Strategic Airports and Bases - Something wrong?

I noticed two things about these corps in KB:

1. The demand has been ballooning lately. So, chasing profits, I built a corp.

2. And found out these corps have extremely poor returns as evidenced here, and here. The main culprit of the very poor profits are the enormous supply costs. I suggest reducing monthly supplies use a tad.

I was going to argue this type of corps should have a potential profit higher than most, given that all of its demand depends on player trades, and is therefore erratic. But looking further I see they are needed to make Military Base Maintenance now.

The demand is indeed growing by about 50 bases per day, which is a bit less than the amount the Base Maintenance corps need every month. But then why are the Strategic Bases going into an ever increasing shortage, while all other bases are doing just fine, their monthly need is just 0.01 smaller, and the supply half of the Strategic Bases?


In short, the situation in KB is:

Product	MonthlyUse	Surplus
Defense Fortifications	0.15	324
Defensive Military Airports	0.13	102
Defensive Military Bases	0.13	-55
Offensive Military Airports	0.13	-36
Offensive Military Bases	0.13	-41
Strategic Airports	0.14	-10,254
Strategic Military Bases	0.14	-12,532

Could someone from the dev team look into this? This ever increasing shortage of strategic bases isn't looking right.

Likewise Production Plants are having a similar behaviour. Given they are needed to make new corps in countries, that might prove a bit more serious.

Hey Laguna, I have a spreadsheet I use to calculate profit predictions, and will re post it on the chat. It will allow very detailed analyses of the supplies cost.

What you note here is a serious problem. It stems from the fact that the Game master efforts to tweak supply and demand are based simply on changing production and pricing to influence the supply. It ignores that huge importance of the supplies used by that corp. Over the literal decades it's created a lot imbalance between supply costs and product pricing.

The GM has been getting very irritable about nobody building corps, but who would when they don't make money even at max price.

One thing everyone should do is drop your salaries to 100, it will mitigate the cost of materials somewhat, and add to your profits. Your can go as low as thirty but there is little difference from 30 to 150 in terms of benefit.

Eye-balling it, it seems like the ratio between demand and supply seems to be larger than 15 years ago.

Giving it some thought, I see two reasons:
1. A larger than usual and persistent shortage for natural resources which is causing supply chain issues.
2. The weapon maintenance corps cause a positive feedback. If someone starts building up an army, it will permanently divert a portion of the (world) workforce to weapon and ammo corps.

I don't take issue with this in particular. It's better than the alternative of drowning in constant and universal surplus.


But these two products, Strategic Bases and Airports, caught my eye because it's off the charts and keeps getting worse. Something isn't tuned properly.

The Supply web is just out of wack.

If you look at C3 countries, countries which constitute the bulk of the productive force: They are all bogged down in shortages and not making hardly anything. The C3s have always been what kept the world supplied, and they are not doing that now. I think because products must be going first to premium players, because we never have shortages, except when it's really bad.

Given that the player base eligible to open natural resource corps is not large enough to even turn any of that whole segment green. There are going to be an inherent blockages of supply.

The change that was made to trade engine sometime back doesn't help either. It basically limits all product sales to the "Quality adjusted market price minus 9-10 quality points. Eg everyone making Q269.5 is selling it at ~2.58 x market price regardless of what their trade strategies are set for. Under the old trade strategies we could jack up the asking price, and that improved profit over and above just what you get from the normal changes to the market price. This incentivized people to rapidly build more corps to cash in. But this mechanism no longer functions, despite appearances otherwise.

Check your recent sales on the corp page and you will see what I mean.

I read something about it in the Game News from years ago, about how trading strategies were changed.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

1113. Profitability of Corporations
Corporations that are trying to sell products at a high price should make sure the requested price increase factor is lower than the quality of the product.
Example: If the product quality is 300 and the price requested is 330% of the market price, the product will most probably remain unsold.
The product price will be reduced and the trading process will retry to sell it in the next game month. This can repeat itself several times and the product may end up selling at a much lower price and only several game months later.

Reducing the requested price factor to a level equal or lower than the quality level will speed up the trading.

Many players now purchase raw materials and products for their countries at a lower quality level and there is less interest in very high quality products.<!-/Quote-!>

From my testing, requesting a price above quality just made my income stream a bit irregular with a marginal impact on the whole.

If you haven't gotten down to it in the thread list. I tried to start a re investigation of the matter. See the link below.

https://www.simcountry.com/discus/messages/1/30120.html?1723270315

I included some links to old forum posts that shed light on it, but there is alot of mystery to it.

From what I've seen, I think trading is extensively rigged now.

I wouldn't say it is rigged now... It's more like it was rigged before.

IIRC, we were able to sell high quality products when there was no demand for it. Everybody bought supplies at around 100Q, produced at 300Q and sold it to... let's call it the MatchMaker. This function would match the demand and supply, ignoring quality, and compensate the player for the difference in quality.

I see things were changed so quality has an impact in game mechanics now, specially in the war game. I suppose it's natural the above stop-gap could be removed.

