W3C - Game upgrade January 3, 2024

High Level Workers

We are experiencing a shortage of high level workers that forces many players to manually move workers and professionals between workers groups.

A slightly larger number of new workers will now become high level workers.
the change will help in reducing the shortages we experience.
It will however take some time to materialize as it does not change numbers in all age groups but rather increases them in the young groups.


Shortages

We have slightly increased production numbers in some corporations. Changes are small but will help to reduce shortages.
As a result, many corporations will make a larger profit.

We have done so before and may need to repeat this several times as shortages are very large.
Such changes never cause any major changes in the market. They never transform shortages into oversupply or have any influence on the market prices.

Extreme Shortages

Some products are showing extreme shortages on the markets.
In extreme cases, like Defense weapons maintenance products, we will allow the price of such products to increase to a higher level.

Only a small number of products may undergo such changes and the higher price will hopefully convince more players to build such corporations.

Game Level Requirements

For a long time, game level requirements remained unchanged. In the mean time, many Simcountry parameters did change and some have undergone major changes.
For example: population numbers are now higher than before and the population grows far beyond previous "natural" limits around 60 or 70 millions.
The requirements for game levels did not change.

The same is true for more conditions.

we are now looking into the game level requirements and will make some (small) changes to update them to the current situation.

This upgrade includes such small updates and changes will continue in the following rounds of game upgrades.

Game Score

The game score needs to be updated. Despite many changes in Simcountry, the way the score is computed was not updated.
As with game levels requirements, we will make some changes to the computation of the score. None are included in this update but some will follow in the next updates.
Such changes will cause fluctuations in the score and will not be introduced in the last couple of days of the month.

Andy,

Thank you for the updates, and the information about them.

"In extreme cases, like Defense weapons maintenance products, we will allow the price of such products to increase to a higher level."

Which products have had their maximum prices increased? Players can only respond by building new corporations, if we know what products are effected.

Only defense weapons maintenance had its upper limit increased.

You can see candidates on the market page.
if shortages go into tens of billions or more we will start looking into it.

also market value and profits of such corporations will increase.

we will put messages on the forum.
such changes do not require an upgrade.

We hope that other small scale measures we have taken will reduce the need for such interventions.

Defensive Weapons maintenance product had a shortage of 230 B on FB.
That is beyond any reasonable market condition and could not be repaired even with many new corporations.
we think that huge scale buying created that shortage.

anything we may do will never change a shortage into a surplus.

Andy,

In my experience, shortages of defense weapons maintenance, (or any maintenance product really), are usually caused by a shortage of one of it's input goods. Often because a player is placing huge orders for that weapon type. Causing the maintenance corporations to stop producing.

I closed most of my maintenance corporations, because they spent so much time idle, due to input shortages.

Honestly, I think the problem is more upstream. With Wind Farm income, upgrading your military is much more viable. So myself, I've been buying allot of upgrades, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Its also more realistic to have a larger standing army, and more need for DWM, and the other maintenance corps.

Wind Farm income, makes playing the war game much easier, because its easier to build up, and rebuild after a lose. I think its altering the flow of Sim econ.

@ Daniel Iceling, yes defensive weapons maintenance corps require effort to manage, but as Andy has made them use whole units of all materials they are reasonable to self supply and contract to. The problem was with the low price cap self supplying lost money, now it is more worth the effort, though it's still not high profit when self supplied.

I have one enterprise with max corps focused on defensive weapons maintenance and it does quite well now after this change.

Not all corps should be just simple build and profit, some should be a challenge, though that challenge should be properly rewarded with high profits. It seems lately there has been a focus on simple set and forget corps by both players and game master, sadly many set and forget are still more profitable than corps that require active management.

The problem with self supplying the corps is, unless you carefully balance the input Qualities, you'll end up losing a lot of money on lost output Q. Supplying all 220-300 to a corp only to get a 300 Q good out is a huge waste of money.

That combined with the fact that maintenance qualities mean nothing means I can never contract with my own maintenance corps or risk paying 3x as much for the exact same goods a 120Q works.
Quantity of goods used should scale on quality.


100 items of 300Q should provide the same support as 250 items of 120Q (300/120 = 2.5 * 100)

Preach, Hern. Spot on.

The current settings are also why common markets are mostly unused for general contracting as well.