I don't know if there has all ready been a topic made. So I just make a new one :).

So when are you going to implement an oil technology to help optimize an oiler strategy. I have heard in the past people were against it because there are enough technology choices.... which I think is a lame excuse. There are technology to help promote other strategies, but not oiler.... an oiler strategy shouldn't be as black sheeped as it is.

Another suggestion I have regarding oil is to have it factor into your offensive allies. I am unaware if it all ready is or not. My thought is this, if your using your allies military, they should use oil.

This would do a few different things. It would increase the need of oil more than it all ready is, making oiler strategies more needed. It would make the use of your OA more complex in figuring their helping power. I think it would make farming a bit more challenging needing to factor in the oil you will need to send the full power of your OA's.

I am sure there will be a deal of players against the 2nd idea, because people are lazy and like doing things the easy way. However, it would make it more "real" and challenging.

oil tech has been suggested few times.

off allies military using oil too is nice idea but also very costy if oil price is 200+ or there aren't enuf oil on market.

It would be a game changer ;)

The way to make oilers work is not to introduce tech to produce even MORE of it (i.e increase supply --> makes prices drop).

It is to increase demand, for example, make 1 oil only supply 5 units, instead of 25.

A combination of both (introducing tech and requiring more oil to be used) can be introduced, as long as the latter outweighs the former significantly. The Fascist oil bonus also needs to be reduced if this happens.

I think it can be disputed. I don't see how food/agri tech would be any different. When it comes down to it, all goods and their prices are set due to supply and demand.

Your idea of oil consumption is a good idea though. Example, I think troops should cost little to 0 oil, they are foot soldiers..... but jets and tanks should use a considerable amount more. I am sure that would take lots and lots of code to rewrite though.

Any ways back to the original topic. I was just stating all other strategies have technology to help boost their production and oiler shouldn't be any different. Even a farmer selling at horrible prices is going to buy agri tech to produce more food.

The other problem of introducing oil tech is one of philosophy. The developers have said they don't want to turn oil "into another food-like" commodity, since there would be very little to differentiate them other than the means the 2 commodities are consumed.

WRONG XINHYUAN, THAT IS EXACTLY HOW TO MAKE OIL PRICES GO UP. CUT PRODUCTION BY 50%. LET OIL TECH GO TO 225%. DONE

OIL ALSO NEEDS TO BE SELLABLE ON THE PRIVATE MARKET

AS WELL AS BEING FA'ED

\

I like this topic since I'm always thinking of ways to use oil to win. Here are my thoughts on oil:

1. I agree with xin, as an oiler the problem is never the production of oil, it's that your oil doesn't sell out if you put it at a good price. Idiots undercut price by $25-$100 at a time - with so few competitive oilers (in primary), oil price shouldn't have to settle down to equilibrium price (think ogliopoly). The only way I've found to be successful as an oiler is to farm most of the other oilers and keep them small while you buyout their cheap oil and resell it at your price (hopefully bringing it to a duopoly or monopoly).

2. Which leads to point 2. Since most oilers are n00bs and thus aren't smart enough to treat it as an ogliopoly - increase demand of oil. I like the idea of requiring offensive allies to use oil and also making the # of units a barrel of oil supports lower. This will also make an all oiler strat viable - right now the only way to do well is to build rigs to a certain point and then build something else since demand is so low.

3. Don't add oil tech. It makes it a unique strart that can be played w/o worrying about keeping tech levels up and makes it a market pricing/reselling strategy. Otherwise all the non-techer strategies are essentially the same and it gets dull.

4. Don't make oil buyable on private market, supply is enough as it is. I'm mixed on being able to sell it on private market unless price is at least $100. Setting this as a price floor for oil is a good starting point, but any lower and there's really no point in the floor.

5. Indifferent on FA'able - sure why not.

make building require oil, at least a moderate amount.
that way everybody will constantly be buying oil, through their building stage, at the very least.

i suppose oil peak would be sooner than bushel peak, but we'll let xin blaze that trail and all follow him ;p

such a good suggestion that i ended any further discussion?

slagpit had a really good plan a while back that is still part of the plan to go in; i just need to get around to doing some of these things heh

may i ask what his suggestion was?

hm basically to burn oil to create more PM units

so for war you could burn oil to buy more units with empty markets, or for netting have an oil peak near set end to destock faster?

both assuming no oil buyout

on which page would we be offered to replenish our private? i would imagine purchases, but buy or sell?.. main menu or advisor, maybe?

and are we talking like set amounts, six bonus points for two booms esque, or you have X barrels this will generate Y units sort of thing?

i may have worded this terribly

how does burning more oil, have anything to do with the original topic of having tech so the fascist OILER strat can compete with other strats?

the prevailing logic i think, bolts, suggests that tech will not help but only further reduce its ability to perform on par with others.

to make oiler competitive we need to increase demand, or i suppose make it more scarce a commodity..

i defer to xin on this ;p

if I understood qz right, he's planning on increasing spot demand during war and near end set for the netters

hmm if i got this right. they are saying... making oil tech means more produced, which means a flooded market and then a crappy set for oilers.. as to if u keep it the same without tech.. and make things need more oil, it would cause the market to have a lack of oil. which in turn makes for the need of more oil and maybe someone playing a oiler would benefit

Yup, increasing supply (via tech) will bring down prices, increasing demand (various ideas in this thread) will raise the price of oil throughout the set making the current output levels more valuable.

why not do both? have tech to increase the output of a fascist (yet lower the bonus as someone else suggested) but also raise the amount of oil needed for units and hell make a fascist since he has a oil advantage need even more per unit then the rest..

