This was touched on in the Taxes thread and in the partial qualities thread, but I wanted to give it some attention here specifically.

We have a large project and long-term transition to replace the Size Tax and simple Diminishing Marginal Returns effects with improved management options. The idea is that instead of simply being told "you make less money now and have to pay X", you'll face the costs of operating a building and have difficult decisions to make about how and where to sacrifice. This will come to all buildings. The first stage is centered around R&D and research, but will touch on all buildings:

Here's what this R&D improvement will include:

• A change in description text indicating that quality/research score indicates improvement over baseline/common knowledge, and that baseline improves over time so quality advantage will erode.
  
• Partial quality will be allowed for products. This will affect other buildings.
  
• Manual product merge will be available to all and take partial qualities into account.
  
• Automatic product merge will be offered with 4 settings:
  
  
  
  • Automatically merge everything - default for new players
    
  • Automatically merge consumer goods - not industrial products
    
  • Automatically merge everything except the 4 types of building materials
    
  • Don't automatically merge anything - default for existing players, with an alert to notify them of options
    
  
  
• Partial levels of research will be allowed.
  
• Multiple lines of research on the same product will be allowed. (See below.)
  
• Licensing! (See below.)
  
• Product quality will drop at a medium-slow rate, perhaps 0.05 per day. Everywhere - warehouse, invoices, markets, stores, etc. Stores with sales already started will see the quality of products drop, but the sales rates will not change at this time. The same is true for factories and farms started with research that degrades.
  
• Research drops slowly, perhaps .02 per day
  
• The catch-up bonus for being behind in research will be greatly reduced
  
• R&D centers will no longer commit to single-level increases. Instead you set it to a product and the research level is constantly bumped.
  
• R&D centers can work on the same product, either contributing to the same research or working for separate lines.
  
• R&D centers will get added management features to make them more interesting to run. These will largely revolve around high-level employee management.
  
• R&D will be removed from the Size Tax calculation as they now have their own running costs.
  

Partial qualities
As said before, the concern here is warehouses and markets filling up. So we're going to push auto-merge where possible, but not force it.

The "building materials" option may become unnecessary if we introduce build kits, but I'm deferring that decision to a later stage.

Quality & research degrading
This is a change in views, but a reasonable one. Instead of companies building to infinite quality while society remains in the dark ages, all research will over time get absorbed into common knowledge. This means quality numbers indicate an advantage over baseline, an advantage that erodes. This means companies at very high levels, or who have stopped researching a particular product, may find their research going backwards unless they step up the research efforts.

Multiple lines and licensing

Habar had suggested something he called "sidestock". I think this would be more generally described as "multiple lines of research" and would prefer the terms "primary" and "secondary" to describe what is and isn't being used. I think that's possible.

Now the thing to be careful about is to avoid players (especially new ones) accidentally having separate research when they only want to work one type. If they do, research merge still won't exist any more than it does now. We'll have to build in some safety features for that. We'll assume that any R&D center wants to work on your highest quality available unless you tell them not to, and factories always will use the best you own.

What this will allow is safety measures if a sent invoice gets cancelled (for example). Additionally it will let companies that want to work on Research as a primary business be able to do so. They can have 3 different lines of corn research if desired, each one to be sold to a different customer.

Licensing is an idea I think people will enjoy, which becomes possible with this new remake. Basically, instead of selling your research to people you can keep it but let other companies use it. They'll pay you a fee - which you set - for each unit made. We'll make a tool or two to let manufacturers browse licensing offers and pick one for their farm or factory. Then you get paid whenever they make something using it.

This is a new idea and I haven't fully designed the plan yet, so details will have to be worked out. These are some concerns off the top of my head: Speed share - I suspect the owner of the research will set the % and everyone else will use it that way. Cheating (setting β1 million licensing fee per item, in which case I drive to your house and punch you). All licensing is public, no private deals. An offered license can be pulled at any time, but you can't raise the price if people have accepted it.

Feel free to hit us with ideas on this, but I think it's something you'd enjoy.

Management features
This is mostly designed, but I'm going to keep it secret as a mix of in-case-things-change and pleasant-surprise.

So if you have ideas around research management or R&D operation, now's a good time to let us know! It's pretty exciting and we look to get this package of upgrades out ASAP.

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Working on: 1) Diminishing Returns Reform meets Size Tax Reform. 2) Stock market Always anxious for suggestions

man! are you guys like robots???????? you finish one improvement, 2 days later your onto the next! I love you guys

just out of curiosity, do you guys have jobs, or is this how you make money?

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Milkco. "You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free" John 8:32 Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life Jesus, your Savior, is Lord and King over all. Have Faith in the Lord and you will be saved!

I'm pretty sure they get paid for something. They are doing a good job with development!

Right now, when you have one level of R&D and buy another R&D level on the market, your lower R&D is wiped out. In this new model, it would be possible instead to merge R&D so that buying level 20 R&D when you already have level 20 R&D would have the same effect on total resulting R&D as would doing level 20 R&D in two separate R&D facilities. Obviously, the resulting R&D would not be level 40, as it costs much more than twice as much cash and time to get to level 40 versus level 20, but two level 20 R&Ds might merge to become level 24.37 R&D or something like that, based on total investment to get both done.

