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An Incentive For Action


Sketchy
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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.

 

 

 

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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.

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1 minute 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.

The third part of the suggestion addresses that, obviously if you implemented only the first part, it would be detrimental to the goal. Perhaps read to the end? lol

Also Sheepy already did increase production, he scaled production output by improvement count if you remember. This isn't about reducing supply, its about reducing supply AND demand, and incentivizing people to use resources more proactively rather than sitting on them and not using them.

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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...

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29 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 prefer the idea of increasing resource production. Inflation has the same impact of nerfing long term hoarding and letting younger alliances catch up. Increase cash gain a little more. Let people build more cities, and be forced to buy more tanks and ships. It's a little more fun than watching resources magically disintegrate. It will also naturally act against VM manipulation and bank hiding.

I like the intent behind the main idea, but 11% annual resource destruction seems trivial compared to the current inflation.

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It's better than the "Let's just change production a bit" changes that people demand for more warfare. I think predicting the exact nature of what changes this will have on politics and warfare is probably harder to define but I don't see any glaring issues with the proposal.

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Why is this a better fix than capping the amount of each type of resource a nation can hold?  Perhaps:

 

potential stockpile = a*(number of cities) + b*(number of Warehouses) + c*(number of Strategic Reserves) + d

where a Warehouse is an improvement that boosts stockpile capacity; a Strategic Reserve is a project that boosts stockpile capacity; and a, b, c, and d are constants

 

and potential alliance bank stockpile = e*(number of cities in nations of members, officers, heirs, and leaders)

where e is a constant (not Euler's number, I'm just going alphabetically).

 

 

I'm opposed to the Safe Storage project.  It will benefit whale-tier nations that have already bought all the other projects, which would only encourage hiding a bank in a score tier that historically hasn't seen as much warfare as lower tiers.  It would also partly undo the effects of your suggestion: the nations most able to stockpile resources now because of their wealth would continue to be the nations most able to stockpile resources because of a lower decay rate in addition to their wealth.

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I'd like to chuck in the proposal to scale the degradation in accordance to city size so that the bigger of a nation you are, the more degradation you'll see. Same thing with alliance banks, the more cities an alliance has, the more degradation you'll see.  

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Just now, Edward I said:

Why is this a better fix than capping the amount of each type of resource a nation can hold?  Perhaps:

 

potential stockpile = a*(number of cities) + b*(number of Warehouses) + c*(number of Strategic Reserves) + d

where a Warehouse is an improvement that boosts stockpile capacity; a Strategic Reserve is a project that boosts stockpile capacity; and a, b, c, and d are constants

 

and potential alliance bank stockpile = e*(number of cities in nations of members, officers, heirs, and leaders)

where e is a constant (not Euler's number, I'm just going alphabetically).

 

 

I'm opposed to the Safe Storage project.  It will benefit whale-tier nations that have already bought all the other projects, which would only encourage hiding a bank in a score tier that historically hasn't seen as much warfare as lower tiers.  It would also partly undo the effects of your suggestion: the nations most able to stockpile resources now because of their wealth would continue to be the nations most able to stockpile resources because of a lower decay rate in addition to their wealth.

Because one solution imposes a hard unflexible rule and another gives players choice? You can still stockpile large amounts of resources if you like, but a penalty exists if you do.

The problem with capping stockpiles is determining where and how to cap them.

Introducing an entire new improvement into the ecosystem is fairly obviously going to have ramifications on the economy. This is a solution that doesn't require breaking or heavy rebalancing the economy in order to work.

Scaling caps by city count in banks creates a multitude of fairly weird consequences. For starters, different alliances have different warchest/bank stockpile ratios. This would force people into a box where they can only use one type of system. Then there is the question what happens if a player leaves an alliance, and suddenly the cap is reduced below that of what the bank has in it?  Does the excess disappear, does it bypass the cap? Etc etc.

Hell, the simpler reply to you is, what makes your proposal better than this? 

