An Incentive For Action

[ComradeMilton]

1 minute ago, Sketchy said:

The economy is rolling again. The last few updates have essentially fixed the key issues that sheepy created when he implemented the the great deflation.

The economy is balanced atm. We aren't trending towards inflation or deflation, because after sheepy gutted the supply he slightly walked it back by increasing the supply again, and then he increased the purchasing power by fixing some of the issues he made by ruining the commerce.

I posted a timeline of the economy in one of my earlier posts.

Wow. The economy is terrible compared to how it was for the bulk of my time here. The balance isn't there, credits are still overvalued, improvement slots in max still pollute with too much supply screwing with demand, etc.  There aren't even spikes before and after wars anymore.

[Lilac Veritas]

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. 

[Sketchy]

35 minutes ago, ComradeMilton said:

Wow. The economy is terrible compared to how it was for the bulk of my time here. The balance isn't there, credits are still overvalued, improvement slots in max still pollute with too much supply screwing with demand, etc.  There aren't even spikes before and after wars anymore.

There was a spike before this war. The changes that corrected things happened between this one and the previous global.

The pollution stuff is less to do with supply and more to do with specialization. In the previous system, you could make all resources, but you made less of them. Now you can't make all resources, but you can make more of the ones you focus on. So supply isn't lower now, its just more specialized.

There is certainly a debate as to whether that is better or not (I'd agree it isn't, specialization is still a trivial non-choice), but its not accurate to say the economy has't reached a balanced state. Prices are not climbing or falling on a consistent pattern over time since the last 2 bandaid fixes to the economy, which is the sign of deflation or inflation. In fact they fairly noticably bottomed our pretty quickly after sheepy scaled outputs.

[Avakael]

I agree that the gap between wars is too long, and expanding ever more- which is a fairly significant part of what's caused CyberNations to deteriorate, but when you're a big nation, wars are expensive. Just drawing up to my full tanks and ships pre-war cost me nearly 40k steel, and I'm only at 22 cities; arguably not even quite the top tier in this game, and I obviously need a lot more than just that initial 40k steel to stay in the fight- more like 120-150k. We're talking at least a month and a half, perhaps even two months time spent saving to buy nothing but steel. Then I need to buy the other 3 important war resources, and preferably a few cities as well, and you can see where all the time is going. Solve the problem much faster by buffing resource production rates. 

Edited October 31, 2018 by Avakael

[Shadowthrone]

4 hours ago, Avakael said:

I agree that the gap between wars is too long, and expanding ever more- which is a fairly significant part of what's caused CyberNations to deteriorate, but when you're a big nation, wars are expensive. Just drawing up to my full tanks and ships pre-war cost me nearly 40k steel, and I'm only at 22 cities; arguably not even quite the top tier in this game, and I obviously need a lot more than just that initial 40k steel to stay in the fight- more like 120-150k. We're talking at least a month and a half, perhaps even two months time spent saving to buy nothing but steel. Then I need to buy the other 3 important war resources, and preferably a few cities as well, and you can see where all the time is going. Solve the problem much faster by buffing resource production rates. 

 

^^^^ I mentioned that in my last post and seems to have been missed. Your premise is faulty in the sense that somehow penalising alliances for resource production would lead to them going to war, when I believe the opposite will happen. That coupled with the increasing costs of warfare due to the higher ranges its moving into, this proposal and its "neutral" mechanical model of fixing things is completely missing one of the reasons why larger stockpiles are required and thats simply because wars are no longer fought by 5 city nations, but on average above 10 cities today. The problem is not command v non-command as much as storage of command v non-command where in one case you're disproportionately hurting one model over the other. How? Already been mentioned multiple times here, bank storage is different and the stockpiles required in both are different, so the long term degradation as it increases with the total value of resources held and well certainly those having larger centralised stockpiles will be disproportionately affected. What thats going to do is make higher tax alliances move towards saving more to make up for that cost. Thats rationality, not that they'd start a war for the sake of not "losing" resources. This entire game so far has been built on this aversion to loss of anything, and this magical penalisation somehow is meant to change that meta? I find that hard to buy.

