no Price changes

Wow, that's a big change. I can't say that I like it or that I dislike it, but it certainly will change the game. Luxury motor cars will sell for less than half of what they do now while quartz watch will sell for over double its current price. Overall prices will be a little lower. Ice cream will sell for less, but wooden table will sell for more. There will definitely be winners and losers with this change. Will the old maxim of "make cars to win" still hold?

I'll say one thing - this suggestion will lead me to look at the numbers again.

The way things were players would look to key products: ice box, keyboard, fridge, motor car, etc. Each time you'd get to one of these products the game would change, and your company would become much more profitable and your score making ability would go up to a new level. This change could eliminate or change those key points in the RL tree and change the game. Will it be for the better or for the worse?

(One Stroke thinks for a bit.....)

I like the change. The mechanics of the game have become too well known. Top players have picked their products and done their research and are now manipulating smaller and smaller details of the game mechanics to gain an advantage and win. This change will shake up the old guard, and perhaps give the new guys a better shot at the win. Perhaps.

Dang, I just formulated my plan for the new prices. It would have been awesome and different.

With the help of Google translate I was able to read the German thread. I understand that there are some who very much dislike this proposed change. I understand their position. People become familiar with a situation, invest time and emotion into it and don't want wholesale change. After analyzing the numbers briefly, I suspect that the winning industry would change from cars to jewelery. Somethings would change very little. Wooden table - already the best initial product would be slightly better, while ice cream (also a good beginning product) would be far worse. Tricycle (Jik's starting product) would be much better than before.

In the proposed price scheme a product that can be produced in great number with a small number of buildings and with high production costs would give the most profit, most vendor score, and most manufacturing score. In this case the product would be Jewelery by a wide wide margin.

So, it would be a big shake up. The dominance of the auto industry would be replaced by the dominance of the jewelery industry.

I wouldn't mind it, but I know may others would. The fact that people would dislike the change so strongly would probably lead some to quit and reduce the sized of the pool of players. I think this reduction of numbers of players is the one good reason to not make this change.

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With that said, the game does have a problem with only one or two paths to victory, a problem with a few people vying for victory each round, and a problem with a market that is calm and predictable. Fixing some of these problems would improve the game, but how should it be done?

Right now only Autos and maybe Jewelry can lead to victory. When a game with such a broad variety of products and a deliciously complicated structure of production and scoring is reduced to one or two paths, the complication is being wasted. But how do we open a new path to victory? To win you need sales volume to get vendor score, you need to produce a lot of items with high normal price for manufacturing score, and you need to make a lot of money for ROI.

In a real market, items will gain higher prices when they are under produced. As production rises, the price at which an item can be sold drops. In this game that occurs to an extent, but only in products that are overproduced in great numbers (ice box, fridge, motor car, etc..). When 42" LCD TVs first came on the market in the US they cost $15,000, but now you can buy one for $1,000. If we mimicked this sort of price curve we could make all products a potential game winner. Let the normal price be 10x as high as the current normal price when production is only 10% of the market demand. Let it drop to 2x when 50% of the market demand is satisfied.

Current year Normal Price = (Wiki listed Normal Price)*100%/(SuDe % market satisfaction) - then place an upper limit of 10x Normal price and a lower limit of 1/10 normal price.

Use the current year normal price in the calculations for vendor score, and manufacturing score and all of the sudden any product can win the game for you if nobody else is making it. Under this formula a motor car would have a normal price of about 14,000 right now (SuDe is almost 1,000%) while Diesel fuel would have a normal price of 70,000. This only makes sense because in Tycoon World all these people have cars, but nobody can run them because there isn't enough fuel.

This would create a dynamic ever changing market. It would more closely resemble a real market, which I expect would be more enjoyable to more people.

Of course this might be all too much for the players of Tycoon World. After all the game has a long history of steady prices, and predictability. Maybe we could introduce a method where prices change more slowly. You could make it so any product that suffers over production to the extent of the SuDe reaching 500% or more at any time in the round have its normal price reduced by 5% in the next round. At the same time make any product that never gets the SuDe to raise above 20% has it's normal price raise by 5% or 10% in the next round. The game would maintain its slow and steady demeanor, and still have an element of change to it. After 10 rounds of insanely high motor car sales, the normal price would drop to 60% of what it is now, and it would no longer be such a great product. At the same time, after being completely ignored for the whole game, maybe frozen foods would become a reasonable thing to produce.

