Fwurg

[Brend]

With RemcoSwenker's announcement of quitting FWURG, we are faced with a unique situation. Never before has a world with the Daryan's level of economic involvement become a Fringe World.

(FYI: They announced fringe-world status in 222, so trades have to be phased out by 232.)

The Fringe World page contain rules on how to phase out a Fringe World's economic assets:

When a faction becomes a Fringe World it's assets and system stay as they are, and trades and deals with the Fringe World should be phased out.

• Normal trades should be phased out in the upcoming 10 .
• Corporations should be phased out in the upcoming 52 .

But these rules are woefully inadequate in covering the mayhem that will ensue if we actually do this. For one, several worlds are dependent upon their trades directly with significant volumes and being traded, and even more worlds being dependent indirectly on their contributions through production lines from directly dependent worlds.

Next to this is their presence in the corporate market. You might not realize it, but the Daryan's form a major backbone in the corporation economy, runnning three raw material corporations:

• DVF Organics , 8 zones
• RAEB Limited , 12 zones
• VAC CATANB , 9 zones
• VAC DAZ , 3 zones

If their export of 2800+ goods is suddenly removed from the game, this will hit the as whole Union economy due to the low number of worlds that interact economcally. Further if their corporations would simply stop existing after the 52 period (which would make all their specialised zones stop working) the resulting economic crash will make the recession after the Mandalorian War look like child's play ^_^


I think that we need to discuss how to handle this. Both from an OOC and an IC perspective. From an IC perspective trades of this level, and corporations of this magnitude don't simply disappear. I'm sure that if the Daryan's simply stop replying, everyone trading with them would get very anxious after a while, and start sending scouts and such to check on them -- eventually going to the Senate to see about sending in Union forces to find out what's going on.

From an OOC perspective there'll be the impact of 2000+ exported goods suddenly going away in a period of only 10 weeks, which is not enough to compensate. With regards to corporations we could see if other players can buy into them. Unfortunately, the players that make use of these corporations have one of their own already since they started those together with the Daryans. And the players that do not have a corporationn with one of these specialisations probably have no interest in them. Even if they are interested, they would be buying a corporation with significant baggage: treaties and such which makes them less desirable than starting a new one.

Right now, I have no good solution to propose, but I wanted to make everyone aware of this situation so everyone can post ideas if they think of something.

[Stuiter]

The Daryans have a big economy and just like Brend says, phasing out will be hard.
The corporations for a big part of ours economy and I think we will have to come up with something.
Maybe some special take over by the other corporation partners.

[Dragonmaster352]

We could turn the Daryans into an NPC. That would solve most problems on the short term. Giving more time to phase them out.

Then again I could be wrong.

[Gerben]

That would solve the problems regards the corporate real estate of the Daryans. And I'm not against such a solution.

Trade wise however I feel that simply maintaining the current trades as well, as would happen if converted to an NPC, would result in an unfair advantage for those currently trading with the Daryans in large volumes. (Myself included)

I have yet to do the calculations on the effect the phasing out, as per the current fringe world rules, will have on my economy. I suspect they will be significant, given the sheer volume and variety. But my economy and possible trades with others may prove to be robust enough to deal with the loss of goods. As of yet I can't yet see if the 10 grace period is insufficient to recupe or not.

I have expect to work this out during the weekend and post my estimation here.

[Fedor]

To give an example of the economic impact on my faction. I do not have a single trade with the Daryans, but I use 3 of their corporations, 2 of which I would have to completely buy up, the gasses corporation maybe I could work out a deal with Veolians for splitting the costs. This is assuming the corporations can be transferred over for the same cost as rebuilding them, iirc this is what was done with previous dissapearing corporations.
These would all be the second corporations of a type, and so would cost 20'000, 22'000 and 12'000, totalling 54'000 . In the span of 52 I could do this by paying roughly a 1000 per to this endeavour, for things to remain as the status quo. But I do not find that to be fun. I would much rather use all that to build new great things which is what I enjoy in the fwurg economy.

A solution such as Dragonmasters of turning them into an NPC could work. I see such an NPC as stagnating economically (as all NPCs seem to do, they don't build new things), and it could keep up current trades, or contracts that are going. Finishing on the ones that run a definite amount of time. I do not see this as giving an unfair advantage to those currently trading with the Daryans, as had they stayed this would be the default case, I see it rather as not giving them an unfair disadvantage, but I might be biased in this and would like to know from those who don't have big economic ties to the Daryans. (Mercury?)
By turning them into an npc there would be no devastating blow the economy of the union, or players spending a lot of time to get back to where they were due to something that could also happen again at any time.
The one problem I see with this solution is how the Daryans would act politically with Remco gone. Do they vote? If so what do they vote? If no, why don't they vote?

