Game Development Discussion: Economic Balance Update

[Panky]

Realllyyyyyy easy fix for most of these issues. DEAR COMMUNITY, STOP FARMING SO MUCH AND HAVE MORE WARS, thank you.

[Corvidae]

7 hours ago, Keegoz said:

Those that like to track the games data may not be surprised by this, but the game has reached fairly high amount of resources. Whilst we look towards more sinks and have actively tried to adjust consumption, it is time we tweak some of the production side of things (which is much easier to implement in the short term). The basic thought is to make slot choices a little harder and nerf some of the improvements that are a little too effective right now.

This is the current proposal:

• Decrease Nuclear Power Plants base to 500 and max to 1000 (reduced from 1000 infra and max 2000 infra)
• Police stations to decrease crime by base 1.5 % (Down from 2.5%)
• Manufacturing production to be halved from the base amount, amount of manufacturing improvements cap to increase from 5 to 10
• Remove the production bonus from food (50% max to 0%)

Ideally this will lead nations to have to invest more slots into other areas of their nation and make it harder to retain the same production they have now. I am aware that nerfing the production side of this game is seldom popular, nor the most inventive idea but we are trying to advert the games economy from once again becoming oversaturated. As always, leave your thoughts and ideas below.

All of these seem like bad ideas that have no benefit to the player or the game. "Make less resources" to balance a spreadsheet and fit your general idea of where resources should be is a horrific waste of development time.

 

Let me hit you with some bullet points just based on your own:
 

• RNG nuclear meltdowns and disasters with an extremely low chance of occurrence and an annual limit on how many times it can occur per nation (like it can't happen twice in 365 days, nations get a disaster-happened flag when it pops off and it expires in a year. Can be used for adding in more events later!)
• Crime fluctuates based on events, active wars, recently destroyed infra, etc and it actually has an impact beyond being an income reducer. This game desperately needs some kind of events system to give the actual feeling of a nation.
• Feeding into the events-theme of my post, unions can go on strike and reduce your manufacturing output. Or the nation can rally together during times of war to increase production.
• Deepen the Season system that is already in-place. Give a chance for a harsh winter or summer, a bad harvest due to blight in the Autumn, and maybe even rework how farms function in totality: You have to have them in the Spring season to plant them, if you build them after or lose them before Autumn then you get a reduced harvest. Winter has no production.

 

I think we're reaching the death-point of this game rapidly and without some serious and creative changes, you will continue to see Band-Aid fixes like these be universally hated by the community you're pitching them to.

[MrBeast6000]

7 hours ago, Keegoz said:

Those that like to track the games data may not be surprised by this, but the game has reached fairly high amount of resources. Whilst we look towards more sinks and have actively tried to adjust consumption, it is time we tweak some of the production side of things (which is much easier to implement in the short term). The basic thought is to make slot choices a little harder and nerf some of the improvements that are a little too effective right now.

This is the current proposal:

• Decrease Nuclear Power Plants base to 500 and max to 1000 (reduced from 1000 infra and max 2000 infra)
• Police stations to decrease crime by base 1.5 % (Down from 2.5%)
• Manufacturing production to be halved from the base amount, amount of manufacturing improvements cap to increase from 5 to 10
• Remove the production bonus from food (50% max to 0%)

Ideally this will lead nations to have to invest more slots into other areas of their nation and make it harder to retain the same production they have now. I am aware that nerfing the production side of this game is seldom popular, nor the most inventive idea but we are trying to advert the games economy from once again becoming oversaturated. As always, leave your thoughts and ideas below.

What the game is experiencing right now is a combination of project price cuts, less wars being fought, and natural growing pains as more people play this game. I think it would be better to introduce more diversity into the market by adding new raw resources and manufactured resources like luxury resources. Until you introduce more diversity or make more resources diversified into new sectors like making your citizens happy, the game's economy will always be driven by projects and war. Most people stop buying projects after they get to a certain point (city 40) because the late game projects just suck and you have little to no project slots anyways by then. And war is obviously player driven so it makes sense that the economy is inflated since we only had 3 major wars this year (including the one day global).

