Adjustments to resource consumptions

[Prefontaine]

7 hours ago, KindaEpicMoah said:

My apologies to you and to everyone who supported my original post; I did make a mistake in my original formula by multiplying the amount of resources needed by the city count of the buyer without first subtracting the lowest value for the city count range first (so like doing 100 * price of steel * x instead of 100* price of steel * (x - 19) for cities 20 through 29).

Here's the (hopefully) correct (peer reviewed this time) graph. 

 

The data does clearly show that city prices are decreased across the board. However, I will maintain that this change is slightly skewed towards whales due to the nature of multiplicative discounts on non-linear costs (though not as much as I originally made it out to be, which I apologize for), and especially skewed towards whales if the 2.5% price decrease is changed to 5% for cities 41+. The green line shows the formula you proposed with the additional 2.5% discount for cities 41 and over, and the orange formula shows the same formula but with that additional discount removed, so I think removing the additional discount would be more consistent with the lower cities. 

That looks more accurate, appreciate your deep dive into the numbers. We were discussing some of this in the design channel and I think some perspective may help. We were using C55 as an example and the 5% discount would be something around 300M off the next city. This number seems very large and impactful to a lot of players. Put into proportion however, most top economies would make this amount in 3-4 days. I think at my peak at C44 I was bringing in around 80M a day. 

I'll also reiterate the point I was getting at in my last reply which I've removed with the updated math. The players already at the high end of city counts have gotten there without a lot of the mechanics that have discounted city prices. The same with this. If anything discounting cities above 40 will help players catch up to those marks as it's now cheaper for up and coming whales to whale. 

All that said, I'm honestly fine with taking out the additional 2.5% discount at 40. 

7 hours ago, Krouton said:

The only thing I can kind of get behind is resource costs for building cities. Please don't reduce the margins of refined production. Refined production should be viable for newer players. Add something to spend resources on, and not another project that most nations don't have the slots for anyways. Players should be spending excess resources on war. It doesn't help that the greatest cost of war is overwhelmingly infra damage.

What if operating costs were cut in conjunction. Currently they range from $2,500 -> $4,000 per refinery per day. If we cut that by say 25% that reduces the losses sustained by requiring more raw upkeep costs?

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

The resource increase for cities in my view is a pretty small change/expenditure.  I know its been a few years, but i believe when you hit c30 or so, you are picking up around 1 city a month? by 40 its 1 city every two months.  I guess its better than nothing, but its seems like it would be a drop in the bucket. 

Do you guys have numbers from before the last war on how many cities were purchased between 20-55 over the course of a month or so, and how many resources would have been spent?

I do wonder why you didn't touch war expenditures as they are generally where you spend all those lovely refined resources.  One would think that would be the easiest place to make adjustments without making large changes to how the economy works.

[Gudea]

Food Production - If Food went from $1.4 billion to $4.7 billion excess in around 4 months, maybe that can be fixed by just changing the Farm limits, ie. limit of 10 Farms instead of 20, Bonus Production = 50% @ 10 Farms, Land area bonus would still apply. Kind of like Fe / Pb mining and Oil drilling, but with the Land bonus. That would effectively cut excess Food production in half.😲

I'm not sure how to define 'excess', but there is currently about 118 days of Food available for the entire population of Orbis, vide the World Map, and Data Visualization numbers. I'm not sure what would be a nominal figure, but it seems that less than 1/3 of the Food produced in that 4 month period was used.🤔

*Face facts : Growing Food is stupid profitable compared to anything else, given the zero cost for mfg. / pollution reduction, so whales buy Plantations. Get Green Tech + land and you're all set. That juice was definitely worth the squeeze! Hey, I'm somewhat guilty of doing this myself.😁

Uranium usage rates : Double? Maybe a 50% - 66% increase for U usage, but double seems a bit excessive. I'm thinking of players that can't mine it like I do, or have low city count and have to purchase to keep the lights on.💡

The rest of the sinks seem OK. Nice to see the crew's on top of things!

