W3C - Shortages of wind turbines

Many countries have wind farms but are not maintaining them.

One wind turbine is needed for maintenance each game month, for each wind farm you have.
if you do not have the wind turbines, the wind farms are not getting maintenance and their quality is deteriorating.

wind farms that are not maintained, cannot work for 100% and will start showing a decline in the amount of electric power that they produce.

A next update, later in May will introduce the first step:

If a country has a shortage of wind turbines that is larger than 100.000 turbines, it will loose one wind farm each game month.
The number will grow in the future.

If a country has a shortage of less than 100.000 wind turbines then the income from wind farms will decline by 1% for every 5.000 wind turbines shortage, to a maximum of 20%.
The percentages will increase in the future and will reach 1% decline for a shortage of 1000 wind turbines and 100% loss if the shortage goes up to 100.000 wind turbines.

We have said many times before, that countries must have the needed turbines to maintain their wind farms.
There are large shortages on the market. Producing wind turbines in your country and contracting their production to the country, can resolve the problem.

The long-anticipated wait for this change is coming to an end!

Thanks for this update, Andy.

Can you possibly let us know when we can delete our own wind farms instead of have them get deleted by shortages?

The next upgrade, before next Monday, will include a function to delete wind farms.

That’s great
Good job

Andy, that's awesome.

Thanks for the work on all of this.

Wind farms and wind turbines cannot be ordered in immediate mode.
Such orders will be processed but at the end, they will have no effect and nothing will be delivered.

Shortages in these two products became far too large.

The only way to influence the priority of order processing is by offering more money for these products.
success is not guaranteed but it can help when new product offers become available.

To guarantee delivery, make your own corporations producing wind farms and wind turbines contract their products to your own country.

Why do I have wind turbine corporations with unsold products when there is a huge 2.8M shortage on WG, and I have multiple countries that have bids on the market for wind turbines at the maximum allowed price?
Why do I now have wind farms corps closing for debt when they make massive profit and don't have supply issues? I understand the changes above, but how is this destroying my wind farm corps that don't have shortages?

It also appears that my wind turbine orders just aren't really getting delivered.

I'd placed manual orders in some countries to where I'd have more than 50,000 turbines on order. The orders are decreasing in my trade screen (less are waiting to be delivered), but I am showing 0 turbines purchased in my purchases section.

There was an unannounced brief maintenance period a couple days ago, there hasn't been any official word on what it was about but so far your issue with WTs not being sold on the open market is one of the reported problems. You are still able to contract them to yourself through contracts and they will execute properly. Also at least on my primary world, even trying to immediate order for WTs fails.

Also since the maintenance mode the EP provided from the WFs has been impacting the quality of the country's stockpile. To this point the quality provided was based on the existing stockpile's quality. I initially assumed that he just changed it so the provided quality was based on the WT or WF qualities, but a player on the discord reported that his stored EP quality was actually increasing well past his WF/WT qualities so I personally don't know what's going on there either.

I do contract most WT to myself, but I am building new corps also. The corps without contracts have unsold product, but I see in my CEOs none of the WT corps have unsold products, even if they are new and not contracted.
I am not sure about the WF corps. My main had almost 200 WF corps selling on the open market with no unsold products and no supply shortages. I have had about 150 close in the last 2 days. They produced at differing levels of quality but many were old corps with high quality already.
I will check my purchase records to see if I am getting WT on contracts. I know some contracts have failed recently as my country took on massive debt from corp closures though.

I just noticed that while I'm 40+ thousand negative wind turbines I have no active orders even when I have scheduled auto orders, are your removing the auto order function from wind turbines making this either contract or extremely micro management requiring?

I do not see the benefit of removing the auto order feature from working with turbines.

To expand on something possibly negatively impacting Zentrino's WF corps that I just stumbled across on mine. I have supply quality for my WFs at 120 for obvious reasons. Well, the reasons were obvious, I'm not sure what's going on with wind right now. Anyway, even at that mark, I noticed two of the corps had WTs delivered and charged last month from the world market at 220Q. Other needed products were still at 120Q on the same month delivered. It was a not insignificant sudden cost bump and I'm lucky to have caught in time to clear out the loans that the corps had to take out. Add it to the list of sudden issues with WTs

Zentrino,

when you contract the WT to your own country, they are obviously not offered on the market.
if you remove the contract they will be offered.
nothing is changed.

