Not so fun part of Banking DLC

[jamills102]

Hey Devs,

First off, I like where y'all are going with the new Banking DLC. Secondly, I have a minor request for a minor improvement. Can you please increase the rate increases for holding down the plus/minus button when buying/selling bonds and taking out loans from other companies. Maybe allow us to increase the bond price to 1000. After you reach totals greater than 1 billion, it becomes super tedious (I end up holding down the plus button for minutes before giving up). Also, this makes buying bonds as an insurance company a complete pain (to the point it isnt worth the effort). If there is a way to already do this I would greatly appreciate the info.

Keep up the good work!

[David]

You may press the SHIFT key while clicking the [+][-] buttons for 10 times increases/decreases.

[smplfy]

Hold CTRL+Shift will clicking to increase/decrease. That increases/decreases by an even greater rate than just Shift alone or Ctrl alone.

- smplfy

[Brutus]

is there also a way to make the increment smaller?

Sometimes I get stuck with odd price numbers and I just want them to be synchronized with other products but am always somehow stuck with the odd cents here and there making the price something like Product A $60,00 and product B $60,01

[communist]

I agree with this. I reached a point where i was able to purchase entire blocks of US Treasury bonds, i had the money, but i was unwilling to hold Ctrl+Shift+RMB for the few minutes that it would require.

[elaken]

I agree with this. I reached a point where i was able to purchase entire blocks of US Treasury bonds, i had the money, but i was unwilling to hold Ctrl+Shift+RMB for the few minutes that it would require.

They've moved this around a lot in beta and I'm not very please with where they landed. Essentially after not-very-long in the game, bonds become a pain in the ass.

1) If you want to buy bonds (and given your options, why would you do this?) - You have to keep buying the same small quantity of treasury bonds (and remember to re-purchase when they mature). There are usually no / minimal corporate bonds to buy, so it eventually becomes an exercise of doing a lot of micromanagement work for minimal gain. Especially once you take inflation into account, it's always better to buy global stocks than mess around with bonds - even though bonds are a much larger market in the real world. Long ago I proposed global corporate bonds (presumably with some risk of default, but higher yields), but that never happened.
2) Somewhere along the way (last 1-2 updates) they put a $1B cap on the bonds you can issue. So if you want to raise $50B in bonds you need to click the button 50X. This amount of micromanagement makes them super annoying, and the AI players will automatically re-issue bonds to cover maturities. If, for example I want to build a bunch of real estate: I always create a subsidiary and issue short term bonds, relying on the AI to handle the maturity roll (I similarly must rely on AI bankers to get cash out of the bank consistently because those options are not available the player corp).
3) The micromanagement issues could be solved with some sort of "rolling purchase" / "rolling sale" functionality that could be conducted by (for example) the office the CFO (which would give that function an actual purpose). If you don't mind rate volatility, I'd far rather automatically re-issue $x of 1-year bonds (at the then prevailing market rate) than issue 10-yrs at higher rates. Where it's an option I often end up just paying ~5% more for the longer term debt than dealing with having to manually reissue 10-20 bonds every game year. Not because it's good economics, but because the alternative is annoying as hell.

[David]

I agree with this. I reached a point where i was able to purchase entire blocks of US Treasury bonds, i had the money, but i was unwilling to hold Ctrl+Shift+RMB for the few minutes that it would require.

Actually you only have to hold the CTRL and press the right mouse button to speed it up. Holding CTRL and SHIFT key at the same time does not speed it up further.

I did a test and I was able to increase the purchase amount to $10 billion of treasury notes by holding the CTRL and pressing the right mouse button for 2 seconds only. How much bonds were you trying to buy that took a few minutes?

[David]

1) There are usually no / minimal corporate bonds to buy

If you reduce the initial amounts of capital of AI companies and the initial cash levels of cities in the new Game Settings menu, there will be a higher chance that they will issue bonds.

2) Somewhere along the way (last 1-2 updates) they put a $1B cap on the bonds you can issue. So if you want to raise $50B in bonds you need to click the button 50X. This amount of micromanagement makes them super annoying, and the AI players will automatically re-issue bonds to cover maturities. If, for example I want to build a bunch of real estate: I always create a subsidiary and issue short term bonds, relying on the AI to handle the maturity roll (I similarly must rely on AI bankers to get cash out of the bank consistently because those options are not available the player corp).

I recall that $1B cap was implemented for blocking a loophole reported by a player. If the cap is going to be removed, the loophole will resurface. If you really think that there is a need for issuing bonds larger $1B, the practical way would be to add a script variable letting the player to customize the cap amount. If you think this is a good idea, you may post a suggestion with a poll for this. (Or I can write such a post for you if you want.)

3) The micromanagement issues could be solved with some sort of "rolling purchase" / "rolling sale" functionality that could be conducted by (for example) the office the CFO (which would give that function an actual purpose). If you don't mind rate volatility, I'd far rather automatically re-issue $x of 1-year bonds (at the then prevailing market rate) than issue 10-yrs at higher rates. Where it's an option I often end up just paying ~5% more for the longer term debt than dealing with having to manually reissue 10-20 bonds every game year. Not because it's good economics, but because the alternative is annoying as hell.

I would recommend that you create a poll for your suggestion to gauge the community's interest in it. There would be a higher chance that the dev team will implement it if the interest level is high.

You could see some examples of the polls in the Suggestions forum at viewforum.php?f=14

[smplfy]

I agree with this. I reached a point where i was able to purchase entire blocks of US Treasury bonds, i had the money, but i was unwilling to hold Ctrl+Shift+RMB for the few minutes that it would require.

Holding CTRL and SHIFT key at the same time does not speed it up further.

It does speed it up if you are dealing in larger quantities in the hundreds of billions.

[David]

The speed of changing an amount when holding the CTRL key and pressing the right mouse button has been further increased. Please download the latest patch v6.6.09 from viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7948