rebalance mod, fixing freight prices and bugs

[AdamMil]

I've been bothered by the high freight prices and bugs in the game. For instance, the expected profit of citric acid, coconut oil, corn syrup, dyestuff, flour, linen, polyester, textiles, and wheat germ oil are negative. (Just try producing citric acid profitably!) In addition, some other products have ridiculously high profit margins -- as high as a million percent!

So after doing some reverse-engineering of the game data, I created a mod kit that allows all of the prices, freight costs, etc. to be adjusted, and I used the mod kit to create a mod that fixes the negative profit bugs, rebalances the profit margins, and reduces freight costs. However, it's a lot of work to test it, because one game could last many hours.

Is anyone interested in trying it out?

Also, if you want to make your own game mod, you can use my mod kit. :-)

[Esoteric Rogue]

Is anyone interested in trying it out?

I'll look, but I'm only interested the data I've been converted to the lab. Have any of these problems been addressed in CapLab? Edit: Yea, it appears citric acid doesn't require 10 lemons in CapLab.

[AdamMil]

I created a page about it here. If you're just interested in the game data, you can view it online here. (See the links at the bottom of the page, or download the spreadsheet also linked at the bottom of the page.)

I'm pretty sure the mod kit will work for Capitalism Labs too, to some extent, so you could use it to extract and edit the data from your CapLabs game database, if you like. The CapLabs game database probably has some new or changed columns in it, so if you send me a copy of the CapLabs gameset\1STD.SET file, I can update the mod kit to support them.

[pengchuande]

Nice

[Esoteric Rogue]

Good job, you sure found some cool stuff . Note to anyone else that your excel file seems fully compatible with OpenOffice. EDIT: oops, found the formula on the ITEMCLAS sheet doesn't work as 'averageif' isn't defined in OO.

For one example, I was always paranoid that maybe cattle give more leather than sheep, but nope, I don't see any indication of that.

Well, I guess my passive attempt to talk you into buying Caplab failed

[WilliamMGary]

Hmm....

I'm all for moding!

Do you think there's a way to grab the financial data out of a save game and export it into a csv file format?

[AdamMil]

Note to anyone else that your excel file seems fully compatible with OpenOffice. EDIT: oops, found the formula on the ITEMCLAS sheet doesn't work as 'averageif' isn't defined in OO.

It's definitely compatible for simple viewing, and the calculated fields aren't part of the game database, so they're not strictly necessary. But if you want to use the mod kit to make updates to the database, then it requires Excel (unfortunately).

Well, I guess my passive attempt to talk you into buying Caplab failed :D

I'd like to have it, but I have some worries that CapLab is buggier with all those experimental features and rapid updates. At least, that's the impression I got from reading the forums. Maybe it's not, but they don't have a demo, so I can't give it a try. :-(

[AdamMil]

Do you think there's a way to grab the financial data out of a save game and export it into a csv file format?

There is a way, but it's a lot more difficult than reading the game database. It only took me a couple hours to understand the database format, but figuring out the structure of the saved game file would probably take weeks...