How is the economy/production now after the removal of the cap?

[Pashahlis]

Hello, new guy here. Been wanting to play this game for a while now and recently started digging through *a lot* of old forum and steam forum threads searching for information about game systems that aren't sufficiently explained ingame. Like, were speaking about 40 pages of posts already that I collected with helpful tips and game mechanics explained.

Anyway, doing that I came across an economy change that made the production facilities go up or down in production to maintain an equilibrium in the worlds supply to help the AI. I read that it basically made it useless to build more facilities. That really turned me down and I was considering no longer playing this game. But then I came across the recent patch notes and apparently the "cap" has been removed, while the surge in production is still in.

Personally, I don't care about any over supply issues, especially because it is partially fixable through higher market prices. I care more about my facilities declining in production because of some algorithm and thus making them useless. But here is the problem: GI Joe, a member of this community who I have seen across many posts across many years helping out, said that he did not notice any difference.

So now I am wondering: Is the issue of the "cap" now fixed or not?

Unrelated: I find it really interesting as a new player to dig through these old threads and sort of relive history. Seeing people argue about stuff, suggesting stuff with me having the hindsight that these suggestions happened or not, some of the offtopic political threads... it is really awesome haha.

Once I am finished with my work I might post a thread here with my remaining questions that I hope will be answered.

Sidenote: Why did they have to remove the non-nuclear ballistic missiles :( No matter how useless they may be, I would love to use them for roleplay reasons!

[GIJoe597]

Hello Pasahlis, I did indeed post I did not see any difference. It was a test game I was running to test that one patch note. It was just one game, so I suppose the results were anecdotal, but I experienced no change from previous game play prior to the patch.

I have been consumed with another game and have not had a chance to do more "testing" since then. I am interested in other users comments regarding the matter.

[Rosalis]

I played 2 games since the patch. 1 as Republic alliance or whatever Trump region is called and 1 as China. As US i had very strong world economy after red sphere was pretty much annexed. Lots of regions had over 100 billion and growing sorted by economy strength. So Japan was 2nd UK 3rd Germany 4th. Liked that alot. 1 other thing to note was that whole world turned red while i was white. So in Trump scenario AI might be more favoured to trade with others instead of US. My first war declaration had alot to do with that i think, since i only had 70% CB.
As China i had to squeeze everything out of my population, pretty much max domestic prices, min max social expenses, etc. Everytime i annexed a region, my treasury started to go down very hard, so i had to scrap alot which resulted in dropping gdp/c. The whole game i pretty much had the same GDP/C nomather who i annexed. Same with US btw, but yeah that give you alot more room with almost 10x more GDP/C. World economy was pretty crap with a couple of regions going bankrupt, but starting setting of preventing bonds help AI not taking unlimited loans, so it stays atleast competetive.

The dropping production is fixed, the demand which is the real problem in SRU, not. As China i pretty much had the same demand in consumer goods for the whole game. Same with US, altho there was a little bit more growth in demand. I also thinks it depends alot on scenario. WW2 demand might be too high, where modern world there seems something broken with demand. Which let me to believe economy will never be fixed in SRU, unless you fix it yourself with modifications. Personally i still fail in doing so tho. Still cant fix China GDP/C. Think i need to take drastic measures and give them like 50 land fabs and fulfill their demand. Thats also very unrealistic, to fix a region economy you need to fullfill their demand as much as possible, till you get to the famous 3% unemployment mark. Also need to give population more money to work with (demand). Which makes it highly unrealistic for regions outside of US and Russia. Regions which need to import/export, regions which rely on service economy, regions like Japan using their puppets as slaves in WW2 to get everything they can as fast as possible. But seeing how drastic BG changed in opinion of unit designs not giving to regions which import units, i think it is working as designed. To bring a better experience i think its better to remove some production in some areas. Like Russia got insane agriculture production. For US you cant remove alot, but if world demand increases, they might face problems and perhaps take interest in Middle East, just an idea.

[SGTscuba]

I'm the one who nagged the dev's to take away the "cap" from the game, I thought they would only do it on the beta branch for a test to see the difference.

Obviously, this only affected the cap on production, which was all that was removed AFAIK. It has made a quite a bit of difference, but the main problem is still the lack of ways to increase demand over long games.

I have asked on discord for various bits of information regarding the demand, it is quite a complicated system behind it all, but all the scenarios have a figure for min and max demand, this figure changes based on years going forward to match the next scenarios values. This provides you with the "base" demand around which the other figures are applied (prices, unemployment, inflation etc). What demand your country ends up being capable of requiring, is dependent on here values and where you sit in world gdp rank. For example, if you have 1 as min, and 100 as max, and you are rank 50 worldwide in gdp, your demand will be 50.

I did suggest that maybe the way forward would be to ditch this part of the system, and have gone with a generic curve based system, which would use gdp directly to identify the base demand. The curve could be non-linear to provide sensible limits at either end of the scale. I think this would also help keep the game going when running across multiple eras, as well as providing a better capability to keep the economy going if technology is researched quicker than in real world which leads to costs ballooning for both techs and units. Various techs could then also be used to boost the curves in a positive direction if required to simulate new technologies being deployed (for consumer goods mainly).

[Pashahlis]

Well I am glad to hear this then!

I do not care that much about the demand issue. But I was very put off when I learnt that over time, due to that formula, my production will become less and less productive, meaning one is unable to actually increase production, just your overall market share of the global production, making the whole economy gameplay pointless. I am glad that this is fixed now.

I think your proposal is very good and could diminish the problems a lot but my opinion obviously doesn't hold much sway.

[Rosalis]

If demand is fixed you wouldnt get dropping production... i dont care if they go back to SR2020 like 99% of people loved economy or if they do something new, as long it works and devs know how it works to change gamelplay. Now they just seem affraid to micromanage their own features because its complicated, not a good excuse.