W3C - Shortages of wind turbines

Looks like that elusive 14 will forever remain elusive. Maybe I need more WF. A lot more.

Just leave it alone. Your actions have already made mass production of electricity by wind farms difficult to put it in a nice way. Let the markets do their thing. I get it they were too profitable, but now they're becoming unmanageable.
Rob

WF corps were likely too profitable. I know I made massive profits. This swing is too far in the other direction. This past week, in one country, I had over 200 WF corps close. I have 9 left, and 3 of those will close soon unless I micromanage cash infusions, which I don't plan to do. I assume the other 6 will follow. I will leave the market for WFs rather than constantly babysit them though.

The quality of EP was discussed a long time ago and we have clearly explained that it will be 120.
The choice was, and is, to increase the maintenance cost of WF by increasing the use of WT in maintenance from one to two or three each month.

The same players, some using a different name were involved in that discussion.
check the forum about this issue.

the quality now is 170 instead of 120.
It will be reduced to 150 within a week and then, in the coming weeks to 120 as intended from the start.

The quality of EP in countries will decline more slowly because the new EP at Q120 is nixing with the existing quality of EP in the country.

Wind power will remain very profitable.
If profitability will remain at unacceptable levels, maintenance cost could go higher.

Other forms of EP production will also remain very profitable.

Shortages of WTs will reduce the production levels of WFs as explained on the forum recently.
That feature is now delayed for a couple of weeks to allow for the production of more WTs or a reduction in the numbers of WFs.

"The quality of EP was discussed a long time ago and we have clearly explained that it will be 120.
The choice was, and is, to increase the maintenance cost of WF by increasing the use of WT in maintenance from one to two or three each month."

When discussed a long time ago the discussion was to tie it to the Wind Farm / Wind Turbine quality, not an arbitrary number.

"The same players, some using a different name were involved in that discussion.
check the forum about this issue. "

Please tell me this isn't you admitting to knowing of alts, please let it be they changed their name.

"Wind power will remain very profitable. "

While some might make it sound like the issue is profitability, the issue is the added micromanagement recently, auto orders don't work right with wind turbines, so frequently I find no open orders even though auto ordering is set.

Often it seems the games solution for something being too good is to add more clicks. Adding more micromanagement without adding new elements is removing fun, no one wants to manually place orders for each country daily.

The EP discussion was about EP from wind farms being sold without any regard to quality.
Please check the old trail.

I mentioned the player changed name, to say that the quality issue was known for a long time, also to players commenting about it now.
Please feel free to change your name. The feature is there for some years, to be used.

The only point of disagreement about EP was always, the disregard for the quality of EP from WFs.
nothing else.

we explained why then and we explained why again now.
same reason, and the same explanation.

We can continue the discussion for some time but please realize, that this is the way wind farms were intended to work.
WFs are very profitable and will remain so but they cannot change the entire financial model of Simcountry and will end up as one of the ways countries can become and remain profitable while they are much more dependent on the price of EP on the market.
 
We had similar discussions about natural resources when these were introduced and more such discussions when military units were introduced.

Simcountry has many more features now then in past years and each and every significant development always brought discussions.

we will not stop the introduction of new features.

I'm not sure I've seen anything regarding this yet, so maybe someone can clarify.

Since changes were implemented last week, wind turbine corps have been basically unable to sell on the market.

Despite there being demand, turbines are not sold. My countries also are not getting almost any re-supply UNLESS I manual order with high price. Something has changed, and I'm wondering if we know what or if it's getting looked at.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about with turbines. This planet has demand for turbines but they are not getting sold.



I have individual countries with huge defecits at the same.

There's a lot to unpack here so I'll try to go through it point by point.

"The same players, some using a different name were involved in that discussion.
check the forum about this issue."

Yes, I am one of those players that brings up wind and its effects and errors to you relatively often, and for good reason. Yes, I used to have a different name on the forum. Until you took down a post that I had made that you said threatened you and you imposed a ban - ignoring the multiple players that then came out having read the post before it was removed backing the claim that there were no threats and ignored calls to put the post back up so others could decide themselves. Being on the discord I still knew of some things going on with the forum after I was removed. I had to wait for my account to expire to re-register for the game completely to be back on here.

