Got My Butt Kicked

[applemachine]

I think the AI identifies where you're making money and then enters it. Never try to compete with them on price. I always just set an overall value I'm willing to accept and if I only take 25% of the market as long as its profitable I just move to another market that they're not in. Eventually they do exit the business especially there's strong recession. If the market can support it open up more retail outlets, sometimes there's unmet demand that they're taking advantage of with cut throat pricing.

I actually thought I could simply wait out the AI, but they are satisfied with minor losses or breaking even. I unfortunately can't stand low profits so I think using your value pricing method works. Even though you can't maintain market share you still maintain profitability. The problem is that I usually build large factories preparing for demand but if I decide to keep prices steady and hope for the smaller market shares to profit, my factory becomes severely underutilized.

I've started to become more flexible. If I find factory overproducing I try to switch production to a second product so that the space can be used more efficiently. I've also cut down on training. I'm with you, I prefer to maintain a high level of utilization and just lose potential sales. You protect yourself from recessions and leaves a buffer for entering competitors. The cost that would have gone into training or a larger factory could be placed into new product research or producing a second or third product. If a competitor enters the market you have profit from a more diverse portfolio of products and you have that buffer of revenue you were never engaged in attaining that the new competitor can grab before they take market share away from you. The new competitor may take some share away from you but it would be a smaller drop than if you had 90 or 100% of the market covered.

[Esoteric Rogue]

Another mistake may have been spending time researching the intermediates like linen and textiles

Yes, semi-products are very inefficient to research in general.

Let me try an example, from my current game.

My Leather Wallet tech is 9. Highest tech is 138. My Leather Wallet tech will be 188. Material / Tech contribution to quality is 50%/50%. My leather is rated 30.

Currently, My quality should be ( 30/100 * 50/100 + 9/138 * 50/100) * 100 ~= 18. And it is. (Wohoo for maths!)

After research, my quality should be ( 30/100 * 50/100 + 188/188 * 50/100 ) * 100 ~= 65, a 47 quality point increase, and my opponent's quality will drop by ( 138/138 - 138/188 ) * 50 / 100 ~= 13, a 13 point decrease.

Now, that seems great, increasing quality from 18 to 65, but I still have to see what effect that has on consumer perception. For leather wallet, the consumer values price 47%; quality 26%; brand 27%. So my overall will only increase 47 * 26/100 ~= 12 overall ratings points from all this research, but that would be 26%*60 ~= 16 overall better than competitor because he lost a little when he lost the tech lead.

But for the semi-products? Leather bag is leather + textile. Material / Tech is 50%/50% to quality, and leather is 40% while textile is only 10%. Assume the cotton to make textiles is 30q. my Cotton tech is 9. material:tech ratio towards quality (yep, im changing to ratio so it doesn't look like division) is again 50:50. Max tech is currently 100. so 15+9/100*50% ~= 20 quality of textile. What sucks is that we have to do that again to get our final product, and textile contributes very little.

We'll compare how going from only 9 Textile tech all the way to 188 helps our LeatherBag
40%*30LeatherQ + 10%*20TextileQ + 50%*9LeatherBagT
= 12 + 2 + 5
= 19 LeatherBagQ
All the Leather Products have the same Consumer concerns of 47P:26Q:27B.
= 19 * .26 = 5 overall rating points

50%*30CottonQ + 50%*188/188CottonT = 15+50 = 65TextileQ, so that's some decent textiles now.
40%*30LeatherQ + 10%*65TextileQ + 50%*9LeatherBagT
= 12 + 7 + 5
= 24LeatherBagQ. My bags quality is 5 better, that's not so much.
= 24 * .26 = 6 overall rating points. My overall is only 1 greater than before I researched.

When I researched Leather Wallet from 9 to 188, my Leather Wallet overall rating increased by 12 points.
When I researched Textile from 9 to 188, my Leather Bag overall rating increased by only 1 point.

So, I agree, do not put much value at all in researching semi-products. We should be able to buy the 2nd, 3rd or even worse tech dirt cheap and still be just fine because they don't contribute that much.

I could re-write this better for a blog post.

[Esoteric Rogue]

Actually I didn't understand why the AI would research all the way to 400+ until I realized it negatively effects your competitors quality and prevents them from ever catching up to you in tech.

Ah! I didn't realize this but it does seem to be the case.

Definately, that's in the manual pages 47-49 Quality of Manufactured Goods: Your effective tech factor is Tech / Top Tech. (That's a lot simpler than what it actually says, hee hee.)