Edited May 28, 2024 by darkblade

[Shiho Nishizumi]

14 minutes ago, darkblade said:

What the game is experiencing right now is a combination of project price cuts, less wars being fought, and natural growing pains as more people play this game. I think it would be better to introduce more diversity into the market by adding new raw resources and manufactured resources like luxury resources. Until you introduce more diversity or make more resources diversified into different sectors, the game's economy will always be driven by projects and war. Most people stop buying projects after they get to a certain point (city 40) because the late game projects just suck and you have little to no project slots anyways by then. And war is obviously player driven so it makes sense that the economy is inflated since we only had 3 major wars this year (including the one day global).

In fairness, Keegoz did mention in RON that simple changes are much better because of the dev team having to deal with bloated legacy Alex code.

Which does mean that stuff like the stuff you suggested is probably unviable. Otherwise, I'd have brought up an idea I pitched like six years ago of having an extra improvement category (something like consumer goods) which uses up refined resources and gives you cash.

It does surprise me a bit that such an improvement category doesn't exist, given that it doesn't add any new resources, and I imagine would be relatively simple to implement (especially given that stuff like generals is being considered/implemented).

Edited May 28, 2024 by Shiho Nishizumi

[im317]

let me start by saying that i think there is to much food in the game. however prices never went below 100 ppu because it was to good of a value buy, which stems from farms being to valuable on a per slot basis. that said you have to invest to make up that value, as it takes buying land and the food production project. im always a proponent for gradual changes, so you dont end up swinging things to far. i think a better idea would be to reduce the max bonus on farms to 25% rather then removing it outright. then check back in 3 months and see if it has had the desired changes. also what is the desired change here? if its just to get food supply under control relative to the other resources then changing all the manufactured resources at the same time as food will mask the effects of the change.

the issue with most (all?)of  the other resources is due to inflation imo, and i agree with Exalts that raising the improvement cap would hurt smaller nations. at the moment there best options to get the 50% bonus are uranium mines and manufacturing. imo only food and manufactured resources are actually in high supply and since manufactured resources are critical to fighting wars there will always be an organized push by alliances to keep producing them even if its not the most cost effective thing to do. you need to take into consideration the massive amounts of resources that alliances keep for warchests as those are kept off the market.

also please stop raising the cash exchange value for credits

Edited May 28, 2024 by im317

[MrBeast6000]

7 minutes ago, Shiho Nishizumi said:

In fairness, Keegoz did mention in the OWF that simple changes are much better because of the dev team having to deal with bloated legacy Alex code.

Yeah, I'm assuming this is the best option based on the resources the development team has (which I'm glad he is addressing). But it still sucks because it punishes the players for the dev teams inability to properly address it due to Alex's greasy code. Eventually we will reach a tipping point to where a patch won't be able to fix the problem and a major change will need to occur.

 

15 minutes ago, Shiho Nishizumi said:

Which does mean that stuff like the stuff you suggested probably unviable. Otherwise, I'd have brought up an idea I pitched like six years ago of having an extra improvement category (something like consumer goods or something) which uses up refined resources and gives you cash.

It does surprise me a bit that such an improvement category doesn't exist, given that it doesn't add any new resources.

Yeah, my suggestion would probably be too complex to implement it in a reasonable time if it all. But I think your suggestion of introducing a new category that turns resources into cash would be easy to implement if done correctly. All that really needs to be done is copy and paste most of the code that turns raws into manus. Only problem would be balancing it since it can easily speed up growth too much and we end up back where we started with this problem.

[Sketchy]

I think it would be best to allow the market to correct itself for a change, before tweaking consumption or production again.

Some of the people hovering over the prices in the design team trying to pull levers to course correct need to relax a bit.

The market right now is already super high, reducing consumption further will only exacerbate that.

Even if we were going to course correct, not sure why manus need fixing, nor why we'd do it this way. Increasing costs is always the best way to approach this.

---
Also the reason the food supply is so high, is the game has been at peace for a long period of time. Looking at the supply chart, during peace we generate about 50m food per day, and at 100% radiation, we consume about 50m per day.

Politics can resolve that.

