Trading Price Change Mechanics details and explanation

[forzion]

Based on feedback from some readers of the Reports for the Community 56 and 57 where I tried to describe the in-game Price Change Mechanic based on recent trades I realized that no matter how much I tried to be clear, I totally failed and people misunderstood and misinterpeted the text.

Two main mistakes I made:
- I thought I can describe the mechanic breafly to help people understand how it works.
- I thought people will be able to understand what are the main ideas behind.

I do not see a reason to try further explain the mechanic in another post because it is too complicated to write about it and it cannot fit the Reports well. Then there is a language barrier because some people use translator to understand the text and I did not count for that. All the text regarding this contains more tahn 2400 words and it is really hard to understand. I take the blame, it is my fault, and I want to provide clarification for those who are interested.

Additionally I will make a spreadsheet in which you will be able to easily see the projections for potential price changes. It is not so easy though. I am working on in for more than 2 weeks already but it is not ready yet. I will share it publicly as soon I will have a good enough version ready. It will help more than 10.000 words in discussions or blog posts.

It took me weeks of thinking about the mechanic to understand how it works and there was lot of misunderstanding on my side too. Please bear with me as I try to provide correct informations and fail in the process.

Basic information about the mechanic before the change:
- It was not scaling with population which caused problems if you were living from imports for huge population. Prices just skyrocketed over time due to trade price factor going exponential.
- The factor for price change was 10% which amplified the problem even more.
- There were wild price changes especially while unloading certain resources from ships.

Basic information about the mechanic after the change:
- Now it scales with population and that prevents prices going too high with large population.
- The factor for price change was reduced to 5% to give players additional room to breathe if they want to use imports as source of provision.
- Ships and planes can trade higher amounts of resources without causing wild price changes.

Most of the Republics were doing fine before the change. After the change they will do even better because the change should prevent prices from skyrocketing for imported resources needed to supply the population and also allow better trade conditions for those who have large population.

Trade price changes are temporary and the change is always aplied to resource's base price after the amounts from exports and imports in recent 75 day period are calculated. There is no lating effect on prices and as soon as the trade goes neutral you will trade with base prices.

I can provide further explanation or examples if needed but please give me a scenario you want to know about first becasue even I tried to provide some examples it looks like a fail, because people may be distracted by the numbers I used and miss the point of the example because of different mindset and timeframes I used.

So here we are, bear with me and give me time to answer you question here.

[longshots444]

Looking forward to seeing it. Thanks.

[forzion]

I made a calculator that should be easy enough to use. You can get it here:
https://1drv.ms/x/s!AupeI3t5EG4EgotdseHuyye7DeUXlg?e=6Y2vE3

It opens in view only first so you need to switch edit mode first on top of the page or download it if you have Excel in your PC and edit it here.

Only the orange cell are editable, others are locked.

[Thomas]

Here is scenario.
50 000 people in republic.
Grain always imported to produce food. What is the price change in 10 years when deliver with ship or trains?
How is new mechanics affects oil exports in 10 years for same republic?
Is that possible to play as major oil exporter and buy all grain for republic?

[MrKrabs]

I, and I guess all of us, very much appreciate your efforts.
Thanks very much.

[CaPY]

Im planning to play hard mode scarcity where I randomly choose 1-3 resources that I can not mine in my republic. I was thinking that I will try hard republic where there is no bauxite and oil and uranium. So no cheap power.

Or maybe Congo mode where you can only mine bauxite/trees/food rest must be imported.

Or Oymyakon republic mode where you can mine coal/iron/bauxite/wood and unable to grow food.

[Adil3tr]

I'd really appreciate anything in the game that helps the user with this. Maybe something in the almanac showing the current threshold and how close you are to it for the 75 day period and the year?

Do we have a road threshold plus a air/sea threshold or does road shipping count towards the air/sea threshold? Do air and sea count towards the same threshold?

[forzion]

Originally posted by Thomas:

Here is scenario.
50 000 people in republic.
Grain always imported to produce food. What is the price change in 10 years when deliver with ship or trains?
How is new mechanics affects oil exports in 10 years for same republic?
Is that possible to play as major oil exporter and buy all grain for republic?

So let me give some numbers for your scenario first. You want ot supply food for 50.000 workers and average food consumption for a citizen per year is about 0,15 t. So you will need about 7500 t of food each year to satisfy them.

If you would just import the food they need you would have to import about 625 tons of food each month and you would reach 300% of the threshold doing that. That is about 15% extra cost for imported food.

