I had got into a very long debate with a friend of mine over Don Madalff and how he effects the game. He argues that the Don limits the cap price any good could sell for, and can always supply goods, so therefor is ultimately putting a cap on the amount of money you can charge for goods on the market.

While I agree with what he is trying to say, I disagree that the Don caps the ability to sell things for more than 150c. First, NO ONE pays 150c for goods.. I mean come on! Secondly, any resource even on a new map can be made for less then 15k, so why would anyone pay more than 150c for something? Secondly, the supply issue is indeed a problem, as the Don never runs out and will buy up anything you will sell to him cheap. He claims this destroys the concept of a supply and demand market.

I however, think that the players control the prices on the market by the supply. If there are 4000 offices on the market, they will sell for 17 to 20c if you are lucky. But when there is only 5 units of food on the market, they might just sell for 100c a peice. Even though you could buy as many as you want from the Don for 150c, it is always better to wait for a player to sell it cheaper to save yourself money. So, my point is that there is a supply and demand market as far as the supply dictates the price and so forth.

And the other reason the Don is there is to bail your city out when you are negative cash flow and can not afford to list resources onto the market. If you have 200 offices, sell them to the Don until you get your cash flow positive again, and then you can make market listing again.

Anyways, what do you guys think about the Don? Hate him ? Indifferent? I kinda hate him cuz hes so rich cuz of the deals he makes, but at the same time he has helped me too so I don't know. But I think ultimately, he doesn't really effect the prices of the game imo. But what do you guys think?

I don't think it affects the game either way as far as price values go. Players still dictate the going rates for tokens. I think its a necessary evil otherwise when you specialize in one service such as offices/high tech etc the businesses complain that the cannot sell their products, without Don you would have to wait for someone to buy up your products. I sell my High Tech for the lowest prices going (20C) and it still takes me 2 days to unload 30 tokens. Without an easy way to dump your tokens your city would stagnate and you would have to wait for everyone to buy.

I totally agree with you there. I always felt he was there to buy your stuff and bail you out. Again it seems like the player's supply dictates the price. So, really he doesn't effect the game. But my friend still refuses to listen to my side of the story, still saying that the Don ruins the game, and that he could be making alot more money without hte Don capping it. However, said person refuses to make 5 cities on the same planet and yet also wonders why he has a hard time sometimes.

Must say that I pay 150 C from time to time, especially when I only need 1 token and the only other guy is selling 5 @ 100 or even when I had contracts canceled with the other guy, and he is offering for 80 or so and I still only need 1, I will still buy from omnicorp.
I realy like trading with the don from time to time, atleast he gives you the most stable contracts around and he doesnt get pissed off when a contract gets cancelled and he is always there to buy / sell to you.

When it comes to making prices its somewhat more difficult I guess, ofcourse the most important rule is high supply - low demand gives low prices / high demand - low supply gives high prices and ofcourse low demand - low supply = average prices and high demand - high supply = average prices.

But what should be the average price, you can easilly say low price = omnicorps buy price and high price = omnicorp sale price, so it must be somewhere in the middle, but I think its still a bit harder than that.
For instance you take food, you almost need half your map to produce 1 token, and even then these farms hardly give you any money in taxes compared to manufacturing for instance, smaller area for 1 token and highest tax income, then there is another factor that is not fair from my point of view, ofcourse manufacturing pollutes, and everybody tends to create cities with as few pollution as possible, the prices on the market rise way too high.
So if you consider manufacturing doesnt need any natural resources and only needs hotel services and heavy industry to produce their goods it has a much lower cost to manufacture than food for instance.
And its rather unfair to lower prices for starters, because they are much easier getting broke when exporting food, than with manufacture goods.... instead of players that have a good city up and running and can sell at lower prices and still make money.
I am completely aware that noobs are the people that bring food on the market @ 20C but still people need to know that when you sell this cheap while starting a city you are much easier going broke.
So I keep saying, people dont sell natural resources that cheap, because you will ruin the planets economy and get lots of starting cities going bankrupt and therefore getting more and more cancelled or suspended contracts and well I just have to say this, if you get cancelled contracts, its mainly because you had this coming, I think if you want to have a more stable economy with lesser cancelled contracts you may like to buy at higher prices, maybe that will have some influence, because simply calling people stupid when they are selling cheap doesnt seem to have any effect at all.

I sell my food no lower than 45, otherwise it goes straight to omnicorp, this might sound stupid, but atleast I am trying to make a point here, by saying, try to offer at this price, you get your sales too and even make a (better) profit (depending what size your city has).
And ofcourse I am still willing to do some private trading with friends that are on my planet, so if you are reading this and are in dire need to get food at lower prices, contact me and I think we can always work something out.

