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.
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.
What about lowering the minimum price that we can still for?
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.
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.
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 :)
Out of curiosity, why aren't people switching to cashing strategies? With literally millions of rock-bottom priced troops available, you could clean up.
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.
yea, food monopolies could be a fun way to screw with the competition if people cooperated.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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...
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.
Quote from: Firetooth on July 11, 2013, 01:16:19 PM
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.
I think this needs reiterating.
Do people even math? 15>14, and 16>15. You get more money if you sell your food higher. If food prices are fixed at 17/18, everybody involved makes more money. Why would you undercut?
Quote from: Shadow on July 11, 2013, 05:28:57 PM
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.
Because it's not worth it for a lot of races to buy food that high.
For the cashers, it is not more effective, and as they are the ones with all the money...
Undercutting allows a faster sell off of the product.
Also basic economics tells us that demand goes down when prices go up so more people will switch to making their own food if prices go too far up
Food is pretty much designed to be worth $15, so it's not really surprising where it is mostly staying
Quote from: Firetooth on July 21, 2013, 03:58:33 PM
Do people even math? 15>14, and 16>15. You get more money if you sell your food higher. If food prices are fixed at 17/18, everybody involved makes more money. Why would you undercut?
Because when 12 people are selling at $17, I get 1/12 of the sales. But if 12 people are selling at $17 and I am selling at $16, I get 100% of all the sales. That means more money for me, because when 12 people are selling at $17 I am producing more food than I am selling. It's worthwhile for me to drop the prices to $16 or $15 because at those prices I am selling everything that I am producing and turning a much greater overall profit.
So by undercutting the market, I benefit myself greatly. But then I also benefit the whole economy, because another one of the guys gets frustrated that I'm pretty much soaking up all the money. So he drops his price, and now we are sharing. If we work together, we pick whatever price means we are selling all of our food.
So the whole market comes down to $15. Except that at $15, the Marten couldn't be bothered to sell food. It's not profitable for him. So the supply of food goes down.
That's the whole idea behind markets. Drive the price to a level where consumers are buying at the same rate as producers are selling. When the price goes down, producers have less incentive to produce. When the price goes up, consumers have less incentive to buy.
As it happens, the real world price gouges that people often complain about are expensive, rare, and hard to pull off. Not that it doesn't happen, but usually it's not in your best interest. Usually someone will undercut, or society will find some other way to circumvent the conspiracy. For example, at $19/food I'm just going to keep twenty thousand foragers around instead of five thousand. At $11/food, I'm not going to have any foragers at all.
For example, a US bank (I think JP Morgan) bought something like 80% of the worlds copper, with the intention of driving up the price and making a profit. This is a big risk on their end, and it relies on the idea that there's no cheaper alternative to copper. JP Morgan is hoarding all the copper because they know that we can't just build more foragers and make our own copper.
But by driving the price of copper up, they are taking a big risk. With copper at high prices, there's greater incentive for scientists to find a more suitable material. If they do find something that is abundant and cheap, most of the copper will become worthless, because the demand will disappear.
With copper at high prices, there's a greater incentive for people to mine copper. Copper-rich soil that may not have been worthwhile before might be worthwhile now. So the supply of copper will go up. As people continue to produce more and more copper, JP Morgan will need to keep buying it all up at the artificial price, and this will drain their coffers. And the longer they do this dance, the greater the chance that someone is going to find an alternative to copper.
If the people can't however find a good alternative to copper, then what JP Morgan has really done is slow down our consumption of it. If there's not enough in the world for us to keep going sustainably, JP Morgan is doing us a service by hoarding copper because one day we might actually run out. JP Morgan will make tons of money in this scenario, but it's probably good that the price of copper went way up, because no good alternative was available and the price was bound to raise anyway.
Markets are pretty remarkable things.
The fact that the market is actually finally behaving like a theoretical market is strong encouragement that we're on the right track for making it actually work properly :)
One thing that I think is an issue with the current setup is that money is circulating through the system way too quickly. This is probably largely due to the fact that it's not safe to keep large volumes of any resource around: cash gets sacked, food gets sacked, troops get reverse-deserted.
So for the time being there's no reliable way to collect more than a couple of runs worth of resources, except to protect them through the market.