1 problem 1 bug 1 weird thing and 1 question

[eleaza]

it is actually the other way , governement don"t want to buy overprice , it can only sell overprice , in public people think my company is stupid but they don't say it because they like the ton of cash i give their mayor to build school and healthcare, i own 100 % share of my company so no chairman complain about how i waste my money ^^

Either way, that's not the norm even in real life with a transaction regarding an overpriced "transaction", it has something to do with taxes in every transaction between any party, the tax records are public, and have regulations to prevent "disturbing fair market price" (if they are not on record, that would be blackmarket, or under the table transaction), since every transaction indeed constitute part of the "current market price" if they are on record. There are laws in most countries regarding fairness in transaction (I'd imagine if a realistic "real estate" supply/demand mechanics is in place, how such large transaction of single media firm would inflate the "fair price" across the board in real estate in an instance).

But if we call this specifically as a donation then it's probably fine (and why there are tax exemptions in real life specifically dealing with donations), but for a "business deal" involving real properties out of norm, it certainly raises red flag. And for game balancing concern, there's no reason for this "purchasing" even work the same way as "firms on sale" between AIs and human players. It could simply be the same mechanic like "transferring firms" between subsidiaries where it's always fair price, and the whole loophole can be avoided altogether (at least on the government laundering front, stock market exploits are whole other matters)

this would still apply though as some sort of anti-corruption measure i guess, goverment accepting billion of cash from a private company as a deal to lower their taxes and open 12 university researching on this company expertise , all of this hidden through a media firm privatization , to my point of view no-one has interest into denouncing the fraud ( nor public nor private no citizen )

it's like philanthropy right ? Public Relation tells me we could have add the creation of a landmark of myself as part of the deal governement would have done it ( it happens before ^^ )

This will certainly be interesting, as a donation system. Maybe we could even change the name of the city, or even adding a sector/street/public buildings named after the donor. Other political influence would also be nice, and lobbyist do engage in dubious businesses to smooth things easily.

BTW, I've easily built 22 universities (and full 3 million funding for every product class in each university) without even using any exploit around the time when a city reaches around 1 million population to support the expenses. I just get better at balancing city budget and grow the city population fast, with constant high GDP growth, and excessively build universities (like if a city requires 2 universities for supply/demand index I'll build 6, and so on). This is actually a self sustaining loop, build more universities to keep competitiveness, and with more jobs more immigrations and higher GDP growth. Kinda nice if you think about it.

step 3B is not really a step , it is a mechanism that by itself provide infinite amount of cash in a company
3C is a way to have cash on the main company
3a is a trick to get money from governement ( but not very effective at laundering the money )
...
All of this is done while time is pause ( 01/01/1990 or not ) , it was not said but it is needed ^^

We should really treat 3a, 3b, and 3c as separate exploits, there are not many connections between them. 3a is close to the traditional land plot exploit with a CES DLC twist using government built facilities, 3b and 3c are different stock market exploits one newly introduced by subsidiary DLC, and another one probably already existed for a very long time, just not that easy to implement in the core game and not from day one (probably doable in late game where players have enough cash to set up all the nested corporations through real stock purchases, and defeat the purpose of gaining cash in such complicated manner).

I have read this topic , hence I discovered that everytime it is fixed it has another exploit is found , and it is fixed , and another exploit occur ^^

i'm just participating in the process ^^

Are there any other ways to transfer money back from government account to private corporation than said 3a scheme? If there are, then we will have serious troubles of keeping the loophole floodgate close. The same can be said about transferring cash from subsidiary back to the parent company. If this can be done easily (than convoluted nested shell companies), many stock market exploits dynamites will explode.

[Pietro]

as a donation system. Maybe we could even change the name of the city, or even adding a sector/street/public buildings named after the donor. Other political influence would also be nice, and lobbyist do engage in dubious businesses to smooth things easily.

Something like a boost of influence for an individual , a corporation , or a party , according to whom did provide with the fund needed by the city ? that could be part of the corporate branding , i guess the "Airport to the land of Grape" could raise a wine selling company brand awarness to the whole world. Or maybie they would need to watch some games into the "Bottle-Milk is Healthy " stadium.

i'd like to see a city where an old and rich hippy musican own most of the houses influencing population for him to have political power to tax pollution to make factory go in another town so it can improve the environment , rent higher and invest into out-sourced factory for its local cocoa and linnen production

all those things that would make cities have an history and being different not just younger / older city , and could work very well if city have some sort of weather , or agricultural / natural ressources specialization

those could be means to divert players away from exploit , instead of using tricks to transfert cash , making it legit but with rules and rewards.