The point with the reduction of value of resources, is it'd reduce the costs of war. You're going after a non-problem. Stockpiling isn't bad. Its the reason why that stockpiling is necessary and why it takes so long. That problem is two-fold: 

1) Higher tiers of warfare, requiring more resources, therefore natural lengthening of war preparations and,

2) The increase in costs of resources over the last year, especially during war time. Buying resources from the market alliance wide, requires alliances to plan those purchases, to ensure they maintain the right price, or move towards self-sufficiency. In both cases, thanks to the first reason, the stockpile times only increase. 

This proposal does nothing to change reason 1, but the second part tackles problem 2 to some extent. By reducing the value of resources, the longer stockpile periods will reduce and therefore reduce the times between war to some extent I imagine. If you continue leaving resource values high, the more this game grows, the larger the stockpiles/costs along with this degradation period, really does not help the overall meta. I get this is an interesting proposal, but I believe, you're tackling the wrong problem, and thats not stockpiling slowing down the game, but why those larger war chests are required in the first place. 

Also whats this aversion to bank holding? Always been confused at why people want to tackle something thats not inherently problematic. 

[Edward I]

9 hours ago, Sketchy said:

I mean, thats a fair argument I already addressed with Edward earlier. I still don't think its a compelling enough reason not to implement it, as projects are by definition longer term investment advantages for larger nations, so that argument applies to all projects. But assuming the project was not implemented, which frankly I'm not as concerned about as the first and 3rd portions of the suggestion, then what is the overall gripe with the remainder of the proposal? People seem to be arguing the proposal itself disadvantages centralized bank systems, which is categorically untrue otherwise.

And it doesn't take a prolonged period to save up resources, because the costs are offset. That is why the costs are offset. People keep ignoring the 3rd part of the proposal. It isn't harder to stockpile resources, because you need less resources in order to perform war under the change. I've already addressed this a few times now.\, and you seem to have read that part, so idk where the confusion is.

Also, just to math check you, it would be 33% not 50%.

So, lets say the project isn't implemented, whats your argument then?

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.

[MonkeyDLegend]

9 hours ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

 

Instead of a direct penalty to stockpiles, my suggestion is that nations must pay upkeep on improvements and infrastructure in the form of refined materials.

I mean, think about it. Our population has malls, why don't they have cars? Why do they eat food but don't use gasoline? How is it that we've got airforces but no civilian airlines? How do our police function without using any bullets? Refined materials are necessary for a modern lifestyle, so we can call the refined resources degradation "civilian use" or "upkeep", and balance it to cost more for larger nations and/or nations in larger alliances.

I see what you're doing and it sounds great, the more crime you have per city the more gassoline and bullets you'll need.

[ComradeMilton]

8 hours ago, Sketchy said:

There was a spike before this war. The changes that corrected things happened between this one and the previous global.

A very small and briefly seen one that disappeared quickly. That's not a fix, it's an anomaly.

8 hours ago, Sketchy said:

The pollution stuff is less to do with supply and more to do with specialization. In the previous system, you could make all resources, but you made less of them. Now you can't make all resources, but you can make more of the ones you focus on. So supply isn't lower now, its just more specialized.

There is certainly a debate as to whether that is better or not (I'd agree it isn't, specialization is still a trivial non-choice), but its not accurate to say the economy has't reached a balanced state. Prices are not climbing or falling on a consistent pattern over time since the last 2 bandaid fixes to the economy, which is the sign of deflation or inflation. In fact they fairly noticably bottomed our pretty quickly after sheepy scaled outputs.

Yup. Every time someone screws with the code effecting economics the economy ends up worse. Surely you can agree we should stop doing anything related to the economy and just Ctrl-Z like fifteen times.

[King Olafr of the Faroes]

14 hours ago, Sketchy said:

Yes.... creating a balance so as not to mess with the economy. That is literally the point.

Your suggestion as to how a balance is created is just very, very bad in my opinion.

