How to do better and why

Hello. My country is the Teddy Empire Home Territory on LU. However, I am not looking for answers for my country, I'm looking for answers for everyone's country.

I have these specific questions

Can you take a look at my corporations, and suggest ways I can run them better. Most importantly, can you please explain WHY I should do these things. Please send more time explaining why than what I should do.

Can you take a look at my country itself, and suggest ways I can run it better. Most importantly, can you please explain WHY I should do these things. Please send more time explaining why than what I should do.

My hope (perhaps I'm very foolish) is that this thread will become "the" reference that new players use going forward. I think one reason that the existing guides are not as good as they could be is they lack the why. If you understand WHY you are doing something, you can apply the same ideas to other areas, and you can then take those ideas, and apply it to your own country, even if your country is radically radically different from mine.

Thanks in advance to the vets within the game who take the time to add their own thoughts to this thread. Fingers crossed that this will turn into something positive!

There are a few reasons why most guides don't include a "why" focus. I think there are several parts to "why" and a place where "how" fits in.

1st. You have to understand what your goals are, which is part of where "why" lives. For example, what does a successful corp look like? It is one with more market value? One with more net profit? For me, those two values are mostly unimportant, but why is that? You must figure out what a successful corp looks like before you can understand the "why" you must do certain things to make it that way. Which leads to..

2nd. The "how". This is where must guides have their focus. Once you know what you want you must know what steps to take to make it happen. To understand why these steps work, that leads to the other part of "why" which is

3rd. Why the "how" steps work. This can be quite complex depending on which game system you are discussing. You must know things like how to interpret all the data on corp pages or the various tabs of your finance page. Details, such as what makes up your military expenses and your welfare index, are in this too.

In short, "why" is difficult explain for every potential game topic on a single thread. Often, quite substantial effort goes into a guide just to explain "how". I am out of time right now but can offer some general advise on your country soon. Check this forum for guides I wrote by searching "Aries".

Okay, so, let me explain a bit more. When I type "simcountry guide" into google, I end up with things like this:

https://www.simcountry.com/statforum/1/112668.html

The "good economy" section in particular is very lacking on why. It just tells you what to do. It does say "You first want to line up a list of the most profitable per-worker corps" which is as close as it gets to explaining why, as well as " All corps are not created equal"

These statements help me understand why I'd want to follow the formula outlined.

The only statement in that section that is fully explained is this one "IPO your country's shares during the SECOND half of the month, after the hour has rolled around, and you ought to not have any problems from inv. funds." it says how to do it (second half of the month) and why (avoid automatic investments from national funds). This simple line can be applied to all sorts of situations where you'd want to avoid buying or selling at the same time as automatically activated actions.

You say yourself...
and I want to stop here to go on a tangent to thank you for replying. I have explored the forum a bit and know you are one of the best players; so I do want to say a thank you for replying here. I am not intending to sound ungrateful, rather, I want to assertively get my point across.
Anyway, you say your self that "what does a successful corp look like? It is one with more market value? One with more net profit? For me, those two values are mostly unimportant"

Why would I want the former? The latter? Why does it not matter to you? These are the exact sort of questions I'm looking to find the answer for. Maybe I'm going about it wrong because what I want to achieve is not something I can do with the method I have in mind. Maybe I don't know what I want. Right now, I think I want my country to be in surplus even without the beginner income, so that I can have more of a worry free hand to spend money; but perhaps being "in surplus" actually has nothing to do with being worry free in terms of money. I may not know what my goals are, and hence, want to learn the "why" of things so that I can figure out what I want. This is why I will often get a new game, create a character, play for an hour or two, and once I realize exactly WHY I want high magic, or +2 to defence, or a golden bag of holding, I will restart, and create someone new, now knowing what I know.

I hope that makes sense. This game is VERY large and complex, and most of the need for guides comes from not understanding it's intricacies. In my corporations thread, I asked why they were not selling at ordered prices, and was told there's a cap. The problem is that I'm now left with the implication that due to caps and possible floors as well, that I can do very little to change the success or failure of my corporation.

I think understanding the motivation behind some of these decisions - decisions that may seem obvious to a long-time player who deeply understands the systems within the game - may help me and other new players make better decisions themselves.

On corps, they are the basis of your ability to generate cash for your country. Generating income for your "Profit & Loss" tab of your finance page is one measure of success for this but is also important to do to improve your finance index. Your finance index is important to set your spending limits. Ideally, a successful corp makes more cash that it uses in its operations and feeds it through your Profit & Loss calculation.

In summary, you need corps:

1. To feed your country cash.
2. To improve your finance index.

With that in mind, there are two considerations when setting up a successful corp. First, it must be setup in an optimum situation to make money. Things to review here are:

1. It must sell a product that is in consistent demand. Gain familiarity with analyzing your world's market situation for products to do well here.

2. It must be upgrade its Quality and Effectivity processes to maximum.

3. It must select the optimum quality of supplies to balance producing a high quality product with the cost of those supplies. For a fully upgraded corp, this should be around 215 quality.

4. Buy and Sell strats must be reasonable. On the sell side, simply selling at "best price" is sufficient. On the buy side, balance paying a fair price with ensuring no shortage of supplies.

These steps will lead the corp to generating cash but then you must set taxes and/or profit sharing to send cash to your country through the finance page. If you choose low taxes, make sure you set high profit sharing to ensure your state corps contribute to your country's finances in this way. Considering the original goals of the corp, these values are most important to me.

1. Tax Paid

2. Profit Payment Paid (for a state/national corp)

3. Country Resources Used (for a private corp)

4. Salaries Paid (this influences citizen taxes/health contributions/education contributions/IF contributions)

As for your country, head to the game docs and look up "welfare index" under game features->indexes. It is the key to balancing the costs of your education/health/trans/social indexes, getting the most out of what you pay to improve this important index.

I advise selecting a reasonable health index and building the other indexes around it. More on health index can be found here:

https://www.simcountry.com/discus/messages/6/25580.html?1457104003

Hum. Thank you. I have been trying to keep the various indexes under control. I've been expanding a bit faster as I actually ran the numbers for how long my beginner income bonus will last (a long time) and figured that I should overspend while I could. This "he higher average age also leads to a larger older population, which results in a smaller workforce relative to your population." is exactly the example of a "why" answer btw, so thank you for that.

As for corps, I've been buying corps that produce items that seem to constantly be in the red. It's possible the cycles are beyond the data set I have access to, however.

I have an answer. One anyway. From someone who contacted me in game. I'll summarize:

Your welfare index is important. Why? Well it can determine how well your country does in all sorts of ways, like making companies more productive, and is one of the key ways used by veteran players to judge a nation.

Your welfare index can be kept up by increasing other indexes like health and education. This is why you may wish to target these latter indexes above 120.

That information on the welfare index is very generic. Refer to the docs location I recommended to properly tune this important index. Again, there is a reason I pointed to it right away when you asked about improving your country.

You should also make a habit of reviewing other countries to compare to yours and see what is working for you and what isn't. This can also lead to questions you have about that game that you might not have thought about otherwise. One country worth checking out on LU is my main, or any country in my empire really. Check out Candinnalm.