Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Hi,

I am just curious if there will be any adjustments to the stockmarket in Cap Labs. The amount that the AI stock prices go up to is crazy stupid levels and it makes it every easy for a player to manipulate their own cash in the beginning of the game.

For examples, All I need to do is start a new game and immediately pause the game, invest 80% of my initial monies into almost any group of AI stocks, set the game to speed 5 and watch my stock market screen for maybe 30 seconds or so.

An initial investment last night of only $60,000,000 and maybe 30 sec to 1 minute total at speed 5 had those AI companies stocks going to over 3,000% increase. I immediately dumped all the owned stock and had over $700,000,000 in cash. I'm quite certain that had I invested 90% of my starting cash, I would have easily had over $1,000,000,000 in cash after dumping all of the stocks, and quite certain that if I had simply held on to them for another couple of minutes I could have easily seen over $10billion or more after dumping the stocks as I played very conservatively to avoid losing any money in my invested in stocks, i.e, did not want to see even one AI company lose money, only wanted to have gains, had I allowed, I could have made it to where I did not make as much with some companies stocks but had made crazy more money with some others, but I wanted to only try to make as much in all stocks that I bought. I'm not sure how else I can try to explain that.

Is this an exploit? In my opinion it certainly is. Should the user avoid using it? Again, in my opinion they certainly should. But there will always be players that are going to complain that this type of thing should be "fixed" so that we as player can not manipulate the game in such a way as to take 60M and turn it into 700M in a matter of 30 sec to 1 minutes time in the game.

I ask what you and Enlights opinion is on this type of exploit and whether anything will be done to try to prevent players from so easily manipulating the game in such a way.

Thanks for your time,
CB

P.S. I'm all for players playing the way that they want to play, but it seems to me that the stock market is broken when I can invest 60 million into stocks on the first day and then sell them in a couple of minutes and have made a profit of 640 million or more. What somebody else does in their single player game does not affect me, but when it comes to challenges that allow unrestricted stock market use then that's a totally different matter and it affects anybody that is playing that challenge game IMHO.

How bout adding a time limit before you can sell stock of a company from the time you bought some. For 1, 2.5 or even 5 years.
So if your last purchase of comp. A was on 5 jan. 1990. You can sell some not earlier as 5 jan. 1991, 5 june 1992 or 5 jan. 1995. (i opt for the 5 year, since 1 or 2.5yr will go fast on speed 5)

Ofc your stock value might still be as high as citybuilder says. But while you wait for the time to pass, the AI has time to build, brandish their retail, invest in tech etc; so it will cost you to catch up again.

Perhaps it would be better if we could sell a certain percentage per year and then on year 5 if we have not sold all of it by then, then we would be allowed to sell all of the remaining stock if the player should want to do so.

In that way the player isn't totally locked into not selling the stocks for a long 5 years, I mean what happens to the legitimate stock market players that forsee that a stock is going to go down and want to dump all of their stock in year 3? At least if they can sell maybe 20% per year, then by year 3 they can sell 60% of the stock that they own and not have a total loss.

I don't know, just thinking out loud.

I wonder whether the behaviour by Cap Lab is realistic or not. If it is I say keep it that way, if it isn't then I agree that a change is possible.

Well if it is realistic then I seriously need to get into the stock market, I'd love to buy some $5.00 stocks and see a 3500% increase in just a matter of a couple days or weeks.

It just feels to me to be too much of a increase and too quickly. But maybe it's just me that feels this way.

City Builder wrote:Well if it is realistic then I seriously need to get into the stock market, I'd love to buy some $5.00 stocks and see a 3500% increase in just a matter of a couple days or weeks.

It just feels to me to be too much of a increase and too quickly. But maybe it's just me that feels this way.

You have to consider the underlying mechanism. I'm positive the mechanism is fine in real life as noone can pause the real world or invest that much money consecutively in 1 second. It is the Cap Lab player who decides to do something unrealistic by pausing the game. One can wonder how far a game developer needs to go to prevent unwanted effects from urealistic player decisions.

Maybe Challenge games with a 300% + difficulty should be the only ones with a stock market option. If the shares are calculated right then they are correct in value. (Net worth divided by outstanding shares.) I wonder if the AI stock goes up faster now because they immediately have access to so many products. Inflation might also play a role in making the stocks go up real fast because it makes it look like the company is making more money.