 

Again; I would much prefer people were given the opportunity to go to war, rather than have the issue pushed on them by decaying resources. Most (loudmouths on the forums) wants more wars. Increasing supply, one way or the other, means it's easier to fill war chests. Full war chests along with people who dislike eachother for whatever reason mostly lead to war. The only downtime we have is rebuilding nations and war chests.

 

An improved war UI would also be amazing, like being able to set alliances as enemies and thus easier being able to search for targets, check war stats in game (easily trackable) and generally see how everyone stacks up for the common member of an alliance.

[Avakael]

12 hours ago, Shadowthrone said:

 

^^^^ I mentioned that in my last post and seems to have been missed. Your premise is faulty in the sense that somehow penalising alliances for resource production would lead to them going to war, when I believe the opposite will happen. That coupled with the increasing costs of warfare due to the higher ranges its moving into, this proposal and its "neutral" mechanical model of fixing things is completely missing one of the reasons why larger stockpiles are required and thats simply because wars are no longer fought by 5 city nations, but on average above 10 cities today. The problem is not command v non-command as much as storage of command v non-command where in one case you're disproportionately hurting one model over the other. How? Already been mentioned multiple times here, bank storage is different and the stockpiles required in both are different, so the long term degradation as it increases with the total value of resources held and well certainly those having larger centralised stockpiles will be disproportionately affected. What thats going to do is make higher tax alliances move towards saving more to make up for that cost. Thats rationality, not that they'd start a war for the sake of not "losing" resources. This entire game so far has been built on this aversion to loss of anything, and this magical penalisation somehow is meant to change that meta? I find that hard to buy.

The point with the reduction of value of resources, is it'd reduce the costs of war. You're going after a non-problem. Stockpiling isn't bad. Its the reason why that stockpiling is necessary and why it takes so long. That problem is two-fold: 

1) Higher tiers of warfare, requiring more resources, therefore natural lengthening of war preparations and,

2) The increase in costs of resources over the last year, especially during war time. Buying resources from the market alliance wide, requires alliances to plan those purchases, to ensure they maintain the right price, or move towards self-sufficiency. In both cases, thanks to the first reason, the stockpile times only increase. 

This proposal does nothing to change reason 1, but the second part tackles problem 2 to some extent. By reducing the value of resources, the longer stockpile periods will reduce and therefore reduce the times between war to some extent I imagine. If you continue leaving resource values high, the more this game grows, the larger the stockpiles/costs along with this degradation period, really does not help the overall meta. I get this is an interesting proposal, but I believe, you're tackling the wrong problem, and thats not stockpiling slowing down the game, but why those larger war chests are required in the first place. 

Also whats this aversion to bank holding? Always been confused at why people want to tackle something thats not inherently problematic. 

I think you quoted the wrong post, because 90% of this has nothing to do with what I said at all.

[Lilac Veritas]

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.

[Sketchy]

19 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.

No it doesn't.

0.03% of 1,000,000 Gasoline in the bank is the same level of degradation as 100 000 in 10 nations or 10,000 in 100.

The 0.03% is per unit.

[Radoje]

On 10/30/2018 at 6:10 PM, 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?

Actually, this wouldn't penalize trade or nations that trade, but would increase the supply ie. reduce the prices. The reason it would reduce prices is because people would have an incentive to store less and trade more, thus chugging more resources on the global market.

If you were sitting on 1mil steel, why wouldn't you trade some of that steel at an opportune moment and cash it in, meaning you're indirectly lowering the price of all steel and allowing people to acquire a bigger warchest while getting rid of your massive stockpile that you're sitting on and not using. Than when war comes around, you can simply buy more steel with the money you've earned from your previous sale.

It's the same thing that happened when the first private banks rolled around and is still happening. Whales that are sitting on stockpiles of billions invest in banks, the banks turn around and hand that money out to nations that need to build cities in the mid tier, thus there is more money circling around the economy without causing inflation. 

