All who want to make kapilands an actually interesting place

[Guest]

may want to read this - i have returned to kapi after some vacation to notice that situation hasnt improved at all - lack of wood, lack of stones, lack of power ... kapilands is no fun at all

especially for those who want to actually be in a business thats other than wardrobes. because, if you are in wardrobe business, you can buy wood&steel from npc and mind your own business. but thats not the point of this game at all, well it isnt the point of any online game. point is you have to interact with other people. thats why i deliberately decided to go into very unprofitable perfumes business, where i met the following problem:

THERE IS NO FREAKIN CHEMICALS ON THE DAMN MARKET ... i mean seriously people, chemicals are very profitable business when it comes to chems price at over 50 caps, but no one seems to make them ok i would understand if there was a contest requiring chems but there is no contest like that -.-

so i wonder, is kapilands the mirror of todays turbocapitalistic society or is there any room left for an altruist who only wants to make kapiwomen stink better?

[Guest]

Yup, well it aint gona change anytime soon, we have serious problems! We have several power/water intensive industries and a power industry that simply cant sustain it. We would have to have about 50% of the market supplying the rest with power and water alone, not even counting the steel and stones that we consume like popcorn in a 9 hour star-wars marrathon (no ive never had one!).

The whole kapi system in flawed to the extent that we we somehow did convince the big guys at upjers to make the changes to a real economy then the whole thing would fall flat on its over priced posterior becase we cant even begin to achive raw material indipendance in a year! Even with open market forces

So no, your quest to make kapi smell less like a camels arm..legpit is only a drop in the ocean, I wish we all went that way! Even if im not even leading by example at all lol We would firsh have to drasticly increase the number of power plants (15 mins/meter would do nicely) and increace the steel production/hour be a factor of 10!....

My 2(very pesimistic)cents
H

[Guest]

funny post, lol, but seriously I have a couple things to add.

first, remove all npc's, make things truly supply vs demand (makes steel profitable and slows expansion etc.) this won't work good without #2

# 2 Limit things put on the market to + or - 15% of the current low price. again, supply and demand will take over

# 3 Remove items that have been on market for 48 hours. (Obviously price is to high)

Economies handle themselves when you have true supply vs demand.

Horizon, the moment something like steal makes a great profit, 100 gas producers (me included) will jump right on it.

Of course, chems etc would become popular too with the noobs.

[Guest]

Oh, of course all the prices we knew and loved would be history. Now, if I only had a plan for grocery (hmmm better lower cost of production)

[Guest]

Yup, well it aint gona change anytime soon, we have serious problems! We have several power/water intensive industries and a power industry that simply cant sustain it. We would have to have about 50% of the market supplying the rest with power and water alone, not even counting the steel and stones that we consume like popcorn in a 9 hour star-wars marrathon (no ive never had one!).

I do know what your saying (guess you posted while i was in yap mode, lol)

But, if there is a power shortage, or even water, (no npcs) price will go up, when it becomes stable it will decrease. And it will, true supply vs demand always works.

[Guest]

Here is the problem with most products in kapilands, they just can't compete with wardrobes.

To give you an idea, in order to chemicals to make as much money as wardrobes, you would have to sell chemicals for 100 with no expenses. In other words, the mineral and power along with cash requirements are not included, that is a 100 profit each. Chemicals are starting to go that direction though, but chemicals can't become a good industry until the price of minerals go up. So many minerals are required, but there aren't many mines compared to factories in the game. Also, stones is always more profit than producing minerals, so until minerals go above the price of ~30 or so, no one will produce them. That means the price of chemicals will be between 130 and 150 before it becomes profitable to produce them.

This is the case with most products . The only way we could see real change would be to eliminate NPC. This would cause steel, wood, power, water, and stones to go up to the point where wardrobes would no longer be very profitable, and other industries would catch up because of the massive new prices of wardrobes. My rough estimates say that if NPC were eliminated, steel would probably hit around 600 before it slows down, wood would probably get to 200. Stones aren't nearly as bad, but would probably get to 50 or so. Power would cost at least .5, probably a little bit more than that, until people begin to produce their own or switch their buildings. Wardrobes are ALL NPC made, which creates incredibly unrealisitic expectations. Consistency is not good for an economic sim.

