Ridiculous.
We have a market module that is already a shit (tax, pollution factor, radius limitations related with regions/bonus/resources, etc) and you want make it worse?
Big holdings already spends a lot in a module that takes forever to "pay" the investment. A joke of a module. I am not even sure if i should consider calling it a "market or economic module". With all its bad factors, it rather looks a logistic module.
Your idea might give us an astonishing inflation on the gold/monetary market, tokens market, houses, job market, etc. In the end if all sellers are profiting more, they will be likely spending more as well. Which means: you jail everybody in 1 module and nothing changes.
I'm not disagreeing that there are a lot of other changes that could be made to improve the game. I'm trying to make it better, not worse. I love to debate the merits of the proposal though. At the end of the day, unless something gets drastically changed, the economy will always reach an equilibrium point/range eventually. So,what I believe will really happen is profit margins will improve to compensate for the additional energy cost. There are three main groups of producers, newbies that have low quality and quantity and need the best ROI to get by, middle tier like me who focus equally on ROI but less importantly as it's also about margin on energy consumed, and the big guys who own hundreds of Q7s and have millions of $ who are more focused on how much they can make per energy as opposed to per gold invested. That top tier would be most sensitive to the change and would back off production until the nominal spread increased enough. That would create a temporary gap in the market that would trickle down to those producers that care more about making best return on investment than getting the most for your energy.
I could always be wrong but welcome a thoughtful debate to think through how it could play out. If you disagree, I also urge you to think what would happen in the opposite scenario, one in which Q1s only take 1 energy, Q2 only 2 energy etc. to produce.
Lastly, this isn't an attack on wealthier players, I wouldn't want to do that to myself as I'm on my way. I think the point of a game is to have fun, thus, this would create a new decision point when building, upgrading, producing and even downgrading companies as right now it's all about money, after proposed changes it could be about managing money and energy. To me that would be fun because it would create a need to model out when it makes sense to produce or not, or even if I should downgrade a company as lower quality companies will likely be more favorable.