 

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

12 minutes ago, Gudea said:

 maybe that can be fixed by just changing the Farm limits, ie. limit of 10 Farms instead of 20,

if you do that remember you now have 10 free improvement slots to make something else, so you go from having nations making max food to now making max food and maxing out 2 additional resources.  For a nation like mine that means yes half the food output, but i am now making over 4k a day of 2 other resources.  So you are just pushing the issue somewhere else.

Edited June 8, 2023 by Sweeeeet Ronny D

[Austin Powers]

On 6/7/2023 at 12:18 PM, Prefontaine said:

There has been a lot of talk regarding hyper inflation of resources, largely since RPC. While some metrics are skewed based on how many of those resources fall into inactive nations, market values are dropping which shows the production of many resources is outpacing uses. Some changes have been considered for addressing this imbalance. Please provide feedback, thanks. 

 

POWER PLANT INCREASES
Oil and Coal increased from 1.2 tons per day -> 2.0 tons per day
Nuclear 1.2 tons per day -> 2.4 tons per day

REFINEMENT INCREASES
OLD: 3 tons of oil -> 6 tons of gas
NEW: 4 tons of oil -> 6 tons of gas

OLD: 3 tons of iron and coal -> 9 tons of steel
NEW: 3.5 tons of iron and coal -> 9 tons of steel

OLD: 3 tons of bauxite -> 9 tons of aluminum
NEW: 4 tons of bauxite -> 9 tons of aluminum

OLD: 6 tons of lead -> 18 tons of munitions
NEW: 8 tons of lead -> 18 tons of munitions

RAW RESOURCE REFINEMENT
Food no longer has bonus to production for having more farms. 

RESOURCES USED FOR CITIES
Starting after C20, every city requires 100 iron, bauxite, lead, steel, aluminum. This increases by 100 for each city until C30, after C30 it increases by 200. After C40 it increases by 300. After C50 it increases by 400. Cities above C20 are reduced by 2.5% for cash Cities above C40 are also discounted by another 2.5% (5% total). Any current discounts to city production does not impact resources, only cash costs. 

Examples:
C21 Costs 100 Iron/Baux/Lead/Steel/Alum in addition to $
C25 Costs 500 Iron/Baux/Lead/Steel/Alum in addition to $
C30 Costs 1000 Iron/Baux/Lead/Steel/Alum in addition to $
C35 Costs 2000 Iron/Baux/Lead/Steel/Alum in addition to $
C40 Costs 3000 Iron/Baux/Lead/Steel/Alum in addition to $
C45 Costs 4500 Iron/Baux/Lead/Steel/Alum in addition to $

FOOD CONSUMPTION
Formula Change: (basePop)^2/125m + ((basePop) * (age modifier) - basePop)/850

The red line is the new formula, black is the current.  We were looking at some other options as you'll see an orange and green line as well. I'll let members of the team who took a deep dive into the formula provide some more information. 

that is very bad and i have a discord ticket also @Prefontaine

[Cirno]

On 6/7/2023 at 10:31 AM, Hulu said:

wouldnt that just drive the food demand up, increasing the price of food, it would still benefit the farmers.

but the reason is why is this change happening.

Right now it makes more sense to buy someone who specifically produces a resource because the multiplier means they produce it more effectively than you would by having a few improvements to cover just your needs.

By removing the multiplier, you could argue there would be more incentive to just have X number of farms per city to cover your needs rather than buy from someone who produces food in mass and more effectively. Even if it means just partially covering their needs, people may just fill any extra slots with farms over anything else as there's no reason not to -- since you aren't missing out on a multiplier.

If that ends up being the case and more people slot in a few farms for their builds, it will negate the effects of extra consumption / lack of a multiplier. The only leg up a dedicated food producer would have in this case is how much land they have.

Edited June 8, 2023 by Cirno

[Dorothy Latimer]

Delete RPC project

[Gudea]

11 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

if you do that remember you now have 10 free improvement slots to make something else, so you go from having nations making max food to now making max food and maxing out 2 additional resources.  For a nation like mine that means yes half the food output, but i am now making over 4k a day of 2 other resources.  So you are just pushing the issue somewhere else.