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As for the claim about the project, whale tier nations can already hide resources easier than everyone else. I didn't say it would eradicate bank hiding, I said it would reduce it in some cases. The reduction for the project is only ~3% in terms of how much is lost percentage wise of your stockpile. The fact is, this particular suggestion is primarily focused for alliance stockpiling, not nation stockpiling. You are correct, older nations can still stockpile at faster rates than newer ones, I didn't say I was addressing that because I don't think that is the issue. The idea this update hurts smaller nations proportionately more is not accurate, as larger stockpiles are needed for larger AAs and larger nations, and as such, they lose by minimum more. They still make stockpiles faster, so nothing changes for or against either in terms of proportionate balance. The reason this makes it more competitive for newer alliances is simple, it prevents incentivizing longer term stockpiling of well established aas. 

 

 

 

2 minutes ago, Codonian said:

I'd like to chuck in the proposal to scale the degradation in accordance to city size so that the bigger of a nation you are, the more degradation you'll see. Same thing with alliance banks, the more cities an alliance has, the more degradation you'll see.  

Then that throws off the balance. Larger nations are by default required to stockpile a larger minimum of resources in order to maintain a baseline warchest. This means, by default, they will lose more in degradation. This is offset by their increase income.

By making it exponential rater than flat, you aren't making it to scale, you are making it to punish upper tier nations for no express purpose. This isn't about redefining the balance between upper and lower tier, its about incentivizing more proactive spending of resources, and allowing newer nations to enter a landscape where their competition doesn't have 2-3 years of stockpiles advantage over them. 

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This all really terrible. Both the OP and the subsequent suggestions. I see no reason to penalize people trading in large quantities of resources by assuming they're war stockpiles. There's no need to incentivize more war as this is the second and biggest one in just the past couple of months.  Fiddling with the economy on each previous occasion has resulted in a worsened economy. Surely at some point we'll learn to stop?

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1 minute ago, ComradeMilton said:

This all really terrible. Both the OP and the subsequent suggestions. I see no reason to penalize people trading in large quantities of resources by assuming they're war stockpiles. There's no need to incentivize more war as this is the second and biggest one in just the past couple of months.  Fiddling with the economy on each previous occasion has resulted in a worsened economy. Surely at some point we'll learn to stop?

You might want to reread the suggestion because it has nothing to do with penalizing trade (if anything it incentivizes trade), and it doesn't have any major impact on the economy because its been offset by other factors.

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Good suggestion, it's low risk and low reward - it won't require everyone to completely rethink their econ, but will marginally influence the decision makers in top alliances because of the opportunity cost of not fighting. Longer you go without fighting the more resources you squander to deterioration ?

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30 minutes ago, Sketchy said:

You might want to reread the suggestion because it has nothing to do with penalizing trade (if anything it incentivizes trade), and it doesn't have any major impact on the economy because its been offset by other factors.

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. :P

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. 

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Not particularly persuaded. This more likely results in stockpiles being sold more and being used to feed a growth cycle that encourages less confrontation. Players reflexively turning to growth instead of confrontation because they'll be penalized if they don't operate on a shoe string.

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2 hours ago, Sketchy said:

As for the claim about the project, whale tier nations can already hide resources easier than everyone else. I didn't say it would eradicate bank hiding, I said it would reduce it in some cases. The reduction for the project is only ~3% in terms of how much is lost percentage wise of your stockpile. The fact is, this particular suggestion is primarily focused for alliance stockpiling, not nation stockpiling. You are correct, older nations can still stockpile at faster rates than newer ones, I didn't say I was addressing that because I don't think that is the issue. The idea this update hurts smaller nations proportionately more is not accurate, as larger stockpiles are needed for larger AAs and larger nations, and as such, they lose by minimum more. They still make stockpiles faster, so nothing changes for or against either in terms of proportionate balance. The reason this makes it more competitive for newer alliances is simple, it prevents incentivizing longer term stockpiling of well established aas.  

This penalizes alliances that run command economies.  Since there's no analogous opportunity for a 1/3 reduction in the decay rate for alliance banks, any alliance that chooses to keep large portions of its stockpile in its bank will likely lose more refined resources than an alliance which doesn't.

