The Economist ~ Housing: Finishing the job

Day 2,479, 12:28 • Published in Poland United Kingdom • by Spite313


Dear friends,


Some time ago the admins made a landmark decision introducing a new industry- or rather reintroducing an old industry- in the form of housing. This was a landmark change in many ways, not least because they prevented house manufacturers from using Work as Manager (WAM) to produce houses or house raw materials, meaning all houses must be produced by workers.

I wrote three articles on the topic (here, here and here), with my basic conclusions being that the admins had fluffed it by rushing housing out without doing enough preparation. In short, the houses weren’t desireable enough to buy, were too expensive and were typically linear.

To explain what I mean by this, look at weapons. The cheapest weapon to use per unit of damage is Q7. Q1-Q6 is therefore worthless. That’s because the advantages of the weapons grow in line with the costs, rather than decreasing inversely to quality. The best system is one where the advantage gained by a quality increase is smaller each time until the difference between Q6 and Q7 is quite marginal indeed- or by tying it to something finite like workers that cannot be infinitely produced.

With housing not using WAM, using workers as an anchor to prices is probably the easiest system. Below you can see a simple little excel chart showing what the current system for housing is (Q1-Q3) based on max bonuses and Q5 House raw material companies:



The thing that leaps out immediately is that Q1 and Q2 are basically identical. Sure, one house has a lower entry cost, but Q1 is basically half a Q2 house. There’s no actual benefit it producing one over the other in terms of cost- except initial investment.



You will see a little column there called coefficient. That is simply the number of workers divided by the number of days duration the house has, reversed. In other words, how many “works” per day you need to produce a house. I decided to use that as the basis for designing my own system. Instead of making the numbers of workers and so on nice round numbers and just stumbling into a coefficient, I started with that.



I literally just made this up, so don’t read too much into it. Before you all go racing to the comment box, read the rest of the article.

So what does the coefficient mean? It is basically how many works per day you need to produce a house over that duration period. So for Q1, you need 0.5 works per day over 7 days, which gives a coefficient of 2. For Q3, you need 1 work per day. For Q7 you need 10 works per day.



Cost per day = arbitrary wage cost of 30cc
Tank = how much “total wellness increase” you get from the house
Regen = how much health per 6 minutes extra you get from the house
Regen/Tank coeff. = basically a cost/benefit comparison tool
Health from Regen = total health benefit over the lifetime of the house


I have been guided in this by two major principles:

1. All Qualities of house company must be viable as businesses (ie: have a market)
2. The upper qualities should be always in demand (supply will always be short)


A normal player with no source of income other than their wage should be able to afford a Q1-3 house (at least at production cost). Everything above that effectively means paying other people to produce it for you, with Q7 houses costing a huge amount (based on expected wage increases, something in the region of 12-15k cc per house). This means that whilst everyone should be able to buy a house, there will never be any oversupply. It’ll also massively drive up wages, which was the original point of houses.

I see the mission of this industry as to introduce a level of product cost and scarcity such as we experienced in early V1. By making this expensive and difficult to achieve, we reintroduce challenge. We also make it so a businessman with a Q1 house company can make a profit, and will make a profit with every upgrade he makes. In fact, with this system it’s entirely possible that lower Q companies could be more profitable than higher ones, depending on the market.

Q6 & Q7 houses would be incredibly desirable, especially to the 300-400 players who buy big gold packs every month, and to those who fight enough to be worth it. I see big markets too for Q5, which represents what a middle class citizen with a few companies could afford. Q1-3 are basically houses for newer players mainly reliant on their wage, with Q4 being aspirational. But at all levels, there is a market and the advantage increases. Importantly though, the cost/benefit for most players decreases as price increases, with Q7 companies likely being many times more expensive with marginal benefits. This will make them attractive to those who have the money to spend on small increases, but not the only viable option in the market.



These are just my initial ideas. Stuff I literally wrote on the back of envelopes at work. It’s by no means a finished product, but I am putting it out there at this early stage because I’m interested in the thoughts of mathematicians, programmers and economists who play the game- what would you do? Go from my two starting goals above, viable businesses and scarcity at all levels- and do your worst. If anyone is interested in collaborating with me, just shout.

Obviously the admins are under no obligation to listen, and in fact I’ve had no sign that they would. However in the past they have looked at suggestions by players, including me, favourably and I think by presenting a finished and logical work we have a decent chance of making positive change to the game. The current hiatus on the housing rollout certainly suggests they’re thinking it over- can’t help to throw our own hat in the ring.


Cheers for reading o/


Iain