Introduce transport costs of goods to allow regional trading monopolies. i'll argue the benefits to the game of this suggestion, if implemented. i'd like to hear what others think of it, if they can be bothered reading it all. lol, though i doubt it ;)
it's a very simple thing which would introduce much greater complexity into the economic/political aspects of the game. corporate transport costs for goods could increase exponentially by the amount of regions needed to reach its destination. extra costs would be added for crossing continents.
the purpose of this would be to create regionalised trade relations. the current situation is of an industrial era production system with an unrestricted lassiez-faire capitalist system which has no analogy in historical fact. the claim that this game is realistic is, imao, untrue in this regard.
historical empires competed for trade routes and dominance in important industries. trade/economic dominance was an expression of military dominance, since industries were guarded and expanded by military force. the european colonial era is a perfect example of this. the indian cotton market was destroyed by the british backed trading companies in order to force indians to buy english cotton, for one specific example. c3 countries in this regard would be the 'native' countries, ready for economic exploitation by presidents.
the effects of this suggestion, if implemented, would be that sim countries would seek to build empires which have colonies across several regions, and possibly continents. transport costs across player owned countries would be minimalised, meaning that having a far imperial reach would be vitally important, both to gain access to foreign regional markets and to reduce transport costs.
countries could then use military power to destroy selected industries of other players and c3s, so that the monopoly country could sell their goods within a region at a higher price without competition. obviously, high ppw industries would be the main target for a monopoly. ultimately, a country would use military power to protect its monopolies.
federations would become more important. each member could attempt complement the monopolies of other members, and a fed could have monpolies controlled over many regions and industries, making power politics an aspect of the game again.
trade tariffs (increased tax on imports in selected industries) would complement this situation, because countries could use tariffs to support their domestic industry and challenge any monopolies. the necessary downside to this is that their corps would have to pay an extra amount on un-tarrifed goods, to simulate the tariff retaliation of other countries. this would make the case of whether to introduce tariffs an important satrategic decision, with both drawbacks and benefits.
also, the president/ceo interaction would become more complex, as ceo's choose to either accept or challenge the monopoly. if they choose to, they could attempt a hostile takeover up the presidents monopolised industries for their own profit, and presidents could attack the ceos indusatries in retaliation.
it seems as if the gamesmasters are discouraging inter-president war, but alowing economic competition, within the limits of the current unrealistic trading system. my suggestion would not compromise this, but complement it, as the main reasons for war would become the destruction of corps, not total destruction. economic competition would become much more dynamic.
trade and military empires would then become standard. currently, the only real reason to build an empire is to transport population into the main country, which makes empire building pointless to most people if there is no aspect of competition. my suggestion would reintroduce that competition without compromising what seems to be the way the gamesmasters want simcountry to be played.
i don't know much about programming, but it seems to me that the code for this wouldn't be particularly complex. i guess it all depends on what vision the w3 staff have for the game's future ;p
this is an excellent idea, except for the fact that there are not enough active players in this game to make this feature interesting
All that will end up happening is that most player controlled countires will end up losing money because they'll have many fewer buyers for their goods. Also, this will require more resources in terms of processing by the servers, so it will also slow down the servers, which is bad Maybe if we has alot more players, it would be worth the expense of upgrading the servers to handle the load that this modification would cause, but with the vast majority of countires being controlled by the computer, it isn't worth it right now, and also there are more interesting things which are being implemented now on GR and the free servers, so, even if WC decides to go with this cool idea, its going to be low on their list of priorities.
thanks for the reply
it seems really counter-intuitive that strong empires/feds can exist side by side without economic competition. in fact apart from security concerns, which is minimal due to shared defences and attack limits, strong powers can pretty much ignore each other. that's pretty unrealistic
regionalised trade wouldn't mean fewer buyers as you've said, but since high-quality goods are only produced by players and CEOs, some regions might only have low quality goods available. it would however screw up the weapons market- i don't see anyway around that.
as i see it, regionalised trade will balance out in all areas and reach near-equilibrium conditions in all areas. this is because the production capacity is everywhere equal to demand. it's just that it would take time for each regional economy to change corps to match regional demand. the natural mechanism for this is the short life span of the c3 countries corps. when new ones are built, they react to demand, and it would balance out production vs. demand in a region relatively quickly.
i think you might be right about it slowing the servers down though :P
i know that terrorism, economic R&D and military intelligence are to be implemented soon. are there any other changes that are to be made to the game that have been anounced?
Another feature that's already on GR is the Common Markets. From what I can tell, the common markets are optional, and they aren't necessarily regional. I agree that your idea would be a cool feature, especially if more human players got into the game. It would add a dynamic to war that otherwise isn't there.