Simcountry is a multiplayer Internet game in which you are the president, commander in chief, and industrial leader. You have to make the tough decisions about cutting or raising taxes, how to allocate the federal budget, what kind of infrastructure you want, etc..
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How does quality come into play? (Golden Rainbow)

Topics: Help: How does quality come into play? (Golden Rainbow)

Kamidan (Golden Rainbow)

Sunday, May 25, 2008 - 07:18 am Click here to edit this post
I'm going to give an example here...

I have a corporation that produces electricity, and it's got a quality level of 187

My factory maint corp buys electricity from my electric corp, according to the lists for my factory maint unit corp, the last price I paid was 307,897 for the electricity, although I have a contract with the electric company for 115,616

So basically Im paying more than twice the amount of money for the electricity just because it's got a higher quality level.

How am I benefitting by buying higher quality supplies for my corporations?

This just seems insane to me that the amount is so high because of a quality index unless there is someway that my corps in my country are benefitting from buying higher level quality supplies.

Could someone briefly explain this to me.

Thanks for your time.

agentaMajors (White Giant)

Sunday, May 25, 2008 - 07:02 pm Click here to edit this post
Your corps "benefit" by producing a higher quality of product, which can sell for more

Countries don't benefit at all and should be buying their supplies at 100.

Kamidan (Golden Rainbow)

Sunday, May 25, 2008 - 08:46 pm Click here to edit this post
But isn't it other countries that are buying the product that I put up for sale on the world market or is the world market some figment of my imagination and just a game thing, so why would a country want a higher quality of product if they don't benefit from it and have to pay more for it?

Vicious (Little Upsilon)

Monday, May 26, 2008 - 12:27 am Click here to edit this post
There is a peculiar system of subsidies.

Countries and corps that specify that they want low quality products often buy high quality products. But the gamemaster marks down the quality so that the buyer pays as if those were low quality products. Simultaneously, the gamemaster provides a subsidy to the seller of the marked down products so that the seller gets the difference between the low price paid by the buyer and the high price commensurate with the high quality. It's a socialist economy where the government (ie, the gamemaster) provides price supports.

Put simply, buyers wanting low quality products sometimes buy discounted high quality products while the sellers of those high quality products get a gamemaster subsidy equal to the discount.

Pascal Couchepin (Little Upsilon)

Monday, May 26, 2008 - 12:07 pm Click here to edit this post
This System effectivly prevents local or common markets, because there are no subsidies.

Kamidan (Golden Rainbow)

Monday, May 26, 2008 - 03:10 pm Click here to edit this post
Okay I think I sort of understand what you two are saying, so basically because prices are so high with quality products, people don't want to be in common markets because they would be paying full price for these high quality items when they could be buying items off the world market at 100% quality for a much lower price.

There was a game that came out many years ago called capitalism II, and the population put a certain amount of concern in a products quality, a certain amount of concern in a products price or brand etc.

But that game gave you the information on how much people were concerned about a specific products quality verses it's price verses it's brand, so you knew if you had to increase your products quality level or lower your prices.

I don't see that in sim country though it seems like that might be going on behind the scenes, because even though someone mentioned that the simulation might crunch the numbers first of people that are selling at a fixed price and following quality levels I've seen the opposite.

I've seen products like milk sell at best price strategy much sooner than selling milk with a high quality rating selling at only 112%. But my point is that there must be some levels of concern for price verses quality levels for what ever mechanisms are buying products on the world market that aren't other players and I think we need to know what that information is so that the player doesn't just keep letting his quality go up and up if it's the pricing is set to follow the quality level the prices gets to ridiculous amounts of cash and the product sits there rotting on a shelf somewhere waiting to be bought.

Now I'm sure many will cry that Im a noob and what I've seen isn't right, but this is what I've seen in the simulation so far.

Si_Attica (Kebir Blue)

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 - 05:33 am Click here to edit this post
This is effectively a bump for a brilliant thread I just found that is very much OT. Look up 'Problem with using high quality supplies' started by Tholan1001 of LU in Nov last year. By halfway through the thread he's tearing his hair out that all he's getting is game-mechanic formulae in response to a question about meaning. But then he gets his answer from the gamegod, and it's very exciting stuff, because when the GMs keep their promise, it's going to turn SC into an incredible game that actually models reality. You'll need to find the thread to put this in the proper context, but here is the GM's reply:

"Hi,

You are right.
high quality products should do a lot for the country.
I said in my previous mail that we intend to add that but we are caught up
in many urgent features and did not get to it yet.

In the mean time, to prevent exactly what you suspected and to prevent the loss of interest in the corporations
to produce at high quality, we in fact compensate them!

We give them the money for the quality they produce and
we charge the country for the quality it asks for.

This only happens when the market cannot match the orders.
we also do that the other way and take the money.

in general, we subsidize the market.

This is the second reason why we are interested in such a feature.
the first reason of course, is to make the game more interesting and realistic.

The gamemaster"


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