....or CI now sucks in primary?

I can understand having too many CIs and few active players drive the prices down, but i didn't imagine this down.

Is it this way always or is it just a bad set for CIs?

Not trolling but been away for years and i am really not up to date on what the best strats are in primary atm.

Look at the previous sets top 10. Cashers and farmers seem to be favourites but indies have a good chance.

What prices do you expect? @$110 the CI makes about as much as a non-cashing rep casher tech:tech at this point.

I am also back since like 2 months and when i played turrets/jets were like 140-160 at this point but Commie bonus was only +25% and indy tech maxed out at 140%. If mil prices didn't drop massively it would be completely retarded to play anything other than C/I and maybe techer lol, but that doesn't work.

C/I have a really strong finish if you can do some math and know all the game mechanics and formulas that come into play. If you just cash your turns aimlessly your finish will be poor no matter the prices at this point.

Well, I have some clue about playing CI actually, I am just not up to date.

I liked more Alliance's price.

Inherently C/I is bad for alliance and good for Primary and other shorter(in turns) games. Expenses kill you while jumping to such high NWs because of the formula. You will do better in primary with lower prices.

I sold turrets at 61 at one point in express, still won by a margin. The prices at this point matter very little for C/I, very much for farmers and techers.

What did you buy your indy tech for in alliance? Are you selling more or fewer turrets/jets per tech point you buy in primary now?

Got it, I'll just produce more.

It's just that by this time I would have liked to have my tech levels maxed out already: guess I just have to be patient.

After reading this, i feel like i made a mistake coming back after a couple years and starting an oiler...

Well, 240 for oil and 45 for food are good prices.

atleast you can get twice amount of money on turrets than yesterday in ffa (55 bucks and set has barely started).

Jeez....

atm the top 3 and 9 of the top 13 are commies

Hopefully it is because they got their turrets stuck on market a few times too many because half of those commies are suffering from a severe state of anorexia nervosa. :p

And most of them don't know how to play a CI judging on how much they undercut and drive prices down.

/sigh

With ya on that one Karim. They need to stop undercutting so hard.

Supply/demand. If they undercut hard it is good for you and bad for them. If you don't get your goods sold you are the one who mispriced them.

There are either too many C/Is or this is a price range where C/I is competetive.

It's not competitive when food is at 40 and oil stays high: personally I could even sell on private and keep going, but if you don't produce enough at these prices you can't grow effectively.

It could be a strategy.

Anyhow now I understand why last set finishes registered lower finishes compared to few years ago.

well, few rounds ago we have military units selling at 80+.. there are those few newbies who depress the price so low, and the top guys are induced to sell even lower to be able to sell their units.. it's the same with everything, from oil to food.. u can see that at certain point in time, food price spike to 60+ bucks cos food got sold out, only to get depress back by some unknown smaller farmers.. be happy that im a farmer this 2 rounds, as i supplied about 20% of market food lol.. else we will have 90 bucks food like 3 rounds ago

So it's you I have to curse for those 45$ bushels? :))

Anyhow it's player's base related: atm the big CIs (and there are 3 land wise) are brutally undercutting smaller CIs ridiculous prices to get their stuff sold.

Meanwhile oil and food are high, not allowing to unleash all CI's potential to attack and grow.

Tech is cheap, but having no cash for everything I think not many CIs have decent tech levels: if prices keep falling down they will stall.

Being this the situation I will just adapt and use my land size and tech at my advantage: we'll see how it will go.

still much better military prices than on FFA has.

A CI that sells any military at 55 has not figured how to play this game: if you sell on private turrets at 52 you make more cash, considering the 10% cut from public market commissions.

Would be sad to get that low, but if we get there at least you don't have to wait hours for stuff to sell and can decide when to weaken your country and play your turns at best.

The problem is that to survive CI's expenses with that kind of prices, you'd need a full tech CI, otherwise you will get stuck, you'll have to drop defences and you'll become a juicy target.

well I've seen below 50 jets, can't remember amount also 50 bucks turrets and troops aren't that uncommon.

seems that prices drop below reasonable price (120-140) sooner and sooner when new set starts.

also bushels tend to be 30-31 bucks making demo only govt to get profit vs priv 1st week or 2.

There's no 55$ turrets. Lol. Lowest I've ever seen is in the high $80's or so maybe.

