[An Incentive For Action]

16 hours ago, Edward I said:

Even without the project, this penalizes larger individual stores of resources.  The optimal resource storage solution, assuming your overriding concern is to prevent loss of resources, is to divide your total stockpile by the number of nations in your alliance + 1 and store it in equal shares in each nation and the bank.  Centralized alliance economies don't do this; they store a massive proportion of their resources in their banks.  So, even without the concerns about benefits to the upper tier or bank hiding in upper tier nations, concentrated stockpiles and thus centralized economies are implicitly penalized.

I literally already disproved this in a previous example. x amount of resources degrades at the same rate whether split over 200 nations or stored in a bank. The only possible difference I could see would be if you stored it so dispersed that the degradation amount got lessened by rounding, or by having the project. As I've also previously addressed, the mere existence of the project is also not a nerf to command economies due to the opportunity cost of getting it in a dispersed model, and the fact that command economies could just store some of their stockpile in fully mill'd nations with the project.

I'm fine with actual criticism on certain points, you can argue with me but you can't argue with the numbers.

[You're Disowned Rose!]

Finally someone is setting the record straight! This TAC revisionist history will not stand! Empire of Spades forever!

Rose, as your only former Empress, I'm a little disappointed...

[An Incentive For Action]

12 minutes ago, ComradeMilton said:

Which command alliance has 20 members? You might as well use NPO and they have more than a hundred, IIRC.  They also don't have a cap where they stop taxing and revenues are just absurdly greater than your examples.

If you're unhappy with my example, I can give another one to your specifications. I did 20 cause it was the first number that jumped into my head, it was arbitrary. I can consider income and more nations and people with the project, just it gets a bit harder to calculate and harder to communicate. I wanted a clear example showing that the effect on command v dispersed economies was the same for equal nations and warchest goals.

There was a valid point about bank raiding but hey that gives a pretty clear CB. Blockades would be an issue yes, but you could spread the bank over say.. 10 gov members, and have them maintain a higher mil standard during peace.  During wartime you could put stuff in the bank anyway, cause you'd be using it. It's only for long-term (months or more scale) that you'd really get a benefit from the project. However the project offers an opportunity cost: You can have it regardless of command or dispersed economy status, but this blocks a slot from taking something else that might benefit you, eg an economic or a war project. If a dispersed economy had all the individuals have the project, then thats x nations that aren't getting some other benefit versus a much smaller y nations for a command economy. 

There was some other points made but I feel like to address them is to just repeat myself or sketchy. This change is a nudge, a small change in mindset which can have a decent effect. 

[An Incentive For Action]

Just now, King Olafr of the Faroes said:

They don't complement each other though. One accelerates war chest building by allowing you to meet goals faster, the other hampers it.

One reduces the cost of war, the other makes a cost for not warring now. It makes it so you could have a low stockpile, and then buy a bunch as a prelude to war. It adds a penalty to waiting 6 months with a stockpile, or planning 7 wars in advance etc

[An Incentive For Action]

8 minutes ago, manas said:

In current situation it is hard to build a city and grow faster for people like me who are in 20+ city and playing the game since 2015. Many major changes crippled my economy like refined resources reduction etc. Now if this purposed action got implemented then i hv to wait for a year to buy a city. So...yeah i love challenges but hate to get bored 

I fail to see how this will change your ability to buy cities. This proposal does not affect cash

[An Incentive For Action]

Re: Command Economies

Many people seem to be under the misconception that this hurts command economies more than it hurts a dispersed economy. This is blatantly false.

So say we have an alliance of 20 nations and we want 50k resources of all 4 types for all of em, 200k total. I'm going to run a few sims, over 10 days, with zero production, of a few models.

1: 20 Nations hold their own stockpile (full dispersed)

2: Command economy bank holds stockpile for 20 nations (full command)

 

Amazing! It's the same number!
And consider the project that reducing things. Either you have 20 nations waste a project slot so they can individually plan 7 wars in advance, or you have 1-2 gov members waste a project slot and have higher mil and have them hold the majority of the bank and then just put stuff in as need be.
I get it, NPO etc likes to stockpile to hell, and you can still do that. Hell I'd say this change benefits command economies more as they minimise the amount of people who need this anti-degrade project to allow for easier long term stockpiling.
If people still aren't convinced by my numbers, I could do some sims of a mixed economy and then also consider the project

6 minutes ago, King Olafr of the Faroes said:

Please, for the love of God, don't do multiple suggestions in one post. Make an overview and individual posts for each suggestion, so it's easier to see which suggestion has support and which don't. I had to downvote, as 2 of 3 suggestions were the worst bs I've seen on these forums for a long time, which is no small feat, while the third is the exact opposite. But it's a downvote, so if I hadn't written anything, nobody would know that I supported the 3rd part.

