10 billion treasury treshhold, Do not pass it!

[Uglyr]

Currently I am waiting for the election that's interrupted my plan for half year and I hope after this I will try to begin my offensive because AI makes no war even on Hard Volatility.

Don't know. With high volatility I played USSR 1936. It was rather fun: Germany started to DOW and annex Baltic states and Poland in 36-38, Italy DOWed and annexed France alone in 37-38, Japan DOWed me also around 38 (I was completely unprepared). But I after I beat them all in 41-42 there seems not much action except everyone making alliance with everyone.

[nicholas70]

Are you doing this in a 2020 scenario? If so I'm sure it will be harder to make it work as intended for several reasons. First and foremost if you are a debt based economy interest payments could be counted as an expenditure that creates positive pressure on gdp and inflation. To bad you can't turn to allies to buy bonds when needed as this would correct this possible issue. The other problem a debt based economy might run into is is higher interest payments and increased relative cost of paying off debt incurred during the boom times. The 3rd problem with doing this in 2020 starts is the cost of buildings is really high meaning you'll probably want to shut them down during this process for max effect, but be careful as sometimes I've noticed when you go to turn them back on again later they have taken damage.

Don't forget you also typically want to cut down spending on education and infrastructure during this process. This is something I find is more important if you don't fully stop production and need to drag out the re-adjustment process more then a couple months. Don't forget it also helps to drop domestic markups after your demand starts to collapse so that your DAR doesn't totally collapse with it.(focus on food) If need be take markups into the negative if possible as the only other alternative to keeping DAR from collapsing is start putting some money into social assistance but this will work against trying to drop GDP and inflation.

As I already stated it is also recommended you do this once you have considerable wealth. In my case playing Iran, the world just entered 1942 and I'm getting about 200m a day flowing into my treasury, and I've already bought friendship with all the major powers ex for Italy. Going to have try to use my money to bankrupt the AI so I can secure endless interest payments to help me survive the increased costs of having over 10b in the bank.

[Atraphoenix]

Money is not issue in modern world but you just need to manual trade and play capitalistically (opportunism ) I buy oil from poor ones that sells me around 5% profit but I sell it to my blue allies (that is why I always play with spheres) my blue allies swimming in debt but for now they can cover my expenses. In fact I trade once in 10 days that is mostly 1st - 11th - 21st days of any months and I need at least 20b to cover but currently I can easily make around 55-75b per round that gives me around 35-55b profit and daily 3-5b surplus in money. In my calculation if I stop producing everything other than CU and ELEC and my army units I keep my daily budget + 400m but no idea 300- 400k army will cost daily in war.

Yes it may be an exploit but I have no other option than this for now. Also I sell my secondary units that I plan not to use it to my blue and rich allies so I solved the money issue but currently I have no idea how much population is enough to cover my army expenses I began to increase it again and I want to stabilize it around 150m I hope It may cover my 5 armies that is currently built half (500 land 200 air and 250 sea units enough to colonize but not yet to challange Russia.)

I have stockpiled enough food-rubber-wood-coal-ore to last at least 10 years I stopped production and also deactivating their production facilities also helped me to cut facility cost. After Damn election I plan to stockpile military and industry goods as well but I will leave electricity and consumer goods behind no idea but I managed to keep the consumer goods cost lower than market price that is the only production that is below market price. Oil dropped rapidly but I think after population increase globally it is increasing slowly again.

I think my elections will eat my current surplus so ı cannot stockpile for 6 months again and after that another 3.5 years to rob the world again

[nicholas70]

Well I just got Germany to start going bankrupt and let me tell you for having a 0% credit rating Germany must be getting a great interest rate. I'm getting less then 1mil per day interest payments from them and they have missed quite a few payments now. On another note I let my treasury pass the 10 billion mark. (so far my social service costs have not sky rocketed, whew!) Bringing in over 100 million a day in 1941 makes it impossible to not pass this mark after a short time. If I can buy it and not pay more then 2x market prices for it I've bought it already. I'm probably a month from having a trillion barrels of oil in stock. I've got enough Cgoods to last over a decade and enough of everything else to last at least half a century. I figure the total value of all the stuff I have in stock money and commodities has got to be about 100 billion bucks. Depending on how the bankruptcy with Germany plays out I might just go for economic domination. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping compounding interest starts kicking in here soon so I can start focusing on the USA.

[Atraphoenix]

I think I should have tried stockpiling strategy just from the beginning currently I have stockpiled half of the goods and the last three scare me a lot because it cost a lot to stock Consumer - industry and military goods.

As a side note I had no idea but putting facilities offline also reduced my facility cost no idea if there will be a re-openning cost but logically it looks not (if not damaged by enemy spies of course).

