Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Hi again,

my next idea is about Natural Resources Firms (NRF) and how to expand their income through a common commodity market.

1.
The Global Commodity Market - GCM will be like the stock market in-game, it will show internationally sold commodities and the player will have access to buy/sell them and profit from it. The menu for GCM will show - name of the commodity, quality, available quantity, prize at the moment, prize's going up or down, and (if available) player's quota of owned commodity in $ (just like shares of other corps).

2.
Each NRF will now have a option yes/no called "Sold some of the production to GCM" with a slider in %. If the player select Yes and put the slider to 50% for example, half of the produced quantity of the material will be sent and sold in the GCM directly. This will work for all types of NRF, and can even work for some farm products like "chicken", "corn" or "sugar". All natural resources will be traded on GCM, without exception, with the only difference will be how wanted they are - and of course - the prize.

3.
The player can also buy commodities from GCM and have them "virtually" there for some time. The player now has 2 options:
- wait for the prize to rise and sell his quota for profit, or keep his quota as hedging for the future
- move his quantity of the material in "real world" - which means removing it from the GCM and moving in into one of the game cities, if his company has warehouse to offload it there. From then on, he can use the way he wishes. The cost of this "moving" will be different for each city. The commodity now can be used for making stuff. Loading it back to GCM is also an option.

4.
Some materials of low quality won't be available in the GCM, which includes ones mined by the player. For example, gold has to be at least 80Q to enter GCM, oil has to be at least 65Q and so on.

5.
New natural resources will be available to mine/extract and so on, and even if they can not be used for manufacturing new products, they can be 100% exported to GCM and be traded there.
Here's a (including new and old materials) possible list:
From farms: Sugar, Coffee, Rice, Potatoes, Rubber, Wheat, Cotton, Olive Oil, Rapeseed, Soybean, Pork Meat, Chicken Meat, Tea, Cocoa, Wool, Milk, Corn, etc
Energy: Uranium, Natural Gas, Oil, Oil products (in future updates if become available: crude oil, propane, plastics, gasoline, etc)
Industrials: Copper, Aluminium, Lead, TIn, Nickel, Cobalt, Iron, Molybdenum, Titanium, Wolfram, Zinc
Precious: Gold, Platinum, Silver, Diamonds, Gems, Palladium
Other: Lumber products, Salt, Sand, Water, Stones (new extraction firm for these)
Semi-products: plastics, leather, paper, steel
(color scheme can be upgraded to show which group the resources belong to, i mean - on the map)

6.
Commodities added for this will not be used for anything other than GCM - for now. Existing ones will be expanded where possible to have more products. For example gold now has some products, but a new product (golden necklace) can be added. Same for oil (new building Oil Refinery is already mentioned several times here, and its products), lumber (hardwood, paper, cardboard, pulp, methanol), silver (earing, rings, necklace, bracelets) and so on.

7.
Usage: for one, all the commodities can be used for hedging and investment in short and long terms strategies. Also - for buying and moving materials in cities, where they're not available. The demand for such materials will be increased in game, so they'll be more profitable. The commodity may have 4 types of buyers/users:
- GCM (if selected and adjusted)
- local firms
- other corporations
- your own manufactoring firms (internal sales still applies, even if some quantities go to GCM)

So if you have some ideas, please share and give your opinion on this idea.

See ya.

I like your idea. You should add a poll to your post allowing people to vote yay or nay on your idea. If it gets some traction, the dev team will at least consider it.

Great Idea

I see this as a great component for an Energy/Mining DLC and/or the Finance DLC

Energy/Mining DLC: A Global commodity Market would allow you to mine or grow commodities and sell them in a global market instead of just relying on local manufacturers for business. This would make raw materials a more interesting part of the game not just a unprofitable necessity for manufacturing certain products. The goal of these businesses would be to become the lowest cost producer by hiring mining/petroleum engineers, investing in staff training, researching extraction technology, etc. allowing you to generate good profits and reduce or prevent losses during periods of substantial price declines like in real world commodity businesses.

See this post about Energy/Mining DLC: https://www.capitalism2.com/forum/viewt ... =49&t=6916

Finance DLC: Ability to trade/speculate in commodities futures for profit, Invest in Commodity Futures to hedge against inflation, etc.

Commodity prices would be determined by global supply and demand. There would be periods of overproduction and/or demand declines that would tank the price of commodities in the short term leading to losses in most if not all firms and periods of underproduction and/or significant spikes in demand that would lead to substantial profits.

I think the problem with this idea is that it lacks some of the nuance the game actually already does a good job of incorporating. Maybe that could be added, but it might make it quite complicated. Specifically, global commodities markets are driven to a large extent by the cost of storing and transporting goods from producers to consumers and the time it takes to move them. Also, I don't see the point in hedging a lot of goods because either the prices are fairly stable or the cost of the commodities have little impact on overall costs. Note that when everyone in a competitive industry faces the same cost structure, hedging becomes kind of pointless because costs should be passed on to consumers anyway. It just means paying fees to increase the volatility of the firm's performance.

That being said, if natural resource extraction is adapted a bit to be more important to the game, this might be interesting.

That being said, if natural resource extraction is adapted a bit to be more important to the game, this might be interesting.

From the gameplay standpoint, how should natural resource extraction be implemented?

I guess whole natural resources system should be re modeled. Mining/logging etc would have three factors from now, speed, cost efficiency and technology(just could not find better name for now).

so:
speed - researching it would increase by fraction amount of produced resource.
cost efficiency - researching it would decrease cost of production by fraction.
technology - would increase amount of natural resources left to extract - imagine it like new technology to dig deeper mines, or better afforestation techniques.

maybe also funds for new resources discovery?

Wood could be a completely renewable source where mines eventually would go zero or, better in my opinion, so slow production speed that it would be questionable to keep it open, but who knows after ten years when technology advance it might be again profitable to open old mine, especially if price skyrocket from some random number generator events.

also size of the deposits, should be reconsidered, I have found current one, in vanilla game, surprisingly small.

speed - researching it would increase by fraction amount of produced resource.
cost efficiency - researching it would decrease cost of production by fraction.
technology - would increase amount of natural resources left to extract - imagine it like new technology to dig deeper mines, or better afforestation techniques.

Good ideas!