4.4.04 Issues

General Discussions about new beta versions of Capitalism Lab
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David
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

Post by David »

Will forward your save game to the dev team for investigation.
1. Wrong market price of Real Estate. I can buy a building from Government for the land price. That's totally incorrect. That price should be adjusted by 5-6 years' revenue (not profit but revenue). It will make bying Real Estate on loan money useless.
I also think that the prices should be higher and should be based on revenue.
2. Land price glitch. Land price drops by 25% on day 1. Looks like it leads to incorrect ROI number for buildings built by government on day 1. Not a problem but it looks weird.
Will get this fixed.
2.1 Mayors' behaviour. AI Mayors tend to save ridiculous amount of money. It affects economy volume as this money is basically removed from economy. Even without a need to remove my own mayors from power I use to spend all this money reserve. It brings some life to global economy. Maybe it will be a good idea to make mayors start spending money once their cash reserve reaches say one year budget.
In your save game:
2 cities have lifetime accumulated deficits on their income statements
4 cities have year-to-date deficits on their income statements

The others are having surpluses. So the mix seems quite normal.
By the way you may find me doing strange manupulations with my stock. To be honest I want the stocks to be split by 10 once their price reaches 1000. I really dislike large stock price.
By the way, if you play the same game without stock manipulations, do you think you could also beat all the AIs equally easily? Just wanted to isolate the factors leading to this situation.
megapolis
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

Post by megapolis »

David wrote:
2.1 Mayors' behaviour. AI Mayors tend to save ridiculous amount of money. It affects economy volume as this money is basically removed from economy. Even without a need to remove my own mayors from power I use to spend all this money reserve. It brings some life to global economy. Maybe it will be a good idea to make mayors start spending money once their cash reserve reaches say one year budget.
In your save game:
2 cities have lifetime accumulated deficits on their income statements
4 cities have year-to-date deficits on their income statements

The others are having surpluses. So the mix seems quite normal.
I have to say that those are the cities that I already plundered and bancrupted to release mayors and the cities where I control the mayors.
David wrote:
By the way you may find me doing strange manupulations with my stock. To be honest I want the stocks to be split by 10 once their price reaches 1000. I really dislike large stock price.
By the way, if you play the same game without stock manipulations, do you think you could also beat all the AIs equally easily? Just wanted to isolate the factors leading to this situation.
These manipulations are just to lower my stock price. I spent half of my company's money to get 100% ownership on day 1. So no other companies were affected by that. Even more. I waste about 5% of my profit on this. Of course if game conditions would not be that easy I will just stop these manipulations. They are absolutely counterproductive.

In other words this is an absolutely different issue. I just want the stock to split. I understand why it was made this way in the past. There is a minimum 1 000 000 stocks limit and when my initial capital was only 10 000 000 I was unable to achieve 100% ownership by simply buying out 50% of my stock. Neither on day 1 nor later in the game. I had to buy these stocks from other shareholders later. (to be honest for this I used to sell my 50% of the stock, lead my company to bancrupcy and when the stock price dropped I buy it back). Those were the manipulations that affected AI that invested in my company.
megapolis
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

Post by megapolis »

David,

I have found additional issue in 4.4.05
Price of Stock Focused companies drops to 20% of its real price. As a result I can buy 75% of this company for 30% of its price and merge it to my company. This operation gives me 500-700m for free.
Another issue is that stock focused companies in my latest save are acting strangely. Despite the fact that there's a lot of profitable companies they are not willing to invest. in 3 out of 6 companies all their money are on hands. Others are trying to acquire someone. One got 75% share of one of the companies and then started selling its stock. Other did the same after bying 45% share an another company. Third one bought 20% share. I owned 60% in the same target. It approached me in attempt to buy my share and on the other hand it did not want to sell it's 20% stake. It was the only Stock Focused AI who was behaving properly.
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David
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

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I have to say that those are the cities that I already plundered and bancrupted to release mayors and the cities where I control the mayors.
It looks like that the AI mayors are just doing a good job running the cities and having surplus. So there should be nothing wrong with it, right?

If you think it is too easy for a city to have surplus, you may run a game with a higher Public Expense Index. For more details, please see: http://www.capitalismlab.com/survival-m ... tings.html

-----

The other issues you mentioned will be fixed in v4.4.06.
megapolis
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

Post by megapolis »

David wrote:
I have to say that those are the cities that I already plundered and bancrupted to release mayors and the cities where I control the mayors.
It looks like that the AI mayors are just doing a good job running the cities and having surplus. So there should be nothing wrong with it, right?