Sketchy's suggestion is no different, it's simply good for the economy if there's a player incentive to move your stockpile instead of sitting on it. His second suggestion which is to reduce cost for units is a necessary change that should've been implemented a year ago.

I think you misunderstood his suggestion when it comes to the economy impact:
1. Players have an incentive to move large stockpiles around thus increasing supply.
2. Units cost less meaning there's less repercussion to going to war (and tanks become more useful since they're more readily available).

[Lu Xun]

Basically, the war cycle happens like this:

 

Last war ends -> Players spend time politicking to get consensus on who's the latest victim of a beatdown / Players spend time rebuilding, as well as accumulating resource stockpiles for warfighting -> Consensus Achieved & Military Stockpile Sufficient -> War starts, return to step 1

 

If the idea is to actually destroy the value of stockpiles with constant degradation, the most important effect is penalizing alliances that don't get involved in war. However, these alliances can, likewise, sell off their stockpile during wartime, compensating for resource loss. Another, more brutal factor, is that by making it take longer for players to achieve military stockpiles, you're actually delaying the onset of a war.

 

If you want more frequent wartime, the easiest way is this. Reduce all military costs or increase all resource generation rates. Wars now happen more often because the logistics needed to start a war is more easily obtainable.

[ComradeMilton]

2 hours ago, Radoje said:

1. Players have an incentive to move large stockpiles around thus increasing supply.

2. Units cost less meaning there's less repercussion to going to war (and tanks become more useful since they're more readily available).

Can someone identify where they view us as needing artificial increases (that won't work in our alliance, if nothing else) to war more?

[Ashland1]

I'm going to go ahead and say the biggest problem with this is it is adding more work to be done at update which is already horribly overburdened (as we saw) and will just exacerbate our issues because Alex is too cheap to move off of free servers.

[Sir Scarfalot]

4 minutes ago, Ashland1 said:

I'm going to go ahead and say the biggest problem with this is it is adding more work to be done at update which is already horribly overburdened (as we saw) and will just exacerbate our issues because Alex is too cheap to move off of free servers.

These servers are far from free; have you tried to run a web page off free servers? We wouldn’t be able to have 3 players active without nigh crashing.

The added load on update is no more severe than the existing calculations for taxes, shouldn’t be noticeable.

[Ashland1]

1 hour ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

These servers are far from free; have you tried to run a web page off free servers? We wouldn’t be able to have 3 players active without nigh crashing.

The added load on update is no more severe than the existing calculations for taxes, shouldn’t be noticeable.

I had heard he had an arrangement where they were free somehow. I could have misheard.

And fair enough. I still think it would make more sense to have these calculations run at a different time of day if they run at all.

[ComradeMilton]

1 hour ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

The added load on update is no more severe than the existing calculations for taxes, shouldn’t be noticeable.

The load would be even less if we just didn't try to make things worse as suggested.

[Micchan]

People don't make tanks because they are shit compared to other units, I would spend my money on ground units if they are able to hit planes and ships and if wasn't so easy to destroy them with airstrikes, it would make the game way more interesting

And this suggestion was already around when I started to play 2.5 years ago, but instead we will be able to draw a map of our nation, not that ins't cool making my nation look like a cat but it's the #100 of the priority list

[Limbuwan]

On 10/31/2018 at 12:21 AM, Sketchy said:

@Alex

Overview

One of the things I've noticed over time is that there is a tendency for alliances to spend long periods of time stockpiling resources, especially the major AAs, very often far more than is needed for just one or even two conflicts, and sitting on them, in the hopes of never having to be in a position where they can run out, but at the cost of stagnating an already fairly slow political landscape, while other newer and more engaged alliances often struggle to stockpile enough to stay competitive. While there is plenty of other causes for the tendency for war stagnation, rather than just another suggestion to tinker with the war system and potentially break it, I'd like to propose something less direct.

 

Part 1 - Refined resources should suffer degradation over time.

