After talking with a few people I consider to be well educated with the functions of the game I offer this slight suggestion.

A quick fix to help nerf the tech strategy and stabilize the market.

To my knowledge all goods have a max selling point, excluding tech which can be sold for $9999 a point.

I could be wrong though, maybe oil and food can also be placed so high. I don't see these goods being sold this high to yield profit over just plain stocking however, unlike tech being sold at such a high rate.


My question to the rest of the community/administration,

Would capping tech sales at 4-6k be a reasonable solution to help nerf the researching strategy and stabilize the market?

Feed back go!

I'd prefer to see other strategies getting tweaks upwards tbh. If the goal is a variety of strategies being played then just making techers weaker is meh. Cashers could definitely earn a bit more cash per building or their PCI can climb a bit faster, farmers could use a boost through governmental changes, oiler can be tweaked into becoming a viable strategy in its own right through tech, etc, indy needs to be balanced between being really strong on some servers and completely useless on other ones, reseller would definitely be a fun strategy for a lot of people if it wasn't so useless. As there are less people in this game, tweaks are needed to restore food markets, military markets, and oil markets (all of which hurt cashers) and that won't be solved by making techers weaker rather than other strategies stronger because it could come to a point where the markets are completely barren no matter what strategy people choose just due to a lower volume of people playing in a given set.

bushels max price is ~3 times priv buy price, oil max price is prolly near same.

as you know 9999 techs are just money transferring from country b to a.

You don't even know bushels or oil max price, why spread disinformation? And if you're trying to eliminate market transfers completely, rather than balance strategies, then just make it so you can't buy your own tech/food/oil off market. Make it harder to do transfers with tech and those of us in big clans will just do group buy outs at our leisure. It doesn't really change anything except make it harder for solo tags to do transfers. Making cashers/farmers/oilers/resellers/indys stronger is a balancing solution.

Also, I think Primevals post on most servers about balancing governments is likely addressing these issues. After all, all solutions really should be with government changes where possible as every server is different. Indys on primary and express, for example, are very strong, but they're easily the worst strategy on FFA and not competitive except maybe as an early game war strategy on alliance.

I enjoyed your feed back. In a long overall of the game I can see some of your suggestions being viable.

However in regards to a quick fix....

With bot servers there is no issue on volume. There is defiantly a problem with pricing.

Why do some goods have a ceiling and others don't?

I understand non bot servers have different variables.

Maybe just lowering private market selling prices would be a quicker fix. If the goal is to make people use the market and run proper strategies instead of self sustaining countries then that may be the true underlying issue.

My claim is in regards to markets that have unlimited profits in tech despite volume. Especially when 90% of food stock is dumped at $35-$36.

Then again maybe my interpretation is off, looking forward to more feed back.

I might try and get my lazy ass on alpha and figure it out.

I have never done a transfer or talked with anyone who has done a successful one. I know it has been done and all. However 7000 tech at turn 310 is not. Neither is 6999,6888,6777 or what have you. No other strategy can match that.

Let's take this FFA round as a prime example. Currently tech has been $4-$5k, food $60-$70, yet Agricultural tech volume is 80% less than business and residential techs combined... These are ruff figures.

Well, if people are dumping their food at 35-36, then the profits on tech are actually pretty limited when food market will spend whole set over 60, you're essentially stocking with a Trump sized tariff on every bit of food you buy. If you do transfers, there are many transfer taxes on the way as well. It's not entirely clear to me how lowering the cap would solve any transfer problems. It would just take a couple days longer to transfer, not a big issue. Nor would it solve the issue of techer profits as transfers are not what techers profit off of. Transfers are a net loss. Like 2 sets ago I was running mixed strategies, techers, farmers, cashers.... well, I lost 700 bill + on market transfers. That's without accounting for market commission. It's a high risk game. If you want to cut to the root of techers profits, you need to stop bots from buying tech. That's all there is to it. But just making one strategy much much worse isn't going to make other strategies more appealing.

There's less volume on agri because all strats buy bus/res. Only farmers buy agri cause no other strat benefits off it. Perhaps that could be re-worked but I don't know how. It's also misleading to point to tech prices early game.... like when tech prices were 6k and I was teching maybe 15k, that seems already, close to 90 mill profit a turn (not including the cap on market sales or commission)... but when prices drop to 4k... well... suddenly not so good especially when stocking in bushels. Late game cashers, meanwhile, can make 100-150 mill a turn no problem, no stocking needed.

Not trying to argue that techers aren't too strong, I think they are at least in express and FFA, but a flat nerf would just mean another strategy would be OP. There used to be a thread that had how much the min and max caps of each strategy made in terms of profit, I'll try to find it later. It actually gives some decent insight into where changes can be made etc if the formulas are up to date.

just fix the bots so they don't buy over priced tech based on turns played, the more turns played the lower the price they buy at.

currently in FFA busi, resi and agri prices vary from 1500 to 6k (bad combination to have high tech prices, high bushels prices and high oil prices) and in alliance highest price is bit lower.

sinistril: i put my bushels stocks on high enuf price that they won't sell unless some buys whole market empty and oil i keep in hand in that case i need it.

Tech prices have basically been like 4-4.5k or lower for 99% of volume in FFA, they only got above that once for like 1 hr and sold barely any volume cause the market was barren. That's not really high prices. Oil prices have been lowish all set. And bushel prices being high probably has more to do with people like me playing with bushel markets than anything. Last set they were low the entire set except for like a week. Not sure why high bushel prices are a bad thing with high tech prices, though? Seems like faulty logic.