And ofcourse this game is all about economy, but also about the happiness of your citizens, and I know this for sure, your citizens will less likely leave if they have a steady flow of natural resources than if they are constantly hungry, thirsty or dont have any oil in their city, besides that the higher your class, the more likely they want to spend nice holidays near beaches etc. So its better to have +1 food than +1 manufacturing. otherwise they will eventually leave your city.

And if you personally dont care about making money or making your citizens happy, dont ruin it for the majority of the players, or maybe I am the minority..... ah well dont ruin it for the new starters in the game, because they need to get as much profit as they can when they start their city.

Besides that I can always start selling manu / heavy industry / high tech etc etc @ 16.7, which probably makes the people with larger cities having to sell their natural resources for higher prices because they otherwise will go bankrupt, so dont ruin the plants economy and yes, the don is still a friend of mine.

Interesting post there Radioman! And I agree with pretty much all of it. However, I still feel like food is easier to make than Manfuc for several reasons. First, Food can be done on a clean map, and thus does not require half as much service needs as a dirty city might require. Also, for the most part, short of Silos needing a few Qualified workers, and the Fertilizers needing a few Qual. and Execs, you only need tons of Unqualified workers to produce extra food tokens. The U.Q. workers have very low needs for satisfaction, and are the easiest to get to move into your city. Also, the other classes are easy to get to move into a clean city. Dirty cities always seem to have a shortage of Qual. Workers. But anyways, you do need water which does seem to be in shorter supply than oil. I have always said it seems that Water is worth more than Oil, which is interesting. But in the end, it will be Food that win out, as the pop. size of the cities in the world grow, the supply of food will decrease. And eventually, there will not be enough food to run the world. But I imagine, they will figure something out. The teir 3 Farm buildings appear to be bugged currently. But to me, it seems like Food and Mancf are the two top resources, with Holidays come in for a close 3rd. And obviously, Offices are the most over producing thing in every planet, so they rarely have much demand.

Thank you gamer

And ofcourse dirty industry needs much more services to keep especially the elites happy.

But here I go again, I can only truly speak about food, but oil for instance is a dirty industry too, which doesnot bring any tax money in, infact it costs money to make it, so its well between you and me, stupid to sell fuel at 20 C. And ofcourse the same goes with water, except water can still be sold at better prices.

I am completely aware that there is free market, but so many times I see that there is only one person selling, and well if you are the only one selling you can ask any price you like, for instance 90 C and then suddenly somebody puts in an offer @ 20, which doesnt have anything to do with laws of economics anymore, except with creating a recession on the planet.
I can also say and I said this again, I am selling food @ around 60 C, if I am the only person selling, I sell for a bit more, if there are more selling I may sell for a bit less, but I would never go that low that some people (especially starters) loose that much money that they cant make any profit at all.

OK yes, we got alot of cancelled contracts, but if you realy think about this, this only happens because the cities you are selling to arent making any money, therefore cant pay your contracts anymore, only most people come to the wrong conclusion and say they have to buy at too high prices is the cause they go bankrupt, while infact they sell below costprice, especially starters (which are customers of us too) and they just need to make this extra money instead of loose it.

So yes, I can tell everybody here, if you get alot of cancelled or suspended contracts most changes are they are your fault, because there might be a recession going on in the real world, lets not start one at our own planet.

I keep on selling at a good price, which stabilizes my market, I can give others a private deal, in larger quantities at lower prices and depending on how reliable your economy is, everything else is going directly to omnicorp and that way I am almost certain to say that my contracts hardly get cancelled, except the ones I am buying from cities that dont have the resource etc anymore and ofcourse since the problems on the server 2 days ago.

Now why manufacturing should be priced @ 60 C and food @ 20 C is still not clear to me, because if you place farms in the normal way you wont be able to build any exceptional buildings on whatever map you will be on, such a farm of 90% - 100 % could contain atleast 5 HD manufacturing, and then tax income will be less than 100 for farms and 5000+ for manufacturing, so I think you can spoil your citizens even more with only the tax income of comparable industry than you can for farms, atleast more than enough to give your citizens some happiness back in your city.
Besides that, if I choose to make a single dirty city that only produces enough to keep my other cities happy, I have to worry about hapiness of my citizens even less, because I simply havent got that much pollution in my city to reach the residences of the city.

Not that I would do this, because I dont want to ruin the economy if its completely based on dirty industries, all I am asking is give new players a chance to start a good running city, new players think that if there is one resource that can get you rich, it would be fuel, only to find out they go broke and there are cancelled contracts again.

