Economic Nightmares

3iff · Post by **3iff** » Jun 21 2005

This data has been gathered while trying the Panama Walkthrough but I suspect it's relevant to the economic system rather than the central America scenario.

Building an industry.

I looked at building a coal power station. Build cost should be ~160m. I select a spot and click to build. The build box pops up and has the following. Foundation cost $16.74m, Ind goods required $138.85m, Total cost $229.64m, daily maint $30.753.

Now where does it get the total cost of $229m? the total cost as shown should be ~$156m. Is the extra $73m for bribes??

Domestic Sales.

My domestic sales are reported as $46.02m. I'm selling 823 consumer goods to my people at 150% markup, for a cost of $61,000 per ton. This should net me $50.2m. I guess I'm selling other domestic goods for a total of $10m. So, although my domestic sales should be around $60m, the income page shows only $46m. Demand is fairly static and I've watched the data for multiple days.

Crazy AI Economy.

The AI economy either cheats or has some odd error. Basically it behaves like this... If the AI treasury is below $2,000m, it gets $500m 'free'. In no time at all, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th countries in the Panama game had cleared their bonds and owed zero. They also had a tidy $2,000m+ in cash. Meanwhile my cash had risen from perhaps $300m to $400m. You can easily see this for yourself by pressing "W" and showing the page where country treasuries are displayed...

TexasDevilDog · Post by **TexasDevilDog** » Jun 21 2005

I concurr, some funny accounting going on with the player and the AIs.

3iff · Post by **3iff** » Jun 21 2005

I've been thinking about this a bit. I might start the scenario as different countries and see what stocks they have. Maybe I can do it as a multiplayer so I can hop between countries...

To raise $500m in one day, a country would need about 13,500 consumer goods (or equivalent) and be able to sell them to the WM (or someone). They would also need to do that for multiple days.

As Panama, I watched some of them pay back a bond, drop to $700m cash then pop up to $1200m cash, then $1700m and $2200m on consecutive days. At this point they stopped the mad cash increases and rose by anound $10m next day. I was making about $10m per day.

Post by **George Geczy** » Jun 21 2005

Since Update 2 there have been some identified issues with WM subsidies being too generous in certain cases; it was recently discussed in another thread. This sounds like that issue. We'll certainly be doing adjustments on this for the next update.

Regarding the industry and domestic sales issues, I'll had this one over to Chris for testing and we'll take a look at what is causing those reporting differences.

-- George.

yakaspat · Post by **yakaspat** » Jun 21 2005

D8mn bean counters!

NorthernCanadian · Post by **NorthernCanadian** » Jun 21 2005

Yah... just be glad it was only 500 million bucks, and not 500 obsolete infantry brigades

3iff · Post by **3iff** » Jun 22 2005

Rechecked the situation and this is what I found.

Loaded a fresh multiplayer game and check what Panama had in the way of stocks. Ran to 6th May and saw every other country get $500m per day. Many were paying off a bond and getting another $500m to top up their cash.

Once they passed $2,000m, they got no more subsidies until they dipped below this threshold.

Restarted as Costa Rica and played to 6th May, saved and reloaded game as Panana.

In this time, Panama had sold around $125m of stocks, had $1,661m cash and had repaid $1,472m in bonds...a total gain of around Â£3,232m in 5 days...which does seem a tad generous.

My main concern is that this is a small scenario and such a large gain does seem to unbalance the scenario. If this happened in the France scenario (the only other one I'm really familiar with) then most of those countries have $2,000m or more so topping up their cash is not so big a deal.

I also accept that writing a reasonable AI is a difficult and thankless task. I don't envy you!