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Developer Corner | International Market

Hello there, it's me C0rax back for another dev corner, and some of you may have noticed in our last dev corner I mentioned in the MIO goals we wanted to have MIO’s “Provide a framework for national specialisms that can be used on the world stage” well I'm here to show you that stage and introduce international markets.

This is all super WIP, you are going to see WIP mock ups, and some details are still being finalized!

Feature Intent & goals

  • Introducing a place for nations to buy and sell equipment benefiting both nations with a reward. Creating a new way for countries to contribute specialist equipment to other nations
  • Be able to source equipment from other nations as needed
  • For majors to set the global standard for common place equipment leveraging their superior economic might.
The international market acts as a one stop shop for all your equipment needs from other countries. It's intended to be an international store front, with multiple sellers being able to sell the same thing from the same store front. This means that provided you have the appropriate market access, you can go into the international market and buy tanks from the USA and planes from germany in one interface (but not 1 buy order).


The Flow

So to start us on how to get to the market. Well we will be replacing the diplomacy menu with the market UI, the diplomacy window was one of the least used parts of the UI and so we want to replace it with something that will get more use. The diplomacy menu is now accessed from within the market menu at the bottom of the market window, you can also still right click on a country on the map to open diplomacy with them directly.
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From here we can start buying equipment or selling equipment by clicking on the respective button. Beyond that any currently active contract with other countries will be displayed here so you can easily see their current status.

The buy and sell modes look like this
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As you can see we don't currently have access to anyones market, so let's look at how we can fix that.


Market access

For market access we need to go to the diplomacy menu for a country where we will find the negotiate market access diplo action, this is what we want in order to send a request. For nations with factions or puppets this market access is given implicitly. This is important since in many cases you don't want those pesky enemies seeing or trying to buy all the amazing equipment you are selling. This is especially important to stop them seeing your latest equipment stats and MIO modifiers. With this only the people you want to see and buy your wares are able to.
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So now we’ve got market access and we can start buying and selling equipment. Since we have access to a market the buy screen will now show the equipment they have put up for sale.

Buying
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Let's buy some rifles. To do this we click on the rifles equipment from here we choose how many rifles we want and how fast we want to pay for them and thus receive them. The price per rifle is decided by an IC to CiC conversion rate. This gives you all the information you need like total cost, convoys needed and how long it will take to pay/deliver all equipment
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We send of our request and the seller has agreed to the contract
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The contract will now appear in our market window as an ongoing contract, it will show all the information you need to know about each contract you have ongoing.
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Selling

Now let's look at how we sell our equipment on the market. To start off we need to add equipment to the market. We do this by first clicking sell equipment and then clicking the add to market buttons. From here we can add our equipment from the stockpile to the market. We can choose here how many of every variant we have we wish to put up for sale.
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So now we have put up some equipment on the market and it appears in the list. The list shows all of our equipment on the market but not currently sold on the market.
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Right on time we got a request to buy some of our equipment, this menu will show you what they are buying, how fast they are paying and how many the resultant deliveries there will be. We will accept this request.
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We have accepted the purchase request and now we can see the selling entry in our master list of contracts along with all the information around that contract.
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So that brings us to the end of our quick journey through the international market and we brushed over a lot of details so that what the next part will focus on.


Technical Details

Market Access

Market access is a Diplo action to request access to a market and to offer access to your market thus it is a Bilateral relationship. Faction members share market access, as do puppets and overlords.​

Market access blockers
  • Market access and Contracts are canceled between enemies in war.
  • Embargoing someone will cancel market access, and all selling/buying contracts with that country.
  • Capitulation cancels all contracts and if the country is NOT going into exile, it will lose all market access too.
  • Civil war will change nothing. The original country will have original market accesses and contracts after the start of the civil war.
  • Making a country puppet will cancel all market access and contracts of that country.
  • Losing market access to a country will not cancel an ongoing contract with that country.
  • Puppets can have market access to other countries (and not just to the overlord's market) and trade with them. (this might be based on puppet level)
  • There will be a scriptable limit on equipment trade for things like US neutrality act etc

Contracts

Purchasing equipment costs CiC. We use a conversion ratio to convert IC value to CiC value. A contract has 2 main variables, CiC cost from equipment and Civ factory allocation for payment

So with this information we can talk about how a contract is structured
IM_12.png

A contract is broken down into payments every 30 days. So every 30 days you will make a payment and receive equipment. The amount of equipment to be delivered is based on the payment rate of the buyer. So the more Civ’s you assign to a contract the more equipment you can receive per delivery.

Selling​

We have a new stockpile called the market stockpile, equipment can be moved from the normal stockpile to the market stockpile. Equipment in the market stockpile can be requested for purchase by any nation we share market access with.