But you want to make food out of imported crops so you would need to import 42 t of crops for each 20 t of food made in vanilla food factory. That means you need 15750 t of crops to make the food your people would need in a year. So your imports would be about 85% of the threshold and you would pay about 4,25% extra for imported crops.

Then you need to take in the inflation for 10 years which would rise the price of food by about 57% if you would have the average inflation of 5% in a year for RUB. This would happen even if you would not import anything.

So generally you would pay 4,25% more for traded crops during those years compared to base trade price. The totals you can get when you calculate the price of crops you have with the total amount 157500 t.

With previous version of the calculation you would pay more than 12% extra for the same amount of crops traded. Now import prices for real needs should not get out of control because it scales with population.

Then the exports for oil are dependant on how much oil you can produce. I can only tell you how much oil may be a bit too much, but I do not think you would ever run unprofitable with oil exports because with that number of people if you export 140.000 t of oil in each year, you will get by 10% less for each ton and 140.000 t is a lot of oil. You need more than 50 vanilla pumpjacks to produce that much oil in a year.

With your scenario you would do fine because you count in a lot of workers living in your republic. If you would try to export the same amount of oil without having any population you would lose more than 25% of the value.

So the answer is that you can exist with republic importing crops to make food, meat, alcohol and even clothes if you can produce enough oil to pay for that. The base price for oil in first year is about 45 RUB, which means 140.000 t of oil is worth 6.300.000 RUB but after the price changes applied you get 5.670.000 RUB for that.

I used the 140.000 t as an example to show that you need to go really high with numbers to start feeling some pain.

[forzion]

Originally posted by Adil3tr:

I'd really appreciate anything in the game that helps the user with this. Maybe something in the almanac showing the current threshold and how close you are to it for the 75 day period and the year?

Do we have a road threshold plus a air/sea threshold or does road shipping count towards the air/sea threshold? Do air and sea count towards the same threshold?

I do not think it would be possible to implement game showing recent trade data.

About the amounts of resources traded via land or air/water. The numbers are separated for each so the resources traded on land do not count for air/water and vice versa.

I did not try to test what happens to price if you trade both the same time but I think the worst case scenario would be the price changes for both add together like you would have 5% price change for land trades and another 2% for water trades. The amounts do not count though only the trade price change which is dynamic as the recalculation happens each 5 days.

[Thomas]

Thank you, Forzion. That was good explanation . Looking forward to get new update.
This will push players to bigger populations to get better export prices.Which is good thing .

[forzion]

Originally posted by Thomas:

Thank you, Forzion. That was good explanation . Looking forward to get new update.
This will push players to bigger populations to get better export prices.Which is good thing .

That is exactly the problem which had to be solved because previously if you had a huge population your were heavily penalized on import side. The more citizens you had the more you had to pay for imported stuff and it got unbearable when it reached a certain point.

Now you will be limited when you do not have lot of citizens a bit,. as for example oil production which does not require workers will be slightly less profitable early game but still profitable.

But those export/import prices matter mostly if you are goint go trade in vast numbers so if you have one factory making something and you are using it for domestic consumption and export the surplus, you just do not need to care about trading prices because the price change will be negligible. But if you go for massive production with multiple factories making resources purely for export and profit, then you need to consider if it is better to use ships for trade to get something extra. But money is not that important in game in my opinion after you establish your Republic in late game.

[HardCore Gaming]

Thanks for the explanation, Forzion. It seems to me that you explain well, so the mechanics become more understandable. Before your explanations, the understanding was at the level of "if the price starts to change a lot, it's time to stop trading :D". Now we can predict the price change.

I want to clarify this point, maybe I missed it:

Originally posted by forzion:

The total trade balance for the last 75 days is always taken into account (all imports in dollars and rubles - all exports in dollars and rubles)

But we have different limits for rubles and dollars.
What will happen to the price if we buy 200% alcohol threshold for rubles and 100% alcohol for dollars in 75 days at the same time?

[forzion]

Originally posted by HardCore Gaming:

Thanks for the explanation, Forzion. It seems to me that you explain well, so the mechanics become more understandable. Before your explanations, the understanding was at the level of "if the price starts to change a lot, it's time to stop trading :D". Now we can predict the price change.