Edited May 28, 2024 by Sketchy

[Uncle Iroh]

Aren't we still waiting for the full project changes being implemented many of which affect said money/resources?

[SlyWolf21]

What if you give a daily usage for resources? Materials in an army will break down/need to be replaced. Therefor you spend some aluminum or steel to maintain your standing army. What if you had some bonuses tied to resources being consumed in your nation? Such as lead, oil, bauxite, etc. If you successfully maintain your daily consumption of these resources you get a small bonus to income or w/e.

Then once a month you as developers go "these events did xyz to the market, lets change the ratio of what we require to get that bonus" Say hey the oil market is going way down, lighten up on the daily requirement for oil, but whoa the bauxite supply is out of this world. Time to hike up the demands for bauxite to achieve that production bonus. 

This way
1) you dont have to add too much more stuff to the existing code
2) You can change it monthly, quarterly, etc. To accommodate changes in the free market. 
3) Probably a lot more fun to consider "hey i do this i make more money, but lose some resources" instead of wow i need ANOTHER power plant? thanks Obama. 

Or you know. Linear scaling defensives. Idk. 
 

[Siegfred the Free]

i almost never log in to the forum but I did just to tell you that you should not post anything like this again, thanks

[BlackAsLight]

Why is there being a lot of food in the game a problem? This post starts out by saying that there is a lot of resources in the game and implies that is inherently bad without explaining why.

[Totally Hatebi]

They lower the minimum infrastructure I lower the coolant in the nuclear reactor.

[Gul le Necro]

First, when you have a production of ressource you need to have a sink behind.

If production is out of control you need to pump up the sink too.

For example, make the production boost to having more than 1 improvement, 50% less effective.

Second, if nuclear power is too powerfull, you just make his uranium consuption goes 2 times up, without touching the others -> it will make a bigger sink to uranium.

You can augment also the consumption of food, so with only half the bonus of production it will balance it.

[Mohammad]

On 5/28/2024 at 11:25 AM, Kevanovia said:

Resource Fix:

If resources are deposited into the bank, they begin to have a shelf life. A 'use it or lose it' scenario. This would incentivize nations to keep more resources on-hand, which would also provide a boost for making war more profitable. This would assist pirates/raiders, as well as making inter-alliance war more worthwhile.

THIS!!!!

 

Every resource decays at a certain flat % rate. This basically increases consumption costs regardless of the dam Pixel-Hugging Farmer Bourgeoisie that runs the Game. 

 

Ex: X% of your food spoils every turn. No matter how much food u have or where it's stored in bank or in nation.

 

This will make it so that regardless if your food is sorted all in the aa bank or divided among nations it will all get spoiled. 

 

Decay rates get lower depending on the resource, Uranium being longest lasting. 

This should help since resources that never get used except in war (Munitions) will decay with time, and stockpiles will be worn out regardless of how long u try to pixel hug and farm.

 

 

[Sam Cooper]

I think manus can be left untouched for now, only food needs fixing and reducing the bonus production somewhat does that, we can tweak that further with more changes sure but manus are directly connected to wars, instead of reducing their production which may have bigger unexpected effects on wars, we should rather have changes that encourage wars and increase consumption of manus that way and we can take some time with that since only food needs any urgent change.

[Limbuwan]

 

[Tartarus]

3 hours ago, Limbuwan said:

 

I get the feeling you're very keen on this idea

[Abaddon]

The idea to slash or remove the food production bonus has been floating around for years now, but I think its only ever suggested because people think food is "too profitable" or something.

Food is the only resource in the game that is scalable - and because more of the player-base is now in the range to scale their production, they're buying land and switching to the only scalable resource. However, that also means those same people will consume a similarly large amount of food during war when radiation is at 100%.

We've seen the game's food stockpiles rebound after every war; and have had stable food prices for years. We have no reason to make course corrections if that remains being true in the future. Just because the number is high, doesn't mean its negatively affecting the game.

Most food in the game is held as stockpile anyway because major alliances burn through it in globals; and recently we've seen big merges and massive alliances propped up through a long peace which means more food than ever is required as stockpile for later. 