Immediate orders do not come through.

I suspect that under some time conditions, orders can become immediate orders.
then, they try to execute, they fail and disappear.
it could explain the reduction in the number on order.

nothing else is changed.
we announced the immediate orders change for WT and WFs.

I will look into the automatic conversion of orders into immediate orders and we might eliminate it.
you could argue that this conversion is increasing the cost to the buyer without an explicit request.

One way or another, it should not happen with products that cannot be ordered immediately.

More WT corporations must be created to reduce the shortages.
More WT corporations should be created in countries with many WFs and the WT contracted to the country.

For the most part what you are saying is true Andy, but there are a couple issues since the unannounced maintenance period a couple days ago Andy.

1. WT corps operating normal without contracts are not seeing their product being sold. I have numerous WT corps personally with many months worth of created WTs placed on the market at standard best price unsold.

2. EP stockpiles are reducing in quality from wind power. In one case a player actually reported that their stockpile quality was increasing above the quality levels of their WTs/WFs, so if you could clarify this sudden change or possibly error, that would be quite appreciated.

3. WT incoming automatic orders are at inconsistent quality. Personally my WF corps work with a 120 input supply quality. In recent months, some WTs delivered have been normal ~ 120Q, others have been as high as 220Q which adds significant cost when the WF corp is specifically setup without quality growth as a consideration.

Also on the building WT corps to self support ones farms, I completely agree that that seemed to be the sort of intended way and have been building that way personally. I do run into an issue however with spending space. In my main country for example I produce enough WTs to self supply up to 2000 WFs at the lowest quality. If I do self supply with them, my spending space drops into the negative for month to month and my country is unable to make necessary food, maintenance, etc and that’s at the minimum quality less than half of the WFs a player can have. It might be worth considering a shift in the spending space as has been in discussion a lot. One consideration I would recommend at least for discussion is the idea of contracted sales within one’s own empire, so products made by your countries for your countries, are exempt from spending space and that spending limit is treated more as an international market limit.

As I said in my post, the WT corps with unsold products in my country do not have their production contracted to me. They are offering their product on the open market where I also had offers to buy at max price. I continue to have unsold WT in corps with no contracts while also having offers to buy WT at the maximum allowable price (with maybe minor variation for rounding). I am offering 203M and I think there is some change on that which I don't include.
I do see my latest offers for max price have gone through but it took several months while I had corps with unsold products. How is that even possible? I can't offer any higher purchase price for them so the corps theoretically shouldn't be able to demand a higher price to sell. I also continue to have offers on the market to purchase at best price that remain unfilled.
Whatever change was made to WF corps is causing them all to close in my countries. I am not going to micromanage them multiple times a day to keep them open. That market will become like the WT market if no one can keep the corps open. I contracted some WF to myself but many were offered on the open market, were extremely profitable, and closed very suddenly with little to no warning. I have lost probably 400-500 WF corps this week. I haven't counted across the empire but it is nearly 200 in my main country alone, which seems to be the hardest hit. That's another thing that is confusing. My countries have (mostly) the exact same settings but it is not across every country evenly that WF corps are tanking.

I very much agree with Auditor's recommendation that contracted items built and sold all within your countries should be exempt from the spending space limits.

I will look at the proposal to exclude product purchases from your own corporations from the spending space.

the trading of WT is taking place in exactly the same way other products are traded except for the immediate orders that are skipped. The trading process is complex enough to hold off any exceptions or special treatment to any product.

Many of the orders for WT are at Q120.
The question is, is there a market at that price.
If no one wants to sell at Q120, then nothing is sold.

Please send us a name of a corporation, or several corporations, that are offering their WTs and are not selling despite the shortage on the market.

we will check the trading logs to find out what is exactly happening there.