At the same time I'm the player that has always had the health of the game in mind which is why the things that I bring up here are virtually all error fixes and status updates. My main issue that I have tried to convey is the vagueness of details that you provide in updates if any information is provided at all, in a game that is virtually completely about number crunching. That is a reasonable issue to have with a game developer. I brought up the issue of how your updates are posted, namely I recall having a back and forth with you over your 'Game News' page, which for most players, especially new players, would be the first stop to see the game's changes over time. At the time you forum banned me it hadn't been updated in roughly a year, which to new players especially, which are critical to the game's long term health, made it appear that the game hadn't been updated for almost a year. Updates posted on the forum, when they're posted, are often challenging at best to locate. The forum search feature is clunky on its best day. I have noticed that the Game News has again not been updated essentially since the ban, now approaching the end of its 7th month without an update posted. That is a problem. I'm also the player that uses publicly available information to try to help hunt down cheating players in game and present them to you, and goes out of my way to try to identify how exploits are occurring and then share the step by step process with you when I successfully identify one.

And finally the wind that keeps getting brought up. Unfortunately it keeps getting brought up because it is unfortunately clear that even direct complete information presented to you along with all of the data available to you as the GM, you haven't had an accurate grasp on how wind power works in your game. That isn't meant as a personal insult, just a reasoning for why these same issues keep getting presented and why your changes performed and projected seem to miss the mark.

"the quality now is 170 instead of 120.
It will be reduced to 150 within a week and then, in the coming weeks to 120 as intended from the start."

As intended from the start really doesn't hold weight. The most recent discussion regarding wind less than a month ago had some input from you worth going over again:

"The quality of electric power delivered by the wind farms is not taken into account.
It was discussed in the past.

quality is not always taken into account and this is the case with electric power produced by wind farms.

The cost of maintenance of wind farms has several factors. One wind turbine is used each month but also some other materials.
the computation of the cost of wind farms is done correctly.
It is checked and rechecked many times and it is correct.

wind farms remain veery profitable.

We in fact think that the profitability is too high and unrealistic.
we do not have any current plans to correct it."

In the most recent discussion less than a month ago, you confirmed that profitability was too high, something nobody has ever disagreed with, and in the same post said you did not have any current plans to correct it. Then in one unannounced maintenance dropped the financial output by upwards of 50% while dramatically increasing required micromanagement. Despite multiple attempts at explaining exactly how the wind system was working since its release you seem to think the actual income and expenses were far different even with all of the information in front of you.

Players that have invested heavily into wind from day one have seen enormous gains, that is not in dispute. Players have tried to convey to you how massive the gains were for consideration to bring their potential more in line with other products. But there has seemed to always be a disconnect between how the mechanics of wind worked in the game and how you thought the mechanics of wind worked.

Your statement yesterday showed a fundamental lack of understanding the mechanics.

"The EP quality in Wind Farms should be Q120 as we have explained months ago.

We do not take the quality of Windfarms into account because it will increase profits in a way that will force us to increase maintenance cost and use 2 or 3 wind turbines for maintenance each month."

As had been explained a multitude of times, wind production quality not being taken into account is EXACTLY WHY profits were what they were. Making WF or WT quality matter would do the exact opposite of what you claim for anybody with a basic understanding of the mechanics of your wind power system. Your claim that taking quality into account would mean having to increase maintenance costs, proposing to double or even triple WT consumption - which from your recent posts looks like you intend to do even with this sudden arbitrary reduction to 170 and then 120 quality, is absolutely absurd.

A key principle in your interaction with other players seems to be this idea that because you are the GM you know every detail of how the game performs and are quick to dismiss your players experiences and provided data, trying to shift conversation to something else. For the sake of the game, you need to open your mind and understand that information provided shouldn't be so instantly disregarded just because it didn't come from your own personal experience.