[nicholas70]

It sounds like suddenly stopping production wont work too good for you. You might be better off to just use your army to capture a few nations nearby, turn them into colonies and start off shoring production to your colonies. In the meantime cutting back production and raising taxes should help slow your unhealthy level of GDP growth. (you could also use your colonies to hide your money from the game so you don't get penalized for having lots of cash ) Slam stopping production will just get you more immediate results but won't generally correct the underlying problems in an economy anyway. At most this tactic simply buys you a year or two of time to figure out a more permanent solution to your economic troubles. I haven't tried the colony tactic myself yet, but I'm going to start lining that option up by taking over Afghanistan and a few other places. I'm hoping now that have decimated Germany's treasury by putting them in debt and by cutting off their oil supply that the allies will be able to crush them. In turn I'm hoping Germany's defeat will mean the world economy will return to normal and the major shortages of everything, except for oil, will end.

Of course I'm not holding my breath on that one which is why I intend to have a working plan B if things don't play out that way, because I really want to take my 1936 game forward 40 or 50 years. I'm just hoping that the world isn't all frozen up before it even gets into the 1960s.

[Atraphoenix]

Currently the year is 2034. 14 years passed. I did not stop production immediately at first I stockpiled civil consumption goods other than oil-CG-Elect.
After that I stopped producing oil. In the last year I was about to stop IG and MG but finally war began. China DOWed central asia. She wiped out Tajiks and Kazakhs were about to fall. MG started to increase but not skyrocketed. My army buildup is about to finish and I think this year (2035) I can try them in the proxy war. As a side note I began to construct water plants and replace coal plants. It is a slow process but on the point of finalizing, too.

World GDP is around 18k my GDP is under my strict control between 10k-15k depending on if I am constructing or not. I cannot control population yet because I lack money to spare on education. I have no problem till 150m that is my ideal point(1% Army just roleplaying issues). In this year I will stop producing anything consumer goods are the exception. No idea but it is still below the market price and I stockpile everything and covering my losses with the sales of CG.

I am happy to see everything goes according to my plan (only slow reserve recruits.) I stabilize my treasury around 100b-200b thanks to GDP boom in the world. I can sell anything to my rich sphere allies at the rate of double profit. Canada, Australia passed 1trillion and there are more than 20 nation that passed 100k GDP.

I have just begun to manipulate Russians so we have a spy war but it is so slow to increase war justification. Maybe killing their proxy units may help but I have not get a mutual defence treaty with Kazakhs yet. I have more than 1400 units 1000+ land 200+ air and sea and enourmous missile reserve even nukes but no plan to use them.

The bad news....
-I play on capture victory option for RP purposes but AI command units surrender very fast even they just lost 20-25% of unit strength.
-For modern maps I can confirm that we can still have fun. There is still proxy wars. Unfortunately till the economical patch (if there will be any) the only logical strategy is STAY POOR and be happy!

PS. After my check I saw that Uyguristan is absent in dead factions but Inner Mongolia and Tibet are still exiled. So if my manipulations work I plan to revive them together with Hongkong and maybe Crimea if Russia DOWs me.

[KirinFrost]

Hey you can make lots of money easily on the 2020 sandbox though

Just ally with the usa, support their wars on cuba to get friendly relations and buy research for like 15% of the price which i have been doing.

Buy lots of agriculture from where ever you can and sell to an allied japan for more than double the price.

Even producing lots of agriculture can be a good option for this purpose.

With this method i managed to clear my 1.7 trillion debt in 2 years, but thats also because i deliberately reduced pensions, health and family subsidies to near zero

[Atraphoenix]

I stopped producing anything other than consumer goods - electricity - military goods. I do not produce new units just missiles. I have now 300b in treasury and in a proxy war with Chinese allies (Why on earth Kazakhstan is always a victim.) I have a loss around 150m daily but just Canada grants me monthly at least 200b. (She has passed 400k GDP, 100m Pop, 2trillion in treasury) Finally I began to have fun after hours of investing, waiting. I just reloaded once because I had forgotten to send my Special Forces to save command unit in Astana - Kazakh capital. I have an expeditionary corps in Kazakhstan and just lost 3 units because of my carelessness but I have no aim to conquer the world with 0 unit loss. Even on my new laptop game lags a lot and after war started I decreased game speed to normal and it takes around 6-8 hours for a year. Other than this I have no complaints.