Did you miss Sketchy's history lesson on what happens when people cherry pick parts of an econ proposal that's meant to go all together? The suggestions here are meant to complement each other as part of a larger system.

[An Incentive For Action]

10 hours ago, Akuryo said:

No thanks, don't want or need an incentive to sell my excess manufactureds every single damn day while at peace just to avoid the extra overhead that this would cause my personal 10-day economic cycles i use. Your chart does start at 100k, though it's not specifically stated - is degradation only supposed to start at that number? If yes, disregard this first part.

Especially given just how rich these bigger alliances are, your suggestion sounds more like an incredibly minor annoyance. I've never seen 1 million plus of any resource stockpiled in any alliance or nation, but anybody who can afford to do that is merely going to roll their eyes at you. The wealth gap between the larger alliances and the smaller ones is absolutely insane, and i don't think it would do anything to incentivize them to do more than sigh in annoyance. 

And that's pretty much all i expect this to do, be mildly annoying. People who don't want to take risks and start wars, Sketchy, are going to need a much sounder kicking in the hindquarters to change their mind than this fruit fly you've unleashed in their home. 

0.03% is really tiny you know. It meant to discourage long-term hoarding, not short term. 
I don't know your production numbers so lets say you produce 1500 aluminium every day. You run a 10 day economic cycle. Let assume a warchest of 30k aluminium.

How tragic! You'll make 0.7% less profit! My heart weeps for you
To compare if you maintained no warchest you'd lose 0.135% or 20.23 and if you had a warchest of 15k you'd lose 0.434% or 65.17

[An Incentive For Action]

6 minutes ago, Justin076 said:

So your last big suggestion was to increase resource production as people were struggling to build up their war chests and now your suggesting a continuous reduction of war chests.

 

 

 

I think both suggestions work well with each other. Both aim to encourage war now or in the short term, rather than always saving for some future extreme great war. Might also promote smaller engagements if it becomes harder for total war not to drive the market insane (as it should!). Also the point about warchests can be seen with old alliances v new, or those who have recently been fighting vs those who sat out. It lessens the gap, either war because you'll lose some stockpile regardless, or at the end of the war any threats also have less of a stockpile or have had to purchase more, promoting growth elsewhere

Edit: Ninja'd by Sketchy...

[An Incentive For Action]

I really like the main suggestion and the fixes that go with it. A good point is made about extreme stockpiling, and tank cost. 

People like to have a big stockpile so they can survive a war and not use the market in war when prices are inflated. But it is during this exact time that we should see smaller alliances catch up! I really like the implication of not just more wars and less stagnation, but also this economic aspect of making the short-term and medium-term market a lot more important. It gives some nice implications for politics, small alliance growth, but also this dynamic that if you see an alliance begin to stockpile resources and prices rise, then it should be a signal to people to both increase production if they think they're safe, or to also stockpile and militarise if they believe an alliance is stockpiling as a prelude to war.

I don't really have many criticism at this point, you've addressed basically everything off the top of my head. I like the point about raws and cash. Sure you can have all the bauxite in the world and it won't make a single plane or win a war if you can't convert it at a decent rate.

[Beige paradox options]

oooo tricky choice
I feel like the complaints are slightly valid, I went for option 3, especially if further beiges reduce MAP gain further, cause then they can still fight back but it slows em down
Option 1 further disincentives beiging so I don't like it, it would take us too much back to an old system where people avoid winning wars
Option 2 is also good but could damage a raiding style too much, its a counter raider's dream. But option 3 still allows for a counter raid to be effective as long as the people in the other wars are active. Frankly if you're inactive and at war you should be punished for that

[69 Days Later]

My good friends, a Mongolian Khan has returned from TKR bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.

