Pulling troops off the market

[nateac]

So I know that Reg and Turbo use different codes and have a few differences just because of the time length of the game but... why can we pull troops/food off the market in reg but not in Turbo.
this will be my first full round in Turbo so maybe this is just a weird quirk this round but food and rats are about the only thing really moving off the market even though most troops are priced really low.

[Shadow]

If I had my way, you wouldn't be able to pull troops off the market in reg either ^_^. In reg, people just use the market as a storehouse. On turbo, at least stuff goes there to sell.

If your stuff isn't moving and you're desperate, try lowering the prices to the same level as the rest of the competitors. If that fails, you can also sell directly to merceneries.

However, since the market is flooded with rock-bottom prices, why not start using a cashing strategy and clean some of it up? A little cash goes a long way on turbo right now.

[nateac]

What about lowering the minimum price that we can still for?

[Shadow]

We could, but I worry about clans using it to pass resources around aid limits. With a few tweaks to the market it's doable, I think.

[taekwondokid42]

I'm not sure I proposed the idea yet, but I thought of a self-regulating market. It's actually an interesting economic concept and I'm not sure it's been tried before (probably has).

Basically, instead of people setting their own prices, the market sets prices based on how fast things are selling. For example, when there's 12 billion food on the market at $17 each and it's been sitting there for 3 days, the market would automatically start lowering it.

I think you would set a goal so that the inflow and outflow over the course of the last 72 hours was equal. (it's gotta be that much because sometimes people run in groups, and if they all throw stuff on the market with a 6 hour delay it'll jostle the prices... which could be abused.) So if there has been 10 billion food thrown on the market and 8 billion food bought from the market in the past 72 hours, food drops by a set amount ($1). This will encourage people to buy food and discourage people from selling food, which sets the market at equilibrium. Troops adjust by $25 each. Market prices only don't adjust if production and consumption are within 10% for the last 72 hours. Prices adjust every 6 hours.

That's a pretty naive way of doing it, and plenty open to abuse but it's just a first idea. If people like the thought of a self adjusting market I'd have fun building something workable.

I might try to build something workable anyway, because it's such an interesting idea to me.

[Shadow]

I had a similar idea, but based on how much net is in the game. The market prices would be a pre-determined function of the ratio of total networth available in a particular troop type on the market to the total active networth in the game at the given time. High ratio means low prices and vice versa. Everyone gets an equal share of proceeds since everyone sells at the same price, etc. This has the advantage of automatically adjusting itself to deal with any sort of ingame situation via the total networth measure. It would also be easy to fold merceneries into this framework so that there would no longer be two separate markets.

It would be a little harder to abuse since total net in the game isn't something that anyone can control directly, so price manipulation would be trickier, and it would be completely impossible to use it to pass net around aid limits unless your clan was literally the only players on the market.

Still, I like how the market this round is working, so if we can get away with tweaking the minimum prices instead of (yet again) recoding the whole thing, then I'm all for that :)

[Shadow]

Out of curiosity, why aren't people switching to cashing strategies? With literally millions of rock-bottom priced troops available, you could clean up.

[Firetooth]

Why are people so stupid as to undercut the marketed prices of food? People can't select who they buy from, everybody could easily price their food at $19. Instead, we will predictably end up with food down to $13, maybe $12 if people don't clue up.

[Shadow]

yea, food monopolies could be a fun way to screw with the competition if people cooperated.

[Pippin]

kinda abuseable if you ask me in the sense that one unclanned warlord could pile on the food constantly for as cheap as he likes and effectively make the farmer strat unable to make a profit.

edit: i didnt really consider how easy it would be to buy out cheap food.

[Shadow]

If food consumption on the market keeps up at the present rate, then by the end of the round, the food market will have been worth approximately 1 trillion dollars.

[taekwondokid42]

I for one, was wondering why prices have been so high, because honestly it's not worthwhile for me to buy food at $17 each. At $19, nooooo wayyyy I'm making my own. Even at $17 I try to keep some foragers around.

But when lots of troops are selling and food is $15 then I'll drop my tax rate and focus on maximizing troop production.

Competition is a winning strategy :)

[Shadow]

For interest's sake, here are the price cutoffs at which making food or buying your own amounts to the same thing, assuming a 100% economic build and perfect land access. Eg, if you are paying more than this for food you are better off making your own, and if you are selling food for less than this you are better off cashing directly:

rat: $13.46
painted one: $14.27
stoat: $16.92
fox: $15.76
wildcat: $15.71
lizard: $14.32
wolf: $10.83
marten: $19.77
magpie: $19.77
ferret: $10.23
weasel: $15.00

Even more interestingly, the average of these numbers, $15.09, is almost exactly the average price paid for food so far this round. It constantly amazes me that small groups of people are able to (completely accidentally) find the optimum balance just by interacting on a market.

Of course, there are situation where you would want to sell below or buy above those prices which are not necessarily a mistake, eg currently I sell food for less to players who agree not to attack me, and if you are desperate for food to sustain a breaking army, overpaying could be a good strategy in the long run.

[taekwondokid42]

These numbers aren't perfect, because of troop sales. Especially as a rat, $14 is a good deal for me because I'll make a lot more than that by producing troops and selling them on the market.

Assuming they sell of course. But on a good day I can make something like 250k rats per turn, which equates to about 80mil assuming they all get sold.

...wait, is that a lot? That doesn't actually sound like a lot...

[Shadow]

Those numbers are the tradeoff between cashing with markets and farming with foragers. IF you are farming with foragers, these are the prices above which you need to sell in order to be making more money than you would if you switched to markets, and if you are using markets to make case, these are the max prices you can pay before you would be better off with foragers.

I could technically calculate the max cash output per turn for each race, but effort, so no.