But I'm not particularly keen on what seems to be the irrelevance of trading strategies now, and the incomplete impact of quality to the rest of the game. I'll give this a tack once I wrap my head around a matching mechanism that incorporates quality.

Well, it's different. I had in mind the phenomenon whereby you can by anything at any quality regardless of whether there is any at that quality.

The assets and weapon maintenance corporations are among the largest in Simcountry and have a very good potential to make large profits.
on average, much higher than most corporations.

Their problem is the very large turnover and also high cost of the materials and products they use for production.

these are weapons and assets that are bought in large quantities.

Large quantities are kept by players in storage. the price goes to the max and reduces the profits of the maintenance corporations.

This is not true all the time.

The market does what it does.
we do not intervene in the market except for very few cases when shortages are at the point of a breakdown.
Not very often.

what we do, is gradually increase the output of some corporations to structurally reduce the shortages.
This is now done many times and shortages are much smaller than we have seen before. We always report it in the game news.

The maintenance corporations should become a bit smaller, use smaller quantities of products and reduce their turnover.
This will make them more stable. Extreme profits and losses will be reduced.

we also think that players can use these shortages, build corporations that can profit from the shortages and at the same time, add more balance to the markets.
Players make money easier and frequently don't make the effort.

There are countries with 100+ unused natural resources.
There are however few takers who could make a fortune and improve the market situation at the same time.

An enterprise could start 100 Oil corporations and make a lot of money.

That is true. First thing I did when I opened my enterprise was build exclusively natural resource corporations. Same for my countries, as a matter of fact.

But going back to the matter at hand, are you comfortable with a shortage of 13 000 strategy military bases, Andy? I can't help but feel that is too high a figure for this product.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

we also think that players can use these shortages, build corporations that can profit from the shortages and at the same time, add more balance to the markets.
Players make money easier and frequently don't make the effort. <!-/Quote-!>

I'm glad to see understanding from you on this, but I think it's unrealistic to expect players to build corps that are less profitable out of kindness and concern for the market. The trade engine doesn't allow price gouging anymore, and fine, that's understandable. But consider the segment that only makes 0B to 2B a month even at maximum market price? Without being able to say okay, I'm going to charge 300% for that, players just are not going to build.

For example back in Jozi days before quality existed the standard routine was to check your supply and demand when you log in. If all your product sold fast, you would bump your asking price by 10% or lower the same if product wasn't selling. Same for buying if there were shortages up ten, getting it easy down 10. Just staying right on the edge of what buyers and sellers would tolerate was how it worked.

There's no mechanism like that now. So building Certain highly profitable corps is what happens.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

There are countries with 100+ unused natural resources.
There are however few takers who could make a fortune and improve the market situation at the same time.

An enterprise could start 100 Oil corporations and make a lot of money. <!-/Quote-!>

You've talked about this alot, but are you saying that alot of premium players are not building them, I assume?

Only thing I think of is that many premium players have been here awhile, have more cash than they need, and so are not motivated to adjust their cash flow.

Anybody who falls in this category want to weigh in?

I was going to ask if you were also comfortable with the 50k shortage of Production Plants in LU, but I noticed the game is giving different information on the supply.

The "market window" says there's a supply of 6, but the chart says there's a supply of little over 180 while there are 628 PP corps...

All the while, the Plant shortage in LU has increased to 50 003.

Could you please investigate?


Market Window:


Supply Chart:

I was going to ask if you are comfortable with the shortage of Production Plants in LU, but now I've noticed the game is giving different information for supply of Production Plants in LU.

The "market window" says there was a supply of 6, but the supply chart says there was little over 180. This with c.680 PP corps in LU.

All the while PP shortage has increased at a very steady rate registering a 50k shortage now.

Could you please investigate?

Market window:


Supply chart:

That's weird. Every time I tried to upload the images, it said there was a security issue and I didn't see the message go through. My bad.

We hate interventions on the markets.
if services will fail completely we will have to intervene.
There are more such products.
other products, we try not to.

we will however, increase the price range of several products and allow them to increase a bit more.
It might make them more attractive.

The next upgrade will also include an up tic in production and a slight reduction in the cost of many products.
This is part of our continuing effort to reduce structural shortages.

we had several rounds of such changes and it takes some time before the markets adjust.

all the products mentioned here are included.

The coming upgrade will also include a further reduction in the cost of weapons and ammunitions.
we are introducing such reductions for some time to make the building of an army more affordable.
The maintenance cost of the army is not being reduced.

but such reductions in the cost of weapons and ammunitions, will reduce the cost of supplies for the weapon maintenance corporations.

we will watch these corporations very closely, again, especially the cost of supplies.

Thanks. I agree with you, and I would prefer if there were no interventions at all. However, these ever increasing shortages are a sign of structural issues.

I only take issue with Bases and Production Plants in particular, because they are somewhat vital products. Without bases, players are excluded from the war game, and can't even order weapons and ammo, and without production plants you cannot build new corporations.

I'll take a look after the update.