In response to baz's post below, I have set up a poll here for you guys to express your opinions about this topic.
Currently, Gold and Silver in Capitalism Lab is set to a constant quality of 100, to reflect the fact that there is only one price for gold or silver on the commodity market. But baz has made a good point below and we will consider changing Gold and Silver in Capitalism Lab to variable quality if most of you prefer this way.
I forgot to mention Gold and silver. Gold and silver must have different qualities as in the real world you can buy cheap 9 carat gold rings that are totally different to 24 carat which should effect the price of jewerly.
I'm unclear on aluminium but definatley gold and silver do differ greatly. I think it would be a huge mistake to change this as the assumption would be gold is just gold when it's not. Have you ever tried buying your mrs a 9 carat ring or watch and saying " don't worry love it's all the same "
Divorce
Same with diamonds and silver, luckly there is no diamonds yet in the game, and no divorce either.
I do know for a fact that when cheap gold is used in circuitry it's just not the same and the reliabity is reduced by a huge amount.
Again having different qualities of gold and silver allows for different tactics to be played in the game, 10% gold allows you to sell your items at a much cheaper price than say 100 % but i remember when I had 100 % and sold the computer 40 % when we had a price war the computer gave up because the difference in price forced it out of the market because even when I was selling rings ect as cheap as I could I still made a good profit when the computer went into negative profit. Even though the computer had better tech values than me.
My thoughts, you can research all you like on techs but better quality raw materials especially in the jewerly industry will always beat a far superier tech, with a little help from a pricing stratergy.
Before answering this, how exactly will the resources industry be working?
I remember earlier, you mentioning that you were thinking about a commodities market and that all production would be purchased from there directly. Resources needed would then be purchased from a central market rather than from another player
But my initial thoughts are that the 9carat/24carat "branding" is dependant on the purity that the manufacturer wants to put into the final product. Since there is no direct control of this nature in Capitalism, I am leaning towards a variable quality as this would be the only way to control this.
Considering all the feedback, we have decided that we will make all natural resources having variable qualities, just like Cap2, for better gameplay, though not necessarily for better realism.
What might be an option to include is the following, regarding of the quality (read xx carat) of the end product. Ill use the gold ring as example.
Include the different carat rings as output product (thus creating products like for example, 9c golden ring, 24c golden ring etc)
Max the quality of the different carat rings, for example 9c ring has a quality max of lets say 70, 24c quality cap of 100
Beside that ofc the amount of gold required to make the different rings also differs. 9c rings need less gold to produce then 24c rings.
That way you can choose which ring you want to produce giving the different rings also a different pricetag which then can only be improved/changed by the brandlevel.
Result:
All gold deposits have same quality. This is realistic, since pure gold is the same from all over the planet, otherwise it wouldnt be pure gold.
For the gameplay you have different carat rings, requiring different amounts of Gold. Have different pricetags. Which gives the player and AI still the oppurtunity to focus on the lower quality (read less carat) gold rings or the higher (more carat) rings.
The above can also be used ofc for Silver and if you guys are going to include it diamonds.
Another idea is to have the quality effect the cost of mining/loggin/pomping it the recources.
This adds a level of dynamics to the recource market.
Use cheaper (lower quality) recources thus reducing the quality but also the cost of making a product or use more costly (higher quality) recources thus improving the quality but also costs of making a product.
