Author: riser
Last trading period, marcelbuter did three very good articles about how Ibisha was working better than anywhere else and that merging all three countries in single cities would be the best thing for everyone; Because of the higher competition inside a single city and that higher level concept like marketing would start to pay off handsomely. It was the solution for the currently declining number of immigrants coming to the Federation and staying here. In theory it looks good. In practice, it can’t work without some important changes. Ibisha is the proof.
We don’t need less cities to pool citizens together, we need more trade which currently comes from having many cities while still allowing trade early between those cities. More federal taxis – if they have enough gas – would be more than enough. Please note I didn’t say it had to be cheap, just that it had to be available.
For a country to be successful it needs at least one active trader for every resource type, preferably two, and they need to be able to trade with each other. Let’s look at Ibisha last trading period: 3 or 4 MV’s on day one and every single resource type on day two (if not day one), and very active and successful traders. And then it stopped completely.
What happened? There was no market for those products. Other countries hadn’t opened a harbor yet so they couldn’t export. By the time those countries did, their prices had fallen to a point where Ibisha’s products were not really that much cheaper and Ibisha had almost used up its resource lots.
Ibisha didn’t do much better this trading period. As an outside observer I could be wrong but I think it went even worse because the hype was gone. During my last stroll through the city, I noticed a few foreigners were crowding out the native. I was not impressed.
Last trading period, Virtua didn’t have an active gas producer and thus no taxi or even the trade inside the cities was dying. This means that wood was not reliably coming out of Nasdaqar to Cashington, so there was an iron shortage. Since iron is used in almost everything, nothing was produced so no one made enough money to start a gas mv…
Chaos was everywhere because the traders couldn’t trade with each other.
It took 2 weeks for Virtua to recover and even then it had to import all its gas, a good part of its iron, some shovels, etc. We are lucky to have had as many top-20 traders as we did.
This period, Virtua had enough ACTIVE suppliers of the basics on day one: 3 wood, 2 iron, 3 glass, 2 bricks (+ those in Nasdaqar and Centropolis i didn’t know about), 2 ovens, 3 or shovels and saws, a pump maker, one oil and one gas. With these, everyone could build their shops, start their business and start trading successfully and actively. Trade was blooming, shops were popping up in all three cities, lots were dug. Taxis were shipping people and product all over the country. After a few days, even the electronics business was truly starting up. Money was being swapped from hand to hand.
What’s the difference between Ibisha and Virtua? Why did Virtua change but Ibisha didn’t?
Sure, our elected this period are more experienced citizens than we had last time and it shows. They did so much to help and we have been so much more successful because of them. This period went from good to awesome because of them. But it would have been a good trading period nonetheless, something was different.
A country is successful when there is a lot of trade. As long as money is changing hands, everything is working perfectly. When enough money is available and changing hands at any given moment even considering some of it is pooling in sleeping citizen’s hands, trade is active and citizens have fun.
For people to spend money, they must have a reason for it, they must have something they want to do with it. They need to have some hope of gaining even more money.
After Ibisha’s shops were built to a decent size and they had paid for marketing if they wanted, why would they need or want to spend money? There would be no gain at all. Except for exims (which are mostly basic resources), they stopped spending money to buy products. Trade was dead.
In Virtua, traders really met together before the trading started to make sure we didn’t lack any basic resource. Virtua is large enough to have lots of place for expansion and enough resources to last a long time.
This period, I spent a fortune building huge shops in all three cities to make sure my customers didn’t lack the product I make. I bought 16 cars for my taxi company to make sure wood traders could send 80 squst of product in Cashington quickly while leaving a couple taxis in other cities too. I’m buying a couple ships to send products and people to and from other countries. When one of my most regular wood suppliers bankrupted, I had to upgrade my warehouse to a huge size to be able to survive longer without wood and the other wood traders upgraded their shops to be able to supply wood more easily when they are not active in the Federation. I’ll soon run out of iron ore lots in Cashington so I’ll need to get a fresh supply of iron ore that I’ll need to buy from someone because my warehouse is too big to move. I get VAT returned in Cashington but not anywhere else and thus I prefer to sell in Cashington. I need to make deals with my clients that make profits for all of us. The same kinds of things happen to everyone else. We are making deals, buying resources, selling them, bickering over the price but most importantly : we are trading and spending money to trade even more and better!
This means that we keep buying products that were built using other products and so on. Trade is still very active.
If all of Virtua had been bunched up in a single city, my total shop size would have been smaller even if my shops would have been bigger. I would have hogged up main street with shops and have level 10 marketing in all of them on day 3 and bought 10 additional discount options so I didn’t have to make more shops. And I would have stopped spending money after that except to refill my shop. Trade would have been like Ibisha: very intense in the first few days then nothing else after that. And all the iron traders would have run of iron ore lots at the same time and so there would have been nowhere else to get our iron ore from. Other basic resources would have had the same problem.
Currently, having multiple cities is almost the only thing that gives us something to do with our money. We want to expand to reach our clients better before someone else does and we want to outperform them if they did it first.
Three weeks long trading period would be useless if there was only one city per country, trade would stop after 4 days in all the cities/countries. People would leave the Federation even more and not come back.
Are there any solutions? Yes! I see plenty of them but none of them involve removing cities. I don’t want less cities, I want more as long as those cities are connected from the start so that people can buy the things they need even they have to buy it in other cities. With more cities, we can have access to more resources. I also want more things to do before trading period ends and I don’t want to stop trading until the last few minutes! I see a few very quick and simple changes that I’ll go into details in the next edition of The Miniconomist that would change all that dramatically.
Until then, happy trading!