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Those are two options to mix things up a little. I'm sure others have more ideas. Maybe an open call for changes to the game mechanics is in order. I suspect the players would like a little change to the current order of things, and this sort of design and debate will probably be good for the game. It will involve the players, bring some activity to the forums, and bring some variety to the game. If we do it right, the game will be more interesting, and bring in more new players.

-Dave
One-Stroke

PS. I'll list a few ideas for spicing up the game.

1. Introduce a rock-paper-scissors method of winning the game. Maybe Jewelery makes the most money, but has poor vendor and manufacturing score. Autos make the most manufacturing score but have low ROI and low vendor score. And Textiles have the best vendor score, but poor ROI and manufacturing score. This way one industry can't monopolize the high score in every category.

2. Make event manager more important. Right now if you work really hard at it you can get about 1,000 points with event manager while it took Red Viper over 79,000 points to win. Event manager isn't a path to victory now, but if you gave more points for it, it could be. I'd try increasing the points you get with event manager by a factor of 10. Then it would matter.

3. Make market leader important. If people got victory points for selling what nobody else made, then that would be an easy way to get challengers from someplace other than autos. Last round the difference between 1st place and 25th was about 7,000 points. Spread over 90 days of the round comes to about 75-80 points per day. The last few rounds Preetz ended with a market leader score of about 5-6.5%. Right now Fun-Factory is in the lead with 6.5%. If we added 10x market leader score each day to the high-score earned by each player, that wold make market leader status important. Stora Enso has a market leader score of about 2% right now. The extra 45 points of high score for Fun-Factory would give him a meaningful advantage. A player might go all out and search for non-produced items to get a market leader score of 10% or 20% so they could get an extra 100 - 200 points per day. Maybe this would be another path to victory?

4. Give out sized bonuses for delivering high quality products that nobody else does. If a player is the only one to produce high quality of some product, then they have a normal price 2x or 5x the listed normal price. Maybe give a 2x bonus for selling products 10 QL points higher than anybody else, and give a 5x bonus for selling products 50 Ql points higher than anybody else. Players could start their own Starbucks by making QL 100 coffee. As it stands now, nobody will make high Q coffee because the game won't reward it. Make this change and they'll get the ROI, vendor score, and manufacturing score to make it worthwhile.

5. Introduce advertising. Build an office building on one of your squares to produce ads. The money you spend on ads can increase the numbers of products you can sell in your store. Let's say you can increase sales by at most 100% if you spend 500,000 per Wu on a store type. The actual sales increase would be reduced by competing ads. If two players spend 500,000 each on that store then they'd each get 50% more sales. How about this formula:

Sale increase % = (Money spent on ads)^(0.5)/[(50^0.5)*sum(M1^0.5,M2^0.5....Mn^0.5)]
where Mi = money spent on ads by player i.

If I spent 500K on autos, and so did Fun-Factory, Red Viper, Stora Enso, USA, and Oakville we'd each get an increase of 16.7%. But if a player was the only one to spend on Electronics and spent 500,000, they'd get a bonus of 100%. This would be a way to benefit out of favor industries and a way to increase complexity. Likewise since the effect of advertising is proportional to the square root of the spending, it pays to spend a small amount even at low RL where stores can't generate much revenue. It also ads another level of complexity which I believe is good for the game.

PPS. How's that for an opinion Fun-Factory?

This isn't the right normalization function. Since the production costs are the same as the manufacturing score, this function would leave autos as still by far the most profitable industry, albeit by smaller margin. Assuming that you want to have profits be the same for each product, the function you would want is something like:

Price = Price of components + production cost per unit + C * F(RL) / Production rate .

The constant C is something in the range of 100k for the more profitable products, and F(RL) should be something like 1+RL/50 or 1+RL/25. With your factor of 2.5/2 = 1.25 there would be very little reason to research the higher level products, and nobody would do it unless they were going for score instead of just trying to make money and do product research.

With no change to the current demand function, your price function would lead people to spread out over the available products, which would all sell for near maximum price, ending most player interaction. I do think something of a partial move in this direction would be an excellent idea, but truly equalizing prices across goods would get rid of most of the interesting parts of the game, such as deciding which goods in the store to produce and which to leave alone.

The current demand function doesn't feel quite right to me either. Sometimes I can't compete with the other players... literally. Looking at City Cars, for example, I can sell 20 per turn, at 253,000. If I drop the price, at 135,000 I can sell 40... at no change in revenue. Or I can sell 50 for 100k... at no change in revenue. But these aren't coming out of other players' sales. The total sales in the SDE graph goes up by this amount. So far as I can tell, I'm selling cars into my own little world, with no interaction with other players. Shouldn't it feel like, well, like I'm competing with the other players? The fact that the demand function is an undocumented black box doesn't help, but I've been pinging it long enought that I have some idea of what it's like by now.

