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Increased Costs to Build New Cities


Alex
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Akuryo, you should stop making assumptions and talking for people like myself.  Honestly with a little bit of preparations, this isn't a huge hit on nations like myself, its just makes my life a little bit harder.  If bankers want to be petty they are going to be petty.  But a change like this isn't going to stop my alliance from growing, we are still going to buy more cities, it will just take us a little longer.  If it helps you little crap nations grow faster, I dont like it personally, but whatever, do what you got to do.  I personally would much rather see this, than resource costs on infra, or upkeep charges.

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35 minutes ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

Akuryo, you should stop making assumptions and talking for people like myself.  Honestly with a little bit of preparations, this isn't a huge hit on nations like myself, its just makes my life a little bit harder.  If bankers want to be petty they are going to be petty.  But a change like this isn't going to stop my alliance from growing, we are still going to buy more cities, it will just take us a little longer.  If it helps you little crap nations grow faster, I dont like it personally, but whatever, do what you got to do.  I personally would much rather see this, than resource costs on infra, or upkeep charges.

I'm not talking for you. I know this is difficult for your age group, gramps, but try reading. I'd only brought up anything i've been saying after people like yourself stated it as a very possible course of action on their part.

Maybe you wouldn't partake in the hypothetical, but the point was that a dangerous amount of mass is already leaning towards it, and that shrugging is not a helpful response. 

But yes, infra upkeep is far better. However Alex seems to not like it for the time being. 

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1 hour ago, Akuryo said:

If they really wanted to spite you they'd not only buy their cities force, collapsing a meta game that helps small nations, but then use the massive stockpiles of raws they already have to turn on as many cities possible, incase you try to get them with that. Then just take a commerce hit to max raws. Instead of selling them on the market they'll trade them to each other for next to nothing pooling their ridiculous production capacity to turn on cities without buying a thing.

Ah! You say, that gives people time to catch up! Yes, it does, people have been growing quickly and catching up for some time with their clever use of..., Ah the system your angry whales just lit on fire. 

I couldn't agree more. @PrefontaineAll this little update serves to do is take a bunch resources off the market. Whales will  definitely do so. The remaining question is now what? It will cause an artificial inflation in rss prices. It will stay that way for a long time without much movement due to people not being able to afford them. This will collapse banks eventually because they need revenue from frequent buying and selling.

If you are saying you don't care if banks collapse that is very inconsiderate to the people that rely on banks. Thats probably another reason your idea is so unpopular.

 

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I agree with Prefontaine, the player run "banking" system doesn't need to exist, and it will either adapt with the game or it will fail. This isn't Wall Street, there is no "too big to fail" and I am not going to let development be held hostage over whatever financial system a few players have rigged in the game.

If we make this update and what you say is true @Akuryo - the banks collapse and smaller nations aren't able to get funds easily - that's like the easiest thing in the world to fix. It's trivial to tweak the game so that smaller nations generate more cash just by nature of being small. I'm already considering doing things like increasing the login bonus and we're looking at projects that will reduce the costs of new cities. So I'm not worried about that scenario at all.

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7 hours ago, Alex said:

I agree with Prefontaine, the player run "banking" system doesn't need to exist, and it will either adapt with the game or it will fail. This isn't Wall Street, there is no "too big to fail" and I am not going to let development be held hostage over whatever financial system a few players have rigged in the game.

It's less about the fact that banks, specifically, should continue to exist as they have, and more that there is a meta game that you should be taking into account instead of riding roughshod over.  That said, I don't see why this change would harm the banking system to begin with...  But that doesn't excuse your mindset on this particular issue, imo.

There are methods of helping resource valuations that are less of a bandaid fix and hit the underlying problem of low resource demand.  I'm honestly puzzled why this discussion is even happening.  Fix the underlying issue, or don't do anything.  

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6 hours ago, Alex said:

I agree with Prefontaine, the player run "banking" system doesn't need to exist, and it will either adapt with the game or it will fail. This isn't Wall Street, there is no "too big to fail" and I am not going to let development be held hostage over whatever financial system a few players have rigged in the game.

If we make this update and what you say is true @Akuryo - the banks collapse and smaller nations aren't able to get funds easily - that's like the easiest thing in the world to fix. It's trivial to tweak the game so that smaller nations generate more cash just by nature of being small. I'm already considering doing things like increasing the login bonus and we're looking at projects that will reduce the costs of new cities. So I'm not worried about that scenario at all.

