Bug in Financial Index calculation

I just noticed very interesting calculation of financial index. I am sure this is a bug.

As you can see profitability of the country is growing while Financial index was cut at some point and stopped growing.




CountryNumber=3245 in FB

Looks like it was cut when the costs were cut in some way.

I noticed this in many more countries where financial index should be well above 300, so this is definetely an error.

Andy, can you take a look into this.

First one looks like a shark fin

I can add more of them, this is clearly a bug in the formula.

waiting for Andy to check and fix this.

The graph is strange.

However, the financial index is computed with current and previous year data.

This means that there is a large change in January, when it switches to more recent data and it can create a larger change in the index.

Please keep following it, a year is just two days.

I will look into this computation from this side.

There was no recent change to this computation. we have seen "jumps" up and down in January many times but there could be other factors too.

Andy,

I have noticed this behavior is many countries. My feel is that when FI reaches some high(>250) value it drops. Less profitable countries have higher Financial index, here is the example:

you can see the difference in profitability during the time and also in index, which indicates that there is some error in calculation.

Country on the left always had less costs and her income/cost ratio always been better. I cannot show that when the trend is only growing due to market situation, but in case you will not be able to find a reason for this I will wait for more obvious example. it feels like there could not be a country with Financial index higher than 300 or so.

I hope you can run some simulation with the formula you have. you can check too cases:

1st country income 360B/cost 60B Income/cost ratio is 6/1
2nd country income 360B/cost 120B Income/cost ration is 3/1

According the current situation the 2nd country would have higher FI index.

Perhaps the finance index only looks at total income and not total profit.

In any way, the country which had less income and profit and worse rate of them had higher Financial index which makes no sense. I think this is just some bug in the calculation.

that drop in index i showed in the first post happened in more countries, so this is not just some random thing.

Lord Mndz,

My guess is something goes wrong when the index tries to exceed 300. At lower indexes it reliably trends toward the following formula...

(Total Income / Total cost) x 100 = Finance index.

The weirdness seems to set in, when the result would be over 300. It probably hasn't been noticed before, because Finance indexes that high are pretty rare.

Yes, this is very likely. I hope Andy is looking into this and will be able to find & fix this bug.

few more recent cases. Andy - are you investigating this?

and few more... this is happening with most of my countries..

Lord Mndz,

Try not exploiting your people in slave labor camps. If the index goes back to normal when it's at a reasonable level. They'll know it's due to the high index.

Most of your Country's seem to suffer this bug, when they tried to go significantly above 250 Finance index. IE, when you were trying to take more than 2.5 times as much from your people, as you give them back in services/defense.

I'm thinking of calling this the "Finance Index says to stop stealing your people's money, like a third world dictator, bug" haha.

Signed President of DanNation on LU

Lol i am still waiting for Andy to fix this.

my primary country on LU Atlas Shrugged has 308 finance index and doesn't experience this issue.

My finance indexes in the countries with problem should be around 400-500. I just hope that Andy find this bug as now less profitable countries have higher indexes. This is the main index in the game, it needs to be set right.

.

shark fins are not solved

Link

As I said before, January brings major changes.

The index is based on this year financial situation and that of the previous year.
It means that comes January, the year before is dropped from the index and the computation moves one year forward.

also, any thought that the index grows in a linear manner is incorrect.

The index grows nearly linear at lower levels.
At higher levels, it is growing slower than linear.

We could make the January jump less pronounced but in most cases, there is no major change as the financial index is quite stable.

to prevent major changes, we could temper the calculation and make it change at a slower pace like in many other indexes and computations.

a slower change will also mean that the change in January becomes smaller too.

I will look into it.

My observation is that the problem could be related with the speed of growth. The countries where I see the problem should have extremely high indexes but when it starts growing fast it drops. After the drop it wont start growing unless there are some changes in income/cost ratio.

look at the below, slowly growing index is not affected.

As I said, in higher levels, the index does not grow in a linear fasion but slower.

the main event on your graph is a big change in January.
I explained it.

I will make a change in the computation of the index in the next update and slow down the changes to smooth fast changes and make the index a bit more stable.

Thanks, looking forward to it.