1.1.7: Prices reflect real markets, and your company's numbers finally add up

This release folds ten patches into one entry. The substance of every change is kept below.

Your corporation's numbers

• •Your income statement adds up. Two cost lines, your wage bill and regulatory compliance, were charged against your income but never shown on the waterfall, so the total did not match the rows above it. Every cost now has a row, and the total is worked out from those rows, with anything unexplained shown as an Other line instead of hidden.
• •Your margins show what you actually earn. Corporation and sector screens showed a theoretical margin instead of the one the engine really charges you every turn. A sector could look profitable while genuinely losing money. All money screens, including borrowing capacity and credit ratings, now use your real figures.
• •The sector page agrees with the corporation page. The sector detail page used to compute its own version of your margin, so a sector could show a healthy profit on its own page while the corporation page showed the opposite. Both now read the same real number.
• •Being in debt no longer prices you like a bond fund. Companies carrying debt had their real business earnings discounted almost to nothing, because the market compared bond income against income that was already shrunk by interest payments. Borrowing to grow no longer tanks how the market values your actual business.

Prices and trade

• •What things cost to make now reaches what they sell for. Commodity prices used to come from supply and demand alone, so an industry squeezed by expensive inputs like fertilizer and freight had no way to recover, even though the goods it made were badly needed. Producer costs now lift a commodity's own price, so farmers and other squeezed producers get a real path back to profit. Share prices also stopped swinging with every central bank meeting.
• •Prices reflect the market you can actually trade in. Supply sitting behind closed borders no longer drags down your local prices. Millions of units of food from economies that trade with nobody were crushing world food prices while the West went hungry; prices now come from the goods that can really reach you.
• •The iron curtain closes. Planned economies now trade only with each other. Their surpluses stop reaching Western markets, Western prices reflect Western supply and demand, and the bloc runs on state-administered prices at home. The curtain lifts country by country on its historical date: China in 1978, most of Eastern Europe in 1989 to 1990, the Soviet republics in 1991.

Computer-run competitors

• •The economy answers shortages everywhere. Computer-run corporations in every industry, not just mining, now retool toward whatever is scarce. Chemical plants are already pivoting to fertilizer production as shortages start to heal instead of festering.
• •The economy builds what everyone is short of. Freight is needed by almost every industry but made only by logistics companies, and computer-run firms would never build it unless they were already in that industry. Now they build critically short essentials wherever the shortage is, regardless of their own industry.
• •Computer-run firms retool without a phantom cost spike. When a computer-run mine or factory changed what it made, its operating costs could jump for no reason you could see. That is fixed, and computer-run mines now read local prices instead of the world average when deciding what to switch to. A strategy you set on your own company is never touched by this.