Game Development Discussion: Tariffs

[Lysander]

8 hours ago, Alan said:

Seems like another way for alliances to manipulate the market, stronger alliances make more on stronger tariffs.

This however does pull the Market Sharing feature into question. Instead of adding something like Tariffs why don't we buff Market sharing/alliance embargoes.

You can set market sharing to say 0% and all other trades are at the 10% tariff rate. Just add to what's existing and make the current features better with more involvement/planning.

 

8 hours ago, Zei-Sakura Alsainn said:

Yeah, this definitely isn't gonna work that way.

Basically every major alliance and sphere has their own active big name trade market players, who'd get screwed by this. 

It also screws over the other normal less intense players, who overwhelmingly sell to buy offers. 

The only thing I see this maybe achieving is getting spheres to use the alliance marketplace mechanic. Or even just individual alliances, really. Most are big enough to do that. 

 

Hell, I used to run the Econ for a 100/100 AA. Fully Autarkic. The only interaction with the market was me selling excess. As much as 40 active members, as few as like 18. It doesn't take alot to become independent of the market in this game. 

 

For that reason, especially the above paragraph, I'm not certain it'd even be used. There's not many types of resources in PW, so it's incredibly easy for a small group to be self sufficient. There's not much scarcity either, and this would mostly just inconvenience your average player and completely wreck your typical big trader. 

I just... Don't see any point or real benefit? Other than, again, creating closed off sphere markers and enforcing it with this? Unless that's your objective, then... I don't really see what alliance leadership across the game gets from this. Other than their market oriented members who bring wealth to the AA being livid and possibly leaving, and everyone else being annoyed that something they barely interact with anyway got more tedious and negatively affects their income and growth.

But then, everybody would do that, and it wouldn't really be much of a CB would it?

 

It's a nice idea, I see what you're going for. I just don't think it's really going to work, at least not how you imagine, if it does anything at all. 

 

Definitely understand the reasoning being put forth here. To Alan’s comment - in a way, encouraging use of the market-sharing feature of the game is part of what this is meant to do. If the public market ends up not being able to sell goods for an alliance, then selling internally (within the sphere) becomes a lot more useful. Also helps during wartime, when you probably don’t want your members buying from your direct opponents.

To Zei - Given that many alliances are already independent, and only interact with the market on an alliance level to offload resources, them not using the market isn’t really all that relevant, since they already don’t use it? Plus, alliances often do resource trades/sales through bank-to-bank transfers, which wouldn’t end up being affected here, meaning they can still do the bulk sales if they can find a buyer.

Offloading on to the market might be more difficult for them, sure, and yeah, it could definitely hurt certain traders. At the end of the day, though, a lot of traders actually make up the bulk of market volume, so the only thing an alliance does by tariff-ing a trader is make their members buy internally, which as you yourself pointed out, most alliances are already at the point of being market-independent.

[Kosta]

Love this idea.

[Anas Qazi]

Interesting in-game development to enhance our gameplay

[Village]

11 hours ago, Vanek26 said:

I just want to be able to tax raw resources and finished goofs at different rates. Been asking since 2015 for that. 

That's near the top of my list!

11 hours ago, Lord Tyrion said:

Can we finally allow alliance banks to conduct buy/sell trades rather than continually making it go through members to execute?

I'll put that on my list, maybe it'll happen in the future.

14 hours ago, Cassandra Moore said:

Please add togglability to automatically expand tariffs to M-, o-, PIAT &/or Prot allies of a tariffed alliance, and/or their market sharing partners

 I'll take a look at that, might happen.

11 hours ago, Phi said:

This idea sounds amazing, but there are loopholes around it. If they're sealed then this really does add an intriguing aspect to this game. I'd really love to see future treaties based off this.

Such as?

9 hours ago, matyo said:

I think it would be awesome if u could set a default tariff to all alliances making it a lot more useful to trade in the sharedmarkets also i like the idea that alliances could sanction bad alliances with it without fully blocking the trade with them 

A default tariff was intentionally left off to make it more targeted rather than just letting alliances blanket tax trades.

[matyo]

39 minutes ago, Village said:

A default tariff was intentionally left off to make it more targeted rather than just letting alliances blanket tax trades.

But without a default tariff it would not  make much of a difference it would almost feel like u just got embargoed which is rarely used 
But with a default tariff u would have to get some sharedmarket with ur allies or if u are a member of an alliance u would have to contact specific suppliers to import stuff to your nation which might be a bit annoying but would make politics and war a bit more active and intresting  

[Ketya]

I would suggest leaving alliance banks not being able to buy/sell in the market unchanged. It is more fun to see pirates catch individual nations with a load of resources

[Village]

34 minutes ago, matyo said:

But without a default tariff it would not  make much of a difference it would almost feel like u just got embargoed which is rarely used 
But with a default tariff u would have to get some sharedmarket with ur allies or if u are a member of an alliance u would have to contact specific suppliers to import stuff to your nation which might be a bit annoying but would make politics and war a bit more active and intresting  

Yeah that's kind of the goal, it's not meant to provide alliances with a one click mechanic to tax their trades and lock things down, rather a tool to leverage more granularly.

