for all corporations was 66 at full upgrade level.

2011, varies wildly, in an apparent range from 90-125.

P/E doesn't really pertain to the aspects of supply/demand consumption, whether the calculations change or not.

The price of quality and effectivity upgrades on Little Upsilon are ceilinged. The shortage for effectivity is 13,756 at the moment and for quality 15,492. The prices for both are at approximately 300M per upgrade. The graphs of the price changes are now moving up and down in a wave style. What price commodities do once they hit the ceiling. There was a marked steady increase previously, but again, not really important. The prices could be 1 SC$ or 1 million.

There is, I was one of the "pioneers" of space and own the #1 dock on Carina. I was also the cheapest nuclear salesman for awhile up there. They were selling tacticals for 2 GC when space launched, my formula for prices was a little more complex. I love space on the aspect that it's the only portion of this game with a free market system and I can if I so choose apply the precept of "caveat emptor" to the hilt. If someone pays 5GC for a single strategic bomb. Then so be it. No refunds.

Aye I'm aware of the quality impact. I also remember a certain discussion on weapon and ammo upgrades not purchasing via automatic order.

Natural resources if implemented will be interesting, however this strikes back to the core point. Who cares if sulphur is limited? The player community typically doesn't build it. Most building occurs in a narrow, quasi-self-supporting band of corporations. The rest don't exist as far as they're concerned. Why do they not care? The supply system will make it appear by magic for their chemical corporations and then they don't have to worry.

As it stands Little Upsilon has 92 sulphur corporations. I would expect that a significant majority of those corporations are in computer controlled countries or in free accounts. Computer controlled countries are what the player community sits on top of and are partially dependent on. In the case of free accounts being targeted, I expect a number of them don't interact with the extant player community and either leave the corporation building automation active or just build stuff.

That's the point though, those who are established won't change. The system insulates them. So what if there's a continuous 190M shortfall on sulphur on Little Upsilon? The chemicals corporations aren't screeching to a halt. To be exact factor utilization for chemicals at the moment for chemicals is 103% while sulphur is 98%. Both are in a shortfall, and almost every bloody thing in the game uses chemicals.

Before working out that the shortages were essentially paper, I was at one point working on putting a stranglehold on the chemicals industry. At that time there were approx. 50 sulphur corporations supplying all of Little Upsilon. Approximately 60 rubber corporations and approximately 100 coal corporations. The number of these corporations has shifted, mostly due to tweaks in production/consumption numbers on your part.

If I had achieved a monopoly of those 3 items and then squeezed my fist, what would have happened? One would think that the chemicals industry and all industries tied to it would shudder in it's step.

In game reality. No one would have noticed. Everything would just keep going along as before. Some computer controlled countries would build more sulphur, rubber and coal. The price of those 3 commodities would go up, but nothing would happen.

If supply/demand had an impact, suddenly If I had squeezed, people would have noticed when some chemical corporations stuttered in production. If I'd squeezed hard, they would have stopped. Price would have gone up. The computer controlled countries would start building to address this dramatic and sudden shortfall. Some adventurous players might build one of the three I mentioned. Mostly, they'd complain and blame you.

If they were aware that supply/demand were meaningful, in the above scenario, they'd break my monopoly.

This is why, selenium won't really impact anything. You'll be supplying it. Nothing will change, and we'll just keep on building FMU corporations.

If moving it is economic, somebody will move it irregardless, just to address the shortage listed and rake in some essentially free money. Like hauling cheap shuttle fuselages from Kebir Blue to Little Upsilon, early on in the experience of the space program. 30 fuselages per shuttle. At the time it was 7B per fuselage on KB and LU was at 25B. No costs with launching a shuttle at the time. Having a fleet of 25 of them could make a nice profit.

I'm still not sure about limited natural resources. Yes, I know it's a smarter thing to do (breaks the rich econ countries only mining oil), but it depends how you look at it.

The way I see it, one mining company should pretty much have unlimited resources to play with. I mean, one major oil company in a massive country should have plenty of room. However, have more than one, and you'll lose out on reserves.

Even if this isn't the case, then you will have to watch what is limited. You cannot limit wood for instance, it would be sustainable farming. Oil can't be limited that much, there is oil shale.

I am more interested about resources in space. If someone owns an asteroid, is there an infinite amount of resources? Also, how would it function, is it like another country, connected via space shuttles? That is interesting.

On that note, I have a few strat bombers to sell, they're draining manpower in my main country.

Mining asteroids....I like this idea.

mining asteroids, combine that with throwing rocks, and then I'd be interested.

White Darkness has it exactly.

Jozi has so many fun ideas. Then a few complaints, and W3C steps back from the fun aspect.

This is just a game, yet there's so much fear about free markets. Now I can see if in real life people would be afraid about things like not having any dairy farms in New York City, to supply everyone with milk. You'd have to rely on private companies outside the city to produce enough milk, and then rely on private companies to transport it into the city. What if no one wants to do it? No milk and cereal! We'd have no milk in our coffee! The city would grind to a halt! Getting rid of the dairy farms in NYC would be playing with fire, and I understand why in real life we don't do things like that, even though personally I think we'd manage. But this is just a game. Ditch the price controls and the "interventions" and let's have a real free economy. And no war protection on FB, either, while we're at it.