@DP
Aside from balancing other strategies slightly up, that's the most reasonable solution.

Capping the max sales price is like putting a band-aid on cancer.

you really need only look to the bot code and change a few things there.

Right now the farmer, casher and indy bots buy way more tech than the techer bots produce. I did some math on it and it changes during the set ofc but we are talking about something like 5-20% of the bots tech demand that is supplied by the tech producing bots depending on prices and time of the reset. Having a tech demand is a good thing but there should be a supply from the bots as well.

You can create a country on the ai server to check how the tech market acts if there are no humans. The equilibrium tech prices of the income techs will be 6500-9999, usually in the upper regions of that.
The military prices in the ai controlled market will be really low and we see that in FFA constantly. ofc that leaves us with a very easy first step to a fix; make the military buying bots run higher military. As they spend every leftover income on techs and that change will leave them with less leftover such a change would lower the equilibrium tech prices and raise the equilibrium military prices. It likely wont solve the problem fully, but it will make the markets less absurd.

But changing tech floors and ceilings to counter a problem in the bot code is just gonna make tech prices stick to the ceiling all set. it removes the skill in finding the correct sales price and makes the game worse.

I would love to get to work on the bot code again.

its bad for cashers, nice for techers and farmers (and those 2 get cashers bucks). no idea if some1 (outside bots) runs commie indies with these miltary prices.

I don't feel too bad for cashers with FFA prices, to be honest. They're the most balanced strategy with techers (try putting up SV networths over 16 countries with techers... you maybe could in a perfect set... maybe). Farmers do fine, sure. Techers are stocking with bushels. In other words, it's a net loss unless you know what you're doing.

There are way more reasons not to run commie indy than market prices. You probably wouldn't get many commie indys on FFA even with good market prices. They need a rebalance on this server that goes far beyond military, bushel, or any other kind of prices. Perhaps a massive overhaul in the expense bonus for them might help. The problem is the wrong tweak could also make them unstoppable fluff disturbers.

@Gerdler
Yes to all of that.

well yea 10m bushels is ~650m with current price and if price would be on 40s then 10m bushels would be under 450m.

@sinistril

Yes the NW divisor in the expense formula make C/I impossible to net with past a certain NW... There is almost a hard ceiling in the NW achievable. No matter server length, acreage or prices.

I guess you could increase the expense bonuses enough to counteract part of that in both alliance and FFA(all other servers C/I is a legitimate powerhouse, ofc depending on set-to-set prices). There is still the humanitarians issue that forces every fat commie to sell 2-3 and eventually 4 times a day in order to stay in range of the bots.

Wanna up the humanitarians range on FFA and alliance to 20x? Wanna increase the expenses bonus to -1.2%/8p?
I think it would have consequences, that are perhaps unwanted?

That's the kicker isn't it :P I'm not sure anything can be done for them on longer servers, which would be fine. Marshal blaming military prices on people not playing them is kind of silly either way.

if you increased the NW-divisor from 200 million to 400 million if would affect the games this way:

Tournament: Nada
Express: C/I might be very slightly boosted(though hardly noticeably), which is necessary since techers are so damned overpowered
Team: C/I and perhaps rep casher would become more slightly more competetive, which would be a welcome change.
Primary: most strats would benefit slightly. It would be good for any strat that takes turns while jumping or after it. So all but techers and oil destockers. I guess techers don't need that.
Alliance: big boost to C/I's lategame, big boost to big countries that carry a lot of military for defence/war purposes. Imo this is wanted.
FFA: same as alliance, though argueable it won't matter what you do to C/Is lategame if they keep having to sell turrets on private market prices to get funds. :)

Liking that.

What is overpriced? If you have 100% bus/res as a casher, is $4000 overpriced? Having run the numbers a looong time ago (for startups), ANY price is worth it (even $9999) if you're below something like 120% (and have a good amount of time left in the set... I did say I calculated it for startups)

Looks like a beauty of a suggestion on the surface. :P

well when i can get near same money when i sell military on priv instead on public i don't see how commy with 10% tax can get profit.

Did a massive post on this, need a transference of land tax and mil expenses into free cash and equivalent consumption as the only REAL solution to this.

Messing with production is NOT the fix for Indy. Decay/decommissioning rate per turn would be a heaps better solution... Creates some demand.

Think about it of game wide there was 1.2 million dollars available spread between countries to buy up military and there are 10000 turrets available bingo turrets are worth $120 yay. If we then say Indy needs more $$$ so we try to fix it by doubling their production more there are 20000 turrets av but still only 1.2 mil so now turrets so now turrets are worth $60 Indy players get exactly the same amount if cash as they did before ie. 1.2 mil in sales. Everyone else however now just has twice as many turrets and now there is even less free cash because mil expenses climb resulting in an even further reduced amount of cash flowing to the Indy players.

Reduce military expenses, and decaying of units would however be a big boost to them.

Outside the box tweak to Indy, troops have a chance to discover some land for you each turn. get the rate spot on and you help mbr and c/i 1 acre per 100000 troops per turn.

Switching the tech bonus for commie out with a lowering of expense cost bonus would go a long ways here while not giving them a free bonus for no cost.