Things that bug us in this game

As anyone who's been here long enough knows, SC is a special game with MANY MANY rules and restrictions, that requires a special kind of player to keep playing it in the long run, but also yields great rewards to this special kind of player.

So, as special players and (let's not forget) paying customers, we like to engage in some bitching about certain aspects of this game, mainly certain (of many) restrictions. I started this thread to start bitching. So here I go, these are the top rules/restrictions that bug me in SC:

(as an econ mostly player I will focus on these aspects)

1. 100000 monthly limit in changing professionals into workers: This is perhaps my biggest issue with this game. It would save hours of my life if this limitation was abolished. What's the point anyway? You either let this happen or you don't. What's the point in having this arbitrary limit?

2. Enterprise Tax: Why should my 400B-500B/month profit making enterprises keep losing cash? Is this anywhere logical? I dun think so...

3. Trading with own corporations #1 - purchase ceiling: Why should my private shuttle corps take 5-6 months to fully resupply with stuff already in my CEO's inventory because I can only sell them bit by bit in an excruciatingly slow monthly process? After all, the same entity (CEO) is the owner both of the stuff and of the corporation "buying" the stuff. Is it me, or is this just plain silly?

4. Trading with own corporations #2 - negative cash and manual transfers: Why should my private space, plutonium, wg uranium and strategic corporations go deep into negative cash when buying stuff from my CEO and face the danger of instant closure if I, as a human being, FORGET just ONCE to manually transfer enough cash? Why shouldn't there be an automatic option. After all it's not real trade, it's just an inside transfer between two same-owned entities...

5. IPO's and share selling: Why should there be so many limitations? Why can't I just IPO 70% or 40% of a corp like in real life. Or why can't I put all my share up for sale? Or why can't I request to buy all the shares of a public corp?

Well, I guess that's enough bitching for now. Have a nice weekend!

@ #1, i don't have a problem with that, or rather, i rarely, ever, need to demote workers, and if i do, the original 50K would be enough in most cases

@ #2, yea

@ #5, have you reviewed the "portfolio targets" feature? after IPOing the initial 15%, you can go to your portfolio and set your ownership to 40% or 70% or what ever. also, after buying a single share of a public corp, you can then set your goal to what ever you want, and the game will automatically buy or sell shares to meet your goal, i think its upto 4% a game month, provided their is appropriate volumn

I don't completely understand the enterprise tax. It just limits the growth of the CEO and most of the time I'm forced to use money from my countries. Corporations are already taxed, so why tax again?

#1 : Only Problem for Countries with large Population numbers, thats maybe why Orbiter doesnt experience it? dont know your Pop numbers

#2 : Haven't run into negativ per month from this okne, so I dont know but if the Enterprise tax run the Profit into negative it really should be changed

#3 : Should be unlimited if it's a private corp, if public maybe the Limit is explainable as the corp isnt completly owned by your ceo

#5 : Agreed, even though I guess it is limited so one cant Transfer Corps too fast without a Little work

mine is 113M, his is 169M, honestly what i think the problem is, is that if you don't build a significant agriculture, food, and mining base in your country, it throws off the balance of workers

and i don't mean a half dozen.

the way i build, i usually wait for the HLW to build up on their own, rather than demote workers to build more corps. well 80% of the time, i do it that way. also, knowing that the (now,) the game will auto-promote 40K llw, and mlw to HLW a gm, i try not to build a corp that will drop my HLW below that number, when it was 30K if i had 50K HLW, i wouldn't build a HT corp that would use 22K HLW, i'd be looking at stuff that would use less than 20K. although now the new number is 40K base, so i have to wait until 60-70K unemployed HLW, or more, before i consider what corp to build.

i also think that HI and EI 2 high, and unbalanced ed priorities, over a long time can cause prblems

takes longer, but sim-country is a long term game, better to build slower, in a way that causes less problems later

but you both are great players, i'm confident that you know what your talking about, but give it some thought, i'd offer for you to examine "Dream Land," on LU, but at the moment, i'm simulating a plague, with is throwing some of my worker categories off

HI is only a problem in the way it stacks up a whole lota old people you cant get rid of. I'm running high HI and high EI, so far so good. been building those up over time but sped it up in the past few weeks. guess I'll see how much a problem that imposes in the next 100-200 years.
Also the problem of those 40k HLW flat is that in larger population there is a larger conversion to higher worker classes, even at not so high EI and it has been brought to my attention that it might be those professionals are promoted from the HLWs. This would explain why my total HLWs number is going down even thought that is the only workers class I have a shortage in

I think Orbiter had the right answer on #5, I just thought I might add a small twist that might make the econ game more interesting/rewarding.

Allow Corp Execs to buy 10/20/30% of a corporation before the IPO, and allow half of the boost to production that is achieved through public corps to occur, before the official "IPO".

This would:

1) Increase engagement with players and corp execs, especially with non-premium players and execs.

2) Open up greater value for the players pre IPO.

3) Allow state corp owners to get more cash more quickly, and allow the improvement of corps production and value without selling a majority ownership stake.

4) My guess is you would get more player retention, as I would bet folks who run execs are more experienced players and they would likely share their expertise and excitement in the game with the potentially newer/single state players.

In short, I have yet to meet a politician who did not want to be a rich businessperson as well, if they just knew how.