That did cross my mind. It's hard to balance this stuff. Like cutting numbers by 40%, as an example. Maybe decrease raw materials output for manufacturing by around 20%, and increase usage by 20%. ie. Instead of 10 mines putting out 45 units/day, the new output would be 36 units/day. A 5 factory city needing 30.6 units/day would need 36.72 units/day. This kind of splits the extra load between miners/drillers and manufacturers. It might cut into materials production enough to not need to add materials to constructing cities. Excess raw material for manufactures and manufactured material should fall off.

Food and Uranium are tough ones, due to the inelastic demand angle. Slashing Farm productivity by like 40% strikes me as kinda Draconian, but it would bring Farm profits closer to manufacturing profits. Farms are way more profitable than factories. Excess Food should fall off.

I don't mine much Uranium for profit, even with the project. Maybe a pollution/build price/operating cost adjustment for the Uranium mines (and probably everything else I mentioned!) to go with a Draconian 40% productivity cut to Uranium mines. Excess Uranium should fall off.

Anyway, that would fix the excesses on Food and U, and without adjusting usage amounts for the consumers.

"Green Acres is the place fer me! Farm livin' is the life fer me!" - Oliver Wendell Douglas

[Unlimited]

11 hours ago, Mags Black said:

Delete RPC project

it uhm, has been deleted

 

[Ramona]

Why adding projects won't fix resource inflation in the long-term/isn't the best way to combat this resource inflation:

I'm not gonna bother tagging everyone who was suggesting that game devs should just add more projects, I don't really care.

Disclaimer: I am a Goober shill.

1. For most novelty projects people may be inclined to buy it at first, but as the weeks/months/years pass people will stop thinking about buying it. For e.g. Moon Landing, 32 people bought it in 2020 and 40 people have bought it in the last 2.5 years since. A ton of people would have to buy a project at a consistent rate over a couple years to control inflation through this "project measure". 

2. Most people/alliance governments' first questions on a new project is "Is this a good investment? What advantage will this give? What is the ROI?", I believe the answers to these questions have the biggest impact on whether a project will be bought, i.e, will the project be a Clinical Research Centre or a Military Salvage?
Onto my point, the ROI amount would effectively be setting the a PPU at which the project would be a buy or not a buy. Ignore this point if you are imagining a purely novelty project and proceed to 3.

3. Project slots, honestly if project slots were purchasable they could fetch more than the project itself is worth, just a comment on the value of project slots (you can actually purchase a project slot, so there is an actual price of a project slot). Like 99% of players won't build a novelty project to sacrifice growth. Especially if the price of the project is high (Like $200m+).
There are about 13 projects (imho) that are must/should buys (yes of course spy sat is on the list, no it is not up for debate) the amount of slots needed to get these 13 is equal to a c25 with 2.5k infra each city or about 1500 nations above this threshold. In a game with like 6000 nations in alliances would 25% of the nations buy enough novelty projects to make sure inflation get out of hand? I doubt it.

4. I mentioned in 1. that only 72 people have bought Moon Landing (PnW's only/most important novelty projects), I will be fair and say some people who have bought it have deleted, so i'll say 100 have bought it ever. But yes, only 72 people have bought Moon Landing. And I don't believe people are just waiting for the right novelty project to purchase.
And of these 72 nations most of them have a lot of cities, just scroll through the list and you will see some of the biggest nations in the game. Most of the time, only bigger nations are willing to build novelty/meme projects.

5. Compared to other measures for fighting this inflation problem, most of the ones that are being considered are measurable to see their future impact (for e.g. increasing food consumption). How would the consumption of resources by project purchasing be controlled in order to control inflation, as the main goal of the initiatives to cause deflation of resources is to also imho to control it to bring it down to a reasonable level. If there is a way to achieve control, I would genuinely be open to hear it. But I think the reality shown in 1 would kill any sort of control. 
The only way I can see it being controlled is if values relating to the project and adjusted per week, in which look at 5.

