Trading System is messed up...

[unmerged(3352)]

Re: Re: Re: Re: IMPORTANT: Trading System is messed up...

Originally posted by Greven
Then you are quite miss informed. Germany bought large quantities of strategic commodities as precission drills etc etc through Swedish Bulvans.

It was quite easy to obtain commodities on the world market from the very fact that it was considered a problem for Democratic countries like the USA and Great Britain to prove acts of fraud and bulvanism. In the End they started to set a new rule instead, but that was late war.

/Greven

If I'm not horribly missinformed, those commodities were not rubber or oil, but rather various rare metals or alloys. Sweden too had enormous trouble all through the war to secure enough quantities of oil and rubber, and we got special permits per month from the US on how much we were allowed to buy. "January 1942, Sweden gets to purchase X tons of oil and X tons of rubber." Those amonts barely covered Swedish need, so I doubt any Swedish bulvans were able to purchase any oil/rubber for Germany.

But that is beside the point. I think the key issue here is that the buyer should be forced to transport the goods back to his home nation. As it is now the merchandise just magically appears in Berlin.

 

[grumbold]

Originally posted by Trip
True... 10 to 1 seems a bit extreme though.

Want to convert 150 units of oil to rubber? (300 ICs) That's 15 ICs cost right there. That's a rather hefty sum there... two mediocre/1 solid tech, or an armored division.
And that's excluding if you might have to convert coal to oil first.

Good point. It needs to hurt enough that conversion should be third best after producing it yourself and trading for it on the market. You want it to cost the economy to have to rely on manufacturing synthetics otherwise today we'd still have coal mines running at full capacity all over the world turning it into oil and rubber products. Somewhere between 10:1 and 50:1 there must be a good compromise

 

[unmerged(994)]

Hortlund, a couple of question from your German experience:
1) What about your stockpiles during the war? I assume that the Panzers and planes should be rather thirsty, and that this should have quite an effect on your oil/coal consumption, and by consequence on rubber itself. If you can stockpile enough materials to fight two years of war without shortages and later on you start to get problems, for me it's ok as it seems quite historical.
2) And how many units did you have? This goeas along with the Grumbold suggestion, that I find very appropriate, as presently it seems that so few forces are needed that manpower/material shortages don't become a problem as it was IRL
3) Just as an aside, which is the figure for German consumer goods requirements during peacetime and before annexations?

BTW, all my previous calculations were based on a 3:1 rate for every commodity. If you can get enough oil at 2:1, well you can build quite a stockpile, although I wouldn't suggest conversion as a viable option during the first years, as you have a rate of 2:1, which leads to a final 4:1 for coal to rubber (assuming coal as the basic German "currency")

 

[Vynd]

I think people have had a lot of good ideas about how to make the current system work. Just to summarive:

• Decrease the amount of coal and steel available worldwide
• Make conversion more expensive either by upping the ratio or charging it against industrial capacity.
• Make conversion something players set manually.
• Increase the wartime trading penalties and/or make them relate to the strength of your opponent's navy.
• Get the AI countries to build more troops earlier, thereby forcing players to expend more resources to keep up.

It seems to me that if some combination of these changes could be introduced, then the existing system would become half-way sensible. The first two items on the list defeinitely sound like they are possible. The last three sound trickier, but are hopefully something Paradox could do. They also have added bonuses, in that they would allow us to stockpile oil, make the game more realistic, and make it harder to beat the AI.

Although I would like to see the more radical changes people have suggested, like directly controling who you trade with and preventing nations at war with each other from trading with the enemy, I think we have to be realistic. Paradox is unlikely to completely rewrite the trading system from the ground up, however sorely we think they need to. But if we beg and plead very politely but insistently, maybe we can get them to make some less intensive changes.

 

[unmerged(8195)]

I realy don't mind the World Market aspect in the big picture, I guess, since it's really a simplification for so many economic variables...but really, in my game as Japan in the 1936 scenario, I'm up to 1939 already and the World Market has 9999 coal, 9999 steel, 1 rubber, and 1 oil. Needless to say, that looks a bit odd.

Also, I sort of have to agree with Alexander's critiques of the economic aspects of the game--you don't need to play a game of expansion for Japan's economic interests, since you can get all the oil you want on the World Market, and convert for rubber.

Now, I've annexed ALL of China and Siam...needless to say, I don't need any more resources, and really didn't even prior to that. So where's the need for conflict in the economic-driven Pacific?

 

[unmerged(1584)]

Vynd suggests:

"Decrease the amount of coal and steel available worldwide

Make conversion more expensive either by upping the ratio or charging it against industrial capacity.

Make conversion something players set manually.

Increase the wartime trading penalties and/or make them relate to the strength of your opponent's navy.

Get the AI countries to build more troops earlier, thereby forcing players to expend more resources to keep up."

I wholeheartedly concur. I can live with the World Market; honestly, it's the ease of conversion that bugs me. In my current game, as Germany, I have 99999 coal, and the world market has 99999 coal, 1 rubber, 1 oil. So I can't buy oil/rubber on the world market -- which is okay with me -- but I can easily convert my infinite supply of coal. What's the fun of that? I suppose it's tougher for nations that don't have infinite coal/steels supplies; maybe it's just Germany and other coal-producing nations that need tweaking. Give us less coal and steel!

