Common Market Contracts (Little Upsilon)

Common market for your corporation needs do not work.I click on the modify supply contracts for the local area trades.It dont work.I'm trying to buy local products with my desire supply quality through the common market trade.It wont work at all.What am I doing wrong.

It does work. You have to offer products for contracting first. Like, let's say you want to contract High Tech Services. Go to your corporation that produces High Tech Services, click on "common market contracts for your corporation" (under the heading of Product Offered). Then, in the box next to Quantity: you can type in the number of units you want to offer. Note that this is the number of units, not a percentage. So, to offer all of the production of a high tech services corporation, you'd type in 3500000. Then click "Submit Contract Offer." After that, you can accept supply contracts for high tech services in any corporation that's part of your local/common market. Make sure you know what you're doing with the contracts first though. You shouldn't create supply contracts for every kind of supply that a corporation uses, just the cheap ones (in terms of the amount consumed per month). Make sure that the supplies are top-quality (296 for state corporations, 333 for enterprise corporations).

Thank you very much.I owe you for this.With due respects.Thank you and it makes alot more sense to me.

Least I know now where I went wrong.

Do I have to put all the corporation quality supply to 100 and then go from there?

I like to test it on the anti air craft batteries to go to common market trade.How would I go about having the supply quality at 100 and have high tech services at high quality at around 180 mark.Could you please explain,thank you.I still have little trouble.

Wellll... it's dependent upon the corporation supplying the high tech services. If the high tech services corporation is supplying stuff that's 180 quality, then your corporations that sign supply contracts with it will receive 180 quality high tech services. You can't pick what quality you want to buy.

The thing is, though, that I just found out last night that supply quality calculations work differently now than what I was used to. So, I don't actually know when (or even if) it's worthwhile to contract supplies now~
Sorry I can't be more helpful there.

Damn,we were on a roll then.I was looking forward to do good trades.Now what?

Okay, so. Supply contracts revisited. I'm pretty sure I understand the new system; it's actually much simpler than I thought. The basic premise now is to contract the cheapest supplies in terms of their per-unit price.

So, stuff like electric power that costs $60,000 per unit and especially FMU which costs like $2.6M per unit are always a horrible thing to contract and should be bought at 100 quality. But, cheap stuff like high tech services (~$250/unit) and services (~$290/unit) are usually good to contract. It depends. You'll have to look at each corporation and take into consideration what it consumes and the relative prices of each.

If contracts confuse you, there is another way to save a bit of money easily. Set your corporations to order supplies at 160Q (190 for state/country controlled). You can buy factory maintenance units in large volume at 100Q with your enterprise or country. Then, on the world trade page, go to "enterprise (or country) trading with your own corporations" and sell 60 months worth of FMU to all of your corps. This allows you to save on FMU costs in all of your corporations since FMU has an almost non-existent impact on final product quality. You can also do this with electric power, and possibly other expensive things. The reason I don't like this is because of the micromanagement involved. You have to order stuff regularly with your enterprise/country and then remember to fill up your corporations every 45 or so game months (if you let it get too low the game will auto-order 160Q stuff) which is a pain in the ass. I'm more of a "fire and forget" type of person so I go for the contracts.

Using supply contracts from your own corporations also has the added effect of boosting the supplying corporation's income a little bit since while there is a cap on world market selling price (296% AFAIK), contracted products receive $$$ according to their quality (so 333Q gets 333%, and truly-publics supplying 370Q get 370%).

None of this is really earth-shattering, and if you're not an obsessive-compulsive like me who likes to fine tune everything, you won't automatically fail at simcountry for not doing it... but every bit of game money helps.