[The Revolution Will Not Be Televised]

Quote

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

[And So the Dust Settles]

7 minutes ago, Felkey said:

You must really have struggled in math class then.

The Field of Real Numbers

We will now look at some axioms regarding the set of real numbers R. We will note that an "axiom" is a statement that isn't meant to necessarily be proven and instead, they're statements that are given. These axioms are rather straightforward and may seem trivial, however, we will subsequently use them in order to prove many simple theorems and build a foundation for the set of real numbers.

The Axioms of the Field of Real Numbers

Let R denote the set of real numbers and let +:R×R→R denote the binary operation of addition and let ⋅:R×R→R denote the binary operation of multiplication. Then for all a,b,c∈R, the following axioms hold:

• Axiom A1: a+b=b+a (Commutativity of Addition).

• Axiom A2: a+(b+c)=(a+b)+c (Associativity of Addition).

• Axiom A3: There exists an element 0∈R such that a+0=0+a=a (Existence of an Additive Identity).

• Axiom A4: There exists an element −a∈R such that a+(−a)=(−a)+a=0 (Existence of Additive Inverses).

• Axiom M1: a⋅b=b⋅a (Commutativity of Multiplication).

• Axiom M2: a⋅(b⋅c)=(a⋅b)⋅c (Associativity of Multiplication).

• Axiom M3: There exists an element 1∈R such that a⋅1=1⋅a=a (Existence of a Multiplicative Identity).

• Axiom M4: There exists an element a−1∈R such that a⋅a−1=a−1⋅a=1 (Existence of Multiplicative Inverses).

• Axiom D: a⋅(b+c)=a⋅b+a⋅c (Distributivity of Multiplication over Addition).

We note that these axioms define a special algebraic structure known as a field, so we say that R is a field under the operations of + addition and ⋅multiplication.

[Yo Sheepy, what is this math]

Whoops seems I've made a duplicate thread: 

 

[Resource Value Estimates are Extremely Incorrect]

As the title suggests, the in game calculations of resource value in the Revenue tab, and the Profit per Slot calculations on the Resources tab are very much incorrect.

First consider the raw resources.
It gives the following for oil: Expected Daily Profit per improvement at a market value of $4,765 PPU: (3 Oil/day * 50% Bonus * 3784 PPU) - $600 Operating Cost = $22,104.00
I have 12 oil wells, so 4.5 per well. Firstly it gives 2 market prices, secondly the estimate is too high.
Using the given prices we get 20842.5 for 4765, 16428 for 3784, and in my own person numbers where I use the lowest selling price (4220) I got $18,390.00.
Note that ALL of these numbers are below 22k and that the actual profit is below 19,950.  If it was 22k it would be profitable to cut Shopping Malls and Subways for Oil, at 18.4k it is not.

Now consider the revenue tab.
I have 19 cities following the same build of 72% commerce, maxed oil, gas and uranium production, and the projects for gas and uranium. I make no food and face 20/1 taxes.
I make $1,700,429.78 in cash and the game says the total revenue with resources I make is worth $2,926,205.99.
I wont break dowm the math here too much but with 1692 tons of gas per day thats 6.4 million alone, and whilst I lose 400k to food, by my math I make just over 10 million, with the market prices of the lowest selling offer.

The given numbers spit in the face of mathematics at best, and at worst force nations into poor builds. I know you want nations to produce resources but lying about the profit isn't great, especially when the given equation doesn't even match the answer.

[3/6/2018 - Removal of Trial Changes]

2 hours ago, Alex said:

So you're the one who crashed the server...

EDIT: On that note, for those of you who weren't on Discord when things crashed, ss23 was finally able to find the root cause of the intermittent site downtime, and we have opened a ticket with the host provider to fix the issue on their end.

Honestly shout out to ss23 for the hard work behind the scenes, often goes unappreciated 

[Alex, its been 9 months, I think its time to deal with reality.]

1 minute ago, Sketchy said:

-snip-

 

Now this I can get behind, no unnecessarily complex maths formulas (seriously simplify this stuff, if you programmed it in like that with the factorials I'd have you head for wasting cpu time), its simple and to the point, anyone can get the idea without whipping out a calculator or a spreadsheet, and we can min-max to our hearts content within parameters. Also as the bonus caps out at 33% after 3, you get constant returns to scale after that so you still specialise but its not extremely broken and its not an all or nothing affair (go hard or go home)

[Alex, its been 9 months, I think its time to deal with reality.]