Thanks for reading,
APCE Production

[Guest]

and dont forget that all these products are interrelated so if steel punches up to 600ea then the massive drive towards in terms of coal and iron consumption will make NASA look like a model rocked club! Then stones prices will follow suit and that means that anything mined or produced in a factory will be made all but unviable.

Lets tick em off,
>Oil will be ousted by water production so gas will be deader than the dinos it came from! and
>Cars are the largest consumers of steel on the market....need I say more, and
>Wardrobes will sink like a......wardrobe, and
>Gold anything will have been out since power hit 0.35 so count em down, and
>Silicon/Chems/Plastic will be out since the steel will take up ANY excess factory capacity, and
>Therefor Electronics will be last years model, and
>Anybody with a plantation will be cranking out the wood so you can kiss goody by to cotton = no textiles/leather jackets (cows drink too much), and
>Enter industry here, and......

So now we have a problem, inflation will go nuts creating it own problem, speculation. Its bad enough in the coin markets, what happens if prices go up by 10% an hour? Would you sell your stuff? Then we get the even worse problem of people becoming clams, they snap closed not willing to buy of sell in fear of losing out in a market that is hyper-fluctuating, in short-hand the machinery of this game grinds to a halt.

One thing that annoys me is people keep pointing to supply and demand as if it will wave a magical economic wand Potter like and fix everything, they are applying a principal that is made to work on a growing economy, where its expanding as fast as its own production can support, to apply it to an in game situation would be like making the entirety of the Arab world vanish overnight, yes supply and demand would send oil prices sky high but it still dont mean anybodies driving anywhere!

Remove the NPC and we are left with enough third tier capacity to chomp though the GNP of china in a 5 days but not enough raw material production to keep it running for 5 minutes. People will run through their stocks like glassware at a Greek wedding but once thats gone they will start looking for more stock and prices will still be sky high. With people looking at their massive builds with no way to feed them and unable to sell them without a equally massive loss they will take the only other option and walk away, dissimilar into the aether. And guess what, that problem aint going away we will still be striving for total raw material independence in months if not years so in my opinion very, very few of those people will ever return. Until we figure out a way to turn e-stores into power plants we will never be free of the NPC....ever!

My 2.34c
H

[Guest]

@apce current price of minerals in r1 is 49 caps for q0 (on market) production costs for minerals and stones are very similar (minerals - 9 water + 9 power + 0.16 caps = 5.02, stones 5 power + 1 water + 1.8 caps = 3.42 caps), production rate of stones vs. minerals is 1.11

So now, stones that are capped at 27/unit requre 0.9 as much pure profit as minerals to be equivalent, that is, for 1 stone you get 23.58 caps profit, meaning you need 26.17 caps profit per 1 minerals, setting its price at 26.17+5.02 = 31.19 caps/mineral to break even. anything higher means minerals are more profitable than stones. with 49 caps/mineral it is highly profitable

to calculate profit in chemicals i will use the calculated reference price for minerals (i.e. 31.2 caps/mineral). because production rates scale, for our comparison it doesnt really matter how big your factories/joineries are or at what level you are because production ratio for equally sized production facilities stays the same (joinery in red with 2 employees at merchant level produces 9.22 wardrobes per hour, factory in red with 2 employees at merchant level produces 89.11 chemicals per hour. ratio between those is 9.66, joinery in red with say 400 employees at billionaire level produces 441.38 wardrobes per hour while factory in red with 400 employees at billionaire level produces 4266.67 chemicals per hour, ratio is still 9.66)

so for one wardrobe you need 9.66 times as much profit as for chemicals.