Because you could then decide to subsidize some sector for example , it is a direct way to transfert money from governement to private, instead of using tricks , it is more logic but come at the cost of your citizen judging you about that

Maybie political party could also make advertisment on tv in order to make citizen willing a certain % of taxes, or a rich invidual make a good pre-campaign to be the one that run for mayor in its party based on its personnal gift ( stadium ect ) , that would bring some politics in the economy but is it possible not to in a DLC like this one ?

maybie a larger parameter with a box " Totalitarian enable On/ Off " would solve a lot of questionning , if something is fun to be possible but could be source of exploit it would be considered as totalitarian this would allow room for the game to be able to show mechanism that are extreme while still having a some sort of soft simulation where exploits are not supposed to be

a bit like the " stock sim " wannabe right ?

about transferring cash from subsidiary back to the parent company. If this can be done easily (than convoluted nested shell companies), many stock market exploits dynamites will explode.

our corporation has some patented laundering scheme here is one of the solution we propose :



sadly this one is not well implemanted as you can see an obvious bottle neck, and moreover we recommand implantation of this in a city that is not willing to put taxes on corporation ,
if you are rich enough you can even buy your own town so you have a nice and clean laundering place

Gold is quite fast to setup and offers good margin (0.01 to +/- 2K900 ) but needs quite bit of investement to fill the wharehouses

Leather could be good for it is avaible easily , or maybie cars if you need to leech a lot of money , once system is filled you can control flow of cash from any sub by changing the prices on the whare house ( and in any direction )

this is achieved by owning 75 % of a subsidiary , and being manager of all their business , while forbiding them to do anything , no expansion no stock , all product disable , ect

you can also have the subsidiary acting normal just by being manager of 1 wharehouse you make them bleed cash from it to who you want.

This one makes me think about avoiding taxes via intercity loop, hiding profits , or adjusting them , i may experiment more on that later on.

Are there any other ways to transfer money back from government account to private corporation than said 3a scheme?

i noticed while experimenting on the "land exploit" , it seems that despite it is written " do you want to sell this plot for 900$ " , when you click yes , it will still gives you 300$ for example , 300$ being the original price of the land

not sure if it is to prevent the exploit or an unwanted thing ^^

maybie i made a mistake while setting the game i tested on

NOT RELATED : you can buy land with subsidiary , by relocating a lot of time a general store they own ( low setup budget , and 2x2 surface is easy to use )

i may experiment on that later

[eleaza]

Something like a boost of influence for an individual , a corporation , or a party , according to whom did provide with the fund needed by the city ? that could be part of the corporate branding , i guess the "Airport to the land of Grape" could raise a wine selling company brand awarness to the whole world. Or maybie they would need to watch some games into the "Bottle-Milk is Healthy " stadium.

i'd like to see a city where an old and rich hippy musican own most of the houses influencing population for him to have political power to tax pollution to make factory go in another town so it can improve the environment , rent higher and invest into out-sourced factory for its local cocoa and linnen production

all those things that would make cities have an history and being different not just younger / older city , and could work very well if city have some sort of weather , or agricultural / natural ressources specialization

those could be means to divert players away from exploit , instead of using tricks to transfert cash , making it legit but with rules and rewards.

Because you could then decide to subsidize some sector for example , it is a direct way to transfert money from governement to private, instead of using tricks , it is more logic but come at the cost of your citizen judging you about that

Maybie political party could also make advertisment on tv in order to make citizen willing a certain % of taxes, or a rich invidual make a good pre-campaign to be the one that run for mayor in its party based on its personnal gift ( stadium ect ) , that would bring some politics in the economy but is it possible not to in a DLC like this one ?

maybie a larger parameter with a box " Totalitarian enable On/ Off " would solve a lot of questionning , if something is fun to be possible but could be source of exploit it would be considered as totalitarian this would allow room for the game to be able to show mechanism that are extreme while still having a some sort of soft simulation where exploits are not supposed to be

a bit like the " stock sim " wannabe right ?

All these look more like a completely new expansion than added features to CES DLC. But sounds very interesting though, we can probably even develop a political theme economic simulation game just with these ideas.

our corporation has some patented laundering scheme here is one of the solution we propose :

sadly this one is not well implemanted as you can see an obvious bottle neck, and moreover we recommand implantation of this in a city that is not willing to put taxes on corporation ,
if you are rich enough you can even buy your own town so you have a nice and clean laundering place

Gold is quite fast to setup and offers good margin (0.01 to +/- 2K900 ) but needs quite bit of investement to fill the wharehouses

Leather could be good for it is avaible easily , or maybie cars if you need to leech a lot of money , once system is filled you can control flow of cash from any sub by changing the prices on the whare house ( and in any direction )

this is achieved by owning 75 % of a subsidiary , and being manager of all their business , while forbiding them to do anything , no expansion no stock , all product disable , ect

you can also have the subsidiary acting normal just by being manager of 1 wharehouse you make them bleed cash from it to who you want.

This one makes me think about avoiding taxes via intercity loop, hiding profits , or adjusting them , i may experiment more on that later on.

