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IN a campaign game as Madagascar, everything was going along nicely. I had eliminated the the National Debt, a large supply of cash on hand, new military blueprints (primairily for old Chinese stuff, but hey, i'm in Africa), a growing military might (of course, sceptics might wonder what Madgascar hoped to accomplish with a large land force but a navy that couldn't hope to be more than practice targets for South Africa and a non-existant airforce--well, i think i may have had some Hips and Hoplites ), a flourishing export trade, hard-bribed alliances with Kenya and Tanzania, and i was even making headway into reducing the high inflation. My main activities were to try and persuade Tanzania (run by Burundi, if i rememebr the capital right) to part with its unused offshore oil fields so i could palliate my chronic petroleum shortage (although i didn't need it for energy production, just for people's cars and the military), and of course sending the odd wadd of cash or stockpile of AK-47s to Namibia, for their ongoing war with the scary RSA. In other terms, Madagascar was definately on the way up.

Then something happened; although the high inflation was finally being checked and had begun lessening, the productions costs started killing the economy, and overnight the cash reserves started dwindling. But what was strange was that these production costs amounted to three times the combined domestic sales and trade (im)balance, even though I had massive profit margins on both the domestic and international markets. It was when my advisors started telling of a critical shortage in agriculture that i got wind of something untoward; Malagasy agriculture was a success story, and a major export sector. How then could i fail to meet domestic demand, an insignificant fraction of production?

Investigating the Ag sector i found the answer: most of the aforementioned vast production was disapearing. Thousands of tonness of grains and whole herds of livestock were vanishing without leaving a trace. Out of a daily production of (IIRC) 220k tonnes, the total of domestic sales, foreign sales and stocks ammounted to maybe 40K tonnes--and sometimes less, even zero on some days. So, at least 180k tonnes were being wasted each day, and i suspect a similar situation in other industries.
So, can anyone here tell me:
1) why this happens
2) what this represents
3) how to prevent this
and 4) who i can shoot as punishment for this!

Show me this screen in your game, or give me the numbers in the second window.

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This post approved by Tkobo:Official Rabble Rouser of the United Yahoos
Chuckle TM

this is a sort of shot-in-the-dark, but there are some things to look at to identify causes.

1. Immigration. You have to check this at least two times a month to have a gut feel for trend. Was the supply and price of food, c-goods and other consumer items such that you were gaining population at an unchecked rate? this is a tip off. If you were producing and activating new units with reserves staying stable or growing, you probably had a very high immigration rate to back it all up.

2. Domestic prices - again for the same set of consumables. you may have negelected to control demand by upping prices on these thinking that it would have an impact on inflation. Raising the price on these goods has an effect on reducing immigration - which is sometime desirable. Raising prices is necessary when diminishing retruns starts to force prod costs upward. Yes, it may have an effect on DAR, but your poplace is not stupid and they know they can't have something for nothing. I have seen occasions where raising prices and controlling costs (producer costs are also part of the inflation equation) actually got DAR improvement as well as inflation damping.

3. Immigration tax. Another immigration control to be considered.

Also important, at least to me, is to set very tight controls on any automatic selling (I do it all micro-manually). If you do let the ministers buy and sell for you, put a moderate to tight cap on what they sell - AND - put a demand based control on production. That is, produce enough for immediate needs, plus enough to accumulate a reasonable surplus, and then sell a little off the top. As noted in other posts, the percent of capacity produced is not necessarily linear to what is consumed - sometimes producing 98% (or less) of demand is still sufficient to accumulate a surplus, and number like these seem (at times) to have a smoothing effect on inflation. (try it and see). Once you get there, start shutting down or 'condensing' production assets (upgrade one, close down two, replace farms with hydroponics, etc).

You also need to think in terms of the effect of your sales on world market prices. If everyone else is dumping, maybe you should cut back and import at lower rates than you can produce. High prod costs are sometimes (again, not linear) reflexive of external prices. Ministers are not smart enough to arbitrage the commodity pipeline vis-a-vis import vs. domestic production.

And that brings us around to the dreaded efficiency sliders. In theory these represent subsidy or investment that ultimately reduces the cost of goods produced. Very non-linear, and very sensitive to utilization. If you use these at all, you "must" set a demand based ceiling (and it should be less than 100%) or you will have a spiralling unlimited liability on your hands, like this (see other discussions of this by me and others elsewhere on the forum):

...depending on the commodity you adjust, you immediately get a drop in consumer price, and if this is a raw material, you will get a drop in prod cost for downstream commodities that incorporate this good. This will lead to increased consumptions throughout the chain. Since 'efficiency' investment is billed at a cost per unit basis, your investment now dynamically adjusts upward as you produce more to meet demand [the slider doesn't move - your investment is calculated as a percentage of CURRENT production] - causing another price drop, causing another investment bump. This is especially bad if you are investing in a commodity that you are selling on the open market as at some point your investment into producing huge volumes will exceed your profit on selling them. Moral of story - do everything you can to solve your prod costs issues BEFORE you start down the efficiency investment path. Also, be sure to control consumer prices on any commodity that you invest in to limit demand. If I am ever forced to use eff-inv, I note the consumer price before investment and return daily for about two weeks to adjust this price upward to maintain that as the stable price. Wage-price controls suck, and so do subsidies. They are narcotic. Removing efficiency investment is painful, and prices will immediately jump back up to reality when you do.

If you had efficiency investments active during the course of what you have described, the only person you can shoot is yourself. But you already did.

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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously [but otherwise, they do not worry and are happy].

Il Duce:
not only is the game's efficiency investment nothing like subisidies (AKA corporate welfare), but by then i'd figured it was best to turn it off. While i must say i have some diffuclty in undertsanding the relevance of your post, i have worked out on my own what was happening. It appears that, due to criminally high taxation and prices, that the people were apparently unable to purchase the goods they demanded, resulting in internal demand curbing exports without being met (and with the production prices in Africa being what they are, i can assure you i had no trouble with production costs relative to the market); i figured that out in another game as Venezuela, where lowering taxes to stimulate consumption got me out of a tight budgetary spot, without reducing exports, even though domestic sales were doubled in a short period. My long-term problem does remain however, that an economy based on the production of nationalised industry which uses exports to finance high social, military and research spending has no interest in conquering the world.