now lets see, in r1 you can sell your q15 wardrobes for 2400+60q = 3300, with production costs at npc prices 20 wood + 5 steel + 600 power + 32.4 = 2370 (production set at quality 60 to get q15 wardrobes with npc wood&steel) which gives you 930 profit/wardrobe. if you want the same profit (scaled down by the bigger production of chems) you need to have 96 profit per chemical q20! (because if you compare the research for wardrobes and for chemicals, wardrobes need 4/q, chems only 3/q). add to that the production cost (1 minerals, 10 power and 0.81 production cost for production at q60 = 31.2+2.7+0.8=34.7) you need to sell your chemicals for 130/unit. this is q20 chemicals. in r1 right now we have one big offer for 9.870.000 q0 chemicals at 111, which is completely in accordance with 1/q cost increase for chemicals, i.e. if q20 chems are worth 130 then q0 are worth 110 (i bought it already as i am writing this)

now if someone paid 49 caps for minerals he would have to price the chemicals at 127 for q0. which is still acceptable for me and i believe for others who use chemicals (mainly plastics producers, since a lot of products that use plastics are used in special buildings or are expensive end products which dont suffer much from say 100caps/unit increase in retail price)

so yes, chemicals are profitable

and yes, the npcs make this game a bit more boring, but i guess they serve their purpose so i wont get into this topic here

p.s. the biggest problem i see with npc is that there is THE end product (wardrobes, maybe also tables to a smaller extent) that can be made purely out of npc products

[Guest]

p.s. the biggest problem i see with npc is that there is THE end product (wardrobes, maybe also tables to a smaller extent) that can be made purely out of npc products

Yay, someone sees my point.

At Horizon, it is important to note that the reason supply and demand works is because steel wouldn't actually make it to 600. Eventually, people would choose to change their business to things that make more profit, and as the profit of wardrobes plumets, people would have to choose another industry. This would cause the market to change at a reasonible rate (after the initial shock), and cause it to become truly stable. The invisible hand does work, and it works twice as well inn a game like this, because there aren't things like banks that force things to happen, governments that give really good reasons to do certain things, or loyalties through past generations ext. Would i become the head developer of kapilands tomorrow, this is what i would do.

1.) The next patch would involve the ability to change buildings to a different type of building. This change would be fairly cheap (1/10th of the FA of the building maybe), and would be fairly quick (a max size building would take about a week or two). This would allow the invisible hand to actually work, and would eliminate your concern of being stuck with buildings.

2.) Lower the demand of the kapi people. I would also make supply and demand effect something. If demand isn't even close to met, the prices would go up. They wouldn't go up too quickly, but over a large time period of demand that is not met, the prices would become very high, encouraging companies to enter those industries. Companies branching out is good for the game.

3.) I would start by limiting what people can buy from NPC. Set a limit of the amount of each product you can buy per day from the NPC. It would be a fairly low limit, but it wouldn't affect everyone immdiately, it would only affect large producers at the begining, which is good. Those are the people that mean more when their joineries are converted to powerplants, or mines, or wells, or even factories for steel. The limits would get smaller and smaller until NPC is eventually eliminated from the game. This phasing out would probably take 6 months to one year.

4.) I would eliminate the different build times for different buildings. To be honest, the industries that have higher build times aren't the most profitable industries anyway, and it's not good for anyone to discourage the use of mines and wells. I have never understood this, and i really think that the double build times for some buildings is rediculous. On the other hand, i may put different build times on farms, factories, and stores. Farms would be the shortest, factories would be the middle, and stores would be the highest build times, as they don't suffer from DMR and are always the most profitable in the end, for a player who is of a high level. These difference in build times wouldn't be very large, however, and wouldn't affect most people too much.

These changes would allow a free flowing economy, and would change the way we look at the game. I know it's hard to imagine, but i've played games a lot like kapilands that have done these changes, and it worked out really really good.

Just a few cents .

APCE

[Guest]

Most options here just aren't possible,
With the freed supply and demand the prices will sky rocket and probably most big players will just walk away because al there buildings are worthless and there is no way of changing them.

So why don't we just make a 3realm, in which there are no NPCs?
if you start just like here with 680.000

[Guest]

I certainly wouldn't be offended if they just made real supply and demand on r3.