Please dont put in offers you know you werent able to sell at when you just started the city, if you want to sell cheap just sell to omnicorp and give everybody a chance to start building a nice city and still realise that even when they may be overproduced on the planets, the planets need natural resources and therefore they should be the most valueable - profitable, not dump it at low prices and dont give anybody a chance.

And if there are still people thinking that they help others by selling cheap then think again and start reading this post and the other post of me above again, until you finally understand that......

• it's your FAULT THAT MOST CONTRACTS GET CANCELED

• you might think you are helping others, but you are NOT

• if you dont care about making more and more money, just sell to omnicorp, which brings me back to the topic..... and I would almost say Long Live the DON.

I personally like the DON,

For all my bigger projects I start with selling ALL my goods to the DON till I reach the size or shape of town i was going for,
then I start building city services till hapiness levels are ok and spend the rest of my cash on leisure.
Only then I let my contracts expire and sell the goods to players for better prices.
This way a city is fool prove and simply can not go negative because the whole economy is based on the DON.

On the other hand is this tactic making the game a bit boring, since i work this way i havent had a "oh Sh*t" moment.
only the "click 300 times to get out of negative" probs after a few days offline.


For the part of a stable market and fair prices i think some (preferable ALL) of the die-hard's need to create corporations/collectives to control the market by buying up all underpriced goods, and make deals about bottom sell prices.
but this will also make it harder to make profit since its hard to sell your goods if 6 ppl already sell large stacks of the same stuff for the same price.

An other option is to agree on a bottom buy price and simply dont buy any goods below a certain price to crash the discount market.
But this requires a lot of discipline, and the change is big that there will be an oportunist who buys in all the goods below our agreed price, and then sell the stuff 5c below our bottom price, both crashing our market and our policy.
or it might result in a shortage of goods since ppl keep lowering their prices if they dont sell anything instead of raising their prices (this can be fixed by putting up a lot of buy offers though)

Both ideas will eventually result in us taking over the DON's place wich brings us back to the core of this topic; Is the DON (or our future collective) desired?

A last but unsportive option is to accept and directly cancel all undesired offers to clean the page, but i see this tactic resulting in flame wars on the chat.

just my 50 tokens

OK drSplaff, you certainly have a point there, am glad you agree with me that selling at too low prices isnt good for the market.

And yes at the moment I feel the need for a collective or cartel or what you want to call it come up more and more, but selling out the lower priced goods is a thing I tried myself for a while especially when they were selling below omnicorp prices, import them and export again at normal prices, easy money I thought, but I ended up with having 8 highway connections just to support all the extra freight going in and out of the city.

On the other hand I have told everybody about this so many times in the chat, that we kinda get an unspoken agreement, you buy from me and I buy from you, and sometimes we make contracts for larger amounts of goods.

And because around 90% of my production goes to the don, I realy like the don too.

Aggreeing on a bottom price only works between us die hards, but yes, I see a chance that this will work, let the newbies sell at lower prices they realy want and need the cash in the beginning, just dont put in prices too low that when they put their goods on the market its even harder or impossible to make a profit by going under that price.
And ofcourse proove others they are wrong when they say that natural resources are priced too high and industrial goods are priced too low.

Just to give you this example.... I have a city too on a german planet named Janus, that city is only selling food and lots of times I am the only guy selling food to the rest of the planet, so I can actually make any price I like, but whatever I choose, if its 95 or 55 per token, they will put theirs below me @ 30, just cant get that, what is wrong with making money in a game where its about making money, On my normal planet Caliban there is not much cheating going round, but on Janus there are cities having 1E+20 cash, so I guess they still want to make money, so why not offer food when somebody else is selling @95 put in at the same price or 94 or even 90, but not go to 30, because thats real stupid.

Dont think we will ever take over the dons place, because he is so easy buying our products and keep these contracts running for the full 5 days almost everytime, and doesnt whine when we break the contracts because we can make a better offer.

I actually think that if the don wasnt in the game even us big guys would go broke everytime since they might even offer their goods as low as 1 C and the highest offer would still be around 30 C, I actually even heard somebody complain in the chat someday about that he couldnt sell at any lower price because the other guy was selling for 16.7 for instance, this was actually the first time I thought this whole thing is going out of control and I even thought no wonder there is a recession in our rl world.