This is how I see it. Lets say I have 200 wind farms in a country, To support those farms I need 10 Wind Turbine corps producing an avg of 20 each per month. = 200 WT. If this is moved to a maintenance use of 3 WT, I will now need 30 Wind Turbine corps to provide for the same 200 Wind Farms. To me it looks as if you're trying to limit the number of wind farms by making the required maintenance hard to achieve. This alone will have an effect on how much one profits. It most certainly affects how much power will be sold on the open market. Seems that this alone will trim one's profits.
Rob

Rob,

Please read the explanation given about the quality of EP from WFs and the maintenance.

Maintenance requires one wind turbine per WF each game month and will remain so.
We explained that in case EP quality of WF would remain at a high level, maintenance cost will have to be increased and we will have to increase the use of WT to 2 or 3 every game month which will make it impossible to have large numbers of WFs.

As quality goes to 120, there is no need for that. 

ED,

I will check the trading in WT in more details.

I would like to check some of your corporations but there is n world name and no country name.

We did change the trading of WTs as also mentioned on the game news.

immediate orders are not coming through. all other orders remain as before.

I already checked many such corporations and they all sell their products on the markets except for the ones that have contracted their products to the country.

A quick check on WG shows that there are orders for more than 1.000.000 WTs and offers for nearly 250.000.

Most of the orders are at Q120 and most of the offers are at a much higher quality.
There are many thousands of records and it is hard to see the details but:
thousands of WTs are sold.

The log I checked was from the last month run that ended two hours ago.
(may 21 at 7 AM MET).
I can guess why the orders are mainly at Q120 but the trading process cannot match them with offers at Q280 so in most cases, nothing happens.

This mismatch is not new.
I saw very old orders in the queue. They were there long before the last upgrade.

before last upgrade however, immediate orders were processed.

Also, very old orders were frequently automatically converted into immediate orders and then processed.

The sale took place but at a much higher price.
So someone ordered at Q120 and ended up buying at a much higher price.

we now think that the auto conversion into immediate orders, is one step too far.

We will do some more checking today and tomorrow.

in the mean time, I think that placing an order for WTs at best price and for any quality, will result in a quick delivery in the next month run.

There are many offers sitting there waiting for such orders.

There are two ways to change this:

1. produce many more WTs and resolve the shortage and reduce their price.
2. Setup your on WT corporations and contract the products to your country.
As Rob said, one WT corporation will supply the WTs needed to maintain 20 WFs.

"we now think that the auto conversion into immediate orders, is one step too far."

I agree, this is an issue, and an even bigger issue since immediate orders are cancelled for wind turbines.

With the quality mismatch, the switch to immediate order then cancelled leads to losing your place in line, which does make it worse. Normal the mismatch delays orders, but with proper safety stock planning you can hold out, with them canceling you can never get ahead without manually ordering constantly.

I'm sorry but your statement that WT corps are selling products normally on the open market isn't accurate. It's almost completely the opposite of reality in fact. Check every WT Corp in nevrondona empire on WG. Every WT Corp that is contracted directly to my country has no unsold products. Every WT Corp that isn't contracted to my country has unsold products, usually more than 1 month worth. They do not sell at very high Q levels. They are newly built corps that I haven't gone in and manually contracted to myself yet so they are selling at 120Q. It's been broken for going on 2 weeks, and pointed out several times by several players, at the same time that all the WF corps were all killed in my country.

@Andy,

I agree with Zentrino. The issue right now is turbines aren't getting sold on the open market correctly.

-I have countries with big demand (many many months) for turbines and many corporations with huge surplus.
- Something changed during the last couple updates so that "best price" doesn't always move product.
- If so, my own countries would be able to purchase from my own corporations on the market.

Here's some images that may help more clearly show what I'm experiencing:

Image 1 is of my country inventory, showing a huge deficit of wind turbines while also showing that the market has surplus:




Image 2 is of my CEO on the same planet, showing my wind turbine corporations all with unsold turbines.



Is there a reason they're not being sold to my country? I'm aware I could contract, but that's not the question. Why isn't the market working for direct sales or regular sales?

