How to Stabilize the Game Economy (White Giant)

1. Remove Buy and sell caps on prices, let supply and demand set the price.

2. No more surges of supplies buy the GM, if there is a shortage of a given supply the price will go up, making it more profitable to produce, meaning more will be made.

3. Allow buy and sell prices to be set in Common markets, thus making it possible to set up a Profitable Common Market.

You are assuming every players build corps according to what is needed on a short term basis, and if you are not, then there will be a long period of shortage before there is an adequate offer. GM intervening in the process actually makes shortage and surplus shorter,unless people really build when they see red bars for one game month.

The economy system is special, and certainly not as realistic as it could be, but it is not an easy task to balance between real and playable. Economy like you want is theorical, even in real life there is intervention, else you would have population completely devasted by any kind of long term shortage(just think of the current/future food crisis and the rise on food prices).

The point of not letting people put a sell and buy strategy is, i think, to avoid cheating. Some would think making 200 accounts with 200 countries and simply have seeders of cheap supplies or buyers of very expensive supplies. I guess it could be done even with the current restriction, but so much less profitable.

I'm thinking exactly the same thing as dboyd3702. I'm glad to see it's been suggested already, but I'm dismayed that nobody does anything about it.

The game economy has gotten so out of whack as a result of the price controls - at least in LU, nobody gives any thought to how the planet is going to close the massive and crippling shortages of basic necessities. If the GMs weren't creating the stuff like mad to fill the gap, 40% of corporations would lie fallow due to Factory Maintenance Unit shortages alone. Everyone's so concerned about financial profit that they don't care if the world is totally non-self-sustaining materially. As long as they have the GM to provide them with cheap necessities despite obscene long-term shortfalls of those goods, there's no need to try to produce a real material profit. This game is a shadow of what it once was, and what it could again be, in my opinion.

I think there must be a certain fear that the economy would be too volatile if price controls were lifted. It's true that prices would indeed shoot through the roof, since nobody has an appreciation for how to fill shortages beyond "produce another factory". You have to look at the demand side of the equation, and the biggest factor there is FMUs. Everyone and their brother is doing max quality upgrades with zero thought whatsoever. That's what passes for "strategy" - just knowing to increase quality with auto-upgrades, setting an appropriate price, and you're done. Yet demand for FMUs creates such a massive drain on all the products required to create FMUs, that if the price of FMUs weren't kept so artificially low, nobody would ever dare upgrade quality (which increases FMU necessity).

The game creators have set in place rules that require the economy to either grow massively in order to support its players, or would require the players to all make substantial sacrifices in terms of discretionary consumption (think military) in order for the economy to be sustainable. Instead, the creators put in place additional rules to make the earlier blunder irrelevant. We have a free market economy that took a kick to the balls, and nobody knew how to heal it so we shot it in the head.

I weep for SimCountry, what could/would/should be the best economic simulation game of all time.

What makes me most sad is the fact that these game worlds aren't supporting themselves, like the game creators originally intended. Value is coming from outside the system, not from the graceful interplay of millions of moving parts within the system. The commodity dependency network was engineered as a whole, so that each step in the production cycle creates a little bit more material than was there before - a little profit, upon which consumption-based gameplay could be based. This is what was so brilliant and elegant about the original design, and yet that small profit is totally insufficient nowadays, and players depend on the GMs for their livelihood. Like a corrupt federal reserve, feeding the system at the very top in order to keep it alive; that's where all the hungry mouths are now.

I made the following graphs to demonstrate the point I wanted to make. I chose electricity, one of the most widely used resources, as an example. This is based off of 63 years worth of data on Little Upsilon.

Electricity Prices:
http://i.imgur.com/RYGbN.png

Electricity Supply/Demand:
http://i.imgur.com/0xXLV.png

In only two out of the last 63 years did supply keep up with demand. Leaders should be flipping out right now, trying to get electricity. There should be massive shortages everywhere. Instead, I see top players buying electricity with a casual "Start at 95% and increase by 5% monthly" strategy. Clearly the GMs are providing any supply that's needed, and at a fixed price. We're being babied, here.. on just about every critical commodity.

Leaders? What in God's name?... Wendy, come see this!!

Slip of the fingers. I suppose LG LoL. I spot these two Leaders in chat interchangeably one after the other.

This Leader is suspicious.

No...don't get flippant...had a long conversation with that leader...maybe the lexicon is better than yours.

This Senior Leader's lexicon is superior.

You gotta be kidding me.. I heard CP use the term and I assumed it was commonplace.

*pokerface*

Laguna is the Supreme Leader of SC.

Now all you monkeys start dancing for your Supreme Leader's pleasure.

Many leaders believe the word "leader" is the most appropriate term.

Well Androsynth whoever he/she/it may be.... is a disrespectful "leader". PMs me and says he's naming a corporation of his "Jan's Bordello Services." LOL Known him for less than 10 minutes and Androsynth thinks he can call me 'Jan' and is somehow prompted to be disrespectful to me after both me and my fed leader offer to help him in the game.

That's the moment I cut this cough cough "leader" off. Any more rudeness and, if It is male, I'll cut something else off! ha ha ha So watch it, Androsynth. I deserve respect. I demand it. Every player in the game deserves respect.