This definitely looks like money laundering. a slow kind of way, but surely can move millions within a month. But for a very large sum in the billions, I imagine it would take a long time, or a very large and tedious setup. Personally I just go for the tech swap scheme, developing a not useful tech that the sub doesn't have with minimum research time, and using sub HQ to buy tech from your corporation with any price you set, instant transfer without delay (semi-product techs are usually the best option, AIs rarely research them early). The downsides are this can not be done at day 1 in the beginning of the game, and developing new techs requires R&D centers with expenses (so mostly just worth moving hundreds of millions or billions with this, than couple of millions).

Either way, these transfer take some time to take effect. So we can not just set up nested subs and move the final cash back to main corporation and let them go bankrupt from day 1. If there's an instant way of transferring cash from sub to main at day 1, then we don't need any complicated schemes and could gain pure cash instantly like cheat code.

i noticed while experimenting on the "land exploit" , it seems that despite it is written " do you want to sell this plot for 900$ " , when you click yes , it will still gives you 300$ for example , 300$ being the original price of the land

not sure if it is to prevent the exploit or an unwanted thing ^^

This definitely looks like a bug. Just not sure whether it's the text description wrong, or the calculation of land selling price is incorrect.

[Pietro]

This definitely looks like money laundering. a slow kind of way, but surely can move millions within a month. But for a very large sum in the billions, I imagine it would take a long time, or a very large and tedious setup

yes it works as a permanent thing , using it you can manipulate stock prices by lowering or inflating profits as you want , you setup up this for game that revolve around stock market manipulation , or if you want to fully control AI by giving them just the amount of money you are willing to let them , you can use dividend too but you lose a % , here you can divert all profit to a company that does nothing but paying 99% dividend

Personally I just go for the tech swap scheme, developing a not useful tech that the sub doesn't have with minimum research time, and using sub HQ to buy tech from your corporation with any price you set, instant transfer without delay (semi-product techs are usually the best option, AIs rarely research them early). The downsides are this can not be done at day 1 in the beginning of the game, and developing new techs requires R&D centers with expenses (so mostly just worth moving hundreds of millions or billions with this, than couple of millions).

this is brilliant , because the other setup also has cost , wharehouses , the goods that are transferred are money invested but you never see after ( if it's 160 wharehouse almost full of cars ^^ ) , i will definitively use that at some point ^^

it doesn't allow you to go full speed and look at the profits growing it is better i see it as it allow you to transfert a lot of money when time is paused , which means in any challenge you only need to have a starting cash to run a research lab for 6 month , then you can pause the game , borrow infinite money on subsidiary , buy this 1 tech you've assigned 1 cell only an infinite number of time, since you can create subsidiary B from a A , borrow with subsidiary B , buy at your main corp the tech with sub B , and merge A and B, then you have sub A that can create a new sub B that doesn't have the tech ^^ , reseting the borrowing limit everytime to give it to main corp, debt piling up on sub A account that you can sell to public or has it go bankrupt

If there's an instant way of transfering cash from sub to main at day 1, then we don't need any complicated schemes and could gain pure cash instantly like cheat code.

well you have a good way of "instant" , but not at day one

But i've been trying some stuff and found something ^^

it is based one the market capitalization mechanism , when you create a subsidiary , its market cap at IPO will be the amount of money you put in it AT THE CREATION + 20/40 % depending on the IPO dilution share you choose.

If you use russian doll subsidiary method , you have S1 that owns S2 that owns S3 ect with S1 you first borrow all money you can , you create S2 giving all the money , S2 can borrow this same amount of money , which double the capital you convey at each step , you can IPO at 80 % all the time so you keep more than 75 % ownership , the money in the IPO is also add to the total of cash you convey at each step.

i am not willing to do the math atm but it increases even faster than the classic X2 at each step don't expect to see more than 6 or 7 step before Billions.

At this point you will create a subsidiary that is different from the others , instead of S7 let's say you create GIFT , but instead of giving it all the money when you create the subsidiary , you only give it only 20 million at first .

this make the company GIFT owns 20 Millions , being worth 20 million , still private , but in case of IPO it would have a market cap of 25 M if you set 20% dilution

then as you own more than 80% of GIFT's parent, you can inject cash to GIFT, those billions you've been borrowing and taking to public shareholders from S1 S2 S3 ect , they now all are on the account of GIFT , then is the problem , when you make the IPO for GIFT , it has market cap from 25/ 33 million

if you manage to buy it and merge with it , you have all the billions !