Top tech is never < 100. So every game we start out with 30/100 (0.3) tech factor. After 5 years, all my base techs are down at least to 9, so 9/100 (0.09) for many products, but the issue is that some of the top techs have gone up, so my leather wallet is even lower, down to 9/138 (0.07).

[Esoteric Rogue]

9 connecting units are the bomb! EDIT: I WAS WRONG

Sorry guys. That 480% is not a synergy bonus, it's an overlap penalty. Rather than getting 900 points of research for 9 units I would only be getting 480, almost 50% less.

Hate when I'm wrong. I like it when William is right, however.

[applemachine]

9 connecting units are the bomb! EDIT: I WAS WRONG

Sorry guys. That 480% is not a synergy bonus, it's an overlap penalty. Rather than getting 900 points of research for 9 units I would only be getting 480, almost 50% less.

Hate when I'm wrong. I like it when William is right, however.

From what I read, 5 connected squares provide the optimal balance, but the downside is you have a research facility with 4 inactive research squares or a half hearted research attempt. No doubt the AI is researching with all 9 so if you research with 5 your return is great but competitiveness drops. AI tech lead will be too large to breach with 4 or 5 square research. I don't really have enough experience to know if what I've said is true, it's just what I think based on my experience so far. If anyone regularly uses 4 or 5 squares for research successfully let me know.

After I've reached a level of tech to a large enough lead, I switch to 3 squares over 2-3 years. I think this is a good balance for tech maintenance. There is a lot of forethought that has to go into research. If you think you are the only player in the market, any tech beyond 100 is a waste of money that could have been better spent on profitable ventures. Of course if you let reach 100 and then switch to maintenance, you leave yourself open to an AI swooping in.

[azxcvbnm321]

In my last game, I was able to gain total dominance (I was the only one making the product) in around 10 products thanks to a huge tech lead. I was playing against 30 competitors with 4 cities. I found out that as the game develops, the only way to keep pace or maintain a tech lead is to have all 9 units researching one product. This is expensive, but I was making enough so that I was doing this for every finished product in the game. Now it's true that if you don't have expertise in a category, the AI can eventually overtake you in tech. But if you buy out a company that has a big tech lead over the 2nd place tech company, or have a decent lead yourself, then you effectively lock out your competition since the AI can only buy tech from other AI companies (I assume you already refuse to sell leading tech!). The CEO whose company you took over might start another company, but he will not have the funds to research long enough to catch up to you, and he will have to buy the 2nd best tech first.

You must pound the R&D, never ever take your foot off of the petal. At some point, your tech and quality plus advertising will be so high that no one will try to sell that product because they won't be able to meet your product overall rating without selling and producing for a loss! Congratulations, you've established a monopoly. This could take a lot of time and effort to pull off, but one by one you can slowly establish monopolies. It may not be possible to monopolize everything, especially livestock products and products where tech and quality aren't large factors in the overall rating, but you can do this with enough products that you are the only company making huge amounts of money while most competitors make almost nothing or operate continuously at a loss.

Unfortunately this will probably cause a recession as competitors close firms and since they are so inefficient, there's never a need for you to open as many firms to replace the ones your competitors have closed. The recession will last a few years, but the economy stabilized for me and was able to slowly grow (like 0.5% GDP growth). I ended the game because I updated the game to a new version and I'm starting over, this time with 5 cities and 30 competitors.


I always hire a COO nowadays and let him manage my retail operations because I don't have time to constantly adjust the prices. The COO is much worse than I am, but my time is better spent elsewhere, like finding new products to produce and maintaining a good supply line of resources.

You must build apartments in cities that have a shortage if you want that city to grow. Unfortunately, the game seems to compare quality of living between cities as a major factor in population growth. That means if a poor city like Lanzhou with bad living quality will continue to lose residents no matter how good the economy is, and how much housing supply you furnish. I have yet to try and build community buildings to raise the living quality, I will do that in this new game once the money is rolling in, but I suspect that the city with the lowest living quality will always lose residents. The good news is that your richest cities tend also to be the ones with the highest quality of living. They will grow as long as the housing supply remains positive. It takes a lot of housing to change the supply numbers, the largest apartment adds around +2 depending. It's not unusual for me to build 30-40 apartments in one city just to get that city to a positive housing supply number. The good thing is that apartments are a constant and easy source of income. Even in recessions they'll still provide a positive income as long as you didn't overbuild or build in a very far off place.

[WilliamMGary]

I like your management styled. I learned in CAPII to just let your COO run your retail stores. In Cap LAB I maintain control over the larger markets but in CAPII I put the COO in charge of all retail stores and ganged performance based on the profit of that business segment. My COO was pretty good, it freed me up to worry about logistics and other business improvement operations.