I also agree that in the current game, NPC could not be eliminated. There would have to be a change to allow the changing of buildings. The change would have to be fairly cheap and fairly fast, whereas to encourage players to change.

[Guest]

In a perfect world huh =)
@ APCE: There is no comparative product. We cant build more with less like they do in the real world, innovation is impossible. So we cant stop using this amount of material or switch into a side industry or say "lets use plastic instead of steel." Thus people would drop off their expansion and we will still have vast excess factory space because they are deigned to deal with the system as is and the stores will have no real problem acclimatising to lower stock by increasing sales time

I agree with both of you that the wholly NPC products (wardrobes ect) are unfair to the game and I think even wardrobe producers would agree with us here.

So I would propose to make 2 types of steel/wood. Construction Grade and Product Grade. Construction Grade would be sold by the NPC no problems but Product Grade would not so you can build with construction grade with an element of certainty where as wardrobe producers would not be able to use it. Players could produce both but with a bonus to Product Grade to make it pick up the excess demand. Of course a shock-softener period would exist where both sorts would be NPC but that will trail off after a period.

Probably just as pie-in-the-sky since Upjers wont ever consider an update that takes more than 3 lines of code but I think that would be the most effective way to do it.

@ Golds>Can you pass up the line to see if its possible to get our hands on the sales volume of raw materials by the NPC, it should be recorded somewhere along the line even temporarily so capturing even the raw data would be incredibly helpful since until we get that we cant even begin to estimate if the current output on a realm level would sustain a shift In the NPC. Thanks for that if you can =^)

We can find out how much is being used in construction by avg build size changes in stats window. But we need that data for the rest.

[Guest]

Reading (some of) these posts makes me so happy I'm self-sufficient. I produce all I need except raw materials on both realms. It wouldn't be too difficult to shift a little to compensate for the fall of the NPC. It's either that or focus on something other than Kapilands.

Btw, I make chemicals Q0 on realm 1, so if GREED needs some just shout. I can expand a bit to offer my services.

[Guest]

In a perfect world huh =)
@ APCE: There is no comparative product. We cant build more with less like they do in the real world, innovation is impossible. So we cant stop using this amount of material or switch into a side industry or say "lets use plastic instead of steel." Thus people would drop off their expansion and we will still have vast excess factory space because they are deigned to deal with the system as is and the stores will have no real problem acclimatising to lower stock by increasing sales time

My point would be to allow buildings to be changed into different types of buildings. As things begin to be exhausted, people would shift their companies around to produce different things.

The idea about production grade and construction grade materials is a great idea. There shouldn't be any products that use any part NPC products, it's just not fair to the system. I also think seeds should be taken off NPC, and possibly water (the demand doesn't outweigh supply by as much as power).

@ Andro - The reason people are not self sufficient now is because you make less money that way. It's best to have your entire company doing the most profitable thing possible. If that is selling wardrobes, sell wardrobes. If it's producing car bodies, produce car bodies (it actually is producing car bodies. Some quotes Marxer gave me some years back tell me that producing car bodies would profit about 20 billion per day for a full sized company, grossing about 200 billion per day. That was a boring day in school when i figured that out ). This introduces the other problem though, which is supply. My company is centered around TVs. I would be 10x more profitable if i could buy all the inputs to TVs, and just produce TVs. Unfortunitly, no one sells plastic. Because of this, i have to produce my own plastic, and it brings my profits way down compared to what they could be. Wardrobes have a nearly unlimited demand, and a completely unlimited supply of materials to build them.

Man, i'm up late, Goodnight guys .

APCE

[Guest]

@ APCE Production

Probably. This has been discussed before in other topics, and from what I can tell, GREED touches on this exact problem: This is what the majority of players do - follow capitalism, making gameplay rather boring since "everyone" focus on Gas or Wardrobes. I personally didn't go that way because I don't want to do what "everyone" else do. If that brings in less profit, so be it.
...and as you said, there's little supply for those who choose to go their own way.

I vow that, whenever Realm 3 opens, I will be a supplier of oddities.