Energy first

[counting]

I personally believe we are at a cross road transitions from fossil fuel to sustainable energy generation, so multiple energy alternative should be considered in energy sectors. And since it should be the precursor of a later transport expansion pack, hence the energy consumption of transportation vehicles need to be part of it as well. Hence beside the obvious oil -> gasoline -> gas station. I think bio-fuel and electricity generation should be included in. And it has to be easily compatible with current mechanics. So here is what I think :

Related raw material :
Mines : Oil, Coal, Silica (for silicon), and new Rare earth mine, and Natural gas well
Farms : sugar cane, corn, wheat, and new raw source of solid bio-waste from pastures, and biomass from forestry.
Special buildings : recycling center generate solid bio-mass and rare metal.

The fuel manufacturing :
semi product step :
bio-source / coal / natural gas -> syngas
iron + rare metal -> alloy

primary product step
syngas /crude oil -> gasoline / diesel (jet fuel? perhaps latter for airplanes)

Electricity semi-product
silicon + rare earth -> solar panel
alloy -> battery packs
Rare earth -> separated uranium (Optional)

Related renewable products
solar panel + battery packs -> portable chargers
Syngas + alloy -> fuel cell
Engine + battery packs -> backup generators (Optional)

Related automobile sectors :
fuel cell + steel -> hybrid car engine
hybrid car engine + wheels + car body -> hybrid car
hybrid car engine + wheels + steel -> electric motorcycle
Alloy + Glass + plastic -> truck body
Engine + wheels + truck body -> trucks

electricity sectors : (manufacturing "electricity")
Solar power plants -> intake solar panels and battery packs, the capacity is related to the city's weather condition and close to equator.
Wind power plants -> intake battery packs and engines, the capacity is related to the city's location (near coast, or high altitude)
Hydraulic power plant -> intake alloy and engines and it has a maximum limit depend on the city's access of hydraulic resource
Natural gas power plant -> intake natural gas and engines (produce less pollution)
Coal power plant -> intake coal and engines (produce high pollution)
Nuclear power plant (Optional) -> intake uranium and engines (produce no pollution, but required an over-all tech level to build, and need to maintain waste storage sites that increases expenses over-time)
The "setup" of the power plant is that it will began with large quantity of intake representing the setup period, but low "output", gradually it will increase the "readiness level" and the output level depend on this "readiness level". There is also a small amount of maintenance intake that has to meet, if the intake is less than maintenance level the "readiness level" will drop.

Retail sectors :
Gas/Refueling station -> gasoline / diesel / electricity from power plants
Electronics -> portable chargers (maybe backup generators can be retail goods?)

A more detailed "overhead expenses" could be linked to the electricity power plants in the future as a more realistic overhead cost for each type of firms, the only problem is to setup some default power plants for cities themselves to start with and a default electricity price, the rest is to have competitive corporate running electricity power plants than can drive the city's electricity price with supply/demand mechanism, and we have more incentive to open factories in a city not just considering wage, but also different overhead maintaining expense. And optional backup generators where buildings can use to reduce random event of blackout to occur at the expense of maintain a higher overhead of purchasing fuel. The cleaning could be related to the recycling center, where a city has a high recycling budget the city can "produce" more waste for recycling center, if the waste generated by all the firms on the map can not be cover by city funds, the firms over-all have to pay higher overhead cost for the cleaning bill. Maybe later water bill and security cost could be included into the overhead, but right now they can stay as abstract expenses.

What's now left is the detail number of production ratio, and the supply/demand of fuels related to automobile usage. However without a transportation simulation, I wonder how accurate will it be to just using automobile sells number as the base of fuel consumption. Since their "driving frequency" is also a major factor, not just their absolute number.

[David]

Thanks for the ideas! I have forwarded them to the dev team.

[Killerbrandt]

Dont forget that if we have an oil industry there will have to be a lot more oil reserves in each city. To allow everyone to compete for the oil they need to have random amounts of oil in each city and you dont need to have seperate natural gas reserves since most of the natural gas (at least in North America) is produced while drilling for oil.

I really like the ideas of Counting. I believe those products will fit in well with the rest of the game fairly easy, but if you want to create oil tycoons though, then you need to make sure to tweak the car industry a bit so the demand for oil rises with the more and bigger vehicles on the road. Right now we only have one type of car but that will have to change to get the oil industry to change. Luxury cars and larger vehicles tend to use more gas.

Just my opinion

[David]

We also like counting's ideas but we haven't decided if power plants should be required to procure engines (e.g. steam turbines) from factories or just let the player set up a power plant by placing new functional units on the 3x3 layout -- in other words, the engines are assumed to be part of the equipment that are procured automatically during the setup of a new functional unit, in the same fashion as the player is not required to purchase manufacturing equipment separately when setting up a new manufacturing unit.

