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
Feature Intent and 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.
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;
As you can see we don't currently have access to anyone's 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.
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
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
We send of our request and the seller has agreed to the contract
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 not 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
So the definition for this MIO is
Design teams (red arrows show mutually exclusive)
INFANTRY OFFENSE DEPARTMENT
INFANTRY QUALITY DEPARTMENT
SUPPORT EQUIPMENT DEPARTMENT
Industrial Manufacturers
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
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.
Or pacific fleet MIO
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.
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