Maybe none of your playerbase would a need to take things hostage if you out forward more than band aid fixes, ask for feedback, then when it's negative (overwhelmingly) complain that the forums aren't indicative of anything because surely most players would be in favor of it. 

Maybe it's just me, but you'd think a guy with an economics degree would appreciate that a miniature world banking economy has popped up because he got bored one day and started coding. It's not just neat to see, it does your job for you. It promotes and makes small nation growth easier than it's ever been, and it does while being extremely in- controversial, adversely affecting no one and benefitting everyone. 

Yet you have zero respect for it. You have so little respect for it and your playerbase who take the time to do this, again, your job for you, that you would get upset at them for blocking at development.

That you would dare demand they shut the hell up and get over it, all so you can...

Force a band aid patch it seems, about 66% of people are against? A supermajority. Good call mate. Unless you're gonna make a poll in the changelog.

I daresay, you'd have alot less backlash and alot less players thinking you're an arrogant prick if you told them to get over it and adapt, because you're coming in with an actual, long-term focused update that's had serious consideration by the community and does it's best to play as nicely as it can with the game beyond the game. 

Oh, and, the login bonus, and those projects, are not going to compete with something as all encompassing as a bloody bank system. Nor is any of that a reason to go around just yeeting shit you didn't make out a window. 

Frankly they should act spiteful to you, you just have no respect and a complete and utter disregard for anything not crafted by your hands that dare act adversely to anything those hands make.

 

You'd think there wouldn't need to be multiple people text walling for pages to say "we don't a band aid that won't be effective, we'd prefer these solutions that we know we'll have to wait until you're full time for."

 

P.S. Alex if you want an easy update idea that does something you always talk about and does it well, while also helping everyone in general, just pretend the banking system is a sweet ass modpack and you're gonna subtly steal it and put it in the game. 

Aight others can continue this now I need to stop ranting, lol

 

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I don't normally venture onto the forums but I felt that I had to comment about this since its so significant:

1 hour ago, Theodosius said:

Aside from putting in major changes (so, better ideas, such as the one Sketchy suggested), introducing resource cost for infrastructure seems far less retroactive/controversial, and far more impactful than adding resource cost to cities. It's a consistent and constant resource sink during peacetime, easy to implement, adapt and react to. It affects the whole game, not just higher tier rare cost. Higher you go, more it should cost, obviously. I'll leave the actual math of costs to nerds, but the basic idea is sound.

Infrastructure burns, cities do not. Building it is a recurring theme, thus a recurring cost.

Why is this idea being seriously considered. At first glance I was like wow but after thinking about it, whales don't go to war this is just going to slow down growth in the mid tiers and increase the gap as it takes people longer to rebuild and the whales can give out more loans in the process etc.

I think the consumer goods [or legal paperwork in my idea] idea was my favourite, something like this with a low limit on the amount you can make, maybe a project to make it so everyone gets only 1/2 or just 1 per city so that everyone is on a fair playing field or perhaps even exclusive from cities completely, you could send your secondary resources to an 'offshore factory' or something and get consumer goods/legal paperwork returned to you at a set rate per day. Usage for them is beyond me, but city upkeep costs or maybe even something like finance fees - moving more than x amount of money per day would cost you in transfer tariffs [consumer goods/legal paperwork] per million over or something like that. This would combat the amount of money that banks are moving around while requiring them to buy goods which can only be made at a slow pace by almost everybody at the same/similarly low rate in the process. One issue I could see is maybe it would limit new banks from starting although seems like Alex wouldn't mind that ?Obviously this would have to be tweaked etc with algorithms and rates but it would lead to things we need:

  1. Material Sink
  2. Limiting money transfers of whales
  3. Limiting bank activity [costs wouldn't be insanely high to stop all transfers, but significant enough that it will cause suitable demand for consumer goods/legal paperwork or whatever it gets called]
  4. Not slowing down the development of smaller nations in the process with infra costs/city costs etc
  5. Not collapsing the banking system in the process.

Would love to hear what people think - just an alternative idea that could be expanded on I guess.

Edited by Hariff
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5 hours ago, Akuryo said:

Force a band aid patch it seems, about 66% of people are against? A supermajority. Good call mate. Unless you're gonna make a poll in the changelog.