Payment​

So payment is handled via a new construction entry for contracts. When you start a contract a new entry will be created in the construction menu for the number of factories you agreed to pay with and for the total CiC of the contract.this construction task has priority over normal construction.

Contract storage​

CiC payment and equipment before being delivered is stored in a “Contract storage”. At the end of the month the minimum payment/delivery is transferred to each country from the Contract storage. CiC is delivered to the bank while equipment is delivered to the equipment stockpile

The bank​

The bank is a special container for CiC you receive from other countries as payment for a contract it is used in construction by providing bonus CiC to your construction entries.

Here is a flow chart to show you how a contract payment works and then how the bank CiC is used in construction.
IM_13.png

Cancelation:​

Either side can request to cancel the contract at any time no more deliveries are made and all payment to the Contract storage is returned to their originator.

Things that are no part of this feature:
  • Trading Ships
  • Money
  • supply/demand pricing

Things that we are looking into:
  • Limited cost of equipment changes (some active choices, some passive)

MIO addendum​

Last dev corner I spoke about MIO’s, I did my best to explain and answer questions but I want to add an addendum to the previous dev corner to show some things that should hopefully make some things much clearer.

It seems there was some confusion that MIO’s were a totally free form “design your own company” system, this isn’t what was intended to be conveyed. MIO’s have pre predetermined choices which are designed to offer compromise and strategic choice. So Let's talk about what an MIO looks like in terms of a real MIO I get access to for a country.

I’m going to show some numbers here but these are just starting values for initial implementation and so don't read into the modifiers or values too much yet.

So here we have a Generic Infantry MIO
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So the definition for this MIO is

Design teams (red arrows show mutually exclusive)

  • INFANTRY OFFENSE DEPARTMENT
    IM_15.png


  • INFANTRY QUALITY DEPARTMENT
    IM_16.png


  • SUPPORT EQUIPMENT DEPARTMENT
    IM_17.png
INDUSTRIAL MANUFACTURERS
IM_18.png

As you can see this focuses almost exclusively on improving infantry equipment with small bonuses for support equipment. Generic MIO’s are generally focused on one specific equipment providing departments that are generally focused around offensive, defensive and quality/reliability.

Here's some more example of generics
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Generics can sometimes also have specializations for specific stats that are not normally in the equipment specific ones also such as the aircraft range focuses MIO.
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Or pacific fleet MIO
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Of course these are generics and that is why they are very simple. They are there to replace the current generic designer set already present so every nation can enjoy some level of customisation for their mio’s. More major countries might have specific MIO’s that are unique to your country and thus offer very different choices to make. These are just some simple ones but they can be much more branched choices with lots of content tie-ins, but we will show those in a later dev diary.
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I hope this makes what an MIO looks like as a structure you play with clearer and again I hope to see you in future dev corners.

That's all I have for this week, as always please ask questions and comment. I hope to see you in 2 weeks for the next Dev corner where Arheo will introduce you to another feature coming to you in the future
 

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Rebelsj21 said:
Interesting. Will we see any changes to the resource market at all alongside this?
C0RAX said: unlikely we are trying to keep this separate from resource trade.
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Lamartine said:
Wow, very interesting :D

Will old focuses about purchasing arms be reworked? Such as France's Arms Purchases in the US
C0RAX said: in the long run yes, we are trying to get as many converted over for the release but if we miss any we can tackle them in future war efforts.
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Gigliovaljr said:
Can you buy or sell warships and convoys with this new system?
C0RAX said: as stated in thing we are not doing section, no warship sale via this market due to the non conformal ways ships work
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Dlin369 said:
Will there be changes to military factory distribution so most countries are arms purchasers rather than having their own domestic military industry at the start?
C0RAX said: final balance is still a way off so I cant comment on this
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Doctor Bones said:
Can the bank be understood as having a cap to boost your construction by no more than 50% and simply being stored for later use if the bank "income" is higher than the usage or is the 50% marker an indication that the effeciency of conversion between the banks value in construction and you construction is only 50%? Because it seems to be the former but it isn't too clear in the description.
C0RAX said: the former, you receive the CiC from the bank at 50% the rate of your normal construction CiC on the construction task. its not that you lose 50% of the CiC when you use it.
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I'd be very interested in how this will effeciently work side-by-side with lend-lease. Sometimes, I just want to get rid of, for example, my basic light tanks for free to any non-enemy in the game who wants them. I don't necessarily desire a profit in return. I'd love to set the selling price to 0 so anyone in my market could acquire them (it wasn't clear to me if I could control the selling price).

Bonus points if I could limit some equipment to faction-only while other equipment is on the global market.
C0RAX said: we are looking into lend lease balance with this but we will probably make lend lease a bit stricter especially in peace time, and we are looking into price adjustments but more on that in a future DD.

currently no limits to requests but you can refuse purchase requests if you don't want to actually send that country the specific equipment they request
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YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

We're eating good, tonight! This would certainly help any minor nations in their armament procurement process despite the potential setbacks.