 

2 hours ago, Sketchy said:

Because one solution imposes a hard unflexible rule and another gives players choice? You can still stockpile large amounts of resources if you like, but a penalty exists if you do.

Except for the specific objection I outlined above, I like your suggestion. However, I'd still like to see some kind of cap (soft or hard) introduced, perhaps in tandem with what you've proposed.

2 hours ago, Sketchy said:

The problem with capping stockpiles is determining where and how to cap them. 

Introducing an entire new improvement into the ecosystem is fairly obviously going to have ramifications on the economy. This is a solution that doesn't require breaking or heavy rebalancing the economy in order to work.

Scaling caps by city count in banks creates a multitude of fairly weird consequences. For starters, different alliances have different warchest/bank stockpile ratios. This would force people into a box where they can only use one type of system. Then there is the question what happens if a player leaves an alliance, and suddenly the cap is reduced below that of what the bank has in it?  Does the excess disappear, does it bypass the cap? Etc etc.

I'm not especially concerned about that particular consequence because of the poor planning necessary for such a situation to arise.  If an alliance has stockpiled enough resources to be within a nation or two of its limit and doesn't expect some losses due to chance, then its leadership is doing something wrong.  I didn't think there was anything wrong with the former, incidental 999,999 cap on resources: your nation stopped accumulating a resource when you had 999,999 of that resource.

2 hours ago, Sketchy said:

Hell, the simpler reply to you is, what makes your proposal better than this?  

Nothing.  They're two different approaches, both of which are intended to achieve roughly the same end.  I've always liked the idea of (high) caps for resource stockpiles and I suggested it here as much to restart a discussion about them as anything.  Thanks for the reply.

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2 minutes ago, Shadowthrone said:

 A rational actor would not look to spend resources just because, but hoard more to offset those costs and that leads to longer waiting times. 

That, basically.

Resources degrading over time wouldn't lead most established AAs to be all 'welp, let's start a global war to use them before we lose them.'  You're more likely to see AAs simply adjust their war timetables to reflect the fact it'll take even longer to hit warchest targets.  If you want to reduce the costs associated with war, by all means reduce resource consumption, but resource degradation would simply lengthen the time it takes AAs to get together the resources necessary for a war and encourage further stagnation while we all wait for everyone to get their collective stockpiles together.

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Having thought more about this since our conversation last night Sketchy, I don't think this is the right approach to the problem/s.  It might be useful to lay out what the competing issues at play are though.

1. Some alliances have very large existing stockpiles that could last for months and months of war.
2. Other alliances are basically broke (in particular, new ones)
3. War, once you include rebuys/looting/alliance looting/Gas/Muni is extremely expensive to run on any scale.
4. Because war coalitions are made up of groups of alliances from 1 & 2, and because of the cost in 3, large stockpile building times are required.

Your proposal affects rich and broke alliances/nations equally, which is the first problem.  But you may be on to something with lowering the cost of war.

If we further reduced the operational cost of war (Gas/Muni/Loot/Rebuys), then alliances expected costs should reduce.  If expected costs are lower, then the Net Present Value of maintaining a stockpile will be lower.  Over time, this will flow into the marketplace through reduced prices.

A reduction in prices will lower the relative wealth of category 1 alliances, and raise the relative buying power of category 2 alliances.  This should over time, result in a net transfer of stockpile to category 2 alliances, until we reach a NPV/Price equilibrium.

tl;dr, Part 1 & 2 No, Part 3 needs tweaking (more than a 10% price drop required), I would reduce loots as well, or change the mechanics of loot during alliance wars.

 

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3 hours ago, Shadowthrone said:

At first reading, this seems to be an interesting suggestion, but here are my problems with it. The basic premise behind this is having folks penalised for stockpiling will now be more capable of trading or doing more wars since its better to spend them to lose them. The problem with that lies in the economic costs of war, which in the present format of the game, discourages war because of how long it takes to stockpile resources in the first place. Depending on the kind of the economy alliances run, the period it'd take to have their minimum archest targets reached, will take longer and having them degrade over time, would not have the effect intended of promoting more war. The nature would be to hoard more to make up for the losses, which in turn will lead to longer peace times. 