Also there's an error on your formula for b.

You give it as 1 + m! / 2!(m-2)! but really it should be b = 1 + m! / (100 * 2! * (m-2)!) which is what you use in the examples
but even that is wrong because 2! = 2, so its literally just b = 1 + m! / (200*(m-2)!)
for those of you unfamiliar with factorial, the top and bottom cancel in such a way that it becomes:
b = 1 + (m * m-1) / 200, which is a heckaton easier to read and doesn't involved unneeded numerical operations.
The bonus production give as a multiplied increase to the base production for each level of improvement is as follows:

m	b
1	1
2	1.01
3	1.03
4	1.06
5	1.1
6	1.15
7	1.21
8	1.28
9	1.36
10	1.45
11	1.55
12	1.66
13	1.78
14	1.91
15	2.05
16	2.2
17	2.36
18	2.53
19	2.71
20	2.9

 

There's some interesting points to make
First m = 5 is the max for refined resources, so you'd only increase production by 10% which is a little lackluster when the gas project doubles it but its not nothing
Bauxite and Iron max at 6, 15% extra, Oil maxes at 66% extra so Gas production with project, especially importing oil as the increased oil production will make oil cheaper, will go from being the best possible resource production you can do thats even better than bank at 2k, to THE BEST GODDAMN RESOURCE PRODUCTION EVER WHY ISNT EVERYONE DOING THIS RIGHT NOW or until the gas market adjusts due tot high supply.
Uranium only gets a 3% bonus. At 20 farms you get a 190% bonus, ie they are 2.9x better than normal. 20 farms at 2.5k land, no MI gives 290 (100 currently) and 20 farms at 3.5k land with MI (hardcore food guy) would be 507.5 PER CITY.
The bonus goes insane the more improvements there is, its a quadratic as b = 1 + (m^2 - m) / 200. My opinion is the bonus is too weak for low slots and too big for high slots. A 3% bonus for uranium is bugger all, I'd expect more than a 10% bonus for full refined focus (thats 200 pollution for steel), and 190% extra for food at 20 farms is absolutely insane although I'm sure Fraggle would be very happy to run an overslotted low infra, 20 farm, high land build

Edit:
A way to make it not crazy is to have b depend on what % of the max you have you that resource
ie make having 4/5 refined slots on a resource give the same bonus as 16/20 farms

[Alex, its been 9 months, I think its time to deal with reality.]

I'm always a fan for specialisation and all, but really what cuts me most about the update and its long term effect is how commerce has been impact.

Now I know, you'll make the argument that upper teir should make commerce and lower tier should make resources etc etc
Here's why that's not working under the current model:

Commerce gives a flat bonus to income per citizen. This has some interesting effects:

• Commerce becomes better with infrastructure
• Higher commerce means the population lost to disease and crime hurts more
• Due to base upkeep, some higher commerce improvements are worse than lower commerce below 700 infrastructure