5. This may work for other games/MMOs but as i've explained, it wouldn't work for PnW. Also given PnW's current state, I doubt the game devs would be willing to put a lot of time into the game, esp for making and tinkering with novelty projects.

I'm sure some dork could pull some voodoo API to show the DGAF about growth API stats in some very impressive Desmos chart. Feel more than free to do so.

My accreditations: I'm #25 on spies killed leaderboard. 

Edited June 9, 2023 by Ramona
CORRECTION!: I moved up 1 position on the spykills ranking, no longer #26.

[Lord Cosmos]

Have we looked into increasing the number and/or type of cash generating improvements? This would seem another way to impact the market, as it would increase cash supplies, and likely reduce resource production, both of which should help stabilize resource prices, and perhaps push them back towards more historical norms.

[Abaddon]

On 6/7/2023 at 7:18 PM, Prefontaine said:

RESOURCES USED FOR CITIES
Starting after C20, every city requires 100 iron, bauxite, lead, steel, aluminum. This increases by 100 for each city until C30, after C30 it increases by 200. After C40 it increases by 300. After C50 it increases by 400. Cities above C20 are reduced by 2.5% for cash Cities above C40 are also discounted by another 2.5% (5% total). Any current discounts to city production does not impact resources, only cash costs. 

This is a terrible idea from an alliance perspective btw. Having to !@#$ around with 1000 iron and lead to grant someone a city is just extremely annoying and won't do anything to fix the market. It's just a needless time sink for alliance governments to manage micro amounts of raws.

And on the flip side, even if you wanted to look at it from a nation perspective; having to go on the market and buy 1000 lead so I can get my city is just such a waste of time imo.

I think passive sinks work far better than purchases. Even if all 5000 of us cloned ourselves and bought every project you released all at once, the prices wouldn't change.

Edited June 10, 2023 by abaddon

[Gudea]

@Prefontaine Maybe try this out. This strikes at the root of the problem, and might be a long-term solution. I'm paraphrasing an answer to Sweeeeet Ronnie D above. It supposes a target of 40% reduction in materials:

Maybe decrease raw materials output for manufacturing by around 20%, and increase usage by 20%. ie. Instead of 10 mines putting out 45 units/day, the new output would be 36 units/day. A 5 factory city needing 30.6 units/day would now need 36.72 units/day. This kind of splits the 40% between miners/drillers and manufacturers. It might cut into materials production enough to not need to add materials to constructing cities. And a 20% decrease in pollution/build price/operating cost on all of the above is fair, and wouldn't be a real game changer. Excess raw material for manufactures and manufactured materials should fall off. (C, Fe, Pb, Bauxite and Oil base production = 2.4 units per day)

Food and Uranium are tough ones, due to the inelastic demand angle. Slashing Farm productivity by like 40% sounds kinda Draconian, but it would bring Farm profits closer to manufacturing profits, and drop the amount being produced. Farming would still be more profitable than manufacturing for Plantation owners. Excess Food should fall off. (Farm base production = Land Area/833.333333. With Mass Irrigation = Land Area/625)

For U, a 40% downward adjustment for pollution/build price/operating cost to go with the Draconian 40% decrease in mine output. Excess Uranium should fall off. (U base production = 1.8 units per day; 3.6 with U Enrichment)

Anyway, that would fix the excesses on Food and U, and without adjusting usage amounts for the consumers.

Unfortunately, there is no quick fix.

"Green Acres is the place fer me! Farm livin' is the life fer me!" - Oliver Wendell Douglas

[Nacho]

Hola amigos, 

The power plant increases seems like an effective way to keep uranium production and consumption balanced. Similarly, turning up food consumption seems necessary at this point. I think the increase in rss used for building cities is not a good idea. It lacks incentive to keep building cities. 

Instead of increasing the amount used in raw refinement and nerfing farming bonuses, could an increase in consumptions of refined materials and food during wars bring us back to better levels? Essentially, instead of nerfing peace times growth/production rates, would turning up the pixel burning during war times be the better route? My thinking is this route doesn't dissuade anyone from what they are currently producing/manufacturing. 

