Market Saturation - pros and cons

[Deputy Dawg]

I just wondered what players think about the new "Market Saturation" feature. What do you think are the pros and cons?

IMO I think it brings more negatives than positives.

The biggest negative for me is that it punishes farms built around a particular speciality. For example, if you wanted a farm to produce dairy products exclusively, it wouldn't be long before everything you sold was 40% below market price. The workaround is to build a huge number of warehouses, so you can hold everything in stock until the market price rises again. I don't think it's viable to keep a years worth of production in a warehouse, waiting for the price to come back up. I've never seen a real farm with 30 warehouses, 30 Silos and 20 barns...

The other thing I noticed, was that the player is now being artificially channelled towards making a huge variety of different products, which need to be dribbled slowly onto the market using Auto-Sell, in order to keep the Market Saturation at a minimal level. My most recent farm ended up producing around 20 different goods, which was good for the prices obtained, but totally unrealistic. I don't think there's any farm in the world today, that would create that number of different things.

My suggestion would be for the devs to make this feature optional in the game settings.

[UglyBird]

Most farm produced products (grains, meat etc..) have their price fluctuate depending on offer/demand.
Some products are stocked pile or even dumped when demand fall.
But in real life this happens within a very complex system which does not impact on a single farm as it does in FM21.
I do agree with you that this feature should be optional.
To work well we should get a choice of buyers for the same product, prices fluctuating between them. This would allow us to sell to the buyer with the best price which would then decrease with volume sold not affecting other buyers.
This system exist in "Farming simulator"

[jhughes]

Supply and demand is how the world works. Why do you want an easy button?

What is the purpose of the game if you can build 2 fish farms and one frozen food factory and print money forever in fast speed?

The game is over in 20 minutes if the price never changes.

[Rasip]

Originally posted by jhughes:

Supply and demand is how the world works. Why do you want an easy button?

What is the purpose of the game if you can build 2 fish farms and one frozen food factory and print money forever in fast speed?

The game is over in 20 minutes if the price never changes.

Did you even read the post? The said nothing about supply and demand or prices being static.

They are talking about the new feature that makes anything you sell worth 40% less if you aren't constantly changing what your farm is growing. Which is completely unrealistic. No one farm can produce enough to tank the value of any crop that much and no farm is making dozens of products at a time.

[jhughes]

Originally posted by Rasip:

Originally posted by jhughes:

Supply and demand is how the world works. Why do you want an easy button?

What is the purpose of the game if you can build 2 fish farms and one frozen food factory and print money forever in fast speed?

The game is over in 20 minutes if the price never changes.

Did you even read the post? The said nothing about supply and demand or prices being static.

They are talking about the new feature that makes anything you sell worth 40% less if you aren't constantly changing what your farm is growing. Which is completely unrealistic. No one farm can produce enough to tank the value of any crop that much and no farm is making dozens of products at a time.

First of all .. the 40% change only happens (in my experience), if you greatly produce an item. This is certainly true with the 'medium' setting for 'Price of Products'.

I have a farm currently with 24 Large Cow Sheds .. all of them are producing "Bio Milk". I am making all 4 Bio Cow Milk Production Items I know of (White Cheese, Yellow cheese, Butter .. all in a milk processing plant, and cake in a bakery).

I am selling auto selling all excess Bio Milk and have been for at least one year,

Current Price of BioMilk is -8% and I am making money on it hand over fist.

The price of all the cheeses and cake is still 0%

This is a non issue on the Medium setting.

It is easier to get to 40% on the Extreme setting for 'Price of Products'. If you don't like the effect .. pick the appropriate 'price of products' setting.

BTW, I do agree with you that one farm would not have a 40% impact on prices. But it is a game with a difficulty setting where you can partially control the impact. On the extreme setting, it is, well, extreme.