More specifically, I am suggesting that all refined resources (so munitions, gasoline, steel and aluminium), whether they are stored on a players nation, or in an alliance bank, should suffer degradation at a rate of 0.03% per day, per tonne/unit. This works out to 10.95% of all stockpiles of refined resources, degraded to dust, per year. Here is an example in action:

 

So why? Well the most obvious impact would be a mental shift in the meta on how players view stockpiling resources. If stockpiling 10 wars ahead has a downside, players are more likely to spend the current resources they have in the now on current conflicts, resulting in more wars more often, and less long term stockpiling.

The further time people spend out of war, the further incentive they have to invest their resources IN war, or trade them to those who will, increasing the volume and frequency of trade, as people will want to offload their resources before they suffer degradation to willing buyers.

Finally, newer alliances will be able to enter the arena more competitively, being less at a handicap vs alliances with years of stockpiles. Larger alliances already have huge income bases vs most newer alliances, the additional stockpile advantage allows alliances to create long term holds over the game and prevents new dynamics from flourishing.

 

Part 2 - A "safe storage" project, and using the mechanic to disincentivize alliance bank hiding.

To further capitalize on the above changes, my second part of this suggestion is implementing a new nation project, that reduces the degradation rate of refined resources held by nations by 33%, so from 0.03% a day/10.95% a year to a reduced rate of 0.02% a day/7.3% a year. An example:

It would need to be fairly expensive, probably more so than most current projects, but with how long its been since we've seen a new project, I think it would be a welcome addition. Now, the additional benefit of this particular proposal, is how it would create a dynamic which forces alliance leaders to choose between stockpiling resources inside a bank,, shuffling them around during war to avoid looting like usual, where they are relatively safe, OR, on a nation with the project, putting them at bigger risk from raiders like Arrgh and others, but potentially saving a large amount in the process. While not eradicating bank hiding, it does force alliances to consider the risk vs cost analysis and is likely to reduce it in some cases.

 

Part 3 - Offsetting the economic impact and potential negative side effects for stagnation.

Now obviously, by implementing this change, the total pool of refined resources will be lower, further increasing prices, and making it harder for alliances, particularly newer ones, to actually stockpile resources at all, undermining the purpose of the proposal. But that is easily rectified.

For Gasoline and Munitions, all war consumption of these resources, both offensive and defensive, should be reduced by 10%. This will completely offset the reduction in supply with a reduction in demand, while still maintaining the incentive for people to use rather than stockpile.

For Steel, the cost of tanks should be reduced to 0.5 steel per tank. This is a long overdue rebalance in the ridiculously high cost in tanks, which is already prompting people not to purchase them. As many people have noted, tanks are becoming very similar to how ships used to be, too expensive for their utility, and this will both rectify this issue and offset the downsides of degradation. Ship steel costs are fine to remain the same.

For Aluminium, I'd actually not make any changes at all. As  far as stockpiling goes, Alum is one of the least important resources needed at high volumes. As it is only used by planes, and at a much lesser amount than Steel or Gas/Alum, there is really no need to offset it, and it may bring Alum more in line with other resources balance wise.

 

Won't people just bypass this change by stockpiling cash and raws instead?

In short, probably. But doing so puts them at risk of being caught with low stockpiles at a time of war. Once a war is around the corner, the cost of resources increases, and the market volume is not endless. Alliances cannot quickly transfer cash or raws to refined in preparation for a war, not without incurring a large cost from inflated prices, or buying up the entire market and running out of buyers. Even after war, restockpiling is a gradual process, as mass purchasing will drive up prices and ultimately cost more. In effect, it'll be up to the individual alliances themselves to decide how much they think is a suitable stockpile, and bare the consequences.

 

What about Vacation Mode?

In order to prevent exploitation, refined resources should still degrade, even if nations enter vacation mode, so that nations don't use VM nations as "safe storage" for refined resources. VM nations will need to either give their resources to their alliance bank for safekeeping, to a trusted friend, or incur the cost. Otherwise, Sheepy will need to create rules and moderate them regarding this, and frankly that should be avoided at all costs.

Grave digging.

Igniting discussion for possible changes.

Thank you.