Just because something is popular doesn't make it a good idea, and just because something is unpopular doesn't make it a bad idea. You introduce an idea that is going to increase costs, of course it's going to be unpopular. 

 


Take this thread for example. Free money, all upvotes. 

 

My point is thinking this is a bad idea just because it's getting downvotes doesn't mean much when it's something that's going to increase prices for some players. I'm honestly surprised 33% gave it upvotes. Tell people they're going to have to pay more for something they're gonna get unhappy. Tell them here's a bunch of money, they're gonna be happy. 

6 hours ago, Theodosius said:

Aside from putting in major changes (so, better ideas, such as the one Sketchy suggested), introducing resource cost for infrastructure seems far less retroactive/controversial, and far more impactful than adding resource cost to cities. It's a consistent and constant resource sink during peacetime, easy to implement, adapt and react to. It affects the whole game, not just higher tier rare cost. Higher you go, more it should cost, obviously. I'll leave the actual math of costs to nerds, but the basic idea is sound.

Infrastructure burns, cities do not. Building it is a recurring theme, thus a recurring cost.

The problem with increasing costs on infra building is that it adds a pricetag to the (except maybe resource costs depending on the length of war) most expensive part of warfare, infra rebuilding. 


A better way to go would be an upkeep cost for maintaining infra levels in my opinion. The other option people have been discussing, "consumer goods", is something in the works as well. 

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44 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

Just because something is popular doesn't make it a good idea, and just because something is unpopular doesn't make it a bad idea. You introduce an idea that is going to increase costs, of course it's going to be unpopular. 

 


Take this thread for example. Free money, all upvotes. 

 

My point is thinking this is a bad idea just because it's getting downvotes doesn't mean much when it's something that's going to increase prices for some players. I'm honestly surprised 33% gave it upvotes. Tell people they're going to have to pay more for something they're gonna get unhappy. Tell them here's a bunch of money, they're gonna be happy. 

The problem with increasing costs on infra building is that it adds a pricetag to the (except maybe resource costs depending on the length of war) most expensive part of warfare, infra rebuilding. 


A better way to go would be an upkeep cost for maintaining infra levels in my opinion. The other option people have been discussing, "consumer goods", is something in the works as well. 

Requiring resources to buy infra could be balanced by reducing the cash needed.

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5 hours ago, Azaghul said:

Requiring resources to buy infra could be balanced by reducing the cash needed.

One flaw I see in that is resource prices aren't fixed and infra costs vary greatly, creating a little bit of a balancing act depending on how much of a discount in price versus how much of a cost in resources your looking. If the discount isn't large enough, resource prices could cause the cost to increase overall. If the resource cost isn't high enough its usefulness as a sink won't have that much impact. Also this runs the risk of slowing new player growth, as selling resources is a main source of income for smaller nations. If they have to use their resources on themselves for growth versus selling.

 

What I'm saying it's not a bad idea, but you should put some numbers and such to the suggestion if you want it to gain some traction. 

Edited by Prefontaine

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20 hours ago, Alex said:

I agree with Prefontaine, the player run "banking" system doesn't need to exist, and it will either adapt with the game or it will fail. This isn't Wall Street, there is no "too big to fail" and I am not going to let development be held hostage over whatever financial system a few players have rigged in the game.

 

Good idea mate, attack the community-made banks - knowing that the community is all that keeps your game alive.

The banks work absolutely fine, and benefit everyone, providing money for new players in micros that can't afford to give them larger loans/grants. There's no issue with the banks, leave it be.

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1 hour ago, Theodosius said:

lmfao I can't believe people are equating importance of private banking and the much needed fix for a resource sink on this game (whatever it ends up being). Oh noes, you won't have 100b but 90b invested in your bank because part of whale money will be focused on buying XYZ resources, the horror of it, really. 

Actually the argument is that it won't be buying those resources, because the whales will buy cities before the update happens instead. And it won't go from 100b to 90, it'll be more like 80bn value down to 30 or less, in the case of the (as far as i know) the largest bank, and that would be the initial hit of people pulling out to get cities, let alone the hit of less loans and business afterwards that could drop that further to 20 or less. This isn't a 10% reduction, this is a 75% or more reduction. Of the very largest, no less. I understand you don't care as you probably don't use it, but alot of people (the people this supposedly helps) do use it, and that kind of reduction is not good news to them. 

