With the recent Realpolitik release, some governing players have noticed that the “recent cash transactions” on larger planets can fill up with “revenue from production fees” quite quickly. While fees from each individual players are collected in bulk every 24 hours, if there are quite a few players on a planet, you’ll of course still get a high number of those entries every day.
That being said, we’d like to keep this list of transactions as the “ground truth” of all cash transactions that are going on. Instead of re-designing this basic list, we’d like to collect your ideas on what you’d expect from potential in-game financial reporting features.
By the way, this does not just apply to government contexts, but also to companies or corporations. Let us know what you’d like to see in your specific situation(s)!
An hour by hour accounting of types is of transaction would be more useful.
Furthermore, without the ability to actually track that back to something (e.g. Production fee? What planet? For what?) the description is not entirely useful.
As this information isn’t something that can be extracted to other systems, the ‘ground truth’ becomes difficult too. I can’t download a .csv of this data to be able to check it somewhere else.
In its current state with line items for niggling amounts, it isn’t very useful and there is no action or information that can reasonably be gained and acted upon from the list as it is available in game.
The question that I believe should be asked is “what information does one need in order to do some action?”
Changing the tax rates isn’t something that you’ll see right away. That takes days (and maybe weeks) for it to have its impact felt. Reporting that summaries information on that scale would be more useful.
And so, I’m going to flip this question back around. What information do you expect us, as the parliament of a planet to be able to act upon when we see:
Data for the “here’s some data” is ok, but then its just a green scrolling ticker where you want to look for the occasional red lines (which are more for a double check).
For me, as a governor and player, have never used FIN except for the top key figures since there isn’t enough information in the recent transactions to be useful to make decisions upon and too much information to use for tools within APEX to analyze in a meaningful way beyond spot checks and looking back to see what the corporation dividend was (which is going away for all practical purposes).
If you plan on keeping FIN as it exists, and I totally agree with your reason, then there should be a “human friendly” version of it where we can see our summaries and a higher level view.
FIN can be nice to have access too when you need to know a specific line item. However, it only has access to a couple hundred entries which get overwritten basically every single day. This, combined with no search or filtering tools, makes it effectively useless.
Would be nice if deleting an order from CXOS didn’t erase all details of it from existing. “what cx order does this FIN transaction match to?”. CXOS should be for order management, but details about filled orders should still exist somewhere else.
Now is another good time to mention the equity valuation choices, how to value self-produced parts. That comes into play with these systems too. I personally prefer mark-to-market.
The PMMG finance suite has a lot of neat things integrated that could [should?] be in the base game. I particularly like the equity chart.
More than 3 financial periods in FINIS, integrating graphs here can be very powerful. We could actually see financial trends over time, instead of guessing “well it’s more than last week, but what was it before that?”.
Should attempt some system of fair market value rather than putting 0 cost into items made. If you are trying to go into a lot more detail tracking cost accounting buckets that are capitalized and each ticker could have buckets that are adjusted using an avg cost basis so you don’t have to track separate lots. as it’s sold off income and expense would hit the income statement depending on the buckets totaling investments. investments would always be quantity * fmv at any given time. It’s just a matter of how much unrealized gain, realized gain, and opperational costs are booked when quantity changes. something extremely useful would be the ability to see this by ticker. even shipping costs could be capitalized into each ticker as flights are made.
First I would like to know what we realy see in the governmental finances.
My guess is: Its the fee/transaction booked once it is completed. So no h aggregation or something like that. → This as on a small planet the fee is only every few h while on bigger planets it is far more frequent.
For market fees I believe its 2 transactions 1 the base fee 2 for the time period of the fee (like LM order valid for 4 days will bring in 2 fee transactions)
The base establishement fee is self explaining.
But anyhow: I would like to know what we realy see in the governmental “ticker”.
As others said: If we could get a aggregation per population group/industry (best the same as in local rules) that would be great. You can keep the ticker.
Insteadt of the contribute motion I (again) suggest a donate button somewhere in the administration center. Could be as simple as in the ARC command.
For cooperations (I said that somewhere also) is no real use anymore except the 10 % bonus and the cooperation chat. Before you do something to the financial statements of them (what for, without any transactions involved) I suggest to develop the Cooperations. With the availability of CONTEXTS you could make cooperations similiar to governments. You could give them own votes (not necessary equal), decicions and contract ability. You could go a path that leads to cooperations “trade” “or not trade” with the factions and members of the cooperations. Coupled with bonus, planet access, ship building rights (also interessting to give that to governments) or the opposite.
Only if and after changes are made financial statements of cooperations should be touched.
The equity chart in particular is essential in my opinion, I might’ve quit by now if I weren’t getting that dopamine hit from watching the line go up. I also think new players would benefit from this sort of simple indicator to show progression and verify the results of their decisions, and if added into LEAD can help engage them competitively. This LEAD could help provide small goals for players (“just a bit further until I’m a top 1000 company!” etc). # Bases is probably the best we have at the moment, but being one of 100 players with that number of bases neither hits the same nor progresses frequently enough. Commodity production is good in this sense, but not relevant to most players until/if they settle on their own niche.
Some sort of better reporting for POPI contributions would be very welcome. Right now, it seems to have a 30 day rolling window, and simply sums up all contributions per person in that window. So when you see something like this:
You don’t really know how much was just donated. Just that something more than 1 DW was added 17 minutes ago.
This makes it hard to use the POPI contributions to manage government payouts. Because this suspicious “Archiel” dude keeps adding 1 DW and then demanding to be paid for 1800 DW and 1586 OFF four times a month.
Edit: Of course, if the government could set prices for upkeep items and payout people as they deliver them, then this particular report isn’t needed, so that would save some trouble
Oh @Counterpoint it would be nice if the government could get a reporting on what and how many buildings are on the planet. - this would help with knowing the worker distribution as well, and this in turn would help with deciding taxes
Off the top of my head, I have two suggestions that would affect my gameplay significantly:
One, FIN is mostly meaningless to me because it’s all noise. As a trader, I do a ton of transactions, and there is too much information to look through to be useful. What I’d love to see is reporting on stuff like sales over the past day/week broken down by commodity, FX sales, bids activity, private/LM contracts, etc. Basically we need drill downs, if I’m using that term correctly, and filters/sorting.
Two, FINBS is really tough for me because I do a lot of contracts, and they are not being included by FINBS correctly. I have to spent lots of time making adjustments to FINBS. FINBS correctly takes into account cash receivables and payables on contracts. But it doesn’t take into account the materials on the other side of those contracts, and that really skews FINBS significantly for me. For example, if I sign a contract to buy 5M worth of FIM, but it’s neither paid for nor delivered yet, then that contract counts as a 5M liability for me, not neutral on FINBS as you’d expect, because it has a cash payable on it. The materials that haven’t been delivered aren’t accounted for anywhere in FINBS. The solution would be that there should also be receivable and payable materials in FINBS, and they could be valued simply at the same valuation as what’s on their contract.