In the mean time, the maintenance of WFs and the problem of negative numbers of WT in countries, will be held off until these issues are cleared up.

The EP produced by the WFs should be Q120.

At this time it is higher in many cases and mixed with the existing EP in countries, it can push the quality a bit higher but in most cases a bit lower.

at the end, the quality of EP in countries that are producing their EP with Wind farms, will end up at Q120 as intended.

Why is my WF coming in at Q170 across all countries? I've cleared EP to 0 stock and it still comes in at Q170. I only have WF producing EP.

That should read EP from WF is coming in to my inventory at Q170.

@Andy

Thank you for being patient in looking into this and responding as you do your search into the issues. As for the WT corps not selling their output products on market during shortage, my best example country is Quistis on LU. There are 13 Wind Turbine corporations in country that are operating without contracts (contracts appear to be working perfectly fine) and are selling directly to the world market. Each one has multiple months worth of WTs offered on the market unsold so any of them should give you insight.

As to the quality of WF produced Electric Power, is your message that it is produced at 120Q based on a recent change that you made or are you saying that has been the way it is for a long time? I know we’ve discussed the quality aspect of wind a few times. It has behaved the same way since wind was introduced, this change where players are noticing stockpile quality changes started with this maintenance period that occurred a couple days ago which is the same time that these other presented issues began to appear. Add in the player above claiming their EP being generated by wind when emptying their inventory and letting it be their only power provider being 170Q only adds to the confusion. To be clear these issues didn’t start at your last posted update that included the button for removing wind farms, all of these issues began when the site was down in maintenance mode a couple days ago (the exact time escapes me). So something that was changed during that time should likely be checked first as having sprung up these other issues.

The EP quality in Wind Farms should be Q120 as we have explained months ago.

We do not take the quality of Windfarms into account because it will increase profits in a way that will force us to increase maintenance cost and use 2 or 3 wind turbines for maintenance each month.

such a high use of WTs will make the maintenance of wind farms impossible.

currently the quality of EP from wind farms is 170.
It will however decline gradually and end up at Q120.

I will look at the corporations not selling their WT.

But the question I was asking is: Why was it changed to 170? I mean thanks for the extra cash I guess, but beyond that, what purpose was served? By the way, at the end of what exactly will the quality return to 120?

In most countries it was above 170.

We see that the resulting quality is going down slowly to 170.
in some countries it is going up to 170.

we thought that 170 will not be shocking and decided to set it to 170.
it will however decline gradually from there and end up at 120 but it will take some time.

Changing the quality of EP from wind to 170 as instantly as snapping your fingers without any prior notice or announcement after making the change is absolutely shocking. Wind is something that many of your most experienced players have invested heavily in since its introduction months ago. The sudden change to 170Q instantly cuts Wind Farm production value by nearly half for most players. ~ 50% production value loss with no change to expense is absolutely a shock, which again for a change so massive should have absolutely been informed well before hand for such a core product to the game.

A more sensible solution if you felt that wind was generating too much income (which to be honest it was) would be to tie the quality of EP production to the quality of the WTs consumed in maintenance. Your main intent appears to be for players that use wind to be self sufficient and primarily their own suppliers for maintenance, and players that let their WT corporations grow organically including quality upgrades were spending unnecessary money, but this change will actually see players losing money by operating wind farms if the Electric Power shortage is overcome and the market price lowers to its base value unless they micromanage their Wind Turbine corporations to manually ensure they operate at minimum quality.

Either that or increase the number of WTs produced by WT corps without changing their supply material costs. WT corps themselves for self-suppliers have just seen their provided value dropped by nearly 50% by this action.

Any solution or change however, especially one with such a massive impact, should be done with prior notice even if it is a change you intend to make regardless of player feedback. Like I personally have built up 300 Wind Farm corporations for self-supply (with appropriate Turbine corps) with the intent of trying catch up with the bigger players. This unannounced change essentially means that 300 overnight dropped to the value of ~ 150 corps, and when you make your next change to 120Q they will drop even more to a value of ~ 100 corps. That is not insignificant and with no prior notice of intent given it really does sting.