[Chriz]

I agree with Fedor. Just keeping the situation as it is in the form of an NPC will simply keep the economy in check. Phasing out the daryans on such a short term will just simply mean a unbalanced economy for quiet a while with people having to spend a lot of their time and tax on repairing the situation instead of spending it on the future. New things, new project and roleplay etc are supposed to be the focus of fwurg right? The mess that you create simply is not fun for the players of fwurg...

As to the vote of the Daryans I don't really see a problem. Either add it to the NPC's that Mercury owns and continue in a stereotypical voting manner or just continue the auto-abstaining spree and simply remove their vote from the equation...

[Brend]

The mess that you create simply is not fun for the players of fwurg...

Who is the "you" in this message? Because I'm simply stating how the rules would play out...

[Chriz]

the you is not directed at anybody, it was meant to be generic, sorry for that.

just read it as: "The mess that is created..."

[Brend]

I think that the Daryan's will eventually need to be phased out.

Converting them into an NPC only postpones the problem (which is not a bad thing, mind you), and stagnates the economy as a whole because the NPC trades are more static in nature. With regards to the normal trades I feel, purely subjective of course, that I would be cheating if I continue using their trade in the long term -- they do not react to changes in the market, making them an economic anchor that would offer a kind of magical economic independence.

The same holds for the corporations they own. Eventually I would start feeling like a cheat if I continue to use their phased out corporations, and even more so if they would be an NPC. Corporations are already treated very much like a kind of Zone upgrade while they were meant to be awesomely impressive intergalactic corporations of a magnitude that cowes minor worlds -- we even had plans to have an extra level of playable faction: the intergalactic corporation. Having corporations in the control of economically independent NPCs would lower them even further into the position of an upgrade of the "Insert tax here, get upgrade there" concept.

In my opinion, keeping the Daryan trades and corporations in play will stagnate the economy, negatively impact current players by partially freezing the economic system, and strongly and negatively influence new players looking to start an economy -- there is a reason that all NPC trade proposal so far have been deemed inviable.


Unfortunately, the impact of the Daryans' leaving is big because we have only a small group of players, if there were 20 active economies this would not be much of a problem.

Fortunately, we only have a small group of players so we can find a solution to phase them out that sidesteps the rules, if there were 20 active economies we would not be able to do so.


I suggest that we extend the deadline for phasing out their normal trades with +10 , making the total phase-out duration 20 . This allows people to phase out in steps, instead of going cold turkey in one go.

With respect to the corporations, I suggest that we aim for the 52 phase-out time, with another 52 when necessary. I think that the larger discussion on corporations is still going on, and that we should afford it some time to sort out things like shared ownership and public trading. (That said, I'm hereby also announcing that I am willing to take over the corp, with the IC flavour of hostile takeover).

[Gerben]

I would also be happy to join in taking over the corp from the Daryans.

With regards to the economic impact, the impact is actually very limited due to the flexibility of my own economy and the tax base.
Disregarding the corporate impact for the moment, phasing out the Daryan trades will cost me 395 each .

[Dragonmaster352]

Never really meant it as a permanent solution. My train of thought was that turning them into an NPC would create more time to phase them out without having to break/change the rules.

I think it's more a question of who is capable of taking over the Daryan corporations then who wants to take them over.

[Elmer]

I think a longer phasing out period and a 52 period for the corporations would probably solve the problem.

The corporation can be taken over by other players indeed, or be actioned with shares.

[Stuiter]

As the Hiocan Society has lots of corporated zones, I am also interested in taking of the Daryans.
I am also interested in the and corps, which are part of VAC.

[Mercury]

Seeing a long time player go is always a sad moment, and the impact it has on the game should not be underestimated. I was going to comment quite extensively on this, but it seems as if most of the issues have already been adequately addressed.

I think we'll all have to accept that this may affect our factions economically to some degree - that is inevitable. However, seeing all the current trading going on in the holonet forum tells me that regarding the current deals with the Daryans, an extension of the period will not even be necessary. I don't have a strong opposition to extending it by an additional 10 , so if everyone wants that, be my guest. I do not believe it will be necessary to do so regardless

Dealing with the corporations, however, is something I agree should be handled. I believe corporations more generally should get a review to deal with things like shared ownership, and to prevent them from becoming a "mark the checklist" set, but instead make them more interesting. I'm thinking something along the lines of a stock market, perhaps, that allows certain corporations to be publicly traded. That sounds like a fun development to me in any case ^_^

All in all, I think we have a pretty robust economy and we can survive this and even prosper - the Chinese word for "danger" also means "opportunity". And the Daryan's leaving also poses an economic opportunity, as the heavy trade negotiations in the holonet in the past day prove!

[Brend]

Note that no actual deals have yet been made in those threads :P But I agree that they can probably be phased out in 10 time. Let's see where it goes though.

Also, we should think about an IC explanation of what's going on -- I feel that it is one of the more difficult things right now. And I have no idea how to do that yet.