This is from the log file, produced this morning:

There are thousands such records in the log.
Thousands more with the word CONTRACT in the log but we did know about that.
----------------------------------------------------------------
CORP 1725074 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1237018 OF WindTurbine FOR 287433171.81 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725077 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1237018 OF WindTurbine FOR 288413685.00 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725085 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1237018 OF WindTurbine FOR 296500050.00 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725091 SOLD 14.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1237018 OF WindTurbine FOR 289337583.36 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725091 SOLD 10.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 298427030.15 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725119 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 301890960.00 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725120 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 292301708.91 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725121 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 288944334.84 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725123 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 296500050.00 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725127 SOLD 23.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 297847777.50 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725128 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 288413685.00 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725132 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 243938677.50 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1725133 SOLD 24.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 245286405.00 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0
CORP 1784117 SOLD 1.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 192725032.50 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=5071060
1; MANUAL=0
CORP 1831020 SOLD 21.0 MARKETPLUS_TIME TO CORP 1291018 OF WindTurbine FOR 319411417.50 MARKETPLUS_TIME DELAY=0; CREATED=507106
01; MANUAL=0

EO,

I see it was GR.
but no country name, no enterprise name.
we cannot see where the problem is.

For now I assume fixed price with quality specification.

Thousands of transactions take place each game month.

check my corporations, they all sell everything on the market. (except for some selling by contract).

Andy my man. LU shows supply of 63k WTs and demand of 4.8m.

Your main country and one of your slaves have a combined 4 WT corps. Every one is sitting on unsold product.

In this case, the log from WG, there were many orders at market price.
More orders than the available WTs.
the trading started with contracts, then market price, then all the available products were gone.

Strategies, except for market price did not matter at all because all products were gone before even getting to orders with any strategies that are not market.

Auditor,

True.
there were unsold products because the sale strategy was NOT best price.
I now changes the sale strategy to BEST PRICE and the products will be sold.

I am quite sure this is the reason for not selling.
to date, I did not receive any name of a corporation and country selling WT to check why they are not selling.

I am quite sure they are not trying to sell at best price.

In case of oversupply, best price will not be a guarantee for making sales.

The shortage does not mean everything will be sold.

if I request Q120 and the best I can get is Q200, there will be no transaction.

Okay. Feel free to look at the WT corps in Panacea on LU, some with hundreds of unsold WTs mostly at ~ 120Q. At best price strategy.

And I'm not entirely sure I buy into the whole 'if I request 120Q and best I can get is 200Q there will be no transaction' unless this is something you just put in for WTs specifically. Most players in this game buy most of their military equipment from the open market at 330Q, and those orders are filled. 330Q requires a truly public corp, and I'd hazard an estimation that there are nowhere near enough truly public Precision Bomb corporations to account for all the 330Q precision bomb orders being filled out there.

Update: there are zero public corporations on LU producing Precision Bombs. I am able to purchase 330Q Precision Bombs on the regular.

"the trading started with contracts, then market price, then all the available products were gone.
Strategies, except for market price did not matter at all because all products were gone before even getting to orders with any strategies that are not market. "

Andy, so the game mechanic does contracts, best price, then strategies? So then that means strategies do not truly do anything unless market price offers / demand are all first satisfied? This would mean with extreme shortages strategies rarely get executed until they have gone through adjustments to be market price?

@Andy

That's GR -

Country is "Exile" and has 45 months turbine supply deficit.
Enterprise is "Lord Daut Holdings" and has almost entirely unsold wind turbines.

I didn't share because it's happening all over the place on multiple planets and has been since your recent changes. I should have provided that info to you.

Yes, sales periodically goes through, but if there is surplus, why do I have hundreds of thousands of total demand for turbines and my turbine corporations (I have probably 1,000 total corps on all worlds) have excess?

Other CEOs to look at "Repository" or "Dragons are Wise N Things" on WG. Huge amount of unsold turbines. On same planet, my country "Charn" has over 100,000 shortage. There should be sales between the two. That's 25 game months of deficit when the market is showing green.

Thanks for looking into the issue.