[nicholas70]

How did you manage to get 300b in the bank without the 10b+ penalty eating you alive? (I'm assuming you are not off shoring it in your Caymens colony bank) In the game I started in 2020 world that penalty bites hard, and I'm having to resort to some shady economic practices to work around it. I also learned that using the buy in bulk tool can also be a valuable asset when used in conjunction with diplomacy to manipulate market prices. The funny thing is if it wasn't for the 10b penalty I probably wouldn't have figured out that little trick. I'm just glad that it seems a bit easier to keep the small 2020 economies cool vs the WW2 economies. Thus far I'm just over a year in and I don't think my inflation is going over 3% anytime soon. I don't think the global economy is going to last as long in my game as in your though because quite a few countries seem to have high debt loads and very low credit ratings. (looking at you India and China)

As for my WW2 game as Iran, well economy in this one is now very hosed. The entire world probably only produces about 3000t of mil goods per day while demand probably per day is probably like 400,000t or something along those lines. Meanwhile I maintain control of about 75% of the world oil supply some way or another so the world is at a state of overall standstill. Come to think of it, I don't think any resource demand is being fully met on a global scale. I put one of my savegames in MP and took a look at the AI situation and it was as very ugly, and I was unable to repair the damage I did to the AI via my Wolf on Wall Street style of play. Long story short most of the AI countries are not producing anything due to lack of oil, and to make matters worse they are underfunding social services bad and almost maxing out taxes across the board. I also noticed the AI likes to burn money on junk techs and junk units. Bottom line, I'm in this one for the long haul because the UK failed when they tried retaking Europe and America is to weak economically to do anything. I also notice that Churchill should have lost the election of 44, but stayed in office and UK still shows up as a democracy, what gives?

[BlackEagle]

The economic model of this game and SR36 is worse than in previous games. Best economic model was in SRCW, even with its issues... If i make a game in SRCW i can grow in a way much more realistic than in the scenario of CW in SRU... I've tried to play the CW scenario in SRU and after some years i barely grown, even with much investment and construction. The GDP calcularion is completely wrong, just try to calculate it by yourself and you will see it. And after this ingame years playing i face the same problem as you: continous overgrowth of social spending, much more than my consumption can grow. In SRCW this does not happen, although the social spending rises, you can make a sustainable growth. SRCW was the best title until now, but developers didn't use all of its potential, because they just care about releasing the same game over and over to charge people more money.


It's a complete delusion that through SR series we cannot see a significant development from game to game, and the concept of SRU is more or less the same as in SR2010, with a few updates and the visual change. From game to game we cannot see changes that justify spending more money into it, and developers seem to just don't care. Many people in this forum give good advices and opinions on how to improve the game, but developers just find some excuse, or worse, they don't even answer.

And the solution that they find is to release a new game, with just small updates from the previous game, for people to spend more money into it, without ever using all the potential from the previous game.

In military terms, although it still have some issues, it generally good. AI has to be greatly improved, but the general concept is fine. But on economics this game has a lot to improve. And withouth economics this game barely has any interest. This game is made to play at least 10 years and it's impossible to do it in a way that is minimally realistic...

SRU was the last game that i bought, until i see a new SR that really has BIG changes from the previous titles. Which means that it will take a long long time, if it ever appears!


PS: and the developers don't release the economic game formulas and explain how to change them, so we can at least mod it...

[nicholas70]

It would appear the issue with the cost of social services is related to allowing your economy to run hot for an extended period of time. I'm playing a game now were I'm not going to keep inflation under 10% at all times and unemployment over 3.5% to confirm it once and for all. Thus far in cases where I've already allowed the problem to go unchecked the problem doesn't get any worse once inflation falls and unemployment rises. It does kind of make sense that something like this should happen otherwise it'd be unrealistic to be able to pour unlimited amounts of money into your economy without serious negative consequences. I do however kind of wish the game better alerted you to economic issues on the horizon because the low unemployment message doesn't properly convey the potential seriousness of the consequences of not addressing the problem. Perhaps the most serious aspect of the problem is once you have it it is quite hard to correct. Getting unemployment and inflation numbers in a good range only seems to keep the problem from getting worse but doesn't seem to reverse the price issues that already exist. Perhaps you do need to allow a period of deflation to set in before you can get prices down to pre-boom times but I've never been able to get the economy into deep freeze after it was a raging inferno.

[provolone]

The economic model of this game and SR36 is worse than in previous games. Best economic model was in SRCW, even with its issues...

PS: and the developers don't release the economic game formulas and explain how to change them, so we can at least mod it...

BlackEagle makes some good points although he is a bit harsh on the developers. The last part about modding is a constructive suggestion. For some perspective on the economic issue, lets remember that even today there are competing economic theorems. Without getting into the nitty gritty this is another political issue. People on different sides of the spectrum have different views on what drives an economy.

To have a more robust economic model, SR would need to revamp the treaty system. How would the transition from a Bretton-Woods era to a petro-dollar era be modeled without major changes? Competing currencies, the ability for a central bank to default on a currency, these would all have to be added.

For constructive suggestions, I suggest opening up as much of the game logic as possible for modders. Either a separate dll for game logic (with sources provided), or have game logic mostly implemented in scripts. Users are passionate about these games. I doubt BG will loose anything, but the potential upside is enormous. This might allow them to focus more on the core engine and less on individual nit picks.

