The Economist ~ Notes on houses & Sirius

Day 2,433, 06:46 • Published in Poland United Kingdom • by Spite313



Dear friends,


First of all houses. I was sitting at work when I got a little buzz on my phone, and lo and behold the admins were emailing me to say they were introducing a new industry. At the moment we have very little info, but we know two facts:

1. Houses will act as temporary energy centres (in other words they will increase the maximum amount of energy you can “store”)
2. Houses will be made by player owned companies and will use resources in the same way as other companies.

From these two things we can infer some other things, which may or may not be true.

First of all it’s likely that as with Weapons and Food there will be five resource types, which will each give a 20% bonus to production. These will be randomly scattered around, which means that some bonuses which exist already will be changed. It’s likely to me that this means removing duplicate bonuses- if you have 3 fruit regions, you might end up with 2 regions and an undefined housing region. This again highlights the injustice that countries like France have lots of regions and countries like MKD only have 3 and so likely won’t get one of the new bonuses. Of course it may be that there is only one resource for houses, which would simplify things, but it’s unlikely. It’s also somewhat of a worry that they’d take one of France’s rubber regions, which would be funny but horrible in terms of international squabbling.



Secondly we can assume that houses will be expensive- they’ll use a lot of resources and they will use a lot of raw materials. I think people will be conned as well, in that everyone will be rushing to buy house companies but most of the profit will be in the raw materials production, much like now. I think the admins hope that the increased worker demand will drive up prices and cut out-of-control Q7 weapon production. I’m not sure it’ll work out that way though. I do expect wages to go up though, and I have noticed wages have gone up 10cc since the announcement was made.

How exactly they will make the houses rare we are yet to see. In a Q7 weapons company each worker can make 20 Q7 guns. I guess admins could make it so a worker could produce 1 house, but again unless the cost of RM is insane (for example 2000 RM per house) we’re going to end up with loads of houses and after all, each person only needs 1 house at a time. If they last a week, that’s only 4 houses a month, not really going to be a huge demand. So instead I think they’ll introduce partial construction again, where it takes say 20 works in a company to make a house. If you have 10 workers, you make 50% of a house.

As for Q, my guess is that there will be 5 Q to begin with, and each one will add maybe 25 health onto your bar, so Q5 gives you an extra 125 health bar. For me that’s the minimum it would have to be to be worth buying, so admins will probably peg it at that. It would be nice if each Q added 100 onto the bar, but it seems unlikely.

The admins also made the dubious assertion that it would “reduce the need for work as manager”. I’m not sure how, but unless they completely change the game system, more companies will increase not decrease the amount of WaM. It’s possible that they will make it so you can’t work as a manager in a housing company, or possibly even the raw materials companies. That would I guess increase wages, and bleed off workers from Q7 companies. With the active world population as small as it is, this could inadvertently push up Q7 prices if supply was short enough. But that’s all just idle speculation, biased by the fact I’m sitting on a dragon’s hoard of Q7 guns praying every day for a price hike.



Moving on, Sirius has took all three gold mines, hurrah! I’ve got a grand total of 1g out of them so far, which I guess is still pretty good for 20 health. I think as a victory it’s quite symbolic, since Sirius is a lot weaker than Asteria on paper. Although Croatia especially fought hard, and Poland did reach into their bank account and post awesome CO for once, the unsung hero of the campaign is Aurora, whose damage allowed the victory in the first place.

The Sirius-Aurora unspoken alliance has existed since the beginning of Sirius, but it’s been lukewarm at times. In the few months before this one, communication collapsed altogether, being reduced to bilateral communication between countries in the alliances rather than through HQs. Partly this was because of longstanding disagreements between key members, which were difficult to resolve. Partly it was due to lack of effort from both teams.

This month however Sirius has elected Pierre Dzoncy, a Polish player who had long time association with Aurora, including HQ membership there. With his contacts through the old guard of Aurora he has the potential to bring the two alliances closer together. I have to admit straight away that when Sirius was founded, I didn’t see us as an alliance becoming too cosy with Aurora. If we’d wanted to be so close, we’d have just founded one alliance instead of two.


Sometimes two asses are better than one...

However since then the two alliances have had several changes in membership and relations between countries which at least makes a closer union more possible. For me I would say the gold mine campaign shows that when the alliances work together, they achieve more than they do apart. It also shows that working together is possible. What was once an undesirable but necessary alliance of alliances has become a strong working relationship. I’d like to see it go further.


Thanks for reading


Iain



To those of you wanting to join Unity drop Count Drakula, Lord Farhan or myself a PM. Be part of the best unit in the world 😁