My business is failing what should I do?

[Camio]

Regarding Warehouses. So my farming and supermarket business is going OK. If I get all my farms up to 100 for example and they sell frozen chicken.

Does it make sense to then ship all the frozen chicken from all the different farms to warehouses, then the supermarkets purchase from the warehouses?

Shipping directly from farms to factories is just fine. You'll save on the freight (double shipping) and monthly cost of not having that warehouse just sitting there, serving no real purpose. You also save the codt of building the warehouse in the first place and setting it up.

I only use warehouses for ads.

[Camio]

Another question regarding my business is why are the Cost+Freight so different between the cigarettes and cigars?

They are both using the same Tobacco and the same Timber. Is the price difference in cost and freight simply just because cigars are bigger, sell at a higher price and taking into account the image, the cigars come in boxes?

That kinda awnsers it right there in a nutshell

Cigs packs are lighter and smaller than cigars boxes. Just like in real life, freight for cigs packs should be less than cigs boxes. Cigs carton would cost more freight than cigs packs.

[counting]

Another question regarding my business is why are the Cost+Freight so different between the cigarettes and cigars?

They are both using the same Tobacco and the same Timber. Is the price difference in cost and freight simply just because cigars are bigger, sell at a higher price and taking into account the image, the cigars come in boxes?

That kinda awnsers it right there in a nutshell

Cigs packs are lighter and smaller than cigars boxes. Just like in real life, freight for cigs packs should be less than cigs boxes. Cigs carton would cost more freight than cigs packs.

Yep, the absolute values of the base cost and freight cost of the goods are not important, but their ratio. Put them at the price equal to their material cost(exclude freight), and see which one has a higher base-cost-to-freight ratio (most of the time retail revenue matters more compare to few percentage of freight cost). The freight cost has fixed value per unit per distance determine by goods type. This is the wiki to freight cost analysis (it's done with an early version, but mostly still true).

http://capitalismlab.wikia.com/wiki/Fre ... e_Analysis

[counting]

Regarding Warehouses. So my farming and supermarket business is going OK. If I get all my farms up to 100 for example and they sell frozen chicken.

Does it make sense to then ship all the frozen chicken from all the different farms to warehouses, