I heard exporting large volumes of a good will lower prices over time. I think I've seen prices change, but haven't paid much attention to them. My city exports a lot of TVs and I was wondering how low the price can go.
How much does supply and demand affect global market prices
simcity-2013
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I did a little bit of monitoring using Windows 7’s built in Resource Monitor (not the best monitoring tool around), and here are my observations:
- When the game itself is just loading, the send and receive speeds hover around 5‒8 KB/s.
- The largest bandwidth load was on actually loading the map with receive speeds hitting upwards of 130 KB/s, and send speeds just below that.
- During normal playing the game (small city with ~1500 residents) the speeds stayed low, around 0.15‒0.3 KB/s or even as low as in the screenshot below.
- Every so often the network load spikes (as seen on the “Network” graph), when, I suppose, it synchronizes with surrounding cities (which reportedly happens every three minutes or so), but that spike isn’t so bad.
- Importantly, when the heavy network activity goes on, my antivirus (Kaspersky) uses almost as much bandwidth as the game itself (I don’t know if most AV software works like this).
- In general, aside from the occasional spike, the graph does not even register the game’s bandwidth in comparison to the rest of the load.
- I reset my network connection prior to this test, and the results of the first 25 minutes can be seen in the screenshot (7 MB downloaded, 2 MB uploaded). This is not exact figure, as I also have Facebook and SE open in browser with usual AJAX trickery going on, and various background processes. This is where more advanced monitoring tool could be helpful, where I could track the impact of only that particular process.
- The screenshot was taken 25 minutes after I reset the connection, but an hour in numbers were different: only 1 MB was added to my received count, but sent count shoot up to 7.5 MB, possibly because I got disconnected from the SimCity server (again), and the game tried to connect or synchronize the city on exit.
All in all, not precise science, but should give some idea of the impact.
OK, since nobody has an answer, I tried it out myself in a private region.
Turning off addons did not affect the other city in the region, although it could be due to the region propagation delay. I'll check again tomorrow and see if anything's changed. I would imagine it's by design so one city shutting down or bulldozing everything doesn't wreak havoc on the region.
Also, only some buildings are shut down when I turn off the prereq. For the Dept of Safety, the Hospital will stay open while Fire and Police stations shut down.
For Dept of Tourism, Landmarks were still unlocked but big parks were not.
Looks like all the specialization unlocks stay after you close the HQs too.
Don't know if these are bugs or not, but right now you can save some $ per hour while keeping the bonus services.
Also, unlocks do not go across the entire region in the 16-city maps. They only go as far as the 4-city subregion.
Wish I could test this from sandbox mode, but everything is unlocked there from the get go.
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Best Answer
The global market will be server wide[1]; with prices coming to some sort of equilibrium (I believe there will still be price caps and floors[2]). As such I expect the price of TVs to drop a bit -- however they are used in the construction of the Arcology great work so maybe it won't be that bad. But TVs won't be the money making machine that it is now...
[1] currently disabled. [2] their existence is covered in SimCity preview articles from ~December but these, of course, are short on details and long on fluff.
SimCity will have a global market that sets shared prices for commodities. How malleable or open to manipulation or catastrophe will the world market be? Can the price of oil crash and create a shortage?
Librande: Yes and no. We didn’t want to make an EVE system or a World of Warcraft auction system where the players have control of the prices in that way. Those economies tend to spiral out of control over time, since money is an infinite resource. You just start a new city and start making new money. The way the global market is set up, we have bounds on the high and low prices. We won’t allow the price to go outside those bounds. There’s a little bit of price-fixing on that side to keep the game playable. Then we tuned a lot of the commodities so if the price maxes out, you probably don’t want to be working with those resources.
Here’s a specific example: I’m drilling oil out of the ground and converting it into fuel. The more fuel I sell, it’s going to start to lower the price on the global market. But my single contribution to that lowering is a fraction of a percent. If everybody on the server starts dumping fuel and nobody’s selling oil, then you’ll start to see the price of fuel drop down and the price of oil rises up. The idea is that encourages people to say, “Well, I’ll just start selling the oil and get out of fuel now.” Then that causes the opposite thing to happen. From a design point of view, the idea is that we didn’t just want someone to write a guide, like, “Here’s the FAQ. You should always make this and sell that.” If anybody thinks they’ve found a flaw like that in the game and says, “You should do this!” and everyone starts following them, that actually changes the whole price structure. That invalidates that technique while something gets boosted on the other end.