It feels clunky, too. When I'm the only one selling an item, I usually have one store which is selling a few items less, often selling at half of what the others are. This appears to be to due rounding. And it's always the same store. When the prices of my stores are all the same, it's always the same store always gets its turn to sell last, which smells of sloppy programming. I can understand that Stdok wants to have an method which is deterministic, computationally quick and also has no dependence on previous events, but, still...

It's not as bad as some here are suggesting, though. It seems to basically work, except for the fact that the demand levels are set a slightly too high for many of them to saturate. The "Supply" number from the "SuDe" statistics is NOT the number of products sold. It's the stock in the product warehouses as a percentage of the base demand prior to the sales step. Even though Motor-Cars are showing "Supply" as 1250% of base demand, the real number being sold is somewhere around 300-400%. If you check the shop statistics you can see that, despite the ever-increasing sales, the auto shop revenue (mislabeled "volume") has been on a downward trend for quite some time.

At QL 0, the auto tree isn't the most profitable one at the current time. In fact, it isn't even anywhere close. I'm just hanging around because at this point, the manufacturing score (which everyone knows is nothing but a competition to see who can build the most cars) is the only one I have a chance at, so I figure I should hang tough and get the gold medal for that one. (I never had a chance at the overall from the start, without QLs) I'm not quite sure why so many other people keep piling into auto tree as if it still made money.

Anyhow here are my proposed changes:

1. I do like One Stroke's idea of adjusting the prices slightly each round, but I think it would eventually lead to all goods being close to equally profitable again, with the same bad effects. Perhaps we should record the fraction of the normal demand which has been sold throughout the game, drop the prices of goods in the top half by 2%, drop prices of the rest by 2%, and then multiply by 0.8+0.4*Rnd(0), and finally multiply all prices by the same factor which depends on the profits of the previous turn, in order to insure that prices don't drift to high or low. This way there would always be goods which were better than others, but which ones they were would slowly change.

2. What if you could change the QL of your manufacturing plants, and the cost to run your manufacturing plants was multiplied by (1+Desired QL/100), or even (1+Desired QL/50), since manufacturing costs are always so small? And what if the demand function was such that you had 1 consumer for each QL who always chose the shop with the lowest price if it had an equal or higher QL, but the lowest Price + Normal price * (QL difference/50) if it had a lower QL? Setting the QL you're selling at would be a rock, papers, scissors problem, and you'd have to worry about which QL you should be selling, instead of always picking the highest one possible.

3. In order to give players some price guidance, I think that we should go to a fixed price-width window for demand, instead of the current one where the window is a set by the number of stores. If the lowest price is P, and your price is Q, your chances of getting the sale would be 1- (Q-P)*10/Normal Price. This is hard to implement without either a random function call or a price memory, in which prices remember previous sales. I'm not sure it wouldn't be better to have store prices relatively stable over the short term anyhow (in the same season). It would be more consistent with how the rest of the game works. I will write pseudo-code for this if you're actually interested.

4. The ROI component of scoring needs to disappear. In the real world, there's always something else useful you can do with your money, so it's a useful indicator. In this game, it's not true, and the ROI gives you a heavy penalty for having made money earlier. As One Stroke has pointed out, the only way to win is to deliberately sabotage your returns in the middle game, which is not fun. Everyone with a high score will also have a high vendor score and manufacturing score, but since the ROI is the change of the log of the company value, their ROI changes will not be high, and this the ranking of this component consequently has a heavily outsized effect compared to the other two. Furthermore, the game handles stock and outstanding requests for goods as if they were worth virtually nothing, causing a high ROI volatility for anyone interacting with other players, making the game less interactive for anyone seriously going for the high score.

The entire daily ranking scoring system serves no useful function, and I would get rid of it. It was intended as a method to balance the importance of the different types of scores, but it ignores the fact that the top players have significant score differences only in the ROI score. There are other was to balance the importance of scores, however.

The current event system is not fun. It usually involves deliberately throwing away cash just to get score points, which most players don't want to do. I'd replace it with the following system:

Randomly, every 1-12 months, a new random product is chosen for an event, which runs concurrently with other events. The event lasts 4 years, or until 4 years of normal demand has been filled. Until this happens, all shops selling the good sell 4x as much as normal at the maximum sale price, and are credited with event points equivalent to maximum price they could have sold their goods for.

