W3C - Game News August 14, 2024

World Trading

Targon, Metadium and Baradium are now trading on the world markets in the i
5 main worlds. There is not much trading to speak of for now, but when materials become available on Tiny Atlas and are transported to the 5 worlds, trading will be possible.

Immediate Trading

To make immediate trading possible, the Gamemaster is delivering the ordered products and then orders the products on the market. The products are then delivered back to the gamemaster in the following hours and the product accounting remains neutral, meaning that the GM does not add products to the market.

Many products however, are hard to recover and the immediate delivery is becoming a feature that enables deliveries that should in fact not take place. We have already stopped immediate orders for Wind Turbines and Wind Farms.

we are now stopping the immediate trading for some raw materials. These materials must be ordered and delivered when the products are available.

Several natural resources are no longer available in immediate trading. These are: Gold, Lead, Lithium and Uranium.

We intend to extend this to other products and natural resources.

Natural Resources and Tiny Atlas

Natural resources are available in very large quantities in many countries on the main 5 worlds. There are huge quantities of unused natural resource in a very large number of countries and the number of such resources in a single country is many time larger than 100. It is easily possible to purchase or conquer a country with many natural resources and build Many profitable corporations.

Natural resources are in short supply in all the worlds and corporations producing them are among the most profitable.

We are now adding more natural resources on the Tiny Atlas world, were until now, there are only several rare metals that are not available in other worlds.

Although natural resources on Tiny Atlas are now being added, there is no urgent reason to mine these resources there. As mentioned before, there are currently many unused natural resources on many countries in all the worlds.

The upgrade will be completed on all worlds in the coming hours.
Natural resources discovery on TA too.

On this topic, I have the Simcountry Notifications on for Game News, and I'm neither getting the e-mail or the in-game message.

You should be careful with natural resources, a non premium player auto assigned a quiet world can get buried as many level 1 corps require natural resources and there are extreme shortages.

There are several ways you could address this:

-Reduce the number of worlds concentrating the player base, this will also encourage greater player interaction which encourages players to play longer. Note I rarely saw corps run short of resources on White Giant, the market was in shortage but turning over fast enough, on Kiebler Blue its bad.

-Rework the corp level system to have less resource dependent corps at level 1, and more easier to supply corps there.

-Not make such a change to immediate orders, though even being able to immediately order still leaves a difficult learning curve for a new player.

Leonard,

I will have someone test it.
Thanks.

Clicks,

I am ordering many natural resources on the 5 worlds and get them. No immediate orders.
I am not checking immediately but rather the next day and it is all delivered.

I do not think new players use immediate orders.
Last time I checked click statistics they did not. it was a long time ago.

we will check the info to new players, advising them to build natural resources corporations.

New players have in most cases enough corporations.

tweaking the education is a challenge.
getting all of them to 100% hiring and production is another challenge.

Immediate orders became a way to get materials independent of market situation and especially for those who do not care about the cost.
For those who do not use immediate orders, the delivery time becomes longer.

Andy,

"we will check the info to new players, advising them to build natural resources corporations. "

They must be premium to build resource corps, while I get incentivizing them to move to premium is important, if resources are an issue within first 5 days and their economy starts collapsing they will not make the switch no matter the game master provided advice.

True. No need to push them to build corporations that require full membership.

But as I mentioned, in most cases, these countries that were C3s before, already built all they could.

But again,
I do not think immediate orders are a big issue and certainly not for beginners.

I've noticed that new corporations do not order Robotics properly in the first few months. Not sure what this about. You create a new corp, and it takes a month to get its first round of supplies, and then it never orders more Robotics. I have to go in and specifically place an immediate order to stop it from running out. Why its only robotics not sure. Maybe because it's a different amount each month as the efficiency goes up???

When taking over a country, immediate orders are absolutely necessary to right the ship. More often than not the former C3 corps are missing products and production is stopped. Given it takes two-three months to get contracts working (something I never quite understood), losing immediate orders will definitely have an impact. (maybe change the order of the calculations so that it checks for new orders to stockpile before it throws that months inventory on the market, that way it can handle the new order immediately)

There are always perpetual shortages. Often it is the only way corporations ever make any money. I can see a world economic collapse from this. There aren't enough players to compensate for the loss of immediate orders. On KB there is a 23 million shortage on oil. Its been higher. If no oil is delivered a lot of corps will just stop. EP first, then everything else that needs EP. From there everything else will stop. Maybe it will only be the C3s that go broke and disintegrate. Self-sufficient players will probably/hopefully survive.

Fingers crossed...

I would like to look into the robotics problem.
what is the name of the world, country and corporations where it happened?

There are high shortages of natural resources while there are so many countries with more than 100 such resources.
I really hope more players would produce these materials.

We have now increased production in some corporations to try to reduce shortages.
the strategy already had some good results.

we keep increasing the production, including some tuning in the last upgrade.
there will be more.

There is no intention to stop immediate orders all together.
most products can be ordered with immediate orders.

Andy,

Many players would develop more resource corps but they'll use their all their countries available resources, and during that time used tremendous effort building the country, and gotten their empire to a size they find bigger is not manageable, that leaves them the only option of either abandoning countries to replace them with resource heavy countries, or not make more resource corps.

Enterprise only allows resource corps until 100 corps, so most advanced players enterprises end up too large to keep building resource corps, which was the original intent, offer resources to get them profitable then move on.

This has multiple options for solutions:

Allow more enterprise resource corps

Improve game efficiency so less clicks are needed to build a nation (past few years have been the opposite of this) so people are less attached to their countries.

Have C3 nations build resource corps

Encourage player interaction, including war so empires are forced to move around.

Allow non premium to build resources corps.

Natural resources are a challenge and an opportunity to improve the financials of any country or an empire.

Taking a new C3 country and building a 100 of them is a solution.
you do not need 500.
Very large enterprises are a problem in many ways.
One of them is the huge difference between the few players who have them and all others.
So we require them to have more smaller enterprises with 100 natural resource corporations each.

Unfortunately, there are very few ones having 100 natural resources corporations.

Maybe one way it to have the enterprise close many other corporations and build natural resources corporations.

It will make them richer and help resolve the problem.

We are reducing the cost of war for a long time now.
some more balancing in on its way and more reduction in the cost of building an army and making it more challenging to keep a huge army.

Andy will you provide a list of products that will no longer be available through immediate order, even if in the green? Will weapons/ammo be affected? So corps are not able to purchase supplies at start up? I noticed none of my new maintenance corps (Air, Base, Off, Def) are being supplied anything even after several months. So if we were unable to buy supplies immediately ( I tried) what should we do? Some items can take years before being supplied. Please do not make this game so labor intensive that it's no longer fun. just work.I know its your game your rules, but I truly believe this will not work out well for anyone.
Rob
The Brain
Fearless Blue

Andy,

"Unfortunately, there are very few ones having 100 natural resources corporations. "

This is because the 100 cap is total corporations not only natural resource corps. If it was only 100 natural resource corps at one time many more would have them, but you can't build resource corps once you hit 100 of any kind of corp.

Yes it's definitely 100 total when the cap comes in. My enterprise has no where near 100 mines.

Weapons and ammunition remain unchanged.
you can order immediately.
most products in general will remain unchanged.

The immediate orders change is limited to several natural resources
where the possibility to place immediate orders removed any incentive to produce those in larger quantities.

It makes sense to replace some corporations by natural resources corporations and achieve more independency and high profitability.

These corporations are extremely profitable and are essential for countries to make sure their corporations have the raw materials they need.
despite it, there seems to be little interest in doing anything about it.