Post by pese on Nov 10, 2020 9:38:24 GMT
There is already a consumer demand model, where the more an item type is sold in retail (at least non-SO), the lower the demand, and the lower the selling speed is. However, the demand doesn't seem to do anything about the industry tiers, so I'd be OK with making the demand model more impactful. I don't know if demand still affects SO prices (they did before demand started affecting frequency), but if it doesn't, perhaps it should. Last time I checked, aerospace end products have very low demand by the model, so making demand affect SO prices would have a net effect of nerfing aerospace.
tl;dr Mercedes and maximumindustries are proposing a system that already exists but could use a boost and/or an application to sales offices.
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Now that I've pointed out the existence of a demand model, I'll address the automotive nerf that's included in the proposed changes. As someone who has done cars earlier this year and has noticed calls for buffing cars (Patrik has said no to buffing because he doesn't want players growing too quickly), I initially found the idea counter-intuitive, but then I did some analysis to see if it was as big as the aerospace nerf, and I found that the following price reductions would pretty much cancel out the car (and electronic) nerf:
- $0.2 off silicon
- $0.3 off chemicals
- $0.5 off steel
- $1 off aluminum
I then applied those reductions as well as $1 off methane, $1.5 off crude oil, and $150 off golden bars and figured out the profit/unit reductions for each aerospace end product starting from the outsourcing of silicon, chemicals, steel, aluminum, methane, crude oil, and golden bars. I found that the net loss of profit/unit was 13k for BFRs, over 1k for SORs and jumbos, and 100-350 for the rest. Some checking on the SO simulator revealed that such a hit would be meaningful, and zyz's numbers appear to be plausible, though crude oil would lose $60-70 profit/hr/lvl if my assumption is correct, so there would still be a complexity reward if the profit loss from the nerf was shared among the different parts of the pipeline.
All that being said, I don't think I was making more than $400 profit/hr/lvl when doing cars with vertical integration (i.e. I mostly made my own intermediate products), so I don't think cars need a nerf, as their current state would still be (a little) behind the proposed new state of aerospace.
Most players today are competitive and will always follow the money (highest possible operating margin). Thats what their #1 ambition is.
As players are AS players because they are competitive. I doubt a noticable amount of players will change into resource business.
Resource business is boring and low margin. The players in AS today, they want a competitive game and no boring game. They may rather quit then only starting production every 48hours. Thats why few people are in that business. (no offense tho to anyone in that business - highly appreciated!)
Maybe the players quitting or changing industry cause falling resource prices but a lot of players including myself are concerned the nerf fails and then automotive may be punished more than AS.
Thats why I keep criticising this unverified assumption of a production shift implied by the margin adjustments.