Introduce a benefit to common markets

Currently, joining a common market has very minimal benefit. You can gain access to contracts of other country and enterprise corporations in the market, but you generally don't really need contracts and they don't help with profits. Many to most players do not join markets or use them for almost anything at this stage.

I'd like to ask about improving the experience of being in a market. Creating a benefit to joining a market with other players would increase cooperation, increase a sense of community, and be a simple way to add flavor to the game.

Most of the features of the common market (membership, voting, etc.) are already built, so it wouldn't require inventing something entirely new.

Ideas for common market benefits that I think could be interesting and fun:
- Discount on supplies in the market or a small boost to the profitability of contracting in the market. Even 1% is interesting and worth it.
- Popup events that trigger every few game years that give a one-time bonus to corps or your country.
- Built-in priority in purchasing goods from other corporations in your market. If something is in massive shortage, you can sort of cut the line without clicking on anything to gain access. This idea can be refined, but you can probably get the idea.
- Slight welfare index boost for trading internally or meeting government needs with your market

Other players: I would like to hear your ideas and reactions to these ideas!

For the first point, the more members the common market has, the more benefits it gets. That should be a thing too.

A popup event could be based on market demand, like if wind farms have a shortage, then a popup event will give a bonus to the wind farms corps, or sometimes a nerf.

As an avid solo empire/ceo common market runner, I've had a few experiences with it that make me think 'hey this could be better.'

1. Partial Product Contracts - This has already been brought up and Andy seems open to the idea, but one issue with contracting currently is that only full units of a product can be contracted. If you have an Assets Maintenance and Wind Farms in the same common market, the Assets Maintenance corporation will buy a full Wind Farm every 6 months when the Wind Farm corp produces one despite the fact that the Assets Maintenance only uses 0.01 WF per month in production. Most of the maintenance and some other corps experience this problem, which makes the common market potentially take a lot of micromanaging, which is against its intended effect. Simple solution is to allow contracting partial units.

2. Production Quality Caps - An issue without a simple solution that I can think of when it comes to common markets is production quality caps and the substantial lost income from common market contracts. Private CEO corporations, for example, have a production quality cap of 303.2 at max quality upgrades. This is reached with average supply input quality of 220 (at least at my last check), meaning if your input supplies are of a higher quality than 220, you won't get any benefit of that quality because the output is still capped at 303.2. The longer common market contracts exist, the higher the quality of all of the products in the circle as they're giving each other higher and higher quality supplies, eventually passing the 220 quality mark. So eventually a CEO corp in a common market could be paying ~ 80% market value more than what is needed for max quality output. That extra cost without benefit can be enormous when you're talking about hundreds of corps. Again it's not something that I've thought of a solid solution for, there are major drawbacks with anything I've thought of that would address it.

3. Incentive to participate with others- Common Markets dictate a minimum percentage of output products that a corp should provide, but it doesn't implement any limitations on intake contracts. There doesn't appear to be much in terms of motivation then for a multiplayer common market, especially ones involving a player with hundreds of corps and a player with say dozens. With so many products perpetually in shortage, there is a lot of benefit in common markets for the purchaser, but nothing really to entice the provider. A possibility to promote multiplayer common markets could be to have another rule in them that can be voted on by the members to set a percentage limit between market value of products offered by a player and input contracts signed by that player to foster an environment where players are held to a standard on contributing and consuming to make the common market truly about players helping one another mutually to overcome market shortages.

4. Incentive to participate at all - Especially with what I've outlined above, there are plenty of drawbacks to common markets and the benefits are limited. EO outlined some good ideas to help promote common markets, I'd like to throw out another. Currently, common market impacts your country score to help on the leaderboards based on a percentage of your input/output being from local/common market contracts. In truth, the score provided means almost nothing. For your consideration I'd ponder the idea of the common market score providing a small bonus onto the Welfare Index based on the same parameters currently used to give bonus country score. In the sense of 'game lore' it makes sense that having supplies for the country and its corporations in steady supply without relying on the world market would bring a sense of better quality of life and in turn better welfare.

I think a big one would be allowing sellers to offer discounts, this can encourage greater collaboration between players.

More complex contract structures like multiple year deals would be more difficult to add but would add the ability to hedge against market fluctuations (sellers offer a discount from current price but buyers are locked in to buy for so many game years no matter what the market does)This could really provide benefits to player interaction.

Also allowing contracts at varied frequency such as every other month so contracting things that are often in shortage but do not require a full unit a month in buying corps.

I second all of this!

I love the additional ideas.

I look at the forum and there is a lot less talk about interaction, recruiting, or coordination than before.