45 too cheap for me lol.. i will want to sell at 90 bucks if i can lol.. but those smaller farmers keep undercutting, making bigger guys putting a lower price to sell.. it's a chain effect.. when a small guy sell cheaply, the bigger guy will also put it cheap, and it roll & roll until all bigger guys sell cheap..

Supply and demand, that is all there is to it. If the farmers or indies or techers you compete with to sell your goods/techs undercut too much, they lose and you win.

If I insist on selling bushels at $38 all though the stocking phase a smart Delphinus will welcome it, either buying it and reselling at $45 or get solace from the fact that the cashers and techers will be able to buy more food at $45 if they bought mine at $38 instead of $44 (if they are stocking they won't just buy a set amount of food).

Either way it is supply and demand that drives prices, and lower prices increase demand til we've reached an equilibrium.

The problem comes when, with a tiny player base, you have more offer than the demand is: then the undercutting impacts heavily.

this ain't a game its a god damned arms race

exactly except this isn't about weapons instead it is getting thingies as fast as possible and also as cheap as possible.

not in primary jet but in ffa yes.

Troops $33 $63
Jets $44 $73
Turrets $48 $69

express

Troops $72 $92
Jets $47 $94 $136
Turrets $49 $97

dunno who sells at that low

Bots are controlling express market early and FFA all the time I guess.

Commie Indy is a rare strat to use in FFA so the military market is primarily bot-run there, which is usually crap. They have little affect on the tech market and bushels

You mean on the supply side. I'm pretty sure bots create an upward pressure on tech and a downward one on food just like on all other servers they are in.

I encourage anyone who hasn't yet to create manually a country on the AI server and see for yourselves where the prices go if the market is 100% bots. Income techs hover between 6000-9999, other techs 500-600, military prices are at very close to private market selling prices and bushels are hard locked at $30.

The bot collective net buys massive amounts of techs while net selling food and military. I see nothing wrong with this in principle, but I do feel it could be balanced a bit without creating a clusterfluff.

This is not correct. They do not have enough cash to make much of an impact for very long. FFA is loaded with wealthy cashers and resellers. If you need to transfer tech, you only need to buy the bot stuff in small amounts for just a few minutes before it clears. They have almost no noticeable impact in bushels.

Large techers in FFA easily tech 30k+ points per turn and 100k acre farmers and cashers as support countries to a big techer are almost common - bots don't even come close. The only reason they have an impact whatsoever on military is because so many players only produce 100% spies and have 0% military production or purchases for the entire round. Otherwise, their market impact would be almost nil.

They still buy 10 times more tech than they produce, the bot collective that is. So that is an upward pressure, without them the tech prices would be lower. Same goes for food but the other way around. rainbow bots are self-sufficient and one farmer bot produce about 3 times more surplus bushels than one of each other bot(techer, indy, casher) consume.

They do affect every market, even though they might not drive it in FFA as they do in express and to a much smaller degree in alliance.

Without bots this game would be dead already, imho.

No bots here yet.

Really? Weird, I spied countries so messed up that I thought it was impossible they were played by humans.

nah.. there is always demand, if no demand, there wont be instances where things get sold out totally.. u see today's military price.. it shot up suddenly after the cheap qty get sold out and there's no units available in the market (i waited 6hrs for military units to be out in market).. so it's a matter of whether the indys want to put higher price or not.. same goes for the farmers like me.. if i put my massive chunk of food at lower price, there will be others to lower the price as they worried about their food not able to sell.. so meaning i have the power to destroy myself by screwing down the food market price.. occasionally u see food suddenly shot up to 60+ bucks, that's cos all the cheap ones got sold out.. i would say it will be more of oligopoly going on in this tiny market, and is like price wars from suppliers that we see in real life where they undercut each other..

I partially agree: my jets were the only ones on the market, at a fair price, for hours.

They didn't even sell out completely: I sold only 500k. If we produce more military than the market buys, there is not much we can do.

The market will demand more military the cheaper it is though. If I hit a casher, farmer or techer I calculate what he can make and how many jets he can buy with that, and adjust my turrets accordingly. This is means the number of turrets I need to get is kinda inversely proportional to the market price for jets. That guy will most certainly have more turrets for me to break if he was buying at 90 than if he was buying at 150 as well. But I agree with what you say about the market buyout. But it could be just a matter of login hours matching. This is one problem the bots aimed to solve and they have done a faily good job at it as well even though they seem to fluff up the tech markets whereever more or less.