If you think it is too easy for a city to have surplus, you may run a game with a higher Public Expense Index. For more details, please see: http://www.capitalismlab.com/survival-m ... tings.html

-----

The other issues you mentioned will be fixed in v4.4.06.
Well... I am afraid that such behaviour drains money from economy. It is the reason why the economy is in constant recession. Mayors should not behave like Scroodge McDuck and sit on a pile of banknotes. They should invest these money in new workplaces or at least lower taxes to be on par with city expenses.

At least from what I see, I can grow economy by bancrupting cities one by one. In my way of handling the cities when I release mayors to make them mayors in another city economy growth is only a side effect but once I will come to a later stage I will have to manage the cities on the edge with spendings equal or just a bit bigger than revenues.
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

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So how would you suggest the AI mayors to do with the pile of money they are sitting with? The quality of life ratings are already pretty high (70+ ratings), so it doesn't seem a strong need to keep building more civic buidings.

What did you do to spur a city's economic growth when you were running the city?
megapolis
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

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David wrote:So how would you suggest the AI mayors to do with the pile of money they are sitting with? The quality of life ratings are already pretty high (70+ ratings), so it doesn't seem a strong need to keep building more civic buidings.

What did you do to spur a city's economic growth when you were running the city?
Hi David,

Unfortunately I did not reach the city management part of the game. Now I am having fun plundering city property. ;)

As for proper city management decisions as a manager I think that managers should think about
1. Fighting unemployment
2. When there are enough workplaces they should increase life quality
3. They should either provide more housing and commercial estate

Anyway AI mayor should be a good mayor. Maybe he should not me so skilled as human player will be, but he has to pursuit the same goals a good mayor should do.

Maybe raising unemployment subsidies and lowering taxes to the necessary level will be enough for AI.
Maybe a good mayor should use limited amount of money on university research.

Regards
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

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Unfortunately I did not reach the city management part of the game. Now I am having fun plundering city property. ;)
Since you are having fun with the current settings, I think we should keep it as it is. ;)

After all, it is all about gameplay. Our goal is not to make the game as hard as possible, but to make it as fun as possible.
megapolis
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

Post by megapolis »

David wrote:
Unfortunately I did not reach the city management part of the game. Now I am having fun plundering city property. ;)
Since you are having fun with the current settings, I think we should keep it as it is. ;)

After all, it is all about gameplay. Our goal is not to make the game as hard as possible, but to make it as fun as possible.
Hopefully you won't ;)

Unfortunately I am doing this because game does not offer other challenges. I really want the game to be more challenging. It makes me think and try to find a different way to exploit the game. My ideal game is the one that cannot be exploited. Where all different aspects of the game matters equally. Also I want a more challenging AI. it's such a pity that AI in Capitalism Lab wastes too much money. Every dollar is an opportunity and an AI with a billion in cash has a billion of wasted opportunities.
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Re: 4.4.04 Issues

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As for proper city management decisions as a manager I think that managers should think about
1. Fighting unemployment
2. When there are enough workplaces they should increase life quality
3. They should either provide more housing and commercial estate

Anyway AI mayor should be a good mayor. Maybe he should not me so skilled as human player will be, but he has to pursuit the same goals a good mayor should do.

Maybe raising unemployment subsidies and lowering taxes to the necessary level will be enough for AI.
Maybe a good mayor should use limited amount of money on university research.
Some of your suggestions like "raising unemployment subsidies and lowering taxes to the necessary level will be enough for AI." are quite easy to implement. But I want to know why you think having the AI doing so will make your game more challenging?

In my opinion, having AI mayors perfectly run the cities will just take out the fun from the game. Imagine all cities all having low unemployment rates, good GDP growth and high quality of life ratings. Then what the player's role should be? A game world that is perfectly run by AI can be boring.

Having said that, having more variation in AI behaviors can be a good thing though, like doing more on "raising unemployment subsidies and lowering taxes to the necessary level will be enough for AI."
(Currently there is programming code that will lead to that kind of variations already. The question is whether we should further increase the variation or not.)

But before we go ahead and make that change, we want to hear from other players if they like the variations of AI behaviors are enough in the game now, or we have to further increase that, like what you suggested.
Maybe a good mayor should use limited amount of money on university research.
Which industry do you think the AI should pick for doing university research? The industries that already have high competitiveness ratings in the city or those with low ratings?

<number of firms in the city engaging in business activities in the industry> X <current competitiveness rating of the industry [Inverse]>

So the industry with the most number of firms and relatively low competitiveness rating will get the university research funding.

Do you think this will work?

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Speaking of a more challenging game, the survival mode was designed for people looking for tough challenges. If you don't feel like building civic buildings yourself, you could set the mayor you control to build them automatically for you and you could concentrate on growing your business.
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