I am concerned about lack of interventions though. After all, where would the FMUs come from? Those are in constant demand.

TL;DR: There are many things that need addressing in this game, many changes that need to be made to the core game, and there is no reason to add a whole new field (space) full of bugs to an already buggy game.

Seriously, guys, you're going to have more of a shot at maintaining your player base (and income) if you just fix the core game and leave space alone for a while.

warfreak, FMUs are in demand constantly for a combination of things.

1. Since we have "infinite supply" effectively, we have infinite growth without consequences, so we build what is deemed to make the most profit. To counteract this to a degree since the sheer volume of corporations gets unwieldy, the GMs increase corporation size. Invariably this means the things use more staff and consume more FMUs. But the FMU corporations consume more as well. As it stands, a single FMU corp could not supply the FMUs necessary to all the corporations that supply it if they were all fully upgraded. 12 commodities counting FMU come in, and 765 are produced. Estimating a 95 average consumption (probably higher), that's 8 of the 12 supplied. Admittedly, those sources can probably support 2 or 3 FMU corps, so that helps counterbalance things.

2. People are to a degree brainwashed. If there is (and it has happened) a FMU surplus. Someone will snap them all up and drive them back into the red. We're all making the things, and we're all using them, so it's a self-feeding cycle. If my economy was FMU dependent and they went into surplus, I'd certainly buy a million of the ruddy things to drive it back into the negative. If that price slips from the ceiling it cuts into my profits.

3. I won't deny, that my personal thoughts for a first step would be to begin the process of marginalizing the FMU. It's 90-120 average for a fully upgraded corp. When i restarted in 09 they were 66. I don't remember the exact '09 FMU production but they make 765 optimally now. I think the '09 level was something like 465 or thereabouts. Plus, there are things outside of the small circle people are building now, like shuttle corps. The more things outside the tiny traditional area being built, the worse the shortage is. Fortunately, production doesn't halt, since the shortage just determines what the price is.

The draw back to making shortages meaningful is obvious though. If it was suddenly true that you're not going to get air transport because there's a 4 million world shortfall the whole "economy" of every world would fold up and die.

It'd have to be gradually phased in, weakening the supply fairy's magic gradually. Then people would have to step up to the plate. If my glass corporation screeched to a halt because there was no sand. I'd consider building a sand corp. In that scenario, everyone would have to start thinking that way. Rather than "electric power, oil, FMUs make the most, the rest is crap"

Secondly, it'd eliminate the "magic bullet" concept of corps. Take the FMU, it consumes insane amounts of resources. While I would have to recheck, it was the case that a single FMU corp fully upgraded could barely support the fully upgraded corps to feed its supplies.

That kind of leaves us with a stability problem right there. Admittedly, any sweeping changes would probably leave me very unpopular with the FMU crowd (but once I get the ball rolling again, I'll be part of it to. I know what butters my bread.), since if the price falls, there goes the income, but Sand might be considered viable. If shortages became meaningful, then the FMU black hole would have additional problems. Whereas unless things have changed, you can still run a corporation without any FMUs whatsoever. Certain fixed costs start going up.

If the supply is limited, then that checks growth, whereas with infinite supply there is infinite growth. The only thing that halts growth now is population.

So the challenges would be:

1. Getting people to adjust their game, rather than just complaining.

2. Overall there might be a loss of income for people. On the other hand there would be gains in variety and in what's viable to do. That wood corp might be a good thing suddenly.

3. This could with planning open things up to the potential for monopolization of certain resources. But this would truly create the option for economic warfare. The man who controls the sulphur corps, controls the world. <_<

hey, i'd like to throw out again, a request for a teaser about space war??

are we building orbital weapons platforms? space mines? pirate ships? what? i'm sure if you had it all figured out, you'd do the update, i'm just wanting a taste of whats coming. and partially how to plan ahead for it.

I think the amount of FMU needs is a bit too high. After all, I remember seeing on the forums that a fully upgraded FMU corp produces enough for itself, and another upgraded corp. We basically need 1 FMU corp for every other corp for it to breakeven.

I don't have a stack of FMU/Elec/Oil corps. I have one FMU, 1 Elec, 1 Oil, 1 Gasoline, I diversify my corps. Don't put all my eggs in one basket. So if the magical supply fairy were to disappear, I would be safe, worse comes to worst, I can supply my own country pretty well.

If we were to remove the black hole of FMUs and all, then either reduce the FMUs needed for maintenance, or increase production (and supply). For electricity, make that directly tied in with Nuclear, they are exactly the same.

Nuclear power is more or less dead at this stage. It doesn't make sense that there can be a surplus of nuclear and a shortage of electric at the same time. They're both the same thing. Why would there be 6.2k elec corps compared to 220 nuclear corps? They produce the same thing, different method.

I mean, to change the magical black hole of several resources will see a lot of econ players falling (how many of the top CEOs have diversified corps?). I'm basically playing CEO as president (out of my 5 countries, 3 non-state corps), more fun with more resources.

Another way is to make other resources more attractive. So basically, increase country consumption more, so food, recreation, certain industries, become more attractive.

Just throwing ideas off at the top of my head, but ideas none the less. By making other resources more attractive, it involves more market research, rather than just watching the demand of FMU, elec, and oil.