[Sketchy]

21 minutes ago, Abaddon said:

Food is the only resource in the game that is scalable - and because more of the player-base is now in the range to scale their production, they're buying land and switching to the only scalable resource.

And this is the real issue. Food/Land is the only scaleable resource in the game.

I'm a broken record at this point, but what the game needs is more longterm investments. We need more ways to build our nations tall, rather than wide.

Even infra suffers from the same issue, there is an effective cap on maximum infra that exists, because generally speaking, the games war cycle happens in around 2-3 months. So only idiots purchase infra with ROI periods that extend much further than that.

After c30, the ROI on cities is so incredibly low, you'll never see the money you invested back. The only reason to do it, is for increased military strength.

Rather than constantly adjusting levers to fix the market, we should be looking at expanding and deepening the current economic mechanics in the game. They are so surface level that a single individual can manage 170 nations econ themselves, which is exactly what I'm doing.

[Shiho Nishizumi]

20 minutes ago, Sketchy said:

And this is the real issue. Food/Land is the only scaleable resource in the game.

I'm a broken record at this point, but what the game needs is more longterm investments. We need more ways to build our nations tall, rather than wide.

Even infra suffers from the same issue, there is an effective cap on maximum infra that exists, because generally speaking, the games war cycle happens in around 2-3 months. So only idiots purchase infra with ROI periods that extend much further than that.

After c30, the ROI on cities is so incredibly low, you'll never see the money you invested back. The only reason to do it, is for increased military strength.

Rather than constantly adjusting levers to fix the market, we should be looking at expanding and deepening the current economic mechanics in the game. They are so surface level that a single individual can manage 170 nations econ themselves, which is exactly what I'm doing.

Probably a fair bit difficult to code, but being able to invest cash/refined to improve output/decrease upkeep/etc of any given refining improvement would be pretty neat. Not sure if it would be better at the base city level (how land works) or at a nation level where it'd be the investment divided by the number of cities, i.e. 100000 invested would have half the effect on a two city nation as it would on a one city nation.

[Abaddon]

15 hours ago, Shiho Nishizumi said:

Probably a fair bit difficult to code, but being able to invest cash/refined to improve output/decrease upkeep/etc of any given refining improvement would be pretty neat. Not sure if it would be better at the base city level (how land works) or at a nation level where it'd be the investment divided by the number of cities, i.e. 100000 invested would have half the effect on a two city nation as it would on a one city nation.

This isn't the first time I've heard this idea but yes, you should definitely be able to invest in some sort of technology (call it whatever) that increases output for a specific type of resource. That's practically the same thing as land, except in a different format.

[Gudea]

I'm not sure if there really is a problem with Food production right now. Numbers as of today show Orbis can sustain 102 days and 8 turns of no Food production, ie. 100% radiation. In peacetime.

An all-out Global nuclear war would increase usage by around 25% =  Food for a 77 day Global.

Figuring for massive infra losses, a Global nuclear war could go for around 9 months, or, a big maybe, 1 year max. That's not quite the length of Roqpocalypse Now!

That's also not figuring in any Food stockpiling for National Projects.

Also, given Orbis is no longer bi-polar, there may be more conflicts resulting in 100% radiation levels that aren't Global wars.

Average Food in active Nations right now is just over 1,000,000 units. If the average city count for actives is around 20, they might have Food on-hand for 30 days at most, and maybe some stockpiled for projects. That doesn't seem too excessive.

It might be a good idea to let any Food changes slide for 6-12 months after all the current changes to the projects have been made. And don't forget to do another deletion of dead nations again. Kinda let the smoke clear, and see where that leaves the Food scene.

Just my 2 cents.

 

 

[Benfro]

Resource stockpiling has been largely completed by major alliances to prep for wars that do not occur. The current war mechanics incentivize one side to turtle and slash costs within a day or two of the war beginning. The war system has been an issue for several years and ignored. If we improved the war system, more wars would be fought or at the very least the wars that did occur would involve more resource spending...

This isn't a complex issue. It is just an incorrectly attributed cause, in my mind.

[Stanko1987]

Dumb idea and it is the best way of killing the game.

[GLaDOS]