OK let's say I'm a commie. I play my turns, use all my money, sell military, and put up standing orders for tech. But I used all my money, so if tech comes on for my standing order before my military sells then my SO gets cancelled.

I'm just curious whether this is a designed feature of SO's or something that should be fixed to some degree.

Yeah, I wish sometimes if I have no money, it would just skip me and the goods could go to the next guy with a SO or to the market, so that when my money does come in my country can still make its purchases.

I believe the problem is with the SO request price display. qzjul doesn't want it to show orders by people who have been confirmed to have no money. However, since you can still *place* the order without having money, it already shows unbacked orders all the time. Plus, someone can put in an order for 1 unit and it will still show that price and mislead people further. I don't think it's worth worrying about what the price display is, because of these reasons...

As it is, it's easier for cashers to place orders at the end of their turns than countries that produce saleable goods. As a commie/techer/farmer, you need to sell a surplus the previous day and have the money left over at the end of the current day's turns in order to place an effective order.

Sometimes I've tried to place an order for a real bargain price hoping that goods at that low price won't come in until my stuff has had a chance to sell, but often the bargain goods come in too early and my order is canceled or the bargain is asking too much and those goods never come...

I think it would be easy to program something where standing order goes into effect once you have X amount of money. X could be a choice, or it seems reasonable to me to make X= quantity * price, of your standing order.

And I do some of the same things as you blid...

I agree, and I have said this before. The cash flow for producers is always 1 day behind cashers and it makes things difficult. Especially on servers where you can play a lot of turns at one time like express.

http://forums.earthempires.com/...ontingent-standing-orders

I think it would even be worth making something for purchases on the private market as then you don't have to worry about displaying the SO price. I bet techers would find that very useful to buy defense after sale of tech.

Only in very large mature markets do the SO prices matter. The majority of units shouldn't be priced based on what the SO is at.

I see qzjul said it might be harder to code.

There's already a SO hierarchy, where it checks one person first before going to the next. Could it just continue to do that, but not cancel your order?

I'm trying to figure out if that could end up being harder to code than it sounds. I suppose if it pushes you to the back of the SO queue then it would end up looping back to you at the end, and keep running forever if you and someone else both don't have money. But if it leaves you at your current spot and just goes next, I don't think it would be complicated.

I like this feature, however it needs to be an option on the SO and not made permanent on all SOs. I imagine a check box next to each SO when made that allows you to specify if you want the SO to wait for more funds to arrive instead of cancel if funds are insufficient to purchase any quantity.

The main issue is display, as somebody quoted me on; i need to be able to select the highest SO price; if there's a price higher than the market, obviously it gets bought, or cancelled, and the price drops etc etc until the SO price is below that of the market.

If we don't cancel SO's that have no money, it's quite conceivable that we could have an SO for $999 bushels displayed while bushels are $29.

I suppose I could add a flag as to whether or not you have money, but the only easy way to set that would be if you ran turns again -- it'd be really annoying to have the bots look up which country just got money during purchases (and ingame too!!), look up their SO's, set the flag... it gets very convoluted very quickly....


So unless this is an absolutely-must-have-etc-etc feature i'd tend to delay on it now just due to annoyance/complexity....

not needed.

Maybe an easier way is to allow us to input when Standing Orders can be activated.

Since goods take 4-6 hours to be placed on the market for Primary for example, you can set SOs to be activated 6 hours later.

Would this be an easier to code? (I have zero knowledge about coding)

two options, place so now or place so in six hours?

possibly actually; then i just select valid SO;s and they remain "waiting" for hours...

Allow SOs to be filled up like how express markets works. You can set an allowable range of 0-24 hours for example.

This is brilliant! Much easier to code! Just add a field for when the SO starts being active and compare current time against it.

Well, another way is to reuse code, it can be coded just like goods being enroute, except it is SOs being enroute instead.

another option is to update SO list every hour to include SOs that now have money behind them. Then you don't have to worry about constantly checking who got money every time a transaction takes place.

TTT

I'd rather the game continue to cancel orders if there is no money to fill them. In fact, I would also like the game to tell a country which country couldn't buy anything because there was no money for your standing order. Why should the game coddle you, despite your mistakes? What, do you want the game to run your turns for you next?

NukEvil,

I think the point as I understand it is to allow the player to say when the SO is activated. So for example I create a standing order and select activate in 10 hours. That way my units/tech/food will sell before my SO is activated and I have money. We are all in agreement there are too many false orders out there. This will get rid of some false SO's and will allow some of us to spend the cash we earn without logging back in before the 18hr mark.

this should be pretty easy to implement because standing orders already have a short(very short) TTL attached to them anyway. will just be the case of changing the form's layout slightly to allow a prefered TTL or keep it at default.

It may even further encourage players to stay logged out for X hours to get their 18 hour turn bonuses. because i imagine some people sell stuff, wait for NW drop, then log back in to put SO's on.

Slightly OT, but is there a reason behind encouraging people to only play once a day?

i imagine the original reason(like e2025) was bandwidth/resource usage. i think it also encourages more strategy with turn usage. whereas if u use 1 turn at a time, its more difficult to strategise than if u have quite a few available.

Right, I get that was the reason back in the day. I would think though that nowadays, there really is no good reason for incentivizing not playing.

it's a turn based game though. if you logged in every hour or so on most servers, you'd only get a few turns to play with whereas playing maybe twice a day (two 12 hour bonuses) means you can better strategise your playing.

TTL is fairly doable; i think it still needs a new field in the db, though i'd have to check that

or why not push the SO to a lower priority if the price is not met? errr

Don't show the SO price.

i've started on this.. havent got much further than adding it to the form(not live). discussing some of the mechanics with other devs before i go much further.

still got this at the top of my todo list.

just do away with the display of standing order price

Awesome, thanks Zarcon!