Maybe make it so they can put 98% of their goods on market? Or some higher amount.

I ran into a situation today where I grabbed a few NPCs but lost so many jets, I was under the threshold to be able to put more jets out on market. I do have 2 batches that have not sold yet (from yesterday lol).

I guess we can wait and see how the market auto corrects. I think we have more commies pumping out jets than I anticipated.

Something to consider is using the "Time on Market" setting if there's uncertainty about whether or not your jets will sell. You can arrange it so your jets return automatically if they don't sell without having to do a market recall.

You also can stock like 10+ days of turns - be patient and let the buyers come to you =Þ

I'll try this and see how it pans out. Thanks for the suggestion.



haha

As a related suggestion - I'm not sure how popular it would be, but it could be pretty interesting for a variety of styles (including CI) to have a bonus that allows you to put X% more of your total goods for sale.

CI has too much production in terms of raw NW/(acre*turn). If CI had any kind of half decent market for the early and mid round it would be impossible to compete with any other strat. And it's weird because we have all grown up playing a game where CI has a great early game and then tech doesn't go high enough to let it keep up unless it has a huge lead already.

I forget what mehuls indy tech max was, but it was lower(I wanna say 140%), and C had +25% indy production. Either way we are talking 15-20% higher production now than then.

What you got right now is that as soon as rep casher cant buy cheaper on public market, CI produces as about as much NW each turn as the rep casher can afford to purchase on its income. Thats weird from a legacy perspective. Rep casher is supposed to own the endgame because its been bad all round, takes forever to get techs to decent levels, and cs have to be built in a turn inefficient manner in order to balance income for getting those techs up or even run a tech start(the horror).

This is going to be really hard to balance unless you do something about indy production. Indy kind of HAS to be terrible for 4/5ths of the round in order for other strats to somehow compete against it. And I dont think indy players want that, they want to be able to sell their stuff at 100-150 and actually live on their ICs rather than being forced to build as a half rainbow or something.
Getting rid of the exponential expenses was a good thing but it hid the overproduction that CI had been allowed to aquire because expenses made CI impossible in the endgame anyway.

New permanent bonuses may be popular, and thats a utility in its own right, but its quite risky stuff, and I would recommend not adding anything like that for the purpose of balancing a strat. % goods sold could be a viable alternative to private market units after some strats stop taking turns(which is a useless bonus until you are done with turns). If introduced it should be balanced towards that purpose and against that alternative bonus, rather than what would make a CI/techer take this bonus early game rather than whatever their other options are. Theres luck too remember?

Discussion of overall production tweaks is interesting, and while my suggestion was sort of general, the problems I was trying to overcome were more server specific (though I could imagine demo's - especially techers - could have an interest in trying to sell more in one go on any server) - in case you were taking this as some sort of "CI isn't strong enough on this server" comment.

That is, since we can store a large number of turns and the number of jets a player can use up is increased dramatically, the jets market can at times be completely bought out when someone spends their turns, which leads to a lot of variance - and also sort of a feast or famine where we have to wait for a human to play their turns to buy up jets, which might only happen a few times a day (and likely only align with play times and time to market to sell once a day).

For grabbing CI, it's also more challenging to run up enough jets after grabbing to have a meaningful amount to sell. That was Rasp's point initially as well. Now having played for half the set, stocking turns to wait for a sale is useful, but doesn't resolve some of the other complexities. So maybe a government tweak for this server only is the simpler approach; I just thought it was an interesting idea - but without providing any explicit X% because there would certainly need to be balancing discussions.

For general tuning, I think reduced Indy production could be interesting, but this server has bigger market dynamic problems. I think the NW for tech is too high, which has led to a very large demand on tech, which means techers need to spend their cash on oil and bushels, which means farmers get a lot of cash which they probably spend on tech, etc, leading to a feedback loop. I'd also say that the bots are too prevalent compared to real players, with unusual overlap (e.g. they're still buying defense with no competition, and humans are buying jets with no competition, and then everyone competes for tech). For this set / server, both casher and CI are quite weak due to the market, but maybe we should have a larger conversation on bugs and suggestions if you want to review cross-server / global thoughts.

Let the round play out before making judgements on what does and doesn't work.

easy for you to say. I'm selling a jet for less than the price of a bushel at the moment. lol

I think the NW/tech point thing starts to matter now or a little bit ago. But for the most part we have seen high tech prices due to just more demand for tech points than there was supply. the intrinsic NW value of tech just adds ~$500 to tech points value early on. Now its more I guess. I think its essential that theres a reasonable soft floor for tech prices.

Anyway my point is Im quite convinced we didn't see 10000$ tech because of 4NW per tech point. Maybe at some point later on we will see $1400 tech instead of $800 tech because of it tho. And I'm all for that.

Sell before doing you LG!

But why was there such a large demand for tech, say compared to express? There are a number of large techers, and even some who did tech starts, so it seems like the demand was the unusual piece rather than the supply, but maybe you have more insight there since I'm not playing a techer this round. One idea is maybe since the military was so cheap, bots were able to quickly get to their defense goals and then spend the extra cash on tech regardless of NW, but I thought military is quite cheap on express too?