Perhaps there are less players - but I think there's also less game mechanics where players can easily access (or have a reason to use) to interact in a multi-player sense.

One thought regarding "production caps" from Unsthable. Corporations with common market contracts for extended periods of time could get a quality boost. IE "familiar supplier" boost. Example: Every 60 months of contracts boosts output quality by 1, with maximum boost of 5 points.

Right now, the only benefit of contracting seems to be avoiding shortages - but it's costly.

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- Built-in priority in purchasing goods from other corporations in your market. If something is in massive shortage, you can sort of cut the line without clicking on anything to gain access. This idea can be refined, but you can probably get the idea.<!-/Quote-!>

I like this.

OK, so. I always hesitate to comment on CMs. Compared to what folks think it should do, and what it does. I seems broken beyond repair. Leave it alone or scrap it.

Revisit, Trade cartels, and partial vicotries. Where a group of players can create a monopoly on a product, what ever the GM meant by that. And wars don't have to go to full conquest, you could conquer Natural Resources in the country.

as far as fixing the CM, you need a way to request a quality type, for a chunk of corps.

i mean, if i sell at 300q, on the open market, it sells at 300, with what ever trade stat i've got. and buy supplies at, say 200. A common market, you essentially buy what you(s) put into it. so you end up making 300q, and buying 300q, paying 50% for supplies, that the game cann't give you credit for.

if the common market, was more of a private market, where the supply faery makes visits, so you can sell in 300q and buy out 200, then you have something. and make it easier to buy quality supplies of one type, like 120q FMUs, while buying higher with something like carbon. with more of a brush stroke, than clicking on each corp.

also, i've always wanted "project pages" you could do something like putting all your Wind Turbine corps, that you are self contracting, at a low q, (for the lowest gov cost,) into one page, and run them all with their own set of settings. and put your WT corps that are selling onto the open market, with higher q, into another page, where you can run those with another set of setting.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

if the common market, was more of a private market, where the supply faery makes visits, so you can sell in 300q and buy out 200, then you have something. and make it easier to buy quality supplies of one type, like 120q FMUs, while buying higher with something like carbon. with more of a brush stroke, than clicking on each corp.<!-/Quote-!>

The world market works this way. Why not common market?

Both common markets and federations take a major part of the home screen in your country and honestly are the two primary ways to interact with other players in game.

Having both be mostly pointless for 9 out of 10 players hurts.

Alot of the suggestions in here are good.
The set quality production should be in the corp it's self and the option to have more than one quality produced, but incorporate that in to the contract works alot better, for that reduces the micro.
A similar page for the common market contract buy and sell as EO said/mentioned as the world market has is definitely a good suggestion.
For that in terms would make the corps auto produce the set quality instead.
And just have the corps the possibility to be able to produce up to the upgrade resource/product quality amount.

I have now currently played this game this run for about 2-3 months now and i have been massively using the common market.
And so far the only two advantages have been:
Most of the money stay in one close loop with a few and fair money trickles out to the countries they're housed in and they're taxes and the salaries and used country resources.
And a constant and safe supply line.
That's it.
Yes, the prices are just as up and down as the world market so that's really unfortunate, for that drives the government cost and corp cost up no matter what you do unless you only trade from the world market with a set setting or you do not upgrade the quality for the specific corps that is trading with the government and the corps supporting the other corps producing the products.
And currently as it is, being self supplied is not as worth it as it can be or should be.

I also got to add to my post:
A option to cancel all non used/remanding contracts/contract quota would have been really great.
For that leaves the issue of going through all the left over contracts that are not used/have been contracted.

Most of common market are hold by Empire leader and their Slaves today, so i did the same 😊

Thanks for the suggestions here.
there is indeed a need to upgrade the common market.

We also think that the contracts are automatically closed for a price which is too low.

We will increase the price of these contracts as a first move.

Really the only part that matters here is that production quality cap. Until that's resolved some way, there will never be any use of the markets.

I'm going to bump this as I think bringing interaction back to the game is critical, and common markets are the best tool. The current difficulty with Windfarms could possibly be a great time to improve common markets and incentivize their use.

EO's third idea may be key here: "Built-in priority in purchasing goods from other corporations in your market. If something is in massive shortage, you can sort of cut the line without clicking on anything to gain access. This idea can be refined, but you can probably get the idea."

Which to me means even without contracts you attempt placing market orders within common market partners.

From your comments elsewhere Andy where fixed Q orders are paired with similar Q orders, and ignored if not possible that window could be larger for within a common market. So if normally 120Q is requested and the market will match with up to 140Q, the common market would match up to 180Q, making a transaction more likely.