W3C - Game News December 8, 2024

1. Electric Trucks

Electric Trucks are added as a new product to Simcountry. Electric trucks will be used in the same way trucks are used but initially in very small numbers to allow time for the industry to build corporations and produce these trucks.

Within several weeks, electric trucks will be used in small numbers by the industry but also in the army. The numbers used will increase in time.

The production process of electric trucks requires Targon and Baradium. These rare metals are produced on Tiny Atlas only and are sold in all worlds.

2. Electric cars are now used

Electric cars are now in use in all countries. Only a small percentage of the cars that are used are electric but their percentage will increase in time.

This means that all countries will start ordering electric cars and with only a small number of corporations producing them, there might be shortages.

3. Wind Energy

The max quality of wind energy is increased. Wind energy quality counts and its quality is taken into account when the price is computed. This means that the income of countries from wind energy can increase, as long as they have wind turbines that are needed for the maintenance of their wind farms.

4. Shuttle Maintenance Units

Shuttle maintenance units will be phased out. The product is used to prolong the life of cargo shuttles and they wear down more slowly. However, not many players are using them. Space transports can take place without the product and many players do not know how to use them or what exactly they do.

Starting with this upgrade, shuttle maintenance units remain usable by it will not be possible to start new corporations and the existing corporations become smaller and employ a smaller number of workers.

Future upgrades will slowly reduce the production levels of cargo maintenance corporations and at some point in the future they will become obsolete.

Existing upgrade products remain usable.

5. Reduced army size and defense cost in C3 countries.

The size of the army in C3 countries is reduced a bit and many garrisons are eliminated. We have seen that C3 countries have relatively high defense costs while the army is not used. The reduction will help C3 countries, also when they become active countries, to be more profitable.

When declaring war against a C3 country, the army of that country is brought to a certain level. That function is not changed and fighting a war with a C3 country will remain unchanged.

6. Shortage of High Level Workers

Another update will increase the availability of High Level Workers and reduce the need to manually convert workers. Such changes took place several times before and the shortages of HLWs are smaller than before. This change might contribute to a better balance between workers groups.

7. Game Levels Update

We continue to make small updates to the conditions needed for countries to move to higher game levels. Small changes were introduced to the required population numbers and cash levels.

These changes are required because many countries have much higher population levels and cash levels than what was common in past periods..

I like the updates, thanks

Andy,

Thank you for the updates, and more importantly, communicating to us about them.

On electric Trucks, I'd recommend against making them an input for industry. Anything that needs to be brought in from Tiny Atlas is likely to have frequent shortages on global markets, with supply entirely dependent on when the few players that have functional countries there, log in to do the manual transactions.

If electric trucks are an input to industry, it will very likely cause shortages that stop corporations from producing products. This would be a significant risk to the stability of Simcountry's economy.

We do not plan any addition of these trucks to the industry yet and will wait for some corporations to start producing them.

electric cars are now used by the population and countries have shortages.
there are now quite some corporations producing electric cars and we also
see sales of electric cars on some markets.

the numbers will remain small and also, when we start using the electric trucks, numbers will be very small and they must be available on the markets.

Hi,

I'd just like to confirm we are still phasing out Shuttle Maintenance Units.

Thanks

Shuttle maintenance units are not produced any more and are being phased out.

some countries have these products and are using them.
They will keep using them as long as they have them.
no new products will be available.

once all are gone, we will remove the product from the products list.

Electric trucks will be used, to start with, in large supply units.

Once they become more available on the markets, we will consider more products.

a new product will be added in the coming weeks and will require Baradium.

I'm a bit confused on the "Shuttle maintenance units are not produced any more".

I still have corps producing this product, I see there are some 300 corps in KB for this and I can still order this from the world market into my country stock.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

Placed an order for shuttle maintenance units.
You ordered 1 unit.<!-/Quote-!>

I'd imagine the first step in removing a product from the game would be removing it as an input in other corps, and this is still used for Assets Maintenance.

Thanks for the comment.

I will look into it and set some steps to move away from the product.

Removing the corporations is not an option of course.
removing the use of the product in Assets Maintenance will be in the next upgrade.

this is obviously an error.
The number used in these corporations will drop to a fraction to prevent large new orders and allow the stock to decline.

Then later, it will be eliminated.

I'll gladly close down my corps, but closing them one by one is kind of annoying.

If possible and willing to take a more direct, quick and complete approach, you can announce you will be closing down all Shuttle Maintenance Units corps and as compensation players will receive in cash the market value of each closed corp.

I'd imagine the same can be done for the Shuttle Maintenance Units stored in Country Stock, Space Centers and Cargo Shuttles using its base price.

Is this the first time we are removing a product from Simcountry? I think something similar was done for nuclear weapons around 200X when they became uber powerful, but I think this is the first we are removing a product.

Will take a week to program, or two weeks to manually do it.

I don't think it is needed.

we have phased out other products before.
it takes some time and these products eased out without much of a damage.

In this case, we do not intend to stop the use of the products for a long time but new corporations will not be constructed.
their description will disappear and if some players keep using them, so be it.

All good.

But how will this work in terms of a Shuttle's life expenctation/number of missions?

Will the game stop computing and using Maintenance Units? Will there be a penalization for not using Maintenance Units after the phase out?

The shuttles will age a bit faster.
The basic cost of cargo shuttles will decline a bit. (already lower than before).

The cost of space transport of goods will remain a fraction of the value of the transported products.

The complexity will decline.

Most transports did not use these maintenance products.
It was a complex feature, requiring the stationing of the maintenance products on space centers.

we will later change the capacity of cargo shuttles from 105000 to 100000 units.