The main issue with B2B factories like ones producing steam turbines is the lack of consistent demand which will make survival of such factories difficult.

[counting]

The reason why I choose power plants setup requirement using a factory-isk type instead of a media firm type, is bc I wish for more ways of consume materials upstream for rare earth, syngas related source and mostly engines that could boost up currently low demand of steel. And "electricity product" is NOT supposedly to be an intermediate product, but as retail product for households, and the base for overhead cost (which means factories/warehouses/retail stores are actually in reverse as clients). And it serve the purpose for a likely example of what "utilities industry" could be. From experience, I know who control the downstream has the price manipulation power that essentially drive the demand for the whole ecosystem.

I've run enough simulations of raw material producers, even as pure "middlemen" B2B businesses to know, you can basically supply 7 cities of products with just 1 set of coal/iron mine, On the other hand, the reason chemicals are so high in demand and usually need 1 for every city is because that so many products consider them as part of the ingredients and with enough AI they just setup bunch of new factories over and over to buy chemical and hang them dry. Essentially paid you in their expenses (AI isn't very good at "foreseeing" potential market before it decides to venture in). Other case like silver is in high demand due to their involvement of high profit margin products and able to accept high resource intake and the silver mine's low productivity with high ratio to one-step retail product - silver necklace, where there's no middle men (if gold has more uses involving high profit margin products, it could join silver as part of the high demand minerals). Similar situation apply to timber, and also due to their low starting capital relative to mines, thus easy to be early entry and allowing the control of demand.

The lesson of being upstream, or being the middlemen is that it' not just about number of uses (you can tweak the ratio of raw and product and artificially increase the demand), but to create monopoly in demand even in the presence of competitors, and force AI to buy from you. Make other source unable to supply them all. One strategy I usually like to do is to setup warehouses to "buy out" AI/seaport cheap raw materials, relabel them with your brand, and join the resource pool. This artificially induced scarcity can redirect AI to buy from you at higher price, even if there are other cheap (but always in low supply) sources. And as long as you are not too greedy, otherwise some of your client AIs will think it's better to setup its own mines.

The troubles of middle B2B2B (raw material is also B2B, but different due to cash don't incur in consumption, and the cost of sales were in advance), for utilities like CPU, engines, wheels, and all kinds that involved not just 2 steps, sometimes even 3 steps semi-product, like car bodies, are two front. First, the cost of sale are outbound if you are not involved in upstream source, and AI has a nasty habit of not building enough sources for you to choose from, and always close their doors as internal sale when the demand is just a little bit higher, hence it's not easy to scale up your production. The market signal of shortage is slow to propagate upstream. With high setup cost, not enough AIs have the capital to build them as well. The other trouble front is that the product price and tech rating isn't huge enough for you to create enough profit margin. Because there are no "brand" to semi-product, the only way to compete with AIs is price war (AI will buy 2-quality CPU even if there is 99-quality product from you, simple due to it has cheap enough price to boost rating), and you usually can not use the "buy out" strategy here, since AI like to have their own source, and usually waste large factories and seriously overproduce them (and incur great losses by doing that).

I know it is always difficulty for utility tool industries to exist in current game, however it doesn't mean it could not be fixed. In real world businesses, especially in energy sector, electricity is a natural monopoly goods, which means when they produce more, the average cost always go down. That's why I proposed an odd mechanism of decreasing consumption for "readiness level" and a very low maintaining "consumption", which should result in scale of economy and that it's better to let one company to supply them all in the long run, then multiple competitors exist on the "electricity market". And it's entry shouldn't be easy due to they need to have huge demand of utility tools at the initial step stage thus able to get ready for enough "readiness level" (again why using "reversed" consumption rate). Competitors either need to have enough capital to burn through for readiness level during setup, or they just try to "resell" the excessive power to other region, like what you have in real life as cross-state power grid transfer, or in-game cross city sells as retailers (and electricity "resell" shouldn't need freight cost anyway, but simply a lost of percentage bc efficiency lost over distance).

The good thing about natural monopoly is that it essentially create a "secondary" retail market, where "power plants" are acting like citizen customers who have a steady and easy traceable demand. Hence cut down the 2 stage essentially into single stage. Making engines more like "retail products", and since it's already part of other product's ingredients and I add more usage for it as many different power plants and new types of automobiles, I think it will be a large enough market to sustain it. Although the maintenance consumption is low compare to setup period relatively, the aggregate demand of a monopoly buyer will still be huge in absolute quantity, not to mention the utility industries in real life are not giants compare to consumer products anyway. (They still make a lot of profit with high margin, just not as big in over-all revenue, since they are not end product that contained most intermediate price in them)

BTW, although power plants should be natural monopoly by design, but they could compete against "different types". Some will likely be more competitive being renewable, and don't require abundance of fuels (which I didn't explain that fuel is not a diminishing consumption like utility tools, thus easier to be competitive if there are enough fuel), others may need complicated upstream industries and setup period, not so easy to begin their monopoly, but has the advantage in the long run with "low maintenance" and can be competitive in overall price per unit. Also perhaps the effect of pollution that reduce "life quality" and effectively will slowly choke the city, and should drive away dirty power plants over time, and fuels may go to retail buyers mostly, let fuel less abundant.