Plus, the other recommendations are ones that won't do the above, because a basic understanding of economics says that would do nothing and make no sense, while for a c35 pulling out billions to build a bunch of cities before you get slapped with a tax of 350k+ resources at supposedly increasing prices as all of you go to buy them happens, meaning Alex's math of the cost if, say, SRD was FIRST, is effectively meaningless.

From that POV this retro-tax will equal half or more of their next city, which is a pretty good reason to move to Monaco. 

I know KT likes to joke about being autistic, but don't take that too seriously now. Give reading an actual try, or even skimming which is what i usually do. It's not hard, and it stops you from being a straw-manning dipshit. There's only problematic suggestion in this thread, and it's in the OP.

 

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Dear sheepy, please quit screwing around with the economics of the game and fix the war systems of the game. Maybe then people will actually use up some of those resources fighting instead of just using all planes all the time.

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Here's a sidenote: why does everyone who claim this will help the resource production and aid small nations by making them alot of money (ignore that the people who will profit most are bulk traders who aren't small, that ruins your argument even before this), ignore that the cause and effect of this update results in a much smaller splash in the resource market, while imploding the most powerful and effective tool aside from alliance grants to help small nations, pretend that does not matter or exist. 

This is some real, religious levels of cognisant dissonance right here. "My plan will be sucessful because anything that could make it unsuccessful isnt directly related and therefore does not exist" is not an accurate model of reality. Please stop building it. This whole fricking argument sounds like the minimum wage bs that fast food workers and middle class people who don't know what their talking about push for, and then get surprised when said minimum wage fast food workers start getting laid off left and right because demanding Mcdonalds pay Jimmy $15/hr to drop the fries means there's gonna be alot less Jimmy's. 

 

You're so deadset on your narrative of "FOR THE GOOD OF THE GAME, NO MATTER THE COST" that you're just rewriting parts of reality that don't help you so you can go on your marry way.

I get none of you care because you don't use this system, but without this system i do not have a totally-achievable and simple low-stress program to get base c14s in a micro. If you increase resource prices 10-fold all you do is give them money for their warchests, because as instructed they use their resource income to buy Warchest. The alliance handles cities with taxes, and it does so by working closely with the banks. Just because you do not use the system, because it is not coded in, does not mean it is irrelevant or of second-class consideration.

 

Rado by merely existing at this point has done more to help small nations than i think Alex ever has. In the near future, Alex will have the time to try and change that. Instead of this bullshit, if you want to end the banks, replace them with something that can do as much for everyone involved in it as they do. And good luck, because your best solution to that, is to code in the banks. 

 

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30 minutes ago, Akuryo said:

Here's a sidenote: why does everyone who claim this will help the resource production and aid small nations by making them alot of money (ignore that the people who will profit most are bulk traders who aren't small, that ruins your argument even before this), ignore that the cause and effect of this update results in a much smaller splash in the resource market, while imploding the most powerful and effective tool aside from alliance grants to help small nations, pretend that does not matter or exist. 

This is some real, religious levels of cognisant dissonance right here. "My plan will be sucessful because anything that could make it unsuccessful isnt directly related and therefore does not exist" is not an accurate model of reality. Please stop building it. This whole fricking argument sounds like the minimum wage bs that fast food workers and middle class people who don't know what their talking about push for, and then get surprised when said minimum wage fast food workers start getting laid off left and right because demanding Mcdonalds pay Jimmy $15/hr to drop the fries means there's gonna be alot less Jimmy's. 

 

You're so deadset on your narrative of "FOR THE GOOD OF THE GAME, NO MATTER THE COST" that you're just rewriting parts of reality that don't help you so you can go on your marry way.

I get none of you care because you don't use this system, but without this system i do not have a totally-achievable and simple low-stress program to get base c14s in a micro. If you increase resource prices 10-fold all you do is give them money for their warchests, because as instructed they use their resource income to buy Warchest. The alliance handles cities with taxes, and it does so by working closely with the banks. Just because you do not use the system, because it is not coded in, does not mean it is irrelevant or of second-class consideration.

