How to keep prices cheap in your town:
Ok, this tutorial is a step by step on how to deal with the recession by causing more of a recession in your town. If you DO NOT follow my advice, please remember that your Town Hall worth will continue to fall and an empty Town Hall can help no one. If you create excess funds, then that's ok, because you can give that money back to your townfolk in many different ways at a later time. Most mayors do NOT have a problem with having too much Town Hall worth.
1) First encourage LOW prices by placing suggested prices in your Town Hall message and mention this in your Mayor's Office forum thread. You are ALREADY in a recession. You can't change that. Lowering prices IS necessary in order to LIVE in a recession. This must be explained to the people.
2) Keep prices cheap:
| bags of wheat | 10.20 | 9 |  |
| bags of wheat | 10.65 | 13 | |
| bags of wheat | 10.70 | 13 | |
| bags of wheat | 11.10 | 11 | |
| bags of wheat | 11.40 | 8 | |
3) So, what do you buy? Once people are selling for less, you have to buy correctly. Let's say I want 25 wheat to sell to the county. Here's what I would buy:
2 of the 11.40
4 of the 11.50
8 of the 10.70
5 of the 10.65
5 of the 10.20
Why not buy all the 10.20? If you bought up all the wheat for low prices, then people would start listing at a higher price and BOOM, you just raised all the prices in your town. Every time you buy, you are shaping your market. Remember that.
4) Why you WANT to keep prices stable: If you keep the price stable and affordable then people will continue to list for the same or lower prices.
5) How to explain: How do you explain to your citizens that you need to pay them EVEN LESS in order to help the town prosper? Here are some questions and answers for you and your citizens. This is something I posted in the forum.:
--------
"How do we sell items out?"
Well, we send out grants via citizens that volunteer for it. They are usually Town Council Members.
Then, in the last couple of days we sold items out to the County (via the County Faire). All towns are quite dependent on the County Trade Minister buying up our items (unless their mayor organizes his/her own trades). Until very recently, the county was not buying much of anything, but Sheridan has recently created two trades and has bought up a lot of our extra corn, wheat and fish. This allowed me to clear out the TH for the most part.
"What I see, is an overstocked market with lower and lower prices."
Right now the market is manageable. People are selling their items if they list for a good price. If you wish to sell something just contact the mayor and he/she will grant you cash to purchase your items.
What are the mayor's options as far as market manipulation?
1) Place price-caps or minimums: If the mayor were to artificially "stage" the market, there would be a major side effect. Prices would be pretty standard. Yes. However, people with lower charisma would never sell their items and when I say "never", I mean it. Higher charisma items always sell first, so my bread would probably sit forever, while someone like Hebrin would sell their bread pretty quickly. It would be quite unfair and I would never initiate such an unfair advantaged plan.
2) Set 20 wage prices for level twos: I have heard mention of this also. Again, the same result. It is artificially fixing the market. The results? People with lower charisma would never be able to sell their items and they would never get paid.
I believe a free-market is the best thing that we can do at this time.
"Can't the Mayor or whoever maybe once every two weeks send an email so EVERYONE knows what is happening here."Like someone said, it costs us "communication points" whenever the mayor sends out a "Town Announcement" and I prefer to save the TH cash for better things. If the mayor were to send out letters a lot, you would be looking at serious costs, as we'd have to hire a specific type of Level 3 State Trained to give us Communication Points.
"You guys want to run our town, then how about including those of us (I'm sure there are many) that don't understand or don't use the forum."
Well, I think I do a decent job of updating the TH msg. I change it every 2 - 5 days. Check it. You'll see that things are moved, changed or re-organized every few days. Current News is always given and I keep the "HOW TO HELP YOUR TOWN" section up to date. Is there an additional section that you think I should add? I have been told that most people don't want to read on and on about the town's affairs. In fact, the longer the note, the less people read the whole thing.
"Why encourage people to leave our town? It appears to me and please correct me if I am wrong, that the mayor is encouraging people to leave and then saying we are in need of Lords. Well sorry, why not try and keep the ones we have ?"
Well, it would be nice if the Lords that we have would stay and the non-Lords moved away, but that's usually not how it happens. Over the past few months, I have discovered how incredibly difficult it is to manage Whithorn. Many of the Level 2s are unhappy that they can not make a living here and they have explained their problems to me. Unfortunately, in RK, we have the ability to create infinite fields, but we are limited in size by having only one market in the town. This was okay in the past because we didn't have so many items on the market, but when the recession hit, it hit us very hard.
Our problems are circular and they all radiate from the fact that our town is over populated (around 400 people). We have about 85 level two people.
"Question: What I want to know is why aren't working professions encouraged?" and "Why are prices so low? I can't sell my stuff."
Because we have 17 bakers, when a well-populated RK town only needs 6-9 bakers.
For example, we have 28 millers here. There is no way that they will not have to fight to be competitive in a single market.
The recession is just not going to allow level twos to make an awesome income anymore. Now, if you were to live in Ayr, you would suffer from some of the same issues, BUT you would have a greater income because there are less bakers living there.
6) More recession answers:
Our issues are NOT authentic to our town. Every town in RK is overstocked right now. Most THs are suffering seriously. They are broke, trying to buy up their town's goods to help the people. I have done a good job in getting things sold before buying more here in Whithorn and I believe that is because of my experience.
Yes. Things are difficult here in Whithorn, but in some towns they have no veggies or no bread. I send letters out to mayors to ask trade and I often hear: "Please tell me what you want to bring. We are overstocked! PLEASE do not dump cheap goods on our market! We need our people to sell their goods."
Posts
