Fwurg

[Mercury]

I was working on something which I wanted to do with the IO Protocol when I realised that this isn't yet possible with the rules, so I went pondering and wrote a proposal for a new technology.

State Owned Enterprise

State Owned Enterprises are corporations which are owned and controlled directly by government. While regular corporations may be the property of a government, a State Owned Enterprise is specifically integrated with government-style power structures and controls (as well as the associated disadvantages), and it is used to fund and develop productions for which there is no regular economic market.

This upgrade allows the creation of Corporations for Special Goods. As with Products, you can combine 2 specialised Special Goods to form 2 regular Special Goods.

Special Goods Corporations generally follow the normal rules for corporations. However, because Special Goods Corporations are directly intertwined with the government that created them (more so than regular corporations), they additionally face certain special restrictions:

• They cannot specialize zones outside the sovereign territory of the faction controlling them. Thus, specialization rights cannot be granted to other players.
• No tax benefits are generated (and thus corporations do not provide income per zone)
• Instead, each zone has an upkeep cost equal to the usual tax benefits of such a zone (probably 10 / zone)

Cost: 3.500 / 5
Prerequisites: Corporate Logistics

My preliminary cost calculation is as follows:

These corporations primarily provides additional special goods labour. Players will specialize at least 1 zone, but probably won't specialize more than 5 zones as there simply isn't any market for this amount of special goods. (5 is semi-arbitrarily chosen, but I feel it is reasonable)

Each zone specialized saves one zone which otherwise would have had to have been a regular special goods zone, and the unwritten rule is that this has a value of 3000 per zone. Since the zone costs upkeep (10 / turn), over a period of a year, this would be roughly 500 , so we can change the value of the technology to be about 2500 per zone. Since the zones must also be specialized, this can be further reduced by 1000 per zone, giving us a total value of 1500 per zone.

With 5 zones as a reasonable high value maximum, the value of the technology would be some 7.500 .

However, a corporation has to actually be created - this costs 5000 at the barest minimum (and probably more), but since you get 1 specialized zone for free with that (corporate headquarters is included in the creation), this only reduces the final price by 4000 , which giving us a final price of 3.500 .

In that calculation, we presume 5 specialized zones, upkeep duration cost of no more than 1 year, cheapest possible corporation. In reality, the costs are likely higher, so I feel this amount is reasonable.

The duration of 5 turns was chosen based on the current Quincunx of the Sun and Saturn.

What are people's thoughts on this?

[Brend]

I have not had time to think the idea over in full, that will take me a few more days (a week and a half more likely).

My first thought is: "Everyone that is going to use this is going to create two Special Goods corporations in their own system." (I'm ignoring the fluff for now since it doesn't matter what we call it.)

[Chriz]

I agree with Brend, I don't really see trading special goods happen. To be honest 5 zones of special goods is a bit optimistic as well. I see the concept of a special goods corporation working in the future, however I don't think it requires the extra restriction, the extra cost seems reasonable though.

[Elmer]

I am against the "no specialize zones outside the sovereign territory of the faction controlling them. Thus, specialization rights cannot be granted to other players." We want to promote players to cooperate, this effectively blocks cooperation on a rules level.

On a not important level: Shouldn't players specialise 4 or 6 zones? With 5 they have leftover products :P More seriously: From all the special goods, the most produced currently are: 4 zones by the Praetorian Empire and 5 by the Veolian Commonwealth. It seems that there will be only a small further growth in these products (MTCF's because of the Trade hub, terraformation because of the limited products and to keep the price high.) But lets say that FWURG will grow further, I expect a max of 4 zones to be specialized, but think worlds would only specialize 2 zones, if any at all.

With the current idea, the corporation costs are huge, since you must develop two corporations of the same product. You cannot exchange zone rights after all. So the cheapest zone costs is: 5 000 + 12 000 = 17 000 for 2 zones. But we can discard this calculation once we all agree that we would prefer cooperation.

I was thinking to enforce player interaction by making the rule that the specialised goods must be traded, but then I reasoned that players will seek out each other anyway to reduce the costs of the insane second corporation cost, which brings them on a fine line between wanting to help each other to increase production, and not wanting to help each other to protect their market. Which undoubtedly will lead to the necessary and desired roleplay.

[Mercury]

Cooperation between players is still possible with this: however, rather than the currently very popular "let's exchange zones" solution, they will have to actually ship their goods to one another. This would also avoid the significant cost of the second corporation, and thereby neatly provide at least some opening into the market, since there will be two producers instead of one.

[Dragonmaster352]

I have to agree with Mercury on this one, I would partner up and exchange special goods. Avoiding the second corporation all together. And since most special good already have two producers, it seems only logical to work together. Personally I like this idea.

[Brend]

I have had some further thought to think on this.