In the real world, companies often buy R&D from other firms that by itself would not necessarily be overall higher, but which is complementary to their existing R&D. When IBM or Intel buys a company, they are rarely buying it for the factories, but are buying the intellectual property value of their new acquisition. The R&D on computers or CPUs might not be higher than that which already exists overall for Intel or IBM, but it does add something to the levels already existing.

This would be very useful in creating a more viable market for smaller / newer players to do R&D to sell to others. Right now, if you do level 20 R&D, you will generally have to sell it to someone newer in the game than you are, as older players will probably already have level 20 done. This makes for a limited market for R&D, which can quickly become saturated and thus, low priced. With merging of R&D so that any R&D bought on the market would contribute incrementally to total R&D, someone selling level 10 R&D might only increase a higher level R&D of level 50 up to level 50.2, but it would be worth something to every player in the game and thus, a real potential market for everyone to buy R&D from others would exist.

This could reasonable create an opportunity for some players to viably compete in the game by offering R&D for sale to others, as their R&D even at lower levels would be of incremental benefit to many other potential buyers in the game. It also would give high point players a viable option to buy R&D from others as an alternative to doing it all themselves.

Creation of more market options and more strategy alternatives, especially for newer players to sell to experienced players, would be good for the game long term. Interactions between players and the market is healthy for the game.

I hope he doesn't punch me

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Milkco. "You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free" John 8:32 Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life Jesus, your Savior, is Lord and King over all. Have Faith in the Lord and you will be saved!

Partial qualities sounds good I'm all for it.

For the drop in quality per day that's also a good idea however I don't like that everything drops the same amount. If you're going to introduce this might as well do it right. Food and Grocery should deteriorate faster than Automotive and Furniture. I can't see why you would make Fruit and Luxury cars lose quality at the same speed. ( fruit obviously spoils before a Luxury Car. )

Licensing sounds like a great idea!! Some questions though: what happens if you increase your research from say 30 to 33. Would the license still only be at 30 or my newer level? Also since it research will be decreasing daily how will that work? If I started the license at 30 then in one week it's 29.2 what is the buyer actually getting?


I'm not yet convinced that being able to merge research is such a good idea. Real Value has a nice point, but it I think it has more potential for harm than good. Especially if you're going to be able to have 3 lines of research per product. I just don't like the idea of pooling together a lot of lower research will give you a higher level.

All sounds great.

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Kick the spammers and make it hard.

Reynolds Inc. wrote:

For the drop in quality per day that's also a good idea however I don't like that everything drops the same amount. If you're going to introduce this might as well do it right. Food and Grocery should deteriorate faster than Automotive and Furniture. I can't see why you would make Fruit and Luxury cars lose quality at the same speed. ( fruit obviously spoils before a Luxury Car. )

That's an interesting idea. Cars aren't even the best example necessarily, but certainly fruit and pipes would degrade at different rates...

Quote:

Licensing sounds like a great idea!! Some questions though: what happens if you increase your research from say 30 to 33. Would the license still only be at 30 or my newer level? Also since it research will be decreasing daily how will that work? If I started the license at 30 then in one week it's 29.2 what is the buyer actually getting?

Whatever happens to the research, the licensee gets the latest level.

Quote:

I'm not yet convinced that being able to merge research is such a good idea. Real Value has a nice point, but it I think it has more potential for harm than good. Especially if you're going to be able to have 3 lines of research per product. I just don't like the idea of pooling together a lot of lower research will give you a higher level.

Nor we, now that I've had a chance to discuss it. It's an interesting idea, but probably won't come in. There are balance concerns and as has been said before, you don't get a really good recipe by combining two bad ones.

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"Please let me make my own mistakes? 'cause I really like to learn stuff." --Wise words from Hillside Cottage Please read the rules. Have information? Why not write a guide?

I suggest being able to pay employees more to get things done faster, comments?

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Milkco. "You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free" John 8:32 Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life Jesus, your Savior, is Lord and King over all. Have Faith in the Lord and you will be saved!

http://forums.simunomics.com/viewtopic.php?t=1755&start=0

ahh thanks, one other thing would you be able to cut off the license deal with someone, anytime:?:

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Milkco. "You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free" John 8:32 Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life Jesus, your Savior, is Lord and King over all. Have Faith in the Lord and you will be saved!

Committed wrote:

Reynolds Inc. wrote:

For the drop in quality per day that's also a good idea however I don't like that everything drops the same amount. If you're going to introduce this might as well do it right. Food and Grocery should deteriorate faster than Automotive and Furniture. I can't see why you would make Fruit and Luxury cars lose quality at the same speed. ( fruit obviously spoils before a Luxury Car. )

That's an interesting idea. Cars aren't even the best example necessarily, but certainly fruit and pipes would degrade at different rates..

you do realize that for this to work you will also have to rebalance the ROI on the targeted products, right ?

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Live long and Prosper

Quote:

you do realize that for this to work you will also have to rebalance the ROI on the targeted products, right ?

Yes.

Quote:

ahh thanks, one other thing would you be able to cut off the license deal with someone, anytime:?:

There might be a limit/penalty on pulling it, perhaps where you request a cutoff and then have to wait a few days, or give back a portion of what you were paid. Just to keep the licensees from being jerked around. But basically yes, you can cancel the agreement and take back your license.

thought so or else you could just make a deal, get a bunch of money, then cancel

that's the beauty of the licensing, it's per product!

Perhaps could do something with brands that way too!