you can now sell GIFT stocks from 60/80% ownership with S6 to reduce to 55% ownership for example , to reduce its stock price while keeping control so it doesn't buy back its share

then you sell some S1 stock with your main corp so you lose control of all S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 GIFT to fool the SEC

then you have 45 % of gift stock available on market that you can buy with your main before its price recover to 10$ , you will need to overpay to S6 for the 30% remaining , but once you merge with GIFT you have on your account all the borrowing of S1 S2 ect , and you no longer are responsible in case they go bankrupt

which they will do day 2 for all of them; if you let them on their own; since they have 0 cash and huge debt; except S6, that has some money because of the GIFT selling , but it is also the last of the chain , which means it has the highest amount of debt . In case of a 20 billion transfert , they'd have 8 billion debt so it is a matter of days not even week before they go bankrupt too

it is not as clean as the 'complicated' scheme because you need to go day 2 and have them bankrupt rather than being able to buy everything back and pay the debts of everyone to get rid of evidence

but it is way more simple ( maybie i explain it so it looks complicated but in game it was very easy to do once all part of puzzle were together )

but it is no longer part of the city economic simulation dlc would that be usefull summed up and somewhere else ?

[eleaza]

it doesn't allow you to go full speed and look at the profits growing it is better i see it as it allow you to transfert a lot of money when time is paused , which means in any challenge you only need to have a starting cash to run a research lab for 6 month , then you can pause the game , borrow infinite money on subsidiary , buy this 1 tech you've assigned 1 cell only an infinite number of time, since you can create subsidiary B from a A , borrow with subsidiary B , buy at your main corp the tech with sub B , and merge A and B, then you have sub A that can create a new sub B that doesn't have the tech ^^ , reseting the borrowing limit everytime to give it to main corp, debt piling up on sub A account that you can sell to public or has it go bankrupt

There is a slight risk that subsidiary will trade off its tech when time is running. So any step can not be done at pause will increase the chance of sub trading away this tech (especially when it's the highest tech level across the board below 100, and other subsidiary has tones of money to purchase, but ofc we can set no acquiring tech in sub CEO setting, it's just one more step need to be careful about)

But i've been trying some stuff and found something ^^

it is based one the market capitalization mechanism , when you create a subsidiary , its market cap at IPO will be the amount of money you put in it AT THE CREATION + 20/40 % depending on the IPO dilution share you choose.

If you use russian doll subsidiary method , you have S1 that owns S2 that owns S3 ect with S1 you first borrow all money you can , you create S2 giving all the money , S2 can borrow this same amount of money , which double the capital you convey at each step , you can IPO at 80 % all the time so you keep more than 75 % ownership , the money in the IPO is also add to the total of cash you convey at each step.

i am not willing to do the math atm but it increases even faster than the classic X2 at each step don't expect to see more than 6 or 7 step before Billions.

At this point you will create a subsidiary that is different from the others , instead of S7 let's say you create GIFT , but instead of giving it all the money when you create the subsidiary , you only give it only 20 million at first .

this make the company GIFT owns 20 Millions , being worth 20 million , still private , but in case of IPO it would have a market cap of 25 M if you set 20% dilution

then as you own more than 80% of GIFT's parent, you can inject cash to GIFT, those billions you've been borrowing and taking to public shareholders from S1 S2 S3 ect , they now all are on the account of GIFT , then is the problem , when you make the IPO for GIFT , it has market cap from 25/ 33 million

if you manage to buy it and merge with it , you have all the billions !

you can now sell GIFT stocks from 60/80% ownership with S6 to reduce to 55% ownership for example , to reduce its stock price while keeping control so it doesn't buy back its share

then you sell some S1 stock with your main corp so you lose control of all S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 GIFT to fool the SEC

then you have 45 % of gift stock available on market that you can buy with your main before its price recover to 10$ , you will need to overpay to S6 for the 30% remaining , but once you merge with GIFT you have on your account all the borrowing of S1 S2 ect , and you no longer are responsible in case they go bankrupt

which they will do day 2 for all of them; if you let them on their own; since they have 0 cash and huge debt; except S6, that has some money because of the GIFT selling , but it is also the last of the chain , which means it has the highest amount of debt . In case of a 20 billion transfert , they'd have 8 billion debt so it is a matter of days not even week before they go bankrupt too

it is not as clean as the 'complicated' scheme because you need to go day 2 and have them bankrupt rather than being able to buy everything back and pay the debts of everyone to get rid of evidence

but it is way more simple ( maybie i explain it so it looks complicated but in game it was very easy to do once all part of puzzle were together )

but it is no longer part of the city economic simulation dlc would that be usefull summed up and somewhere else ?

I think this is mainly an exploit created by Subsidiary DLC, so probably in that sub-forum, the release-version sub-forum is also OK, if it's anything related to the game.

And you should definitely make a save game and some screenshot to show this "exploit" that will evidently generate nearly infinite money in day 2. I've known there are many loopholes with the introduce of subsidiary DLC, just not sure how big they can be, and how many of them exist. Personally, I feel these issues will continue to exist for quite some time, like the loopholes in stock market, always lurking in the background.