W3C - Corporations

I just hold all production when my corps are manufacturing a good in surplus and sell it when the market is better.

Even if I temporarily lose a few tens of billions in the short run, you're making over twice as much money selling at max price vs. min price.

Also reduce cost of production by stocking supply level for a number of months greater than the time in between boom and bust cycles for a given product every time it hits a price floor.

I.e. factory maintenance hit a price floor last week, so stock every corporation for 10 years during that floor and you've made yourself way more profitable over time

Yeah that seems like a good idea. I am just to lazy to keep track of those things but if you have the time and energy for it it sure would be smart to do.

Hey Letsie, so I decided to try the strategies again. I set my sale price to 120% and decrease by 5% (with follow quality on of course), and I noticed a 1.5% increase in sale price. I'm not sure how that happened since I am doing increments of 5, but hey you were right, the strategies seem to have some effect. I have increased my sale price to 150% now to see what happens with that. I haven't committed to a final number yet, but I will definitely be using trade strategies now. Thanks for the tip Letsie. We need to make you the minister of finance for LDI

I take it back about trade strategies. They are most definitely broken. Some of my corps are selling at lower than market price despite massive shortages. They were selling for higher on best price setting. Others sell slightly higher, but never more than 2% regardless of the numbers I use. It seems to be a crap shoot. I am going back to best price.

Hi John, i really support what you are testing with trade strategies. They used to work in a very different way than today, playing with them was one of most interesting things in the game. I think you need to open new topic under the bugs section and continue working on this bug so w3c would have enough information to fix it.

When i came back to the game i the same day noticed that these are not working as they should and numbers you set has no impact to the price you are selling at. It was very big dissapointment to expierence this...

I have to disagree with the both of you. Perhaps it does not do as much as the numbers indicate but my experiences with the trade strategies are definitively different.

I am going to use the LU defensive weapon maintenance corps market for my example. When there is a large shortage they run about 1.4-1.7B profit per corp. When there is a surplus as there has been for the last couple of days they lose 1.5-2.0B per month. This big difference in profits makes them a decent candidate to run some tests with.
Both the corporations that I am going to compare are fully upgraded. Their welfare index is only 0.1 apart. Which is not exactly the same but I thought it would be small enough.

My sale strategies are:
For corp 1
200% increase drop 1 per month

For corp 2
best price

Average profit over the last 10 months:
Corp 1
-1.7B per game month

Corp 2
0.4B profit

Stock left for sale

I was not going by the profits. I was looking at the actual purchase and sale logs of the corporations. They show exactly what price transactions occurred in. Some corps were slightly higher and some slightly lower and I could not correlate it to any specific market conditions. The differences were all within 2% of the market price.

One possible explanation is that maybe C3s only use best price for their purchase orders and that since the majority of purchases are from C3s then it could potentially explain why nothing seems to sell for much higher than 1 or 2 percentage points from market price.

I don't believe c3s had been buying differently in the past and still i used to sell at much higher prices than 1-2%. It used to depend on market situation a lot. My guess is that this is related with some hard limit of price and changes in max quality. The max quality in the past was 220, and i was able to sell +100% on top of that, but when Ceo quality was raised to 330, nobody raised the selling limit accordingly.

Interesting. You might be right. 330Q product only sells for around 2.96 times the base price. Maybe there is a hard limit.

Andy, it would be interesting to hear your opinion on this.

There is no change in the way the products market works.
Not in a very long time.

It is hard to figure out exactly what happens and the main reason is that the trading depends on what you offer but equally, on what is available on the other side.

You are not selling to the gamemaster. You are selling to a country or a corporation with their own strategies and these vary from minute to minute depending on what is already processed and what remains on the market.

and then of course the pricing trends that depend on the total quantities of product offered and requested against market price. These determine the direction of the price movements.

Fixed price offers and requests could cause price changes and are easy to manipulate so we are not taking them into account in the totals to decide on the direction of the price.

The market maker in the trading process is trying to match an order with an offer. Many times

Fair enough, and still do we have hard limit in these calculations?

I would like to post a follow up on my previous message. The def weapon market is negative again and right now I am seeing a large difference in sales between the same 2 corps that I wrote about in my previous post.

The first 1
Sale strategy 200% drop 1 per month
9.8B profit (it is now selling of its stock that wasnt sold during the green market conditions)

The 2nd one
Best price sale
0.8B profit

The first one is following a different sale pattern. I understand what the both of your wrote and that is why I will try out these settings with 5 vs 5 corps. For now I am convinced that the sale strategies at least do something

Check the sale logs for the prices. Profit is not an accurate measure because sometimes their produced quality varies a few points due to fluctuations in supply quality.

The 200% corp sold around 255 quality products at 72297 per unit. Over a period of 6 months there were some small deviations from this but overal it stayed around that price and quality.

The best price corp sold around 255 quality products at 55395 per unit in the same 6 month period.

I would like to point out that the market conditions are changing and that def maintenence is once again a red market with significant shortages. This is turning into something that I find most interesting. This is of course a very small sample size so I am going to take 5 corporations of each and keep on checking on them. If you are interested I could post the logs here so you can compare them.

As for the suply settings. I buy my supllies at 180 with a 12/24 setting.

Yes I am definitely interested. Would love to see your findings.

I am doing a 200% test myself on a services Corp since it is always in massive shortage. Should be prime candidate to fetch a high price.

Interesting to see but hard to conclude anything.

Don't forget the dumping of products, taking place all the time and distorting the market. Same with hoarding that we see in many countries and enterprises.

Immediate buying is an issue too.

There are limitations that can kick in, both on the price and the quality. The trading algorithm gets into a tight corner when it meets large quality differences and must make a trade.

It is more complex, with thinly traded products where it is harder to find a good match.

Andy is quality considered at all when matching trade partners? I produce around 290 quality and Letsie around 225. More people buy at that level than at my level. Could that account for why he is getting higher prices from his trade strategies?

I assumed quality does not matter for filling orders and that if I sell 330q and you buy 120q, the game pays me the difference.

I think John is right, i also have the same conclusion. Otherwise it would be too complex to match all orders.

John Galt I do not think the service corps are a good market for this example. Exactly for the reasons you described. It is a market with almost 0 fluctuations.

That theory sounds interesting. Maybe that is why I get the occasional spikes when the market goes from green to red.

Letsie, what you said about not selling in surplus and making up for it in shortage caught my eye. A lot of products on WG have short demand periods, some with the price hovering around the break even point.
At best price my Chemical corps were either loosing or barely making money. They have improved using +200 -1.
Another product I tried has it's price in the top quarter of it's price range. There was little or no difference between best, +100, +200, so the max limit is hard.
I think the monthly production demand controls whether or not it sells not the overall supply. Best price sales are done first, then contracts. If there is still demand the high price stock sells.

strategies do not work

nothing will sell over quality price, ever, no matter the shortage or buy orders

check my thread in problems forum