EE is a game where the public market tends to automatically provide a balance between one strategy and another: if one gets relatively strong, more people will play it, driving down prices for whatever good they produce, and driving up demand for whatever they buy, making them weaker and other strategies relatively stronger. Farmer is mostly exempt from this, as the high floor on food prices provides a guaranteed cashout price and increased demand for the whole reset as bushels are the safest item to stockpile. No matter how many people play farmer, there's always a very high floor for the strategy.

This indirectly affects one other strategy, primarily: oiler, as oil is the other easily stockpiled item in the game. With no floor on oil, it likely wouldn't have mattered if the private market price for food was lowered, as oil had no effective floor. Now, with the recent changes to oil, it does. Even better, the floor for oil is effectively market based, as the price of oil will now be directly related to the price of military. However, while it still remains to be seen how this will work out exactly for oil demand, I suspect that it will have little effect on the viability of farmer as a strategy, as bushels will still be preferred for stockpiling and the floor for oil is highly likely lower than the floor for food; there's little reason to play oiler over farmer.

Still, of the two floors, the method used for creating a floor the one used for oil makes more sense as it is a more market based solution. Oiler will never get too strong as more people will play it if it is, lowering prices and boosting other strategies. So, why not make oil the main stockpiled good instead of food?

If the maximum private market purchase price (demo with full tech) were $15 instead of $35, a fascist farmer with 215% agri tech would produce about $196 in value per farm. That'd be about the equivalent of an $71 dollar barrel for a fascist oiler. At that point, the minimum price for oil is highly likely to be higher than the private market sale price for food, and oil would likely be the preferred choice for stockpiling.

More demand for oil would make oiler a much, much stronger strategy, that would be competitive with the rest. Farmer would still be a viable strategy, but destocks would have to be played very differently than they are currently. There'd be other changes in relative balances between strategies compared to now, but in the end none would be any stronger than the others as supply and demand on the market would solve most issues.

purchase or sell? no govt can get pm purchase price to under 100 bucks so must be sell.

demo with pretty max military tech can sell bushels at priv with 36 bucks and others (non-theo) with 35.

lowering sell price to ~10 bucks w/o military tech would screw up farmer start ups meaning we would need to sell 3 times more bushels to finance build up and when we get oop we would have 3 times less bushels to be sold on public market so less money to spent on build up next day etc unless price is much higher (usually its 32-34 bucks during 1st 2 days of set when countries get out of protection).

the PM price for food has, in the past, been 24, 42, and 32; in all cases food falls to match the PM sell price; 42 was an epic set for farmers though.... at 24, farmers were really kindof a weak strat...


$15 would be really low I think. Might be interesting, I suppose, but I dunno.

.. or could we not simply allow us to sell oil on our private market, creating a floor for it?

although i do kind of miss three dollar food..

If farming needs strengthening, it shouldn't be done via the private market but rather by increasing demand. Similarly, if you use the private market to put a floor in for oil, it might make the strategy viable but will take it out of balance; the mechanism that was put in is far superior to straight private market sale.

agreed @ slagpit's oil idea being superior :)

i'm a little bit lost.. farmer doesn't need strengthening, nor do i understand how lowering the floor to a max of fifteen is going to accomplish it.

oil is already out of balance because such a large number of players play entire resets without buying a single barrel..

but as i said, i'm a little lost. i miss when ska or silver just explained it all for me :P

I assume he's saying that farmer should be weakened

Well, more that food should be weakened, but yes that obviously affects farmers.

farmer is already the worst strat. why make it even worse.

Farmer and casher are the only winning strats on primary, how is farmer the weakest strat?

Different servers value strats differently.

Techer has never won Primary before, does that make it the weakest strat? Techers used to be the only strat that won Alliance, until landtrading became the in-thing.

Techer's not done right in primary :P

If we're talking about strats that haven't won, I'll just point out that I doubt oiler has ever won anything anywhere and that the most recent oil changes are unlikely to change that.

i started as oiler last set and won top 100 :)))

oiler could win in some low level tourny.