Sulfur Subsidy (Little Upsilon)

You guys built too many corps in a highly subsidized market. The subsidization is now over and what was a healthy market is now over-saturated. As a result, the market price tanked to rock-bottom.

Congratulations.

Please check monthly production versus monthly demand in the future. Total supply versus total demand is the silliest manner of determining what to build. Not only will you now be losing money, your malinvestment is tying up workers from sectors that are actually under-producing. Notice that there are actual shortages in Medical Materials. You could have been building corporations in that sector, but instead, you chose to invest in a sector that was for all intensive purposes healthy.

On my end, I spent lots of money subsidizing the sulfur market. I would need to spend much, much more to continue to keep prices at perceived "normal" levels. If I were your government, I would just tax you. You would hardly notice that I was blowing your money encouraging investment in overproducing sectors thereby depriving that money from reaching sectors in real need of investment. Eventually, I would need to ask for more money to continue to subsidize a sector receiving more investment than necessary - increasing production past equilibrium yet still promoting further investment, deepening the malinvestment and inflating other sectors on two fronts - the money spent on subsidizing sulfur and the money invested in sulfur would both be potential investment deprived from more profitable sectors. I would either need to end the subsidization and allow the market to collapse, which is what I've done . . . or to tax you even more in order to subsidize the market further to prevent collapse.

If I had the ability to tax you to support my subsidies, I would have picked a larger market to subsidize.

Don't subsidize it by buying it, let it sink. After building a portion of my target, once I saw it went green, I've moved on to hitting something else that consumes sulphur and is in shortage.

So I'm losing money for awhile from one point. At least it's been shown without a doubt that player interaction can solve a shortage. When the difficulties in getting sulphur started, I counted about 55 corps being built that day. Now sulphur corps are dying off. They'll either continue to die off, and then stabilize, or they'll just keep dying off.

Myself, now that sulphur has been driven over, I've moved on to chemicals. It's the only thing that consumes it and there's a 7B shortfall. Nice market, and now a little more profitable for awhile. At least a sulphur surplus is a step forward on "balancing the shortfalls of the world" rather than what has seemed to be the hopeless sink of the FMU corp.

Really though, who knows how many people were responding to that shortage and it's impact. The number of places I saw with 10 corps queued up was quite a lot. Now myself, I won't deny that I've got nearly my generalized target of 30. So now it's time for chemicals. After chemicals, I'll pound on something else for awhile, and move on to another thing if I see results.

@ scarlet. Thats all very well and most of what you say is true, but when you have dozens of good money making chem corps and all the chain below, suddenly grinding to a halt because of a shortage of sulphur, whatcha gonna do... make your own of course. Unfortunately, sulphur was one of the items I didnt stockpile, for some strange reason, sulphur! who would have thought?

Soybeans anyone?