Quality system update needed

Currently in the game quality of materials is a bit broken thing which I think could be easily fixed and that would significantly boost game in many ways.

In the current situation:

• Local and common market hurts players if used as people are buying supplies at much higher quality than needed and losing money - this is because optimal quality of supplies is 215(needed to reach maximum with quality upgrades), while fully upgraded corporations produce at 300/330
• Number of corporations in the game is too big, causing high calculations for server.
• Countries are only profitable when buying supplies at minimum 120 quality, else losing money. this mistake so common as new people think high quality is good when in reality it actually hurts your cost line.
• CEO are supposed to produce at max 330 quality, but it really adds no value as selling price is capped at 300.
• It is in general very confusing as high quality should allow to do better but instead it hurts.

I suggest that quality of materials should do some extra:

• Better quality of supplies should reduce the number of materials needed in general - e.g. With 120 quality I currently need 100 supply materials while with 240 I would need 50 etc. This means:
  • Number of corporations in game can be reduced 2 or 3 times. W3C could control number of corporations in the game by making high quality supplies more or less impactful on reductions of supplies needed not just increase amount of employees corporations hire.
  • Quality level for countries would mean nothing as countries would use less but higher quality supplies. In game we have already a welfare boost for countries using higher quality supplies, so it makes sense.
  • Local and common markets will invite CEOs to gain more boost from higher quality CEO produce(330 instead of 300)
  • Market would be more balanced and supplies with high quality would be in big demand
• Quality of the resources should have impact to Production Level - this allows to produce more materials. It does not need to be high increase, but 10/15% extra at maximum quality would encourage players to get max quality to also benefit more prom production increase.

Andy - I think this should not be complex to implement, probably just changing calculations in productions material consumption formula as well as tuning the Production level formula slightly, but the results would be significant, also making this step by step would allow you to control number of corporations in the game.

please let me know if this makes sense for you.

image to support this visually for corporations:

the same for country:

maybe this get spotted one day

Mndz, I also would like to see some improvements to the trading system.
You are wrong on one point here though, countries do not spend more for higher quality products because they use less. This is form my last month's spending. (Hope the insert table works)

POP M	GAS SC$@Q	CLOTHES SC$@Q	LUX GOODS SC$@Q
102.9	1,454.42M @161	4,050.60M @210	2,575.46M @168
102.7	1,442.44M @164	4,023.66M @209	2,528.77M @318
102.6	1,446.33M @159	4,036.45M @313	2,537.20M @168
102.4	1,438.88M @161	4,011.67M @301	2,524.20M @193
102.3	1,443.98M @161	4,027.34M @174	2,528.55M @172

For GAS the quality is about the same and larger countries spend more.
The quality of CLOTHES differs by almost 50% and LUXURY GOODS by over 80% but the spending pattern is similar to GAS.

John it makes a difference on products used by the government. Products used by population makes no difference though as you said.

If you change quality for government products to the minimum, you will save insane amounts of money on healthcare, defense, transport, and education costs.

As John says it is broken for governance spending - hospitals, educations, roads, military etc. I just spotted that in my Golden rainbow empire the setting was not accurate and when i changed it to 120, the profits went from 50-60 to 90-100. that difference will never be compensated by few points in welfare

Wow, I've had my empire set to 180, I think I'm going to try the 120

Do it, you will save tons of money.

The healthcare cost plummeted over 10% so far. Thank you.

We can tweak the quality system.
I am not sure this is urgent and we will also have to compensate for the increased profits.
This will start another round of tweaking that will take long to balance.

We will think about it.

Increased quality does not reduce the quantity of products used.
The numbers shown by John are no proof of that.
Numbers fluctuate, quantities bought depend of what the country already has at any given moment.
Only multi year trends show such changes.

In any case, we did not program any reduction in quantities that depend on the quality.

Quality can increase the welfare index and then production levels.

The are however, products where quality is not essential and could be a waste of money.

we have reduced their numbers and tried to make quality important everywhere.
this is currently not the case yet.

Andy,

I am not saying that currently quality impacts the quantity of products used. I suggest making this change as it will have huge positive impact the the game by:

> Giving W3C chance to control number of corporations without increasing number of employees, you can simply reduce number of corporations 2 or 3 times just by enabling this new feature.
> Giving reason to play common and local markets - people would stop losing money playing common and local markets and benefit from them instead. wouldn't be that great!
> protecting new people from mistakes they make with country and corporation supply quality settings

I know that tweaking time will be long, but W3C will be on top of it, also it makes sense doing this together with other things like size of corporations, amounts of production in general, size of countries etc.

We will do some more evaluation of the suggestions but let me first make some comments:

1. We have no problem at all controlling the numbers of corporations. Several small updates in the past months solved this problem once and for all. So much so that it went unnoticed and did not interfere with anyone making his own decisions on the number of corporations.

2. We have no need to reduce the number of corporations in any of the worlds. Processing time for a game month is less than one hour for all the worlds and we run 6 par day.
reducing the numbers of corporations will cause unemployment. Countries are free to build more to reduce unemployment and will overproduce.
I think that the current situation is ok. we might need some more corporations (small numbers) as currently world population is increasing. (very slowly).
3. My corporations are buying supplies at much higher quality and are profitable. All of them.
4. The 300 vs. 330 max quality issue is indeed a problem, no a very big problem but needs to be dealt with.
5. The common market is a real problem in this mix and not so easy to resolve.

I will come back with more and you will too, I am sure.

Thanks for the good thinking and the effort to improve.

Hi Andy,

thanks for reading and replying

I understand that this is not straight forward from game dynamic perspective but I assume it should be pretty easy from coding part.

I would implement in this sequence - focusing to fix local and common market problem first:

1. Add linear monthly of use supplies dependency of quality:

Linear model means, that there is status quo and nobody loses money using different quality setting. that means that using local and common markets will hurt no-one.


2. Check what happens with profitability, number of corporations, market shortage/surplus.

if this is profitability issue you can increase/decrease number of employees, change basic price or adjust standard usage of some supplies categories etc.

Currently market is all in red - this is not ok, it means there is huge shortage of everything. this means balance is wrong, new corporations are not built and old ones are not closed.

3. As discussed with you some time ago on chat- add additional production bonus for local and common market depending on how much supplies coming from them. Nothing big, just 5% max for common and 10% for local. - this part is needed to promote using local/common markets.

when this is done, the most efficient players will need to get maximum supplies from local and common markets to get production boost.

Finding and organizing productions chains will be very interesting part of economy game so people will play local/common markets a lot.