[David]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Do I understand correctly that you meant there should be a requirement for power generator units in a power plant to purchase engine products from B2B factories on a continuous basis? And when the utilization rate of the generator units becomes lower, will the rate at which it is required to purchase new engine products become lower as well?

Or did you mean that it should just be an one-time requirement for a power generator to procure the required engine from a B2B factory?

Also, we have thought about the inevitable comparisons that some players may place with manufacturing units where there is an absence of such requirement for buying equipment products from B2B factories. Any thoughts on this?

[counting]

Excuse my babbling , haven't been sleeping well recently, I just write what comes to mind as it go.

I've wanted utilities industry and other durable goods related to production to be added in Capitalism for a long time. My original idea is to make "overhead" and "setup cost" more concrete, instead of just some abstract concept. From what I've learned over the year, and as you can see from my post of one city dominate corporation using consolidated financial statement, the overhead expenses consist a large chuck of the cost, like 1 billion out of the 2 billion combined external payment annually (the percentage will be lower in multi-cities scenario when sharing factory productions, but usually still over 30%). This is just such a huge amount to be ignored. Compared to the total retail revenue (in above example city, it is 2.2 billion), obviously it should be made into an in-game business sector. Aggregated "overhead payment" from all the firms is truly large enough to sustain upstream industries, including entire ecosystem of electricity production, and other utility tools manufacturing.

However, speaking of how to implemented this with existing mechanism and still fit the overall theme, is an entirely different matter. I've considered this problem before in my transportation system suggestion, but at the time, I treated "trucks" as an "ingredient" of manufacturing "freight service", with an added "recycle" mechanism of depots, so the "ingredient" is different from normal goods, and more like some kind of constant "background maintenance overhead". And it sort of fit the theme of trucking business with parking/gathering lot and repairing stations, analog to the in-game retail and manufacturing pairing. However, it's more just a "dirty trick" to treat whole trucks as "ingredient", the reality is the repairing shops buy "parts" of trucks and replace them. And since Capitalism game is more of an abstract simulation, it really doesn't matter if they are parts roughly 1/100 of a truck 10,000 times, or collectively 100 trucks, as long as the business have large enough purchasing quantity for repair parts (sometimes buy whole thing for parts isn't a joke, in military hardware, countries genuinely do buy whole fighters and take them apart as spare parts, and in the meantime study the tech inside )

The reason why I brought up the transportation business, is exactly because of the quantity issue. They are in the middle range spectrum of the utility tools, when the quantity is still large enough, and could be consider consumer product sometimes, which makes adding them to the existing automobile product class relatively easy. But on the extreme end of the spectrum of "machinery" in power plants where you have just several modules with gigantic steam turbines, which don't come off-the-shelf and are assembled and contracted to build with thousands of components. Obviously, we don't have a contract mechanism in game yet for really expensive "machinery" on demand from the buyers, hence I borrowed my transportation utility idea, and reverse it to treat "many different parts" as a whole. And obviously the best fit role for "many parts as a module" is the engine semi-product (I would prefer a more suitable name, like "mechanical components"). So instead of contract system, by reusing the old purchasing routine and essentially treated hundreds/thousands of parts as 1 module, in a larger scale, it still similar enough to represent the general idea.

With the above in mind, there is also some anomaly in electricity "industry". Unlike physical goods, when you make a product, you use lathes/machinery and consumed some ingredients, and you can count the number of goods produced via bandwidth capacity and get utilization rate. But electricity "production" is merely a process of converting different type of energy at different efficiency. Their potential is depend on the source, and usually the efficiency has positive correlation with the amount being converted. And in the process, the power generator wares and tears at almost constant rate whether it's peak consumption or sparsely used, the connection to electric grid is always on, the turbines never shut down (there's actually mechanism in power plants to deal with excessive power generated, if not reselling and link to other network, they will by cooling it down when extra energy is converted in the form of heat, or store the power or converted it back, like pumping water backup in hydraulic power plant, and re-release them when needed). This is why there are always backup modules in power plants, you don't switch off, but switch hands. There's no 50% working/utilization module, when its life cycle reach to a point before it breaks, it is taken offline and being replaced with another always online "standby module", and being repaired with parts, or new modules are commission to be built as new standby or upgrade.