Actually i have been sitting here, waiting for my jets to sell for 24 hours, so it's market volume related: pretty annoying if you ask me.

The good thing is i will have plenty of turns to attack when some cash comes in :)

well, i dunno what's ur definition of fair price, but i would rather wait for cheap ones if i saw the price at 120+ now.. cos there will be ppl who spoil the market & sell cheaply lower than 110 this point in time.. if everyone like sells 150+ consistently for many days, the non-commie has no choice but to buy them.. there are much more commies than farmers though, so it is not easy to have everyone selling high

It doesn't spoil the market, it spoils their income if they sell $20 too low. The jets at 120 are more likely to sell if the next batch that comes on is at 90 than if it is att 119.

What you are talking about is forming som kind of commie cartel that ultimatly ruins it for each of those commies since they would be stuck with insane expenses and their grabbing would suffer from their NWs. Go ahead. :P

i dont get what u mean when u say 120 is more likely to sell if the next batch is 90 instead of 119.. if i saw jets selling at 90+ for days, then i would rather wait a few hrs to wait for ppl dumping at 90+, rather than buy at 120.. but if the lowest price is 119 for the day, i would be buying the 120..

if u are talking about commie cartel, that is not possible, cos there are much more commies and no single commie has the main market share.. whereas if u are talking about farmers, they can form a cartel if they want, as those top 5 producers are easily produce more than 50% of total market food supply..

anyway, now u see the cheap food got sold out, and the next batch is at 75 bucks.. this means that those smaller farmers are cutting themselves unnecessarily thinking the market price is below 40.. there is actually demand especially at this point in time where ppl begin to stock their food..

Is CI stand for commie Indy?

yes.

Pricing higher wouldn't help. You just wouldn't sell anything, and someone else would. Unless you got lucky enough that someone was forced to buy 10m jets to jump for a retal or something. Then maybe you'd sell some of your order.

I've had jets on for 24 hrs at $103 and haven't sold fluff. You go through stages like that every reset where if you don't undercut, you absolutely will not sell a unit. It plummets until a price where more goods can be bought and you can sell at least most of your orders.

There's a different balance at different stages, and the low player base certainly effects things when you run lean on a few certain strat types.

primary has much better military prices than for example on alliance.

at this stage, commies will all be undercutting each other & selling military units at dirt cheap price, as everyone is starting to stockpile food, and less demand on military units.. for commies, it is hard to maintain high price, as there are usually more commies than other govt, and therefore there is no single dominant commie or grp of commies that can set the high price.. for food wise will be different.. there are less farmers, and so a few players actually can have the majority of the market share.. remember 3 rounds ago where food goes to 50+ bucks for most of the round? during that round i was not a farmer, and the majority of the food is supplied by the rank 1 guy.. myself in this round is a farmer, and i have about 20% market share.. it's all about the other 80%, which some farmers are unaware that they will be able to command high price at this stage in time where everyone is starting to stock food.. there are 3 guys i hit recently who are farmers.. bee po+me+stalker+this 3 guys can supply about 50-60mil food a day.. which is about nearly the demand of food per day.. so i guess 1 of these guys are putting at a low price, and it has forced me to also undercut some food qty in order to sell at least a little lol

Only way you can control the price in an oversupplied market is if you are both buying and selling.

Either way with food it is easy to understand that once anyone starts stocking the lower say 'stalker' puts his food the more of your food will sell. This is because stockers generally just spend all their leftover cash on food or food/oil. This means the demand for stocking is inversely proportional to the food price. With military units and tech it is not so simple, and of course there is other demand on the market for food than just for stocking.

But you must see that the market strives for an equilibrium price depending on supply and demand, right? If I delete my country and start a new one as a farmer I will affect the food price no matter what you other sellers do.

Also you are a demo. If you truly think these guys are undercutting, no one is in a better spot to take advantage of it than you. If you are wrong about the supply/demand situation it will screw you. So put your money where your mouth is. :P

unless has alot stock then no need to buy military when restocking until on last couple days.

"Put your money where your mouth is"

That's about all the retort that was needed. Lol