[matyo]

11 minutes ago, Village said:

Yeah that's kind of the goal, it's not meant to provide alliances with a one click mechanic to tax their trades and lock things down, rather a tool to leverage more granularly.

well it wont affect too much then  i guess thanks for clarifying tho

20 minutes ago, Ketya said:

I would suggest leaving alliance banks not being able to buy/sell in the market unchanged. It is more fun to see pirates catch individual nations with a load of resources

maybe but it a real big pain in the ass to do it through ur nation

[Mexifornia]

18 hours ago, lightside said:

I dislike this idea. People will just temporally leave/join alliances to minmax and avoid them. This would make trading annoying because of that...

Wouldn't an easy fix for this be to have a timer on how soon someone can rejoin an alliance after leaving? 

 

I personally like this idea. I don't think that all the issues people are mentioning will be issues. 

 

I remember a time when everyone was fussing that there were no updates happening to the game. Now we have someone regularly updating the game and all I hear is how the current update ideas won't work. This happened with the previous update also. 

 

I think we should let Village make some updates and then give our feedback afterwards. Things can always be changed, but we can't have actual opinions without being able to experience the update first. 

 

Thank you Village for providing us with these updates and I hope they work out like they should. 

[Panky]

im just waiting for this to be somehow exploited, deff gonna break the game.

[matt2004]

On 8/22/2023 at 7:46 PM, Village said:

A default tariff was intentionally left off to make it more targeted rather than just letting alliances blanket tax trades.

I feel that leaving a default tarriff off is just going to mean the feature sits unused.

I would much prefer to add a Common External Tarrif as a baseline from the alliance control panel.

Once the CET is set, any manual tarriff applications then override the CET (either higher, lower, or removing altogether).

That gives the option of targeting, while lowering the bar for application.
 

[Abdur Rehman]

would tarrif rose and uu 100%

[BlackAsLight]

If A has an import tariff on B and B has an export tariff on A, does that mean a member of A would be paying 20% in tariffs, 10% to each, to gain resources from a member of B?

Edited April 7 by BlackAsLight

[Gudea]

14 hours ago, BlackAsLight said:

If A has an import tariff on B and B has an export tariff on A, does that mean a member of A would be paying 20% in tariffs, 10% to each, to gain resources from a member of B?

Actually, the 10% import tariff and 10% export tariff together would amount to a total of 21% on the purchase. Tax on tax. Ouch.

Example: 1 unit of Food sold at $125 = 125 x 1.10 = $137.5 (w/t Export Tariff); $137.5 x 1.10 = $151.25 (w/t Import Tariff); Total Tariffs % = $151.25-125 = ($26.25/125 = .21) = 21%. Even dropping the decimal by rounding down is still 20.8%. Yowza!!! 😲

Edited April 8 by Gudea
Punctuation

[Raphael]

Echoing what others said, I think this would be a neat flavor addition but see very little use. Applying tariffs would just actively harm your own members for likely no benefit. If you expanded the scope of this change a bit further, I believe it could be very impactful.

 

Remove direct control of tariffs, base it on number of trades between any two alliances. Say it starts at a default 0%, ticking up by 0.01% per turn. Each trade reduces it by 0.01%. Only count trades above a certain value to prevent exploit. If this option is chosen, I'd then recommend the tariff money delete from the game instead of going into an alliance bank. Now you have a cool feature and a money sink.

[BlackAsLight]

Why is there no delete button?

Edited April 9 by BlackAsLight

[BlackAsLight]

@Village I feel like your explanations are be bit lacking as in how they'd work considering the market is not viewed as selling and buying, but an offerer and acceptor. As an offerer can be both a seller and a buyer, and likewise an acceptor can be both a buyer and seller. Your explanations would suggest that the listed price will always increase due to a tariff, but on the selling side of the market, it would make more sense for the price listed to decrease.

Scenarios

Under the assumption Alliance `A` had issued a 10% import and export tariff on Alliance `B` and no tariffs on Alliance `C`.

