We plan to adjust market makers, POPI balancing, and a couple recipes on May 6th, 2025.
Changes
Marker Makers
Based on @lowstrife’s detailed feedback combined with our own judgement and taking near-future recipe plans into account, we’ll adjust the prices at which market makers buy commodities as follows:
ADR: 58000 → 70000
AIR: 185000 → 200000
CBL: 91000 (unchanged)
CBM: 63000 (unchanged)
CBS: 42000 (unchanged)
CC: 370000 → 650000
CCD: 61000 → 80000
CRU: 185000 → 200000
EDC: 11100 → 8000 (over the course of 4 weeks)
FFC: 185000 → 240000
IDC : 15300 → 11000 (over the course of 4 weeks)
LIS: 310000 → 450000
LOG: 68000 (unchanged)
NV1: 120000 → 135000
NV2: 180000 → 200000
POW: 5500 → 6000
RED: 50000 → 60000
SDR: 80000 → 100000
SP: 1580 → 2500
SRD: 59000 → 70000
STR: 1000 → 1750
SUD: 83000 → 100000
UTS: 2200 → 3500
WR: 61000 → 140000
Note: Most of these are buffs (also accounting for overall inflation), except for IDC / EDC which will be adjusted in 4 steps (25% of the change each) to arrive at the final numbers listed above (for example EDC will go to 10325 when the changes release, then 9550 the next week, then 8775, and then finally 8000). We hope that this process together with this early announcement of the upcoming changes will give everyone enough time to adjust their plans.
Population Infrastructure
PIO needs for comfort (5% → 3%), culture (3% → 2%) and education (2% → 1%) reduced and shifted to life support instead
SET needs for comfort, culture, education (all 5% → 3%) reduced and shifted to life support instead
POPI upkeep tick lengths increased from 3 → 5 (short) and 10 → 15 (long)
Horray! I am very pleased at the community response to these changes. Thanks for the support everyone.
My only notes are that lis seems to be a little weak, especially given that it’s construed of air/wr which on their own are quite strong. Eyeballing your changes, it I would ideally like to see LIS at ~460,000, maybe more. It’s the most complicated item out there by a lot! IMO it should be the best.
But still! Great changes. I can now implement my planned changes to my empire I’ve been contemplating for weeks.
Oh one more thing. Air vs WR, WR is too cheap despite them being made of quite similar constituent items and having similar COGS input. WAI is shared, PCB is shared, WAF + SEN is slightly cheaper than SAR, the rest is quite similar.
WR → 140k, LIS → 460k. That will have these 3 APF items all quite nicely balanced and the whole list as a whole in a really good place.
The current MM price for IDC is currently 14225. Thus the effective price is 14200 (because there’s only 3 significant figures on the order books). However the price band is still 14225, which means that players without PRO cannot sell IDC at all to the market maker.
This issue was discovered by kalanchloe on discord
Price bands are a wonderful benefit as they prevent costly fat finger mistakes. They are also a frequent nuisance when they are set with an unreasonable price.
Hopefully the broken price bands for EDC/IDC will be fixed before Tuesday so we can actually sell our stock.
Normally when a price band is jenky a Pro player can make a trade to reset the price band. However, the price band won’t drop below the set price of the MM. So the only fix for this is for the devs to manually adjust the price band down or the MM price up.
I see in today’s devlog that’s you’ve made a tool to fix the price bands. Thank you for that. It seems a bit unfair though that it is being implemented along with the next price drop of EDC/IDC. It isn’t a huge financial loss (at least not for me) but couldn’t you delay the price drop so that us non-Pro players have a chance to sell at the current price?
in the IDC.CI1 order book, i’ve been listing buy orders at 14,300 so that players with free accounts can sell their stock. I just turn around and immediately sell at 14,200 and eat the small loss. I can do the same for EDC and on the AI1 orderbook, if that’s helpful for you