The overall high score would be the company value times the new event score. This would force people trying to win the overall score category to spread out into other branches and have many goods available. It would also throw some random price changes into the game to make things interesting.

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5. The current January classified rush is not fun and it needs to disappear. When goods are scarce, the current game provides a huge bonus to the first person to get their classified in after the date becomes January. I'd allow players to set prices outside of the currently allowable price range. The prices actually paid would be moved until they were in the allowable range, but if the normal price moved in the meantime, it would be possible to still have them at the maximum price without entering a new classified or offer every January.

6. In order to facilitate player interaction, I would have trade prices move at about the same speed as now, but in the correct direction. Average trade prices is NOT a reliable indicator of which direction the price needs to move. In the previous round, I had cases where I had classified out for days at the maximum price, and the price wouldn't move. Then someone would come along and sell it at the maximum price, and I'd buy it up in about 30 minutes. The next year, the price would move DOWN.

All of the top players have learned that, if you want to buy a good which is underpriced, the way to do it is to sell 10 of it at the maximum possible price. Someone else will buy it and the price will move up, eventually encouraging new supply to move in. This is highly counterintuitive and is not useful to new players. Prices should move up if there are classifieds up at above the current price which sit unfilled for six hours or more. They should move down if there are offers below the current price which sit unfilled for six hours or more. That's it. The average trade price has nothing to do with where the market price should be.

7. Goods are reliably available only in 2 quality levels, QL 0 and QL 100. Due to QL rounding, it is not reasonably practical to regularly buy goods at any other quality level. In order to facilitate player interaction, I would round the QL down only when removing goods from the warehouse. Otherwise, the QL would be kept as a float.

8. In order to facilitate player interaction, I would drop the sale cost to a flat 3%.

9. In order to facilitate player interaction, I would make all goods required to produce a good have a RL at least 1 level lower, and if possible widely separated. Yes, this means that the only shop available at RL 0 would be the grocery.
To Dave:
Current year Normal Price = (Wiki listed Normal Price)*100%/(SuDe % market satisfaction)
For supply levels over the normal demand, the current demand function already closely models this, except that instead of using the SuDe % market satisfaction, which is really the product stock level, it uses the actual market satisfaction, which the game refuses to divulge to us. This is why the auto tree revenue has been nearly constant. The problem with the dominance of the auto tree is merely that it's priced so high that even at these reduced prices, it's usually still the most profitable tree, and also that there aren't that many people at 100 QL, so they see less competition.

For supply levels below the normal demand, this is an awful function, because it allows the first person into a tree to capture the entire available revenue of the tree by merely selling one of it, which is now worth 100x as much. (Wiki listed Normal Price)*100%/(real % market satisfaction)^0.5 would work nicely, though.

I suppose I could get behind the idea of an economy with 100 consumers with QL 0 and 1 each at each other QL value X with a hard limit that they don't buy below their quality below their QL value and a demand of 100/((price/(1+X/100))^2. It would give returns outsized compared to the number of factories, so people would do it, but the returns would still be small compared to the total available revenue at saturated supply, so it wouldn't unbalance the game

Oakville,

I like this thread, but I confess that your last post and my last posts were too long and wide ranging. Maybe a condensation of thought would go a long way here. Pick a few of your best ideas and give them a quick pitch, or take your best idea and give it a longer pitch. I think we'll make more progress by trying to do less.

I took my own advice in "Game Theory" and I'll try to do it here too later when I have the time for it.

Numbering by the proposed change leaves the impression that our suggestions are rather scattershot and bouncing all over the place. Numbering them by what I feel are the most important problems to address does, I think, already show some widespread agreement. As I see it, the most important problems to address are:

#1: Assuming that people play well, only way to win the game is to have 100 quality in the auto tree and to go heavily into autos, to deliberately suppress one's earnings in the midgame, and to prefrom only minimal quality research since, for some inexplicable reason, money spent on quality research does not appear to count towards ROI. New players have no chance for their first year or so. This is boring and needs to be changed. Suggestions to correct this problem include my suggestions #1,2,3,4, One-Stroke's suggestions #1,2,3,4 from the "No price changes thread" and Barmcake's suggestions #2,3,4,5,7.

2. It would be good to increase player interaction. Suggestions along this line include my suggestions #6,7,8,9, One-Stroke's 3rd and 5th suggestions from his list in the "Game Theory" thread, and Vana'Diel's suggestions from that thread.

3. How trade is handled when the price is fixed far from equilibrium needs to be changed. Suggestions for this include my suggestions #5,6, and Barmcake's suggestion #6.