Join the new world

First, a postscript from my previous article. It is possible that at some point in your life, you too may get the urge to undertake a marathon. Do not do it. Seriously.

OK, now to today's screed. As part of the rotation of deals, I upgraded one of my weapons factories today. Specifically, I took a Q3 up to a Q4. This cost me 56 gold, the equivalent of a few months work, etc.

I have been playing this game quite a long time now, and as a result have built a fairly substantial economic base, I work in 22 companies each morning. In food I am self-sufficient and then some. The "and then some" used to be a source of modest income, but that was before prices there collapsed to their present level due to chronic oversupply. I see no prospect of this changing, absent the creation of a new industry, which I shall now invent as a suggestion to the eworld. This new industry is the Energy Bar industry. You build a factory and now there's a market in Energy Bars. These allow you to extend your health and fight more.

What does it take to build an Energy Bar. Oh, I dunno, set it at some crazy level, say 10,000 FRM per bar. Choose some level that you feel works, tweak it if necessary. You'll need to set it at a level where buying them with gold will still be a far better deal for the paying players, but at least there's a place for the excess FRM to go.

I know, I know, there is absolutely no chance that the admins will allow a market to develop to in any way compete with what they want people to spend gold on. But trust me when I say that a true market is the only way out of the doldrums of this present economy.

I have another idea for how to deal with the FRM permasurplus, but I am terrified that if I actually put it out there, the admins will implement it, so I am keeping that to myself. If it ever happens, I'll let you know.

OK, on to weapons. In the olden days, there was a real market in weapons because you could fight past your weapons capacity, and could switch weapons mid fight. I can recall trying to figure out if I could finish a guy off with the pistol and save myself a tank shot back in those days. Unless you were very rich, you didn't just shoot tanks in every battle, you tended to stockpile them for the ones involving national security and do the daily battles in Romania or wherever with helicopters or whathaveyou. Nations used to create stockpiles of top weapons, and the level of those stockpiles was key to whether they would start or continue a war, and occasionally that was a factor even in individual battles.

I've previously given a suggestion for how to clear the weapons and food glut (an "all you can eat and fight day"), but again I assume that day is never coming.

As an experienced player, I've got a single Q6 factory online. I worked for a looong time to scrimp and save to get it, and it came just about a week after Q7s were introduced, so it was obsolete the moment I bought it. And that's when I realized what a Sisyphean horror show our economy has become.

I don't even have the heart to think about how long I'd have to be here to amass the funds needed to get a Q7 weapons factory. There will be Q9s in place by then if not Q10s. I do use up all my Q6s in day, and so I need some backup when that happens. Fortunately, I never sold several hundred of my Q5s before the upgrade, so I am eating into them. But eventually they will be gone too.

All this power creep has made lesser weapons more or less worthless, and no amount of rocket factories (because of their foolish construction formula) will change that. And so we have arrived at this point. Today I spent 56 gold to upgrade from one worthless factory to another. How can one spend so much gold and feel so little sense of accomplishment? I actually sighed aloud as I clicked the mouse.


N x NE Volume 9, Number 2