[DenisG]

Hi folks.

Thanks for launching that discussion. I have been experiencing very similar problems and have tested it over and over with all thinkable economic approaches. The main trend that I can confirm: (1) after around 15 years of gameplay the economy seems to disintegrate. I did a latest trial starting with Massachussets and reuniting the US in a funny way. Now the country is big and economically independent on all aspects, but deflation and high unemployment prevail and treasury always trends to zero. In fact, I had to invade neighboring countries to get out of the treasury mess (department of defense is here now a sub-department of treasury, responsible for cash flow management).

Strange that I got the same economic results with annual income and expenses at around 600bn and then with a push at 1300bn. I even let the smart finance minister try to get my out of the chaos, with great results: While increasing deflation and lowering GDP overall and per capita, he burned 45bn treasury cash within three game months.

One of my main hypothesis for a while was that my military expenses were simply too high to sustain them in any economy. But as Massachussets grew from 25m people to 140m people, I kept my military about leveled. Still, the costs would rise accordingly as well. So that hypothesis dropped out.

In general, there are a few things that I can point out so far:

- if my country has a deflation for more than 10 years of about -5%, the social costs should go down, as should GDP and of course production costs per category. Actually, I should gain a huge competitive advantage in terms of production costs to market costs. Still, my productions costs increased continuously over 17 game years. Deflation should bring all this stuff down.

- setting the production to 100% of demand appears to make the treasury department run wild. As they have to adapt again and again, a stable budget planning was not possible. As I tested the % of capacity option, the oscillations reduced significantly.

- I still believe there to be a mistake in construction calculation on treasury, which I had elaborated some years ago already. When you build a new facility, the costs to build should be deducted over the period of the construction time in a linear way. However, the first day after you put the new constructions in, a huge amount is being reduced from treasury, and then the expenses show construction expenses that are so much higher than anything I am building at that time. I tried it over and over again. So when I build a new facility that will cost 2bn and my treasury is 8bn and no other constructions are going on, no military unit building etc, my treasury should not go down to less than 1 bn over the 80 days construction period. To me it looks like that the actual costs of say 2bn for 80 days linear, are being calculated as 2bn for 80 days means 9.125bn for 365 days. And now for the next 80 days, the 9.125bn are being deducted from treasury.

- further, when you change from democracy to dictatorship (which I usually have to at some point), the whole economy suddenly drops its efficiency numbers. This can be understood in a history way, but I do not see any options to counter this development.

The main struggle I have with the economic system is that I simply have no idea of it. To me the whole math is a black box and is has been like that over all these years since SRuler 2020. Please give me anything to find a way to see through the system. From the architecture it's one of the best ones there is on the market, but it still lacks some improvement to simulation and seems to do the opposite of good economic wisdom at various points.

Sometimes I dream of my country not having the defense department integrated in treasury and simply being a good citizenship country in this world... Due to economics, I always end up being the one nobody likes in the entire world...

Cheers,
Denis

[nicholas70]

After playing as Cuba for a few years in the 2020 world I can safely say that aside from building costs there really are not too many economy issues. (well there is the treasury limit but that horse has been beat enough) I can't even really say the building costs were that big a deal playing as Cuba because I was able to turn 85% of my buildings off by month #2. In fact I only produce power and oil while playing as Cuba and just game the rest of the goods I need from the market. I keep my GDP stagnate to help keep social service and buildings costs from rising so much, and given the rate of money expansion in the world I don't see how I can go broke unless the rest of the world goes broke. It seems to me the following things drive up costs, GDP rise, population increase, and to a small degree global expansion of the money supply. The amount of control the player has over these things is variable, but generally speaking you are probably doomed in the long run. In my case playing as Cuba I should be able to keep my costs rising slower then everyone else as my population can't grow as fast as in does in many other countries, and I have not found it hard at all to keep my GDP in check.

Now in the WW2 world there do appear to be some other issues, and the floor on production costs does appear to be one of them. I understand why the floor on production costs exists but this floor on costs has some potential unintended consequences. In fact it appears the floor on production costs is one of the drivers of the oil issues that many people have complained about. It would be nice if countries had currencies and the option to use tariffs in game so such floors wouldn't be needed but I don't think either of those things are going to be added.

I think if anything the in game economy just needs to be tweaked so it can remain stable longer then most people seem to notice it is now. I don't really see an issue with the economy not being perfect resulting in 'eventual' bankruptcy but the player should be able to actually go bankrupt as most countries tend to do at some point. The big difference in game vs IRL is this process tends to occur within 30 game years vs 100s of years, and for the player bankruptcy is a dead end. If anything not making bankruptcy a dead end would probably best change to the game. I'm not suggesting it should be an easy process without some serious consequences but it should an added challenge for the player to overcome.