The market hurts my brain

[taekwondokid42]

Right now, any sort of successful indy strat either needs a ton of workers, a heavy reliance on the market, or both. Furthermore, clans/teams are able to pile roughly 95% of their collective NW into the market if they are clever about it (assume a team of 3 people all massing rats. The rats all get sent to 1 person, who can now put 10x the sustainable amount of rats on the market. Then they repeat for the next guy, then the next guy. Then they do the whole thing again with weasels and stoats and skiffs). The result is that there are hundreds of millions of troops on the market and only a few dozen million troops in the game. It's kind of silly.

I know it's a little more extreme right now because everything just died, but this mechanic has been hurting my brain the whole round. You can spend multiple runs massing up as many troops of one type as possible and throwing them on the market. It keeps costs low and you end up with a near-stupid volume of troops on the market. More than you can recover without losing at least 100 billion to market tax, anyway.

Combine that with the really low merc prices and you have a game economy that's just really weird and a bit opaque. You can't indy all run because you can't sell your troops to the mercs at a price that will cover your losses. You can really only hold onto about 150 turns worth of troops, and that's at a rat, who has great merc prices. An indy can only successful if they use the market, and that results in a ton of required micromanagement.

And again, there's a silly amount of troops on the market right now. imho the market cap should be significantly pulled back. .845 is a huge allowance. Bring it back to .7 and you'll still have a very active market, but a person getting to 100m rats will require much more effort. Right now a person can solo place 100m rats on the market.

And, please also raise the merc prices. You don't have to bring them to reg levels but at their current values your only option to solo indy is to rely on marketing 75% of your troops every run. Bring them up like 50% across the board. At these prices, you still won't be able to make a whole run with all your troops, but at least you'll be able to get pretty far.

The thing about selling troops to the mercs is that when you do that, they disappear. Right now the low merc prices and high market volume is encouraging people to hold onto as many troops as they can, and use workers instead of selling units.

This results in a huge confusing pileup of troops on the market. Furthermore, you can't sell them on the market for less than 3x the base merc sell price, so if you are trying to be competitive in getting money you have to accept a crazy minimum.

I'm not sure how to lay this out in a more logical way, but my strong reaction right now (as it was earlier) is that the extremeness of the market mechanics need to be pulled back. Lower the minimum price, increase the price for merc sales, and reduce the number of troops you can have on the market.

Additionally, the low merc prices have made camps generally a much worse choice. Taking the turns to build up camps can cost several billion, and its only going to pay off if you do a huge sale from off of the market.

I would appreciate if everybody came in to support me on this one. If you like things the way they are, please be vocal about why as well.

And, I'm not asking for a complete re-write or anything, just some tweaking of the constant variables. I'm not asking for major adjustments either, just moderate adjustments. Scale the market % back from .845 to .7, up the merc prices by 50%, and reduce the minimum price by 33%. That means that the minimum market price is still above what you could get on the mercs (for rats the minimum would be $220 while the merc price would be $165).

[Shadow]

I don't like how the market works as a clan storehouse and plan on significantly redesigning it soon. the plan involves anonymity and should mitigate the need for high merc prices.

lowering min price just makes storing easier. tweaking max amounts is fine, but wait until I'm not in turkey...

[Firetooth]

A crazy suggestion why we're here: raise the merc price for food significantly. I think that would make the currently-useless weasel a very viable strategy.

[Shadow]

yup, also planned already

[taekwondokid42]

can you expand on the plan to reduce the need for high merc prices?

I support market anonymity as an idea. Names don't get displayed and you can only buy the lowest priced goods. If goods are the same price, the ones that sell first are the ones that have been there the longest.

Actually, it might not even hurt to display names at that point.

[Shadow]

not on a touchscreen I cant

[taekwondokid42]

lol fair enough.

at some point later then?

[Shadow]

june 22 I get home, ill probably do code the last week of june. I may ask for your help with some javascript if I get as far as the market before july