First off, let me point out that my first thought was not meant to imply something along the lines of "This is the think I thunk, so the tech is bad." Instead, I wanted to point out the first approach I saw with this tech. I don't think there's much use to "agreeing with X, or agreeing with Y" on this technology, since there are no diametrical opposed points of view (as far as I see).

Then, on to the in-depth remarks. (As a change, I have used the blabla tag to hide the much too long post.)

Bla bla bla... Click to open...

On the fluff: I strongly dislike the socio-politically flavoured fluff. I do not think that technologies should declare how a faction works, but that the technologies present should allow the player to realize their effects in a way that matches their faction. Observe, the first article of evidence: All corporations in the Unified Republic of Darya are already state owned. Not just property of the state, but real fully realized communist "State Owned™ for the benefit of the populat!". Other factions might be explicitly against State Ownership regardless of what it is that is owned.

That said, I understand that fluff is just that: fluff. Players are free to implement their actual effects differently. But for me the fact remains that the fluff gives a certain colouring to the application of the tech, even of the player wants something completely different.


On the crunch: Let's start with something that occurred to me when I thought of how I would use this technology: I see two ways to model the special goods market: burst or continuous. Whether you view the market as burst or continuous also depends on the kind of good you are producing. From what I have seen and know from the game and have a certain base level of demand, whereas , , and have more burst demand. Of course, this may change over time as new projects are proposed and new players join in! I think that people that want this technology experience the special goods market as a continuous flow, whereas people that doubt the technology see the special goods market as a burst market.

The benefit of this technology depends strongly on whether you see the Special Goods market as a continuous or burst market. One concern I have is the amount of player-effort (that is the amount of effort a player OOCly needs to invest to get something out of it) necessary.

• If you view the special goods market as continuous, than the doubling of production capacity without the use of double zones is valuable. The player-effort overhead remains low, since negotiation is only required when two factions jointly set up their production.
• If you view the special goods market as burst, this technology will incur a heavy player-effort overhead on your production, as it will require constant negotiations with the other party on the amount of goods to produce in the coming period.

Others might see this differently, but I feel that the amount of player-effort necessary is something to weigh on the OOC aspect of the decision on whether you are going to invest in the technology.


On the upkeep: We assume that a normal zone (with 100 labour) produces about 10 of added value per in a smoothly running economy. This also holds true for zones producing Special Goods (because you have to factor in all the other industrial zones necessary to actually get to special good). Normal corporation are a very sweet deal because of this: not only do you get increased production (or in case of raw material corporations, increased output!), you also get a neat bit of extra income. This income also serves as an incentive to use the shipping based model over the local production model.

This corporation inverts the expectation, and takes away 10 per turn. Even if the goods are not making any money for you. This means that specialised zones offset their own expected income, and are only going to be interesting if they are making more than 10 per for you. Usually, this boils down to more than 100 special goods per . Note that I talk about "goods" not "labour".

To sum up the above remarks: the way I see it, this technology is only going to be useful for you if all of the following conditions hold:

• You have a good stable market to push your goods to (this includes "yourself") -- if you feel that your special goods are burst, the hassle of getting a partner to burst with together is probably not worth it,
• You can find a partner that has a stable market as well (or your own consumption is of such proportion that you simply consume all their products as well),
• You have no undeveloped undesirable zones (such as found on cold-orbit dead rocks) where you can plop down one or two special goods zones for the extra labour at the price of 3000 per 150 labour (that is 20 per labour).

On the cost calculation: A zone that can be specialised by a corporation allowed by this tech has a base production of at least 200. Specialisation nets you zones of ≥400 labour. 5 of those zones amounts to 2000 labour. Taking into account the fact that two corporations are needed, the expected labour that is going to be present is doubled again... To put it in historical words: "4k labour is enough for anyone".

Given the current demands I have seen on the special goods market, I would say that 4 specialised zones is the maximum we are going to see for some time. Unfortunately, the technology is not getting any cheaper, since Mercury forget to multiply the technology cost by the number of players factor (currently set at two due to the not-so-new-anymore technology transfer costs). Putting it together, this would mean that the technology costs 4000 .

In conclusion: The technology is not broken. I think it has a niche application, and should be not be considered the pinnacle of corporate technological development.

I suggest that the fluff is reviewed and, if possible, set in a less socio-politically declarative tone. I further suggest that the price is increased to 4000 .

Aside from my these two suggestions, I have no problem with introducing this technology.

[Mercury]

I've reviewed the comments made regarding this technology and think they hold merit. I think an easy adjustment could be made to fix the technology to fit these limitations, however upon further review, I believe that this technology is possibly not as well aligned with my intended goal as I thought. Particularly, I feel the cooperation angle, as well as the niche-ness of the technology don't appropriately address the problem I am trying to resolve. I am therefore withdrawing my request for the moment, until I can come with a new, slightly related proposal that takes the base problem from a different angle. Thank you all for your insights, they have been most helpful!

[Brend]

If you want to, it might be interesting if you can put the base problem into words in this thread. That way other people can join the thinking and designing.