And this is still separated from licenses anyway so i'm good if this ended up as DLC-only.
 
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I like the art direction of this new DLC goes.
A lot of pink/purple colors. :p
The perfect color of Slaanesh.
 
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Will there be changes to military factory distribution so most countries are arms purchasers rather than having their own domestic military industry at the start?
 
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Can the bank be understood as having a cap to boost your construction by no more than 50% and simply being stored for later use if the bank "income" is higher than the usage or is the 50% marker an indication that the effeciency of conversion between the banks value in construction and you construction is only 50%? Because it seems to be the former but it isn't too clear in the description.
 
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I'm a little concerned about balance. This seems like something that good players on minor nations could cheese like crazy.
 
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I'd be very interested in how this will effeciently work side-by-side with lend-lease. Sometimes, I just want to get rid of, for example, my basic light tanks for free to any non-enemy in the game who wants them. I don't necessarily desire a profit in return. I'd love to set the selling price to 0 so anyone in my market could acquire them (it wasn't clear to me if I could control the selling price).

Bonus points if I could limit some equipment to faction-only while other equipment is on the global market.
 
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Well we will be replacing the diplomacy menu with the market UI, the diplomacy window was one of the least used parts of the UI and so we want to replace it with something that will get more use. The diplomacy menu is now accessed from within the market menu at the bottom of the market window, you can also still right click on a country on the map to open diplomacy with them directly.
One opens Diplomacy in order to find out whether he has become a Major already.

Being a major country is essential for playing the game, so hopefully you will also come up with some easy way of figuring it out *before* joining wars and/or factions. I.e. highjacking a faction and hosting a bunch of exiles in exchange for their goodies OR being annexed (gg wp screen) - this at times depends solely on this tiny nuance.
 
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Can the bank be understood as having a cap to boost your construction by no more than 50% and simply being stored for later use if the bank "income" is higher than the usage or is the 50% marker an indication that the effeciency of conversion between the banks value in construction and you construction is only 50%? Because it seems to be the former but it isn't too clear in the description.
the former, you receive the CiC from the bank at 50% the rate of your normal construction CiC on the construction task. its not that you lose 50% of the CiC when you use it.
 
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I'd be very interested in how this will effeciently work side-by-side with lend-lease. Sometimes, I just want to get rid of, for example, my basic light tanks for free to any non-enemy in the game who wants them. I don't necessarily desire a profit in return. I'd love to set the selling price to 0 so anyone in my market could acquire them (it wasn't clear to me if I could control the selling price).

Bonus points if I could limit some equipment to faction-only while other equipment is on the global market.
we are looking into lend lease balance with this but we will probably make lend lease a bit stricter especially in peace time, and we are looking into price adjustments but more on that in a future DD.

currently no limits to requests but you can refuse purchase requests if you don't want to actually send that country the specific equipment they request
 
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Firstly, I appreciate the respect that you have shown to the forum in sharing these concepts while the design is at an early stage. I know that forum discussion has often been less than healthy and therefore you have taken something of a risk. I note that this post doesn't appear on the front page of the forum at the moment in case that is an accident rather than design.

Secondly, I have a critical question about the design of the International Market feature. You say
From here we can add our equipment from the stockpile to the market.
and
equipment can be moved from the normal stockpile to the market stockpile
So does this mean that only second-hand equipment can be purchased and sold on the International Market? I am not saying that is a good or bad thing, but I don't want to give feedback based on a misunderstanding (as I unhelpfully did last time).

EDIT: And therefore in this line...
CiC is delivered to the bank while equipment is delivered to the equipment stockpile
...the "equipment stockpile" means the market stockpile, not the equipment stockpile that currently exists in the game, right?

Thirdly, I have a suggestion for the 'Contract Draft' window. My understanding is that this is a two-step decision. First, the player chooses the total quantity of equipment desired, by adjusting the "Equipment number" buttons (or typing in the box, I very much hope). This number is a stock. Secondly, the player chooses the rate at which the equipment will be delivered, by adjusting the "Civilian factory allocation" buttons. This number controls a flow. If so, I think that should be made clearer in the design, because it's different from some other windows. In the military Production window, you set the flow (via the number of factories) without deciding the intended stock. The Recruit & Deploy window does not fit neatly into a flow/stock distinction but it's closer to setting the flow first (you can switch the total number of divisions desired at a later stage). I understand that the UI shown in this post is just a WIP example, but I hope that the eventual design makes it very clear that there are two logical steps here. I would do it something like this (but the PDS designers will probably have better ideas):
1684245520864.png

I think this is a case where text headings are required, not just icons, because words like "total" and "rate" are going to be clearer than any icon at helping players to distinguish between the stock element and the flow element.
 
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