VicRattlehead
Member

608

Sep 24th 2014, 21:43:49
If I could post to B&S and contribute to the discussion about oil.

I have been thinking about ways to allow countries to get an advantage on the market. Market tech, etc. I now think a good way to help oilers and help people play the market more is allow oil use for market advantage. Say, if you spend more oil your stuff gets there faster, and if you spend more oil it doesn't take three turns to pull it back. This even makes oil use more strat specific, cuz farmers and indies would probably rather pay three turns to recall goods, but techers would rather pay for more oil. Indies would probably want a lot of oil in the early to midgame, to beat the undercutters to the market. Farmers, again, probably wouldn't care so much early. Destockers might want to spend some oil so they can destock on the public market instead of on their private, especially theos.

I feel this would be a good path to liven up the game a bit, make the oiler more viable, create variety in all strats, and increase market interaction. The market is of course the most important part of the game, and increasing how players can choose to interact with the market would be, IMO, a good thing.

So yeah, pretend this whole post is in the current Oil thread in B&S.

^ I like that. But from a developer's standpoint that'll take a lot of time to implement and test - time being something QZ and pang are short on. In the interim lower units supported per barrel is a simple tweak of a constant so that could be something to tweak oil quickly.

If you do the numbers right, sure, both can happen. But for certain, introducing oil tech by itself will not help anything, you'll just get a flood of $20 oil and cause even less players to play oilers.

Increase oil demand!

Send 25 units per barrel and PSes takes 20 hours
Send 10 units per barrel and PSes takes 12 hours
Send 5 units per barrel and PSes takes 8 hours

Oiler's biggest advantage is the lack of a need to buy an income tech.

Burning oil for PM units would be useful primarily because:

1) Anybody destocking with low prices (think TMBR) could then burn oil to destock more quickly; or to resell quickly
2) Because they can use oil, they would then buy oil; the plan Slagpit had was for an equlibrium price of $80/barrel - as in, below $80/barrel it would be worth it for a TMBR to buy it, burn it, resell PM units
3) Because TMBR's can buy oil at $80/barrel, it then becomes possible to *STOCK* oil below that price, knowing that *somebody* will probably burn it at $80 (just like *somebody* will probably buy bushels at $36/bushel)

That would open up a whole new strat of play and stocking.

That's the idea anyway.

not many do tmbr switch due it costs damn alot.

could we adopt that idea from private and transfer it over everywhere, as in greater military production for indies, increased food for farmers, pci and then tpt for cashers and techers respectively?

greatly increases demand for oil..

more ways to fluff up player, kill portion of pop and raid oil storage.

depending amount of needed oil players might build bit more rigs early instead indies/etc.

Yes, but this would, in theory, make it more worth it; you could stock oil and then destock in an hour if you wanted to

What do you mean "Because TMBR's can buy oil at $80/barrel".. do you mean they will have incentive to buy it or people will be able to buy it for $80 on the PM or something?

I mean they would have an incentive to buy it at that price or below -- just like demo max miltech's have an incentive to buy $35 bushels.

money isn't that big problem, its time (turns) unless has few 100 bpt or 1k bpt. i have 20k acres and 100 bpt so it'd take 2.5 days turns to build up as tmbr (if no earthquakes happens (wishful thinking)).

this doesnt immediately help marshals xountry that he built without this in mind.. so lets drop it, shall we?

i didn't mean that, sure oil usage can be implented but still it won't make changing to mbr better since money isn't main problem, turns aka time is, 100k acres country would either need very high bpt (aka less production and less turns spent on getting money via whatever produces) or spend week or longer on converting to mbr.

Right, and this would save time/turns, because you wouldn't have to convert as early, and you could stock longer

i don't get how but if you say so.

if it takes me three days to convert and one hour to destock then i start my conversion 73 hours before i want to start reselling

Okay, so it would probably be like this:

Say you are 1k A; you can spend, on your PM, 4000 barrels of oil (4 barrels per acre) to generate 3000 troops, 2500 jets, 2500 turrets, 1000 tanks for your PM (3,2.5,2.5,1 per acre). Basically, every 4 barrels you burned would create 3 troops, 2.5 jets, 2.5 turrets, 1 tank, just like every turn that passes.

Why would you want to spend oil to get units available on your PM? so you don't have to wait; so you can make money...

Anyway, that's the basic idea

if you can convert 100k acres country to mbr in 3 days then good for you.

Hooray!

why the fluff would i want to convert a 100k acre anything to full mbr?

ok, this doesnt immediatelt help marshals 100k acre [ffa?] country, lets drop it shall we?

Interesting. You wouldn't even need to be an MBR for it to help.. a 75k casher on primary destocking on private market could destock after playing the last turn of the reset and break even at ~$133 price point for oil (assuming ~$40m/turn).

stop being ass braden.

this change (if it gets implemented) won't change that after certain point its waste of time and money to change to mbr (unless has very high bpt but then has wasted time aka turns and money and production while getting that bpt).

this change would just bring more money for oilers during whole set and increase priv market units on last day's last mins. i'm not against this.

i wish i had 100k acres country but i don't, 100k acres is just a example. atm fattest country in ffa has over 200k acres and no1 sane would try to convert those acres (minus cs's) to mil bases since a) it'd cost big fortune b) would take alot time (unless has 1k+ bpt) c) wouldn't bring any benefits.

don't need to convert to benefit from this...

nope and doesn't make converting faster or more profitable.

i'll stop being an ass when you stop being so phenomenally unhelpful at every opportunity.