Also, could making all projects only of refined materials (steel,aluminum,ammo,gas), rather than raws (coal,iron,bauxite,oil,lead,uranium) achieve more desirable outcomes in the overall market levels? After all, someone always has to refine raws and this could keep an active market with supply and demand. If that isn't effective, another possibility is having small, but recurring maintenance fees of raws and refined for each project.

 

Edited June 10, 2023 by Nacho
more context

[Johnson Boris]

I was gonna write a long text on my views on how this will change the balance of the game but then realised that that is not my job. My job is to try to exploit the mechanics to my benefit as much as I can.

 

Idk, good luck. I hope this makes the game more fun or something.  

Edited June 11, 2023 by Johnson Boris

[Zei-Sakura Alsainn]

On 6/10/2023 at 12:42 PM, Nacho said:

Hola amigos, 

The power plant increases seems like an effective way to keep uranium production and consumption balanced. Similarly, turning up food consumption seems necessary at this point. I think the increase in rss used for building cities is not a good idea. It lacks incentive to keep building cities. 

Instead of increasing the amount used in raw refinement and nerfing farming bonuses, could an increase in consumptions of refined materials and food during wars bring us back to better levels? Essentially, instead of nerfing peace times growth/production rates, would turning up the pixel burning during war times be the better route? My thinking is this route doesn't dissuade anyone from what they are currently producing/manufacturing. 

Also, could making all projects only of refined materials (steel,aluminum,ammo,gas), rather than raws (coal,iron,bauxite,oil,lead,uranium) achieve more desirable outcomes in the overall market levels? After all, someone always has to refine raws and this could keep an active market with supply and demand. If that isn't effective, another possibility is having small, but recurring maintenance fees of raws and refined for each project.

 

Projects have already been addressed as to why they aren't a real solution.

Food consumption already does increase in wars. Furthermore, wars tend to be basically over after the first round, with the loser only suffering infra losses after and tossing nukes out. This is why there's such an obnoxious amount of refined resources, because war mechanics are broken and have been for years preventing war from acting as the resource sink it should be.

 

Fees and resource decay and all that have been suggested before and shot down for various reasons I don't feel like going through a dozen old threads to explain.

 

 

 

[Anarchist Empire]

Now Lead is like 3.4k and Iron like 2.4k; so definity more expensive than I've seen them before. Maybe in anticipation of knowing he wants to do changes to make them more expensive?

Still disagree resources were getting cheaper, but guess them getting more expensive could be good in some ways. lol

[Marshall Tucker]

I think that is bad for new players like myself to run out of resources faster. Consider placing it on the bigger, more elite nations,not the fledglings.

[Anarchist Empire]

14 hours ago, Marshall Tucker said:

I think that is bad for new players like myself to run out of resources faster. Consider placing it on the bigger, more elite nations,not the fledglings.

Raid inactives for resources. They want to delete all the inactives, so those players don't come back & smaller nations have no benefit in being able to raid inactive nations to try catching up some? If they do that, guess will just need to see how long it lasts where raiding inactives can be profitable or all active raids is what to do.

[Nacho]

On 6/11/2023 at 2:09 PM, Zei-Sakura Alsainn said:

Projects have already been addressed as to why they aren't a real solution.

Food consumption already does increase in wars. Furthermore, wars tend to be basically over after the first round, with the loser only suffering infra losses after and tossing nukes out. This is why there's such an obnoxious amount of refined resources, because war mechanics are broken and have been for years preventing war from acting as the resource sink it should be.

 

Fees and resource decay and all that have been suggested before and shot down for various reasons I don't feel like going through a dozen old threads to explain.

 

 

 

I certainly agree first round infra losses are excessive. I would prefer, and I think many of us would, if infra loss were at a lower rate. I think the rss burn I'm suggesting (raws,manu) could be achieved if infrastructure losses weren't so drastic.