| Borg Queen | Friday, December 19, 2014 - 06:20 pm 
Take a look at Drone Mil Base Maintenance 002. It has run out of supplies namely Defense Forts. While it uses 0.35 per month of those and the low water mark is set to 10 months and order quantity to 20. So this would mean it should buy 7 forts every now and then. But as def forts are rare atm on KB it hasnt got any in some time. So, what does it do? It stacks orders over and over and over. It had 43 Forts ordered just a few moments ago until i noticed that and canceled those orders. As the market price is 1.37B per unit and set ordering to 200Q it would mean that if someone would like to mess things up a bit and sells a bunch of forts so my Corp does get all those in one month it would drop by 117B in Cash. The End is obvious, it would have closed due to Dept.
So, why does a Corp that didn't get the Supplies it ordered before buys more time after time? This puts unnessesary stress on Corps while the gain is somewhat negliable |
| SuperSoldierRCP | Monday, December 22, 2014 - 11:28 pm
I've noticed this is a couple of my corps as well, i produce a large amount of air-force maintenance units. Last thing i want is 50 corps closing to debt because of mistaken auto orders. |
| Perival Lovacore | Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - 03:46 am
+1 |
| jammiebrown1978 brown | Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - 01:39 am
+2 wtf |
| Lola | Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - 09:43 pm
Read The Forums. The G.M. doesn't care, or can't understand serious problems like this. He's good at chit-chat but has no Idea. Instead of new Products we should have a new G.M. How can you expect to sell a Game that doesn't work? Just ask Creative, they'll shove more baloney down your throat. They rely on you being a Compulsive Player. Simply stop paying for Crap! |
| craigwilliamson79 | Thursday, December 25, 2014 - 04:08 am
I personally think this game is actually a behaviour research experiment. |
| Aaron Doolavay | Thursday, December 25, 2014 - 06:36 am
craigwilliason you are probably more correct than you realize |
| Gabriel Loyola | Friday, December 26, 2014 - 01:31 am
tl;dr
+3
T.Wo |
| Adam | Sunday, December 28, 2014 - 01:58 am
Ok now I have an issue.
My country hasnt placed any orders for one of my corporations!!!! My stock may run out ... better go to manual purchase for this one.
PS where is andy??? |
| Brostoevski | Sunday, December 28, 2014 - 03:41 am
As far as I can tell, running this game is someone's hobby rather than a serious job/business. |
| Andy | Sunday, December 28, 2014 - 05:20 pm
We have been asked many times before to let the markets do their job and not intervene.
we have answered many times before that we do not intervene unless the markets are in a danger of falling over and this is obviously not the case.
This is the result of a severe shortage which is quite easy to resolve.
build one or two corporations that make these fortifications or agree with another player for him to build them and contract to you and you will have them for a reasonable price and become less dependent on the markets.
The GM is not babysitting the markets.
This game as you well know is not entirely trivial.
You can also close corporations that make complex products and rely on "normal" products that are in short supply, and make a decent profit. |
| SuperSoldierRCP | Sunday, December 28, 2014 - 08:55 pm
Andy
I think you might be misunderstanding what everyone is addressing. If i may explain.
This is a corporation issue. I for one have had corps that attempt to buy goods several times. The issue here is that a corp will try to buy goods several times. While that might not seem like an issue i buy 12 months supply at a time. Meaning that if in the event my corporation is buying several material types at the same time that causes a HUGE loss in cash which can also hurt IPO's.
If my corps supposed to buy 5Billion of ____ goods and it does it 3 times. Ive just spent 15B. Factor that this does the same thing while ordering the other materials the corporation needs, you can see that the corporation can fall into debt very quickly. With big corps like military, space, or maintenance corps this can cause closure.
You need to look at corporations not at the markets. It seems to be happening more into markets that have huge negative stocks of materials.
Hopefully that should help the GM so you can investigate this issue. |
| Lola | Sunday, December 28, 2014 - 09:57 pm
I hope you can get through to him. |
| Borg Queen | Monday, December 29, 2014 - 03:44 am
Andy, as SuperSoldier explained this isn't at all about market regulations, it is about how the corp automation buys supplies. It orders the same product over and over if older orders arent processed and this stacks up orders until it may happen that the corp gets bankrupt if all orders are fullfilled at once. The Automation should stop ordering more if older orders arent processed. |
| Andy | Monday, December 29, 2014 - 05:35 pm
This has been like this for years and works just fine when markets are reasonable, meaning that there is some product available and shortages are reasonable.
This has always misfired a bit when shortages grew very high.
The ordering procedure cannot always know what is already ordered.
When shortages become severe, it can order again.
The main damage is caused by the corporation stopping production altogether.
My suggestions as how to prevent such shortages stands. Make sure you have your own production or get it from someone else.
You can also replace an order by an immediate one and auto ordering stops directly.
Even better, I used it in the past days, increase the low water and ordering quantities.
I had exactly that happening in some corporations.
Increased low water to 10 months and order size to 40 months and it was resolved.
We have not so long ago increase the limit for corporations when buying raw materials from 60 to 120 months.
We can of course add extensive checking for previous orders for each and every order but it will slow down trading and prevent a small number of such problems. |
| Perival Lovacore | Tuesday, December 30, 2014 - 05:40 pm
Hi Andy,
Thanks for replying.
I believe your fix for this problem, as you outlined above, will not necessarily fix the problem for the "Big Expense" items that BQ talked about earlier. Forty months of multiple billion-dollar bases for some firms, would very possibly bankrupt the firm with even one set of orders filled.
This supplies problem can also be avoided by multiple immediate orders and cancelations of old orders, but as I have been reminded this holiday season, its tough to be on top of that 100% of the time. Also, immediate orders tend to be on the expensive side.
Maybe your point is also that if we can't manage these businesses we shouldn't be in them, but you, or the game rather, does limit the prices we can charge for goods and regulates the order of delivery somehow, so the "market" does not rule in everything here, and so posing a market solution in some cases, but not in the end prices can seem to some players, a little unfair.
I believe there is a "market-based" solution, which might be a small fix in terms of programming, but a large one in terms of managing this issue and a few others I have heard mentioned, and that is to allow lending directly to a corporation from the owner, or majority owner in a public corp. If the loan size could be based on the ablility to cover the debt, as opposed to just the total amount of debt outstanding and allow for larger loan balances, that might be the right answer for a few small problems players have.
Cheers, and Happy New Year. |