But for the most part people are above 1k because you really can't do much. Consider 1.5k, 2k and 2.5k. To maximise the bonus from commerce and generally the bonus from any improvement you want to pick the ones with the highest profit per slot.
At 1.5k there's a bit of a triple point between Subways, Shopping Malls and Stadiums at around 14k profit per slot. Subways are the best due to also reducing pollution, followed by Mall then Stadiums, then Banks. The benefit from Commerce is 0.725 * (1 + Commerce / 50) per citizen, using 8 slots at 1.5k (4 Malls, 1 Subway, 3 Stadiums) gives 80 Commerce, which is 2.6x more income per citizen than 0 Commerce. For 1.5k this is ~112k over the 8 slots.
At 2k everything from 1.5k gets even better, more people to use it, and the size of the population is large enough to counter the larger upkeep on all commerce so Stadiums are the best at 22.6k pps, Malls at 20.7k pps, Subways at 19.95k pps, Banks at 12.7k pps. If you didnt get any more commerce you'd make very roughly 50k more from the 8 slots.
Wow!~ 50k more! Everyone should build to 2k!
And that's where infrastructure costs kill the dream. 0 to 1.5k infra, 6 million, 1.5k to 2k infra, 9 million. If your nation is going to be in a war you'll need to rebuild. You could build from 0 to 2k, or you could build from 0 to 1.5k and rebuild another 1.5 cities. Now there's other arguments to be made about infra paying off over the longer term
(ie about 4 months, and you've got other slots which is why 2k is more or less the meta if you avoid war for 4 months or dont get completely destroyed, but realistically if you drop from 2k to 1.5k then thats more than half of your infra value gone so you should be crying)
but on the margin its not great, even if it works out on the war cycle. Supermarkets still suck at this point (8.1k) so ITC is useless. If you've got 2.5k land like any self respecting person at 2k infra should (Land is cheap and cannot take damage) then under current market prices (151 ppu) farms win by 400 pps, and even banks are beaten by the current iron market.
At 2.5k commerce is back, you get a huge 31.35k pps from a Stadium, thats most likely the best a single slot can do. Malls and Stadiums are above 25k, Banks at are 16.3k, Supermarkets are at 10.2k.
oh
oh dear
the ITC is still useless, and 2.5k costs 16ish million just from 2k. You could build from 0 to 2.5k or you could build from 0 to 1.5k in 6 cities...
If you've got the food project at 2.5k land or 3k land then food wins again! Sure an extra 16k from a bank could be nice at 105% commerce but its not worth a project slot, not when at 4.6ppu importing oil and producing gas gives a massive 19k pps. Commerce at 1.5k? Nope, sell gas with a project, although thats the only one that beats 14k right now.

See the issue is, Commerce is both too good and too bad.
At 1.5k which I'd still class as fairly lower or mid tier, malls, stadiums, subways beat any resource without a project. At the same time supermarkets and even banks in certain cases are trash so you NEVER want the ITC unless you have like 3k infra. If you have 3k infra you should feel bad for having $56,124,587.90 in infra value when 2k is only 15.2k. 1 City of 3k or 3.5 Cities of 2k? Losing 10% from beige at that level is over 16 million and thats only 300 infra vs 2k from nothing.
See this sounds crazy but even with these insane market prices that have effectively killed global war as the investment is far too high, resources are still inferior to commerce at 1.5k infra. Now if prices went EVEN HIGHER to make it worth it (ie above 14k pps), what does that mean? It means every single rational player with a 1.5k infra build would cut commerce to produce, lowering their cash income by 112k per city for a higher amount in resources. But you buy resources with money, and these nations would want to specialise for project boosts and because you need to with continents. They still need to buy other resources to run a military with less cash and sky high prices. The supply of resources goes up BUT the ability for nations to purchase the resources goes down because commerce value is flat and not tied to the market.

Anyway I've run out of steam for a bit, I hope I made some sort of point with these numbers. If you want trade to increase, buff commerce. If you want more nations to sell resources, buff production. Sounds a bit like something we had before no? I'm a fan of specialisation as I said before but its a bandaid fix on the wider issue that people dont have liquidity to buy so the market stagnates  and cannot clear properly

[Alex, its been 9 months, I think its time to deal with reality.]

Resource prices are high, so people decide to produce for themselves and sell to take advantage of the market

Due to the slot requirements and the profit per slot, supermarkets arent worth it so they get cut, leaving just 1 bank giving a boost over 100% commerce to 105%. This does not justify the use of a project slot so the bank is cut and the ITC is scrapped for further increases in production.

You go to sell but people only buy because they must AND any rational consumer has done what you have done, ie the overall cashflow or liquidity has beenreduced as there's more asset value in resources, but its hard to exchange cause buying steel at 5k makes you feel dirty when you remember how it used to be.

[Bringing the New Hotness]

To loyal friends!

[What is P&W listening to?]

 

[Be the Change You Want to See in the World]

8 hours ago, Rogue said:

Fam idk who you are but that was even my profile picture wtf

I admit I was confused for a while, people should just maintain a name smh, looking at you Qital/Noytal/Vack etc.

[#SexismEndsNow]

My only response to all that I see here, of virtue signalling, genuine attempts, and people proving why such a thread was made is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRoFXC4lCEU

This thread is a shitshow, I'm going back to doing economics now, don't need to deal with sexism in PnW if communicate solely through spreadsheets

[Bring back color stocks]

Remember when colours meant things? Those were good days