If you think about it and try to make the above process into a game mechanic using "factory-isk-model", we would get the odd "demising consumption". You first need to buy many many "parts" to assemble several complete modules, and only when there are enough of them existed, the power plant is "ready" to generate power (the reason why I used a new word "readiness level", not utilization). A process like when there's 1 set, it's not ready, at 2 sets 1 is on and 1 standby but no flexibility, 3 sets you can have 2 different ratio of power output, and more and more so when there's more. It becomes more and more "ready" to deal with all kinds of request. And the "maintenance" process, can be viewed as a slow replacing standby modules process, and can be reasonably simulated with slowly purchasing "parts" constantly. (But in real life, once it's setup, it's not a continuous process to buy parts, and the power plant would still be working at "100%", at least before all existing backup modules reaching their life spam).

Of course you can also use the "media firm" approach, where this process is abstracted into pure budget level, with readiness level using the pie chart, and define an absurd setup cost, hence prevent mass entry of competitors. However you would lost the benefit of "experimenting" utility industry and the extra consumption of upstream raw materials. Either way, we would still get a more concrete version of the "overhead cost" to other firms and general city electricity demand in city simulation.

*****************************************************

In short, my opinion to the first question is, I think in my vision the "maintenance purchasing" of "engines(mechanical parts)" will be the same at any "readiness level" (Where purchasing of setup parts is diminishing. And you don't necessary need to implement different "intake" unit for setup and maintenance, it can be a unified unit, like in freight cost breakdown, where the mechanics is running behind the scene and calculated automatically). Besides, you will need new modules in the future to make a sustainable power plant anyway. (maybe in the balance sheet we can reflect that in assets, added durable goods/fixed assets, and introducing accounting depreciation). Or, maybe we can introduce some sort of slide bar in this special type of intake unit in power plant, where it can turn purchasing maintenance parts with different "budget level" manually like a media firm. The risk of future meltdown or lost of a big chuck of "readiness level" can be left for players to decide.

To the second question, I think it's reasonably to assume power plant don't build their parts from raw materials, but I can see the appeal game-mechanic-wise to allow building parts on site. Since it's 3x3 layout after all, there are enough rooms to build a composite "factory-power-plant", like players do now with "car body + car" combo factory. But it's more of an issue of optimization whether to allow building on site or using dedicated "engine(mechanical parts)" factory. Besides, the norm in most of my game is the over abundant of semi-product once other related industry emerge instead of scarce. That being said, I always play with max AIs, so maybe there's a point for a few opponents game or solo game for this. And building parts in power plant might be confusing conceptually for new players and less realistic, unless we define the "power plants" with some other suitable names. Any suggestions?

[counting]

BTW, I was talking more about utilities like parts in previous long post. Durable goods like instruments for productions are even bigger issue, if we want to bring "setup cost" to life and depreciation into the equation. And it's mainly an in-game B2B mechanism problem (or the lack of it, and it's a problem for current semi-product as well)

We now have just dozens of inadequate AIs exist, instead of the millions of companies and entities to generate a wide spectrum of purchases. The problem with B2B in game, or more precisely AI-to-human-to-AI business is a coincident of want issue. In many situation I encountered, you just can't get constant upstream and downstream at the same time. Even if downstream is a large business, you could end up being the upstream of the unlucky minority producer, or even a non-competitor who can't sell any of its product at all and just idle after the initial purchases (the reason why in real life you value the contract so dearly, and demand them fulfill quota by laws). On the other hand the upstream is unstable due to AI mines are famously unpredictable, and you never know when it will switch to internal sale, and NEVER implement warehouses system to deal with fluctuation of demand. I've learned to build warehouse complex of my own for this, (at the same time place warehouse near buyers and encourage them to buy from me), but it's really a heavy burden for semi-product producers. You essentially needed to do all the works which won't get you a profitable company easily [1]. The way I see it to combat with B2B business in game, is either make "anonymous local business" buyers, sort of cheated and treat durable/semi-product as "retail goods" using retail algorithm, or try to implement some better AI, or even mechanism of contracts and raw material futures market. They've all being suggested before. Perhaps it's time seriously looking into them and figuring out which is the best way to improve current mechanism.

[1] It can be done, just very difficult. I've done it before with electronic components +CPU +CCD +glass +steel +plastic, and later into engines and car parts, and still no where near normal retail product company, which is insane, since I essentially cover most of the semi-product sector, and AIs will still produce their own inferior tech semi-product for wholesale at a lost and can afford to do so due to profitable retail, and other AIs like these better because they are cheap

[David]

Thanks for your inputs and I have forwarded them to the dev team.

[counting]

I've post a game report, showing just how small current B2B business is, with electronic components + CPU + CCD. And perhaps it can shed some light about where the difficulty lies in current B2B trade with AIs.
http://capitalismlab.com/forum/viewtopi ... =13&t=2011