 

From a command economy point of view, this would not particularly encourage me to war more, since it takes longer for folks to even reach the basic minimums and the threat of degradation would make me plan longer peace times to maintain that minimum + degradation minimums. The unintended effects of such a move would be the necessity of longer peace times, especially amongst smaller, mass-player alliances since they cannot simply produce the levels that larger nations can and make up the loss of resources due to "degradation" as easily. It unintentionally harms warring capacity and therefore tries to fix an issue by slowing things down further. Moreover, very few alliances in this game look to stockpile resources in a manner enough where the degradation will be huge. Those are usually higher tax alliances who try to be self-sufficient without requiring to spend billions to reach mandatory minimums. I'd wage about 70-75% of alliances in game have more personalised war chests where the damage in numbers are limited in comparison to the millions of resources larger, command centric alliances require. While the headache would be consistently changing econ plans, I believe would lead to more stagnation in terms of when these alliances would be ready for war. I don't think folks would go to war just because resources are degrading, but that this would have an opposite effect, that folks go to lesser wars because the requirements are that much higher to maintain. If you're goal is say 1-2 million of refined resources a year as stock, losing even 10% of that would require a lot of planning to achieve the difference. Simply put, I feel these changes would do more harm than good in increasing the war cycles from an economic stand point. A rational actor would not look to spend resources just because, but hoard more to offset those costs and that leads to longer waiting times. 

Well that is why the cost of war is reduced in the third part of the proposal. You don't need to stockpile for as long or as high if implemented. AAs that require larger minimum amounts of resources also have larger incomes as well. As for your claim that most alliances don't stockpile resources unless they have high tax, this isn't really true, plenty of top AAs have significant stockpiles, and warchests are a factor as well. There is no really difference between high tax and low/no warchest, vs low tax and high warchest setups or anything inbetween.

"A rational actor would not look to spend resources just because, but hoard more to offset those costs and that leads to longer waiting times. "

I'd argue an irrational or just lazy actor would do that. It will be easier to stockpile the minimum needed to get into a conflict now, and its more efficient to trade or use those resources then see them disappear into the ether.

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8 hours ago, Vack said:

Good suggestion, it's low risk and low reward - it won't require everyone to completely rethink their econ, but will marginally influence the decision makers in top alliances because of the opportunity cost of not fighting. Longer you go without fighting the more resources you squander to deterioration ?

You're being silly if you think this degradation idea is actually going to force more wars, more often. Big alliances will just war even less building up war funds before using them since these changes would reduce resources stored and it's illogical to imagine large alliances going to war more often because more of the resources to be used for that is removed.

7 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. :P

^^ This hugely ^^

4 hours ago, Edward I said:

This penalizes alliances that run command economies.  Since there's no analogous opportunity for a 1/3 reduction in the decay rate for alliance banks, any alliance that chooses to keep large portions of its stockpile in its bank will likely lose more refined resources than an alliance which doesn't.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Except for the specific objection I outlined above, I like your suggestion. However, I'd still like to see some kind of cap (soft or hard) introduced, perhaps in tandem with what you've proposed.

I'm not especially concerned about that particular consequence because of the poor planning necessary for such a situation to arise.  If an alliance has stockpiled enough resources to be within a nation or two of its limit and doesn't expect some losses due to chance, then its leadership is doing something wrong.  I didn't think there was anything wrong with the former, incidental 999,999 cap on resources: your nation stopped accumulating a resource when you had 999,999 of that resource.

Nothing.  They're two different approaches, both of which are intended to achieve roughly the same end.  I've always liked the idea of (high) caps for resource stockpiles and I suggested it here as much to restart a discussion about them as anything.  Thanks for the reply.

 

 

I don't know if people actually know enough about command economies because this is also a very negative side effect of these unneeded changes.

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