Nobody buys your modems for you anymore

Everyone’s in a price war

Every long Bandwidth Barons playtest went the same way. The player matched the cheap rival’s $14.95, or went under it. The rival cut to a dollar under. The copycat went a nickel under them a month later. They cut again. By the end they were charging $7.95 to $9.95 for dial-up. The two longest games earned about half of what my careful bot earns by the same day, and neither reached the end of the first era.

The rival can afford this. It has no modems, no staff and no bills: it’s a price and a voice in the Feed. You have all three. A bot that prices the way those players did gets the Golden Parachute within a session on none of 50 seeds, in any city.

Part of it was my fault. If you left the war and went back to $14.95, the cheap rival crept back up only while it was more than $3 under everyone, so it stopped at $11.95 and stayed there for good. Now it creeps back whenever it’s more than a dollar under, all the way to $14.95. Leave the war and the old prices come back.

The rule hasn’t changed: the cheap rival stays the cheapest in town, down to $8.95, and every cut it makes is an ad in the Feed. That ad is the only warning you get for now. A warning before your first cut is on my list.

Nobody buys your modems anymore

The Network Operations Center is gone. It bought racks, DSLAMs and T1 lines for you once you set a target, and disconnected or cancelled them when you had more than it needed.

It had a trap. At 12 subscribers a modem the busiest hour is busy most days. Buy a rack by hand to stop the busy signals, and the NOC, which keeps only what its target needs, disconnects it that night. Nothing told you. My playtester bot did exactly that and burned about $50,000 a month on modems it owned for an afternoon.

So now you buy everything: every bank, rack, DSLAM, chassis, T1 and T3, all game long. The bigger units keep the clicks down: a rack is 24 modems, a chassis four DSLAMs, a T3 29 T1 lines. The careful bot buys modems 26 times in a whole session.

• 4× comes sooner. Accelerated Depreciation appears at 2,300 subscribers once you have Access Servers, about four months earlier in the careful bot’s game.
• The Blanket Purchase Order stands on its own, at 3,400 subscribers. The night shift expedites the tickets now, and Marge tapes the order to the server room’s wall. In the second era, tickets no longer expedite themselves unless you’ve bought it.
• If your save had a NOC, it’s gone, and so is the $82,500 you paid for it. It was staffed by one pager. The pager has been returned.

“Legal is full”

A playtester bought Outage Credit, clicked On everywhere, got “no free slot” in every district, clicked it ten times over three game weeks and gave up. Lou’s Associates, the project that lets you hire lawyers, had been on offer for three months. They bought it a year later.

That was the window’s fault. Now, while a package can’t go on anywhere, the Packages window says so under the district buttons: “Legal is full: all 2 packages it can defend are on. Switch one off, or buy Lou’s Associates in Projects.” The ending follows what you’ve earned, so nothing is named before it exists. On everywhere is grayed out meanwhile, and the word “slot” has left the game.

The clock is back to a day a second

The last update halved every speed. That lasted two days. 1× is a day a second again, a month is 30 seconds, and the demo takes about half an hour at normal speed, not an hour. 2× and 4× follow.

No walls, for real this time

The last post ended with the rack of 24 walling a careless player under Collocation. That’s fixed: Collocation appears at 1,800 subscribers instead of 2,000, and CDs in Cereal Boxes at 4,200 instead of 4,400. The playtester bot now gets Collocation within a session on 149 of 150 seeds across the three cities, and every growth project within two sessions on 142. The ones it misses are all in London, which is fitting.

New York plays on seed 39 now and London on 12. Istanbul stays on 1.

Smaller things

• Finance shows your cash at the top in big digits.
• On phones, the Feed stays its size. Its posts scroll inside it.
• Android: the game is in closed testing on Google Play, and testers who stay the 14 days keep the full game. The previous post says how to join.

The last post said your habits might end up in a bot. They did. If you’re in a price war right now, the comments are open.