I want to clarify this point, maybe I missed it:

Originally posted by forzion:

The total trade balance for the last 75 days is always taken into account (all imports in dollars and rubles - all exports in dollars and rubles)

But we have different limits for rubles and dollars.
What will happen to the price if we buy 200% alcohol threshold for rubles and 100% alcohol for dollars in 75 days at the same time?

That is a very good question scenario and I did not think about this. I was trying to find a good example because with alcohol you cannot do that that easily. if you would try to match the percents you presented.

The threshold for alcohol without workers in RUB is 250 tons and for USD it is 175 t.
If I understand correctly then you would want to buy 500 tons of alcohol for RUB and 175 tons for dollars which is 675 tons total. If you would do that the trade price of alcohol in RUB would go up about 14% and the trade price in USD would go up about 20%.

I use zero population for examples because the thresholds are lower and it magnifies things. It also gives a good comparison to real envirometn. For example I have a republic with 17k population and total alcohol consumption is only 260 ton for the whole year which means with the amount of alcohol you mentioned you would be able to supply a population of 50.000 for a whole year which would be not 200% + 100% of the threshold anyway.

But to get the point it can be used as example. For different resources there would be different price movements.

[HardCore Gaming]

In this example, I am trying to understand whether it makes sense to balance purchases of one resource for different currencies when the threshold is seriously exceeded. Those. find out how much the purchase of a resource for rubles affects the price in dollars and vice versa.

I ran a series of tests without a population and got the following results:

Alcohol:
Starting price 307 rubles, 388 dollars
Purchase of 200% for rubles - 493 tons.
Price 338 RUB(+10%), 415 USD(+7%)

Then purchase another 100% for usd - 168 tons
Price 344 RUB(+12%), 435 USD(+12%)

Then purchase another 100% for usd - 168 tons
Price 350 RUB(+14%), 456 USD(+17.5%)


Electronics:

Starting price 1417 rubles, 1739 dollars
Purchase 100% for dollars - 144 tons.
Price 1532 RUB(+8%), 1839 USD(+5.75%)

Then purchase another 100% for usd - 144 tons
Price 1652 RUB(16.5%), 1940 USD(+11.5%)

Based on the data obtained, my conclusion is that when we buy a resource for one currency, then half of the volume of the purchased resource is taken into account in the threshold of another currency.

In the example with electronics, we did not buy it for rubles at all, only for dollars, in the amount of 288 tons in total. At the same time, the price for rubles increased by 16.5%, which is approximately equal to exceeding the threshold by 300%. The threshold for rubles without the population is 50 tons, 300% of the threshold is 150 tons, which is approximately equal to 288/2.

For the alcohol example, the calculations are more complicated, but the conclusion is similar. To calculate the ruble price, 100% of the purchase amount for rubles and 50% of the purchase amount for dollars are used, and the already obtained value is compared with the threshold for rubles.

It is interesting to know how correct my conclusions are, since these results can be a coincidence and the formula for the impact of buying in one currency on another currency is different.

[forzion]

You chose a quite difficult scenario so it is really difficult to find the optimal solution. Lot of things depend on how much money you have in reserve.

Just for yoir information alcohol is one of most inflationary products because it isnmade of crops and the price of crops strongly correlate with workday cost inflation.

Vhat that means? The value of rubels goes down more and if you buy resource for rubels you lose less value due to higher inflation.

For example if you buy alcohol for extra 5% purchase price after a year the extra cost would be negated by inflation as the alcohol in inventory costs more by 5%.

With dollars you have only 2% inflation on qverage.

So it really depends on how much can you affor to buy and how much the transportation cost will be.

[Krejcak]

Hey, thanks for the explanation. I would like to ask one additional question to be sure of everything. Sometimes the two terms get mixed up together.

It's about the difference between population and workers. So is the total cost taken relative to the population (children, 21+, students) or does it depend on the workers only? Above is the food consumption of 0.15t per person. Again is the whole population counted or just the workers?

Example.
I have a population of 50,000 but workers of 27,000. Which number will I count everything with?

Ahoj, děkuji za vysvětlení. Měl bych jeden doplňující dotaz, abych si ze vším byl jistý. Občas se motají oba výrazy dohromady.

Jde o rozdíl populace a pracovníci. Celková cena se tedy bere vzhledem k populaci (děti, 21+, studenti) nebo záleží pouze na pracovnících? Výše je uvedena spotřeba jídla 0,15t na osobu. Opět se počítá celá populace, nebo jenom pracovníci?

Příklad.
Mám populaci 50 000, ale pracovníky 27 000. S kterým číslem budu vše počítat?