[PART]Lobbying suggestings

[Arakash]

(This used to be a bug thread but has been moved to suggestions)

Playing 1.11

When you set lobbying to turn on, it has an immediate effect on the price of your factories. (i.e. you immediately get a subsidy)
Edit: When i say immediately, i mean before you've even passed a turn.

I think it should provide cumulative benefits over time with a degree of randomness involved.

It seems weird that currently all you have to do is set the slider and without paying anything yet you get a factory subsidy.

[Eric.B]

Even though this is a bug, some of it is a suggestion, so I will treat it as a suggestion since to make it better will require a little bit of rewriting somethings.

[Arakash]

Seeing as its now a suggestion, ill try to clarify/expand on it a bit.
Just to clarify, I dont know how lobbying works in the real world, so if anyone wants to share some on that i think it would add a lot to the discussion. Following on from that, if you see anything you think is unrealistic, feel free to point it out.

Some rambling suggestions on subsidies specifically.
1. Ideally i think the game should take into consideration the combined amount of lobbying of you and your competitors. This may not be possible due to game mechanics, i don't know.

2. More far fetched but again an ideal is probably having it change country by country. Again i don't know if this is even possible due to game mechanics.

3. I think you should either have it calculate the average of monthly lobbying over a year, or just how much the total of the years lobbying comes to.
Im more of a fan of the first idea, as it makes it harder to game the system by overspending in one month and not spending at all in the next few.
IMO lobbying takes time and continued effort, you cant just turn it on/off.

4. I think there should be some degree of randomness, say 10-30% (having the error margin too large makes it too hard to monitor/control imo.)


Any feedback/suggestions from other forum users is welcome, as i said at the start i don't have any practical knowledge of how lobbying actually functions in the real world.

[Arakash]

I had another thought on this today.

Perhaps Lobbying could also give a very small reduction in loan interest over time, to represent low interest loans to companies by governments, or just lobbying to reduce loan interest.
I'm not sure how historical that would be, but i thought the idea was interesting and would give you more incentive to lobby in specific situations.

[Eric.B]

Loans are implemented as a fixed contract with banks in this game. So lobbying would have no effect with interest rates.

Government loans, in the form of bailouts do exists in the game. But you have to get to 1960 before there is a chance of that. (Some other criteria to meet as well)

[Eric.B]

I've fixed the original intent of this thread. Lobbying now uses the previous months spending amount.

As for future suggestions, I may implement some of them, but probably not all of them. As such I'm marking this thread at Part, thus leaving it open for when I decide to increase the Lobbying code to take into effect average lobbying over time and make it relative to your competition.