LOOOL, Bob! I would have just been glad with an offering in the form of tuna. :p

You know new players, Jan... They are evolving and multiplying! Beware!


As for the game, Androsynth, if everyone spent their whole time micromanaging the economic side of the game, they wouldn't have time to appreciate its other aspects.

Dang, learn to take a joke! Like it's not enough that I apologized after your overblown reaction, and changed the name immediately, you've gotta make a stink in the forum too? Glad I didn't accept any "help" from you.

...lol.

Wow, the baseline production of FMUs just fell on LU from 965 per month to 918 per month, for each corporation making FMUs. Talk about moving the wrong direction. As if a global production shortage of 50% weren't absurd enough, that gap is going to widen even further. Not that anyone is even capable of experiencing a supply shortage, when the GM is making this stuff out of thin air all the time. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that nobody else gives a crap - the simulation wouldn't have fallen into such disrepair if anyone cared. Not one of you has any appreciation for SimCountry once represented. Pathetic.

You may be suprised to find out how many ppl actually mail the gm's on issues ingame.

I have myself over recent issues...nothing more ppl can do when your mails go unanswered,yet you know things are messed up or being changed.

We are back to the,lets just make the changes and not let the players know.

It really is time to stop adding new things and fix issues that are recent or longstanding or have it explained why its done like it.

They dropped production of FMU to reduce the profit of FMU corps. That's what W3C's top concern is right now: making sure that the players don't make too much profit.

i agree, its been what a lot of the changes have been about over the last year or 2

Androsynth, you should mind your manners. You are speaking in the direction of countless players who really care, but have fainted from saying enough of this game and standing against things they thought would ruin the game. "Not one of you has any appreciation for SimCountry once represented. Pathetic." I'm not sure how long you've played, not that it matters, but you are hardly qualified to speak on what anyone here cares about. The Majority of 'real' players here agree with you and have made the very same case you highlight before the name Androsynth was a thought in SimCountry.

I could play this and many other games, online even and in many cases better, for free or close to nothing. I pay 48 bucks a year, because I care and enjoy the game. However I have better things to do than wish upon a star as do the many players that have left the game because they weren't happy with the direction it is going. Obviously, more people are joining than leaving which is why the game seems to continue full steam ahead with this new direction. Although the quality of player and knowledge base is decreasing with every new join and every veteran exit.

Whine, itch, moan, complain, but don't tell me what I care about. You'll probably fold in a few weeks anyway and quit because it seems like you're on a crash course with a few players already. Or, you'll benefit from the new CandyLand that has been created to shield new players like you who have strong opinions. We'll see who cares.

Well Psycho_honey, I (and dboyd not long before me) made a case for a return to the free market, and the only response we get is little children yammering about my choice of wording, or how I should focus more on blowing stuff up and less on the economy. If I wanted to blow things up, I'd dig up Battlefield 1942 and carpet bomb some Nazis. I play SimCountry because I'm a firm believer in cut-throat capitalism. When I started playing in 2005, new players were under the dire immediate threat of a crushing national debt, and a devastatingly expensive population consumption rate that would not yield, but you didn't see me complaining. I kicked its butt then, and I could do the same now. But nowadays the only threat is from the established order, whose coffers will forever remain full due to artificially controlled interest rates and an artificially regulated commodities market.

Kitsune, if W3C doesn't want FMUs to be overly profitable, they shouldn't have setup a system in which every corporation under the sun requires hundreds of billions of SC$ worth of them each month, plain and simple. For every 7 upgraded corporations, you need a FMU corp, and that lone FMU corp requires another two corporations just to keep itself afloat, which means another half an FMU corp is needed to support the first one & its supporting corps. Basically a third of the world's industrial output is spent supporting the damn things, the way they designed it. Then they act surprised when the economy can't keep up, and the only way to keep corps supplied is to flood the market with it out of thin air, and the only way to keep profitability in check is with these constant and asinine changes to how many doodads it takes to make each widget. And the actions taken aren't based on economic reality, they're based on the assumption of perpetually maxed out (but thus limited) prices for all major commodities.

It's all so ridiculous as to be depressing to think about. The guys that made this simulation were my heroes back in the day. The only way to fight it is by spitting in the face of anyone that thinks the status quo is just fine. What else would you have me do, cross my fingers and wish on a shooting star? Get ignored completely by the kiddies further up the thread, sigh, and be on my way?

W3C should at the very least do the deed right, and kill the dream completely. Supply and demand are one step away from being completely meaningless in this game. So be honest with people, and stop publishing the numbers. The factory utilization page is a joke, you could replace it with list of boolean values to represent whether the price is maxed out or bottomed out, and you wouldn't even need to update the page. Hell, just show a list of prices, because they're sure not changing any time soon. At least not until the next GM tweak. Then why not do away with the bid/ask market simulation altogether. It's unnecessary overhead at this point! Since apparently all your players want is a system where they can perpetually make a modest profit and not have to worry about how, and there are simpler ways to accomplish that.

Incidentally, it seems that the raw materials consumed by each FMU corp declined by more than the unit output just did. A move that would've had a significant (although insufficient) impact on the overall resource strain being created by FMU corps - and it would've done so without inflating profitability on a per-worker basis. Clever. It's possible that, in spite of my rough edges, someone took the advice to heart. Was not expecting that. Hm.

Who are you???????

dboyd, IMO