Universal Forum Archive

In an idle few moments i was having a think about quick ways to make the wage paying in the game a bit more useful, and realistic - and ways to make going without a government wage grant (which is a terrible economic hack) more feasible.

No doubt this has been requested before but to facilitate that i've added a new Wage Source Mode ( 8 ) in which employees are paid only when the building is able to produce new goods. (i.e. If it becomes full, the employee is kept in the job, but not paid anymore until it is emptied)

One method of using that that i thought would be nice would be to have a 0 employee wage grant, and buildings (Ore mines for instance) produce items at 0 cost, but the storage reduction percentage in economy settings is set to 100 percent. A building without employee(s) will produce nothing - when there is an employee the production cost of the item would be determined solely by the amount of wages paid.

This could make for more interesting fluctuations between cost of items and wage demand - and would generate some interesting politics, particularly when a minimum wage setting was used.

Any thoughts on any of the above? Is there any limitations i havent thought about that would make the 0 cost production system inviable? Would it be something any of you would be interesting in using on your worlds?

it would be interesting, and would make skills more valuble, as the need for a certain skill would push up wages more than usual.

One thing i'm thinking might be bad about this, is the cheaper items, as they would be made, but would the cost of the employee be worth the extra cost? we have to make sure that its always worth paying the employees more for their extra money saving ability's

um not quite sure what you're getting at there tom... Its not an extra cost, or an extra saving for the employer - they'd have to pay em or they'd get nothing produced - cheap or not.

p.s. as an addition to this, to make the calculation of costs easier for the building owner, ive finally got round to doin a different wage payment rate - Settings -> Economy -> Economy Rate set to 1 means wages get paid daily rather than monthly (Server/Client v0.1.33) - which i reckon will be well handy.

i like this layout more the more i think of it. :]

Ya could have... with a daily wage..

Employer #1 with a building producing ore at 1 per day for 0 cost up to a certain max
Employer # 2 has another building making cars at 1 per 20 days for 0 cost..

both employers might be real cheap and pay the minmum wage of 1s wage per day.. the ore naturally has a lower cost - 1s per unit. The cars go for 20s each (plus the normal sellers profit).

And then yeh, theres only one active guy on the island with the factory worker skill - along comes employer #3, who opens up a car fac paying 1s1d per day - the skilled worker shifts jobs sharpish and suddenly employer 2 aint making anything and the price of cars has just gone up to 22s.

Its a lot more natural ..

it's got my vote

the one thing ive' been havin difficulty with though is deciding how many employees to require per building. at the moment, even just one or two is askin a lot, tho as the game grows, or depending on how popular / spread out a server is, it could easily triple that amount.

some way of being able to scale the employee rate vs. number of active players would be cool, so rather than a fixed numeric for max employees in the bdat, you give it a percentile. the number's maybe a tenth of a percent of the active users, so if the setting was say, 2, then 0-9 active people in the world might cause that building to require no employees.

when there's 10-19 active, the building requires 1. when there's 20-29, it requires 2, and so on, rounding up to the nearest whole number obviously when necessary.

i know this is kinda probably more our problem than yours and we should tweak as we go, but i like the totally unpredictable nature of it. you could log off one night and get up the next and find your employees screaming at you, and you're in the middle of quite a crisis since gary's been bringing in his clanmates all night to up the employee quota and suddently your stock's not worth crap.

stuff i do like: employees will want jobs where there's no one else working there, so the building fills up slower and they get paid longer. there's a lot of great competition there, tho all the while they're the obvious pressure from them on you to sell stuff cheaper, like having a bunch of shareholders, but they're also your workers. brilliant all around in that regard.

also quite amusing would be to see competitors stocking up your building to try and max it out so they can steal your employees away. all sorts of silly tactics would abound i imagine, heheh.

daily ratha then monthly should be cooool, especially if day time type 2 is sorted

sounds interesting. though i'd probably not use it on zoric (forced employees, yuck).
only thing i don't like about it is that without forced employees, it would be somewhat useless. in nearly all islands without an employee bonus in the past, players would rather not employ people at all, even with a bonus, people barly employ for more then it.

going on hedges idea of player activity judgeing building employment, it could be made so that # employable buildings / # of living people = # jobs per building


the employee setup on zoric 8 was interesting before all the trouble.
nearly all buildings were set up to use 3 employees. not having employees would reduce production time by 10% and storage by about 10%, yet due to employee demand, employment itself was a competitive field. people were trying to out employ others by upping thier saleries over and over.
few years in though, due to too high a demand for employees and too few players, buildings were lowered to 2 employees, and max jobs upto 3. the job market was still great though.

i dug this post out to remind me what i wanted to do with this and figured i had to reply now..

in nearly all islands without an employee bonus in the past, players would rather not employ people at all

as said to tom, that wouldnt be an option.. well it would.. but if they didnt employ someone they simply wouldnt be able to make anything. It gets round the need for an employee bonus completely, which is one of the nice things about it.

Have rethought plans for the a-tractor world (hence the deleted post in General) and think i'll go with a new world built around this system instead...

btw if anyone else uses this idea please let me know. Personally i think it'll add a dynanism to the econ that could radically improve the gameplay on worlds...

when a player asks 'how do i earn money?' instead of having to say 'get a job then come back in a few days' (which will often put new players off completely) it can be 'get a job then wait a few minutes'. Players will actually be able to see their money come in 'realtime', and employers will *have* to rely on others to make their products, improving the teamwork element of the game and at the same time making the economy more realistic.

Im prolly becomin a bit evangelistic about this :] but to me i cant see any reason why anyone would want to use the old wages/econ setup now this new option is available. (well other than the fact it doesnt fit with store buildings yet, but that jus means u dont set employees for stores) Feel free to prove me wrong

this new option is available? just the other day i was wondering if/when you were gonna put it in

...annnnnddd done will be in the upcoming reina roja world as such:

efficiency calc = 2
srp = 95%
production time efficiency mod = 8
production cost efficiency mod = 1

level 1 buildings have a min employment time of one realtime day.
level 2 buildings have a min employment time of two realtime days.
level 3 buildings have a min employment time of four realtime days.
level 4 buildings have a min employment time of eight realtime days.
etcetera

in theory (heh) the more powerful your economic holdings are, the harder you'll have to court employees to come work for you, because they won't want to get bogged down being stuck with you and your high end plastics factory -- potentially losing cash in the process -- if they can be helping out some guy with a level one livestock ranch who's selling like hotcakes due to a food shortage.

there are other sources of revenue, but that should be a boon to store owners who need to keep their investment count up.

out of curiosity, what is the source of the wages using er...wage source 8 :]

(ie: building investment, owner cash, owner bank account, something else?)

tells ya that on *economy - tis from building investment only.. if ya need an alternative combination on that lemme know.

can we have a version of this where the employees don't get sacked after the min employ time?

um, they get sacked after the min employment time?