I agree with you that it'll help with the floor (and one idea for lots of market consumables is including a private market floor, like Slagpit's comment on oil - which I guess could also be considered as an alternative for military as well), but that could also be done by making the market autobuy at a higher rate. Either way, it's an interesting experiment to see how the market changes from small (and large) tweaks.

@Rasp - I think Vic is a CI too? Or he often plays that on other servers. That said, Slagpit was asking for suggestions, so I think discussing it before the set ends also allows time for ideas to get considered and fleshed out enough to be included sooner than later.

I can't tell if you're being naive or sarcastic? Even as a grabbing CI in the early-mid set, you have to run turns to produce more, and you have to produce more than you lose or you won't be able to keep growing, so you gain jets over time (primarily as you build the acres you grabbed), and thus selling after grabbing allows you to sell the most. Yes, if you grabbed until you had very few jets left, that wouldn't work - but that is not what we're doing / complaining about. If anything, players are at the least doing PS, which combats that.

I have a feeling the military market will be changing soon.

Now is a good time to talk about it from my point of view, and it's not like there's anything else to talk about anyway.

I ran dict tech->demo tech. When I had too much cash to run turns and bushels spiked to the 80s, I started stocking tech. When I'm spending $3B daily on the tech market, how many other demos needed to make a decision like that to keep the demand for tech higher than usual? I've been teching 100% bus/res and buying/reselling everything else.

Here's my best understanding of why the tech market looks the way it did for round 1:

1) Tech supply was restricted because bot techers cannot get tech allies (I forgot to account for this) and human techers have limited options for tech allies as well as an increased penalty to leeching.
2) Bot countries estimated high land goals due to the increased number of turns in the round and the limited number of grabs done against them. This made them more willing to buy tech.
3) Tech is 4 NW but this only means that bots are willing to pay a $650 premium when buying tech. It certainly matters right now (some farmers are stocking military after buying tech. If tech was 2 NW instead of 4 NW then they would have started stocking military faster). Personally I think that this is the least important factor when looking at the overall round.

Time to market will likely be 4-5 hours next round which will help CIs a bit.

Combining both of your comments, Vic - I'm curious why the farmers didn't use that excess cash to buy up cheap military and just go to town grabbing bots. I haven't done the calculations, but even techers might have had a benefit from continued grabbing rather than market speculation: it certainly seems some have continued to do so.

We must be mindful of significant adjustments as we level out the server. Make minor tweaks until balance is achieved sufficiently to promote a healthy gaming experience.

Everyone is still learning what their meta will or should be.

can you elaborate here?

From the alliance info page:
"This alliance is beneficial to technology-intensive countries. Each time one member engages in technological research, others will acquire 10% of this knowledge. This alliance also requires 0.15% of your networth in support costs. Note that the amount of technology you receive is also dependent upon your own tech levels."

I think it might be this:

"* Research allies provide 40% the typical benefit to allied countries that have less than 20% of the TPT of the techer."

That along with not allowing ingame pacts to a different tag. For example, if a techer players in a solo tag it's impossible for him to get tech allies.

Oh I just needed a post for the bonus. Your post did kind of indicate that you had enough jets to sell, but after attacking didn't anymore, so there may have been a point right before a grab you could have sold. If in running you turns you didn't actually gain jets and lost as many as you made then it makes sense you wouldn't be able to sell more.

Well I was reselling jets too, for about a week there (when I was in the #1 rank for a bit) I wasn't allowing the jet price below $100 for any appreciable length of time. Since I stopped dumping $1B daily into jets the price has dropped considerably.

So when the jets are close to "normal" price, the SS price in jets to grab, comnbined iwth the big oil spike, gets prohibitive.

I didn't think there are very many farmers. SS loses are very harsh for everyone.

^^ this.

On the other hand dictators can grab great.

For reference, land gained by SKA countries from SS over the past 72 hours by government type:

C 38772
D 15291
H 7100
I 53669
R 7054

Great googly moogly, that's an eye opener. Aren't you guys more demo than any other govt right now?

No, we just have one demo. Not doing SS is a choice that of course players are free to make. However, I disagree that the game's mechanics or current market conditions somehow prevent them from grabbing. As Rasp pointed out, sometimes bushels sell for more than a jet.

I don't think anyone's contending that people can't grab due to market conditions, just that they are potentially making other choices to optimize, how they see it. I was telling everyone who would listen early in the set that the productivity of the land moving forward outweighed the cost in jets, especially when jets are going in the 70s all the time.

Almost half is dictator!

Half the grabbers are dictators as well.

Well that is by design ;)

You like my Dict?

So you are saying my alliance country has a chance? 😂

We all have dicts :)

I was about to say look how grown up we all are now with the substantive, thoughtful conversation in early posts.
And then Kingme comes along...

He always brings that big dict energy

Poor little guy feels left out. At least TC and Vic can relate.

Just reduce military losses for troops and tanks