When it comes to clicking 300 times, I kinda had my city running like I wanted, which means it didnt need any cash from my other cities anymore and contracts with omnicorp would only run out like 10 -20 at the same time, so I hardly got into negative cashflow anymore. But I had some problems last week, 2 cities of mine were having all the amounts of tokens and freight / passengers were multiplied with -1 so yes, I needed to transfer alot of money between cities again in order to be able to sell my goods again. Now I think this is running fine again, so next thing I do is cancel some contracts with the don and immediately renew them again, but I am just not sure if that would be working again atm, so think I will have to do another 5 day term just to be sure about this.

I think that maybe yes, we need to form alliances, but most importantly is that we must make everybody clear that if they are new and prices stay this way, you could better not be producing certain goods infact they could better buy them in the market, maybe then people will realise what they are doing wrong, and maybe they will offer their products at good prices, because I think its not good that I can better sell my goods to omnicorp then sell them to the other cities on the planet, because I simply would know that I get into problems with contracts cancelled etc.

The best solution for me would be dont buy low, or if you do buy low, then sell them again high, buy for your own use at normal prices and therefore give starters a chance, I dont like cancelling trades, so that wont be an option for me and I aggree with you, its very unsportive.

I also found out that buying up and reselling at decent prices cant be managed alone.
I tried it with my 3.6mil office town on prosperus wich had a 1 mil cashflow, so it was financialy possible (I actually made a lot of profit in the beginning).
but it turned out to be a worthless effort simply due to the fact that ppl dropped under my prices the moment I logged off, leaving me with a ton of goods i didnt need, and indeed a lot of connections :p

With at least 5 BIG cities (preferable in different time zones) we can manage a more stable market (for 1 or 2 types of goods), and we can support each other by cash trades or distribute the bought in goods between our members. ofcourse this will work better with more members but also brings a lot of organizing with it to keep all members on a fair share.

Your right about the fact that telling peepz in chat will help them realize they screw theirselves and the market by selling low.
Its actually you that made me think about my water prices for Haarlem on caliban.
I found 30c a decent price myself because i produce over 300 tokens so i still make enough profit, but at the very same moment i was killing starting cities and therefore discouraged them to continue to expand their production becuase they had to make losses to compete with me, now im in the same position since caliban is flooded with water for 25C, and im not even selling it on the market anymore since i raised my low price to 40c min (again, i love the DON for not letting me go bankrupt on my water ).

But on the other hand, how many times a day do we still have to explain there is no difference between a dump and junkjard?
seems like a lot op ppl dont pay attention to the chat or other sources untill they screw up somehow.

Im feeling for a try out on the food market to see if we can control that part since its one of the most important goods, if not the most important (almost killed my industry town due to food shortage)

if we are succesfull we will not only create a healthy market but also make sure we have enough food in the future since more ppl start farm towns because of the nice profits (we kill their towns when we stop the project though)

I use the Don (Omnicorp) to sell stuff to. He is the only one so far that I don't have to worry about canceling a contract because someone offered better one.

When I sell something I want to be assured I don't have to list it again for 5 days, most the time I put it up for general sale, the buyer cancels it an hour later (either because they run out of money or find a better 'deal'

Cheers

One thing to be careful about when buying the resources people are selling for under 16.6c is that likely by the next day the deal usually is either canceled, or the city failed and is no longer in existance, lol. So although it is a good boost, just don't be puzzled when the deal is gone in a day or two when the city is deleted, hehe.

That's pretty much the reason I use 'The Don' (only to sell excess, I never buy, no reason to)
I see people all the time , I need this, I need that. All they have to do is get 5 cities and trade between them and never have to worry about resources again, but I guess that's to easy

The Don is a design mechanism that protects Cities XL when it doesn't have enough players so that those that are still playing will have another method of getting what they need and selling what they don't. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Don is removed if the game ever really takes off in users playing it, I think it's there purely as a backup precautionary device because they know if people don't create all of their own cities to trade amongst themselves, and there isn't people playing the game often enough then they are out of luck to try to get what they need or sell what extra they have created. I'm quite certain that there are many people that play "online" but don't play with others "online", the Don protects their playing experience and allows them to fully experience the planet offering.

I think if they offered all that they do in online play in offline many people would never buy the planet offering as city building has always been traditionally a single player event and honestly to me anyway, Cities XL hasn't really changed that desire, people are simply paying for it so that they get the full game.

No, I feel pretty positive that if the game ever takes off in real popularity, then the Don will be removed so that people are forced to trade amongst themselves.

well I think he means if they fix some of the other elements to keep us from having to spend hours each day when we log in. I couldnt even really play today when I logged in, and in fact was so depressed when I found out that you can only put 12 BPs in one city So I hit the BP cap too.. good thing I have my Tropico 3 campaign I am working on to play with while I wait for MC to release some stuff.