• `A` offers to sell food at $101/ton.
  • `C` would see a `Buy` button for $101/ton, where for every ton of food bought by `C`, `A` would get $100.
  • `B` would see a `Buy` button for $111.10/ton (due to the export tariff), where for every ton of food bought by `B`, `A` would get $101 and `A`'s Bank would get $10.10.
• `A` offers to buy food at $100/ton.
  • `C` would see a `Sell` button for $100/ton, where for every ton of food sold by `C`, `C` would get $100.
  • `B` would see a `Sell` button for $90/ton (due to the import tariff), where every ton of food sold by `B`, `B` would get $90, and `A`'s Bank would get $10.
• `B` offers to sell food at $101/ton.
  • `A` would see a `Buy` button for $111.10/ton (due to the import tariff), where for every ton of food bought by `A`, `B` would get $101 and `A`'s Bank would get $10.10.
• `B` offers to buy food at $100/ton.
  • `A` would see a `Sell` button for $90/ton (due to the export tariff), where every ton of food sold by `A`, `A` would get $90, and `A`'s Bank would get $10.

Under these scenarios, the offerer would always be getting the amount of money they set, and the price on the label would either increase when the acceptor is buying, or decrease when the acceptor is selling.

It should be noted that an export tariff from `A` to `B` of 100% would make `B`'s offer to buy food appear as $0/ton, while `A`'s offer to sell food appear as $202/ton. Even though the food is travelling in the same direction (from A to B), the cost changes simply because of who is accepting, even when it is listed at the same price.

Edited April 10 by BlackAsLight
Typo

[Village]

14 hours ago, BlackAsLight said:

Under the assumption Alliance `A` had issued a 10% import and export tariff on Alliance `B` and no tariffs on Alliance `C`.

• `A` offers to sell food at $101/ton.
  • `C` would see a `Buy` button for $101/ton, where for every ton of food bought by `C`, `A` would get $100.
  • `B` would see a `Buy` button for $111.10/ton (due to the export tariff), where for every ton of food bought by `B`, `A` would get $101 and `A`'s Bank would get $10.10.
• `A` offers to buy food at $100/ton.
  • `C` would see a `Sell` button for $100/ton, where for every ton of food sold by `C`, `C` would get $100.
  • `B` would see a `Sell` button for $90/ton (due to the import tariff), where every ton of food sold by `B`, `B` would get $100, and `A`'s Bank would get $10.
• `B` offers to sell food at $101/ton.
  • `A` would see a `Buy` button for $111.10/ton (due to the import tariff), where for every ton of food bought by `A`, `B` would get $101 and `A`'s Bank would get $10.10.
• `B` offers to buy food at $100/ton.
  • `A` would see a `Sell` button for $90/ton (due to the export tariff), where every ton of food sold by `A`, `A` would get $90, and `A`'s Bank would get $10.

Under these scenarios, the offerer would always be getting the amount of money they set, and the price on the label would either increase when the acceptor is buying, or decrease when the acceptor is selling.

It should be noted that an export tariff from `A` to `B` of 100% would make `B`'s offer to buy food appear as $0/ton, while `A`'s offer to sell food appear as $202/ton. Even though the food is travelling in the same direction (from A to B), the cost changes simply because of who is accepting, even when it is listed at the same price.

Almost, nothing C does would ever get any effect which is right, but in your example the buy offers are wrong though. In all cases the price would go up by 10% for an A<->B transaction, with that extra 10% going to the bank. In the buy offer cases you listed the display as $90. In both buy offer cases, the offerer gets exactly what they asked for, it's the accepter that sees a price 10% higher that's going to the AA bank.

[BlackAsLight]

6 hours ago, Village said:

Almost, nothing C does would ever get any effect which is right, but in your example the buy offers are wrong though. In all cases the price would go up by 10% for an A<->B transaction, with that extra 10% going to the bank. In the buy offer cases you listed the display as $90. In both buy offer cases, the offerer gets exactly what they asked for, it's the accepter that sees a price 10% higher that's going to the AA bank.

So if A offers to buy food at $100/ton, B would see it at $110/ton, but only receive $100/ton and cause A to hand over more money to their bank than they ever intended to spend? Simply because B chose to accept A's offer? By this logic A doesn't actually know how much they'd be spending to buy resources as it's dependent on who accepts their offer, and B is being advertised a lie, which would also look like a mistrade on the market. 
 

Edit: this would also allow B's alliance to temporarily set an export tariff of 100% on A, have B accept A's offer and extract even more money out of A. Essentially allowing one alliance to steal from other alliances. 

Edited April 10 by BlackAsLight

[Village]

That's my bad yeah. I hate trying to logic out all the price stuff with buy and sell and offerer and acceptor and everything. The sell offer examples you listed would be right, 

On 4/9/2024 at 1:21 AM, BlackAsLight said:

• `B` would see a `Sell` button for $90/ton (due to the import tariff), where every ton of food sold by `B`, `B` would get $100, and `A`'s Bank would get $10.

This example would be incorrect, it's adding $10 out of nowhere.

On 4/9/2024 at 1:21 AM, BlackAsLight said:

• `A` would see a `Sell` button for $90/ton (due to the export tariff), where every ton of food sold by `A`, `A` would get $90, and `A`'s Bank would get $10.

This example would be correct.