[Elmer]

In my opinion, the extended 10 phasing out grace period is not for shifting the trades, but for preventing a major recession as a result of 7815 and 7150 disappearing from the game. That is 14 965 raw materials (simplified 15 000) and gasses already have been a high value material for the entire game. Of course not all of those went to the other players, but then again, you can also argue that you need product zones and the Daryans produced other materials as well like .

When we take raw default zone production, in order of recovery we are talking about: 15 000 = 150 zones, 150*2000=300 000 .

And I think this recovery costs is even higher since nearly all high valuable zones are already build.

Anyway, what I try to say is that these extra 10 will allow the economies to prepare for the loss of raw production which should prevent the players from seeing their magical number (spendable income) going down too much and thus keep their joy in the game.


As a side note, recently I believe Brend and I determined that the current average spendable income of the players is around 2000 . If this is indeed the case, than the players need 300 000 / 2000 / 8 = 18 to collectively accumulate the necessary tax to make up for the major loss of raw materials.

[Brend]

(Source: http://www.fwurg.net/tools/economy/bs-uei, select 'Average Spendable Income')

@Elmer: I think that the 300k is an overstatement, since the only labour they really add to economy is their export. Which is way less than 300k .

[Fedor]

We don't actually have to recreate the entire daryan production, but rather their export to other factions.

A crude measure of economic recovery would be what it takes to recreate their export. That is a value of 8930 raw materials (simplified to 9000)
Now by your calculation, that only takes 180 000 or 11 . Though ofcourse the people with more tax don't build at the efficiency of new undeveloped zones (I'm looking at you settlements), this is also hugely more so complicated by the fact that not everyone can build more and , or will funnel money into the production of those.

[Mercury]

It is possible to refurbish zones previously used to supply the Daryans into gasses and metals zones for a fraction of the cost of building new zones on out of the way worlds.

[Elmer]

Okay okay, lets do this decently as we should have done from the beginning and not eyeball it.

TL;DR in yellow bellow

I made the following assumptions:

• All goods are rounded to the nearest 50
• All goods are the same.
• there are no tier 3 products (I like to keep it simple).
• A raw material requires 1 zone.
• A product requires 3 zones.
• All zones are standard zones (meaning they produce 100 labour and costs 2000
• All products exported to the Daryans need to be refurbished
• Refurbishment costs 500

Export from the Daryans:
1515 raw materials -> 1500
2205 products -> 2200

Import to the Daryans:
850 raw materials -> 850
2128 products -> 2150

Taxes costs due to export:
(((2200*3)+1500)/100)*2000= 162 000

Taxes costs due to refurbishment:
(((2150*3)+850)/100)*500= 36 500

I see I almost make a small mistake here: Import can be subtracted from export. After all: those imported products replace the products exported by the Daryans after the trades. What we want to know is how much materials will be missing and thus how much zones we need to build. The new numbers will be:

Missing materials:
1515-850 = 665 raw materials -> 650
2205-2128 = 77 products -> 50

tax costs due to missing materials:
(((50*3)+650)/100) * 2000= 16 000

Simply put: The players collectively need to spend 16 000 on new zones and 36 500 on zone refurbishment = a total of 52 500 to get to where we are now without the direct Daryan trades.
With the 2000 spendable per turn average over 8 players, this will take a little over 3 to complete.

TL;DR: Purely economically and based on loss of trades, the players need to spend 52 500 together, with can be done in 3

[Brend]

It seems that we have reached a rough consensus with regard to how we phase out trades. Corporations will take some more cajoling before we have a good solution, but I'm confident that we we find something that works well.

That leaves the IC matter: What is actually happening to the Daryans? Why are we not sending scouts, star destroyers and Jedi over there to discover what is going on that they suddenly stop trading?

I find that it is rather difficult for me to discuss the topic of the Daryans in an IC context due to not knowing what I should say. The only thing that I can come up with is: their economy collapsed, and the Party wants to focus first on cleaning house before further participation in the galactic economy. But their economy was rather large, and they did nothave outstanding debts, so a collapse is simply unlikely.

I have no other ideas. Anyone else?

[Mercury]

Maybe they decided to leave the Union after a new, more xenophobic government came to power?

[RemcoSwenker]

Hey guys,

I thought I would post here because I might have an explanation. There have been allot of things going on in the union that the general Daryan public did not 100% agree with such as slavery. and seeing that instead of reducing slavery in the union it had spread to there nearest allies. Instead of the one ally stopping there slavery. The Daryan public got a bit upset with there government and they got replaced in the next elections. Together with Konev being as old as he is and deciding that he want to spend more time with his grand children. I would say that there is a big shift in how the Daryans would want to interact with the union.

TL;DR: elections lead to new policies.

[Mercury]

I think that should solve that problem then ^_^ Thank you RemcoSwenker!

[Brend]

Indeed! Many thanks :)