 

[The Andy-Man]

Get rid of conversion, and make it only available after certain techs - and even after that it has to be REALLY expensive.
I mean, I have nev er heard of coal --> oil in my life, steam powered alternative units is possible, but oil? Ther germans spent the whole war DREAMING they could do that, HoI seems to just let it happen.

 

[Emren]

I want to thank all of the contributors of this discussion. Thanks to you, I have a rather clear picture of how the trading system in HOI works and does not work. I can now save my hard earned money and await HOI2, where most of the trading problems will probably have been ironed out. I am pretty sure there will be a sequel, just like there was for EU. HOI2 will, perhaps, be the game most of us have been waiting for (for me personally, that is a game where playing Germany and copying its historical performance will be extremely difficult). Going by the same time table as EU, I guess I'll have HOI2 in a year's time.

I'll go back to playing Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin again...

 

[grumbold]

Originally posted by The Andy-Man
Get rid of conversion, and make it only available after certain techs - and even after that it has to be REALLY expensive.
I mean, I have nev er heard of coal --> oil in my life, steam powered alternative units is possible, but oil? Ther germans spent the whole war DREAMING they could do that, HoI seems to just let it happen.

http://www.caer.uky.edu/fseminar/fsstrang.htm

Germany was well ahead in the goal of affordable synthetic fuels by 1936. Its possible, it just needs to have an appropriate cost...

 

[Javaslinger]

I seriously doubt that the world market is going to get ablolished or changed in a major way. Seems like it would require a big time rewriting of a huge par of the game.

However, I wonder if some dramatic changes are possible with a mod or if that part of the game is all hard coded?

Thanks,

Ken

 

[Greywolf]

As I will lost my ISP tomorrow, good bye all, I can allow myself to be more harsh:

Originally posted by Javaslinger
I seriously doubt that the world market is going to get ablolished or changed in a major way. Seems like it would require a big time rewriting of a huge par of the game.

Ken

You are nearly right, the true sentence was :

" Seems like it would require a big time writing such a huge par of the game. "

Trade was definitely intented to be more complicated/realistic ( look at manual ) but some production time table obviously have rushed this part of the program. It is fairly clear that what we have wasn't what the programmers had in mind, nor the betas too...

And even with Germany on top of Synthetic Oil and Rubber production the quality was bad, that used from their IC and you can bet they will have dreamed on getting ratio like 5>1, not speaking of 1>4.

I tried to ruin my eyes and mental sanity in rereading several scanned post WWII report on conversion techniques, and what I get from that is that the ratio was between 0.29 and 0.67 % of the coal transformed to oil. If you take into account all the industrial manpower and factories added I dont think ratio is more than 2 to 1 , or even 3 to 1, and that is in 1948 !!!

Some interesting number on the topic ( in bad shape )

German oil production 1940
Country: Barrels per day (approx.) - 1 barrel = 200l.:
Germany 750,000 (6.9 %)

Austria 850,000 (7.9 %)

Poland and Czechoslovakia 550,000 (5.1 %)

Romania 2,500,000 (23.1 %)

Hungary 900,000 (8.3 %)

Synthetic oil (all countries) 4,250,000 (39.4 %)

Others (all countries) 1,000,000 (9.3 %)

Total number of barrels per day 10,800,000


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Raw material production in million tonnes
Year Steel Aluminium Coal Synthetic oil
1939 23.7 0.199 204.8 2.2
1940 21.5 (-9%) 0.211 (+6%) 247.9 (+21%) 3.1 (+50%)
1941 31.8 (+48%) 0.234 (+11%) 248.3 (+0.1%) 4.1 (+32%)
1942 32.1 (+1%) 0.264 (+13%) 264.2 (+6%) 4.9 (+20%)
1943 34.6 (+8%) 0.250 (-5%) 268.9 (+2%) 5.7 (+16%)
1944 28.5 (-18%) 0.245 (-2%) 249.0 (-7%) 3.8 (-33%)
It is interresting to note that although all raw material production figures started to decrease in 1943, and went in the red in 1944, tank production went up almost 50% each of those years. Furthermore, the vehicles produced in the late war years were more ressource demanding than the early-war ones.

 

[grumbold]

Another Synthetic Oil link for those who might be interested. Figures a bit different to the above, but not dramatically so.

http://thunder.prohosting.com/~kopper/bcoilobj.htm

 

[Greywolf]

Interesting but still on search of a site that show exactly how much a ton of coal will produce oil EXACTLY...

Anyway the more I read about it the more I miss the 'bombable' synth oil factories from WiF

More seriously this is clear than conversion process require coal but also iron for the catalyst and a lot of industrial power. So perhaps throwing a bit of IC in the equation wouldn't be all that bad....

 

[Jon Shafer]

And don't forget to make world trade useless or very near to it, otherwise all of that effort would be a waste.