[BALANCE] Bonds break the game

[JohanPB]

Greetings.

Bond breaks the game, because they are not taken properly into the company evaluation.

Bankruptcy screen
Only the loan part is taken into account, not the bond part, making shareholder much richer than they should.

Bond issuing and "immediate" buyback

• Pause the game
• Emit one full line of bond, as big as possible
• Un pause the game for a few tick , to the bond price plunge
• buyback the whole bond for a fractiion of the price. This means free money

Save Before
Save after

A solution for this would be to rate the bond risk to the situation after the bond has been issued.

[zonas]

Also you can lower your rating even more if you buy your own companies stock.

1. Issue bonds
2. Buy own stock some reasonable amount
3. Wait 5 mins
4. Buy back the bonds with deep discount

[David]

I've forwarded these to the dev team. They will be looking into them.

[nejxis]

Well, you're right they do break the game if you play like this and cheat.

Fixing loopholes like this imo is a waste of time because this is single player game and you can decide not to cheat or cheat.

I'll give you another way to cheat then.

1) Create subsidiary 'A' and put all cash from mother company in it.
2) Issue maximum number of Bonds on subsidiary 'A'
3) Create subsidiary 'B' with the subsidiary 'A' being the mother company and put all cash from 'A' in 'B'
4) Issue maximum number of bonds on subsidiary 'B'
5) Keep repeating this process for as long as you like.
6) Finally, create a last subsidiary without any bonds on it. Transfer all cash to it and merge it with the original mother company.

Congrats, you now have trillions of cash and shareholdings in a list of companies that will go bankrupt in 2 days.

Make sure to declare bankruptcy on all of them and keep the cash.

[David]

Bankruptcy screen
Only the loan part is taken into account, not the bond part, making shareholder much richer than they should.

This will be fixed in the next update 6.2.07.

A solution for this would be to rate the bond risk to the situation after the bond has been issued.

The dev team will implement your suggestion and it will be available in v6.2.07.

But there will still be other ways to cheat. As the player can issue several massive bonds in a row and the last one will push down the bond prices of the earlier ones, due to the bigger total debt that the company has incurred.

The only way to prevent cheating in this area would be to prohibit the player from buying back its own bonds or make the bond purchase prices for bond buyback always >= 100.

However, this will take some fun out of the game and reduce its realism, as in the real world, companies do buy back own bonds at a discount and profit from that (it is treated as an income in their P&L statements.)

For this kind of cheating, the dev team would recommend players refrain from cheating rather than implementing some artificial limits on the game to eliminate it at the expenses of gameplay freedom.

[megapolis]

I've forwarded these to the dev team. They will be looking into them.

Oh, c'mon. It is an exploit I explained on day1.

[JohanPB]

Then repeating it to get attention was worth it.

[chengtsai]

I talked about this bug already in the past, I can't believe it still have not been resolved yet.

I loved this game so much but I stopped to play until a lot of bug gets corrected.

[megapolis]

A solution for this would be to rate the bond risk to the situation after the bond has been issued.

Just in case, it is not a solution. Just spend some cash immediately and your rating will drop. You can buy technology or flush some inventory down the toilet, does not matter. Show immediate loss on the books by any means and your rating will drop. In my case I take 20m loan on the very start of the game and build an apartment building. It creates a $150-200k immediate loss (first month salary) despite the fact that this apartment building is a highly profitable investment.

[megapolis]

A solution for this would be to rate the bond risk to the situation after the bond has been issued.

Just in case, it is not a solution. Just spend some cash immediately and your rating will drop. You can buy technology or flush some inventory down the toilet, does not matter. Show immediate loss on the books by any means and your rating will drop. In my case I take 20m loan on the very start of the game and build an apartment building. It creates a $150-200k immediate loss (first month salary) despite the fact that this apartment building is a highly profitable investment.

Afterthought: your idea is not a solution but a partial solution. Or at least an improvement.