W3C - Game News - August 21

Defense weapons

The base price of many defense weapons is now reduced a bit.
The real price depends on the market but the maximum price follows the decline of the base price.

Space product pricing is also declining.

Also the space industry pricing is reduced a bit. This will also reduce the chash problem in these corporations although the decline is small.
We will introduce further reductions in the coming months.

Shuttle components are now traded on the world markets.

The trading of shuttle components is opened on the markets on all the worlds.
The space industry requires many corporations to support one that produced cargo shuttles.
Trading these components on the market will make it a little easier.

Nuclear weapons pricing is reduced

This reduction too, will make it easier to build and finance such corporations.
The introduction of Strategic weapons maintenance products increased the need for a nuclear weapon industry.
More corporations are being built.

Numbers of workers in many defense corporations have been reduced again.

We have already reduced the number of workers in the defense related industries.
This is another step to reduce numbers even more.
These reductions make it easier to setup such corporations without a major impact on the availability of workers.

Efficiency upgrades have a stronger effect on the number of workers.

When upgrading efficiency of corporations, the number of workers needed in the corporation is reduced.
This reduction makes it possible to increase the number of corporations in the country with the same numbers of population.

The number of cities will start to decline.

Countries with a very large population numbers have many cities and their maps can become clogged with cities all over the map.
Also in time of war, this is a major obstacle and a bit overdone.
We have now started a process that will slowly increase the number of people in each city and in the process, will decrease the number of cities.
We expect numbers to decline by 10%-15% but it will take up to two weeks to fully materialize.

Beginners population is increasing.

The population is new countries will increase by 2 millions, to 13 millions. It will help beginners.

Population purchases stop when population reaches 290.000.000.

Purchasing population on the direct trading market used to go up to 300M people. It is now reduced to 290M.
We may reduce these numbers even more.
Countries with more than 290M, cannot purchase more but there will be no sudden fall of the numbers to 290M.

Work will start next week on the war game changes in Simcountry.

We have a plan for improvements of the war game.
Work will start in one week and features will be installed once completed.
Changes that are significant to the way the war game functions, will be announced in advance.

The appears to be a new cap of country cash, set at $1000 Trillion. If you had more than that in your country, your funds were lost. If this happened to you, check your asset history to get an idea of lost funds and email the gamemaster, as I have.

I appreciate the reduction of cities. Is a 10-15% decline enough for large countries? Large countries have hundreds of cities, each presenting a target for strategic weapons. Players who wish or must leave game protections on FB might find this new environment unsettling and the duty of providing for their own defense immense.

On the population purchase change, I don't mind the current change but what is the thinking behind it? How low may that number go? Also, is there any plans to change natural population growth? My initial thoughts are that the idea is that the world is setup in a way to discourage one player to have a large number of countries. This is enforced through several malice systems, and hits especially hard after 10 countries. Reducing the potential of individual countries seems counter to the idea of single players dominating many countries.

Jonni,

Thank you very much, this is greatly welcomed news and I for one love the changes! Thanks for keeping us in the loop and I look forward to the changes to the war game

We indeed forgot to mention that change in the max cash.
We did not think there are individual countries with such high cash amounts.

One player mailed us, others are welcome but:

we have the previous numbers.
we will return the lost cash but this is a one time fix.

we request you to move cash to the game account and reduce amounts in the countries to under 1000T.
seems like a non problem for most.

The population growth process (or decline) is unchanged.
The max of 300M is now harder to reach and we would like to take it even lower.

We think that a smaller number of cities will make it easier for everyone. small countries will also see smaller numbers of cities but it will probably not decline under 20 cities of each type.

if you see something weird please let us know.

We expect another update next week, possibly with the first war related update.

The increase of population for starters is a first step in increasing the capabilities of new countries.
we will probably increase the numbers further and will decide how to increase their military power.

We are now working on the limitation of the number of countries that can purchase war protection.
There will be no major limitation but the feature must be in place for later use.

Same with automatic reactivation and placement of directly transferred or traded weapons in the reserves.

With automatic reactivation in place, this will not be a major limitation.

More details were not mentions:

A small change in the computation of the health and education indexes (will also apply later to some other indexes), make them decline a bit in countries where their values are very high.

The decline is small.

We have also introduced reductions to absurd numbers of hospitals, schools, universities and such if the index value is at levels that cause damage to the country.

Having the university index at a level of 4000 while the school indexes are at 200 costs a lot of money and has no positive effect on anything.

Andy,

A recommendation to the GM if I may?

Lately its shown that the GM wants robotics to become an important product in the game in terms of corporation efficiency.
However, if you look on the worlds even the highest value corporations show very little or negative profits when producing them. I had several of them but they where money pits either costing me money or making far less then other corporations.
It seems that its nothing to do with sales price or the production levels but the overall consumption of products. Most corporations the cost of raw materials sits at about 50% of the total cost to produce the goods(others being salaries, ect). If you look they all sit at 80% or higher which is the reason I believe the corporations make such little money. If anything I would suggest a reduction of the goods needed to produce them.
Just a though something like 10% would reduce costs by a few billion per year making the corporations MUCH more desirable.

I do think its worth a double check just on the reasoning that it seems you guys have some big plans for that corporation in the near future.

These corporations should be very profitable.
They have a large turnover and should make profits comparable to electric motors or Displays.

I will look into it.

The larger the corporations, the more they benefit from upgrades.

cargo shuttle corporations, the largest, are losers without upgrades and make very large profits when fully upgraded.

Thanks for these updates. Regarding the reduction of the amount of cities, how about counties and towns? You can reduce clutter even further by decreasing the amount of counties and towns. It would be very helpful to consolidate some of their population.

All types of cities, towns and counties are included in the process.
All of them will reduce 10-15% in this round.

This is in fact ongoing right now, at a slow pace.