 

Rado by merely existing at this point has done more to help small nations than i think Alex ever has. In the near future, Alex will have the time to try and change that. Instead of this bullshit, if you want to end the banks, replace them with something that can do as much for everyone involved in it as they do. And good luck, because your best solution to that, is to code in the banks. 

 

Because people making knee jerk reactions to a change that negatively effects them, and trying to use whatever power and influence they have to prevent their lives becoming slightly more inconvenient, don't deserve to be taken seriously.  Would this change hurt some of us large ass nations?  The retroactive fee will slow us down for 2-4 weeks as we would have to accumulate an extra 200 million to 1 billion in resources depending on size.  Realistically it isn't that big of a deal, I wouldn't be surprised to see that spending billions on cities to avoid the retroactive fee, costs your bankers more money in the long run.

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On 4/29/2019 at 10:00 PM, BOYCE THE GREAT said:

Well, this just basically stops the game for anyone 30+ and to some extent 25+, for example Seb would have well over a billion $ invested in retroactive payments before even buying a city, that is an extreme example but still, i hate the idea of something like this being retroactive but if it isn't retroactive then it would be unfair to new players, this just simply isn't the solution.

ok. I will use your post Boyce and your mention of me to put my five cents.

Does anyone that has made it to 35 cities have money problems? Let's say those who need to pay a 1b retroactive to buy another city. How is that more complicated than for example, saving 3 billion to buy another city? or 2 billion in the case of city 34 or 35. All you need to do is save another billion. Save 2 billion if Alex's change does work and raw demand and price goes up. So for those whales that are currently building one more city every 2 or 3 months it will take 5 for the next city instead? After that it'll go back to normal.

I also don't understand how this would hurt the private banking system. If anything people will try to come to the banks to take massive loans in order to buy resources and speculate with the price?

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1 minute ago, Seb said:

I also don't understand how this would hurt the private banking system. If anything people will try to come to the banks to take massive loans in order to buy resources and speculate with the price?

It really won't. It's mostly alarmist knee-jerk type response to increasing a cost somewhere in the game. Make something cost more, unhappy people. Give free money, happy people. The banking narrative is honestly a waste of time for whomever is arguing against this using that as their main point. 

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On 5/2/2019 at 12:27 PM, Alex said:

I agree with Prefontaine, the player run "banking" system doesn't need to exist, and it will either adapt with the game or it will fail. This isn't Wall Street, there is no "too big to fail" and I am not going to let development be held hostage over whatever financial system a few players have rigged in the game.

If we make this update and what you say is true @Akuryo - the banks collapse and smaller nations aren't able to get funds easily - that's like the easiest thing in the world to fix. It's trivial to tweak the game so that smaller nations generate more cash just by nature of being small. I'm already considering doing things like increasing the login bonus and we're looking at projects that will reduce the costs of new cities. So I'm not worried about that scenario at all.

I take personal offense that a game administrator chosed this specific set of words to refer to a community based program.

I would like you to explain how can development be held hostage over some financial system and how have we rigged the system?

I also would like to point out I approached you ages ago about implementing a coded banking system into the game but despite you feeling it was a good idea, you didn't go through with it. If it's rigged, then why don't you code a bank that is better? You have an unlimited cash machine, offer loans to nations and finish us off. But please, refrain from using this specific set of words again.

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18 minutes ago, Seb said:

ok. I will use your post Boyce and your mention of me to put my five cents.

Does anyone that has made it to 35 cities have money problems? Let's say those who need to pay a 1b retroactive to buy another city. How is that more complicated than for example, saving 3 billion to buy another city? or 2 billion in the case of city 34 or 35. All you need to do is save another billion. Save 2 billion if Alex's change does work and raw demand and price goes up. So for those whales that are currently building one more city every 2 or 3 months it will take 5 for the next city instead? After that it'll go back to normal.

I also don't understand how this would hurt the private banking system. If anything people will try to come to the banks to take massive loans in order to buy resources and speculate with the price?

Alternatively, since their goal is growth in many cases such as sphinx, pull out, build a bunch of cities at once, wait a month or two saving your cash until prices go down, and then pay less while having grown more than others, and still have money leftover towards the next city.

It literally makes more sense to do that because it is cheaper, and because this is a shitty band aid fix. If it wasn't a shitty band aid fix, then you'd be right, people wouldn't bother pulling out because the effects would be long term and avoiding them would be difficult at best.

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