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Rebalancing


Roald Adriaansen
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Read Scott's post further down for the actual changes!


With the timer adjustments you recently made a few things got a bit unbalanced, or at least significantly different in my spreadsheet to make them stand very much out.

Coal, got boosted a lot in extraction time during the halving of timers (more than others), but the export value wasn't adjusted making coal now able to earn a lot of money since it can be instantly sold.
Silicate sand and Diamonds is the same, though Diamonds bear with them quite the research cost after a little while.

Coal is now at least a viable alternative to Gas for electricity use, while more expensive pays of in less time used, so nerfing the timer isn't really that good an idea.

The following numbers take the low numbers and high numbers and puts them all more evenly together:

Coal: Reduce export money from 12.8 to 9.1

Silicate Sand: Reduce export money from 1.6 to 1.2 (Doubling the timer would be too much, currently at 1 second timer, putting it at 1.85 seconds would be the timer equivalent nerf (Do not do both, would be too much!)).

Diamonds: Reduce export money from 8000 to 6000 or production timer from 4500 seconds to 7500 seconds, or somewhere in between if research cost should be taken into account. (NOTE: Don't do both, that would be terrible for Diamonds).

Quartz (Mined): From 45 seconds to 30 seconds. Note: this makes a loss, but is for timer balance when the rest is taken into account. Quartz makes profit when used in Crystal factory so the balance is achieved there.

Sapphire: From 150 seconds to 60 seconds. Note: this makes a loss, but is for timer balance when the rest is taken into account. Sapphire makes profit when used in Crystal factory so the balance is achieved there.

Bauxite: Fine as is.
Clay: From 12 seconds to 10 seconds.
Copper: From 100 seconds to 75 seconds.
Gold: From 450 seconds to 250 seconds. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Gold Smelting is too good, increase timer for smelting from 45 seconds to 120 seconds if doing this)
Iron: From 9 seconds to 6 seconds. (This one REALLY needs it)
Limestone: As it is.
Mineral: From 2 seconds to 1 second. (It really needs this).
Silver: From 150 seconds to 90 seconds.
Titanium: From 90 seconds to 60 seconds.
Tungsten: From 270 seconds to 250 seconds.


Smelting:

Aluminum: From 30 seconds to 15 seconds. (Currently not so good).
Copper: Fine as is.
Glass: From 2 seconds to 1 second. (Terrible at moment).
Glass Bottle: Terrible, but more to do with how good deal the import ones are (the case for all container types).
Gold: From 45 seconds to 90 or even 120 seconds. (It is insanely good compared to the rest).
Silver: Fine as is.
Steel: Fine as is.
Titanium: From 45 seconds to 75 seconds.
Titanium Alloy: From 45 to 120 seconds.
Tungsten Powder: From 15 seconds to 2 seconds. (Will still be terrible, but 1 second would be too good, 1.5 seconds is spot on).

Well
Natural Gas: Export price from 1.6 to 1.2
Petrolium: From 225 seconds to 90 seconds.




The values are balanced as follows:

Mining/Well: Based around a middle ground of the two which lies in the 2400-2600 credits/hour/10m2/Q15. Very High quality levels will start showing some difference again, but even at Q100 these numbers are very close (within 10%).

Highest pre-adjust price point: 5400 credits/hour/10m2/Q15.
Lowest pre-adjust price point: 976 credits/hour/10m2/Q15.

Smelter: Several products were around the same price point 4k-6k, and the numbers above will get them all in there. These can't be exported and are based on wholesale values instead, and need to be consumed/sold. Price balance varies a bit more here due to use in industry must be kept balanced too.

Highest pre-adjust price point: 13660 credits/hour/10m2/Q15.
Lowest pre-adjust price point: 779,28 credits/hour/10m2/Q15.



There are a few outliers in other factories etc, but writing this has already taken quite some time. If you want the actual spreadsheet numbers for each product I can provide them but it's quite.... a lot, I'd fear for breaking the forum.
Scott (Admin)
RJ: Ratan Joyce
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Thanks for putting so much time into this!

Generally it's impossible for me to only update the export price, as it is a function of base product price. (I'm trying to stay lazy when the time comes to add new products and categories)

The truth is that I haven't even started balancing things, so instead of manually going over each item, I think it would be more time-efficient to write a script that updates the base price and production time based on base price itself and a list of other variables.

For more details, could you take a look at the in-game message I sent you?
Scott (Admin)
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After analyzing the situation, I guess it's really about the following.

In a perfectly balanced scenario, we will have the following equations:
cost/base_price = constant < 1
base_price/timecost = constant

With those 2 equations, no matter what the quality is, the gains will be the same for any product. (before taking export_category_price_multiplier into consideration)

However after changing some variables and looking into it more, I've actually NOT going to abide by the two equations and rather keep the game unbalanced with the following exceptions:

  1. More expensive things generally have a higher base_price/timecost, meaning you can produce more value of them compared to lower-end products in the same time.

    In practice, the lowest base_price/timecost will be (10) for 50%+ of the products in the game, on the high end will be aircraft (800), watercraft (500), automobile (300), aircraft components (200), designer apparel (300), jewelry (200), engines (200), ...


  2. Cost/base_price will generally fall between 0.80 to 0.90, so that's a 100% difference in the beginning (between 10% margin and 20% margin). But this difference will eventually becomes insignificant as quality rises.


After the changes, the most valuable export as far as I know would be diamonds, which are at (50) base_price/timecost.

The higher base_price/timecost for the special categories gives people the incentive to move upward, but please note they also take longer to sell, so don't expect to make fortunes by trying to sell a commercial plane with a 10 m^2 aircraft broker.
Scott (Admin)
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Actually. I just realized I forgot something and will need to do more changes tomorrow.

Right now since most of us are producing "tier 1" products using electricity and water, things are working out correctly.

But actually the "current new system" is flawed, to give an example using made up values:

500 seconds on a $500 car body, and
500 seconds on a $500 engine, then
2000 seconds on a $2000 car.

This makes no sense at all.
I've determined that the production time should not be based on product base_value, but rather on value added (base_value minus total base_value of the sum of production materials).

The corrections will come tomorrow.
Scott (Admin)
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Finally finished balancing. Things make less sense logically, but the prices are balanced relative to categories and value added.

In the end, products are now cheaper to produce, and export earnings are the same* among all goods.

*The same earnings in % is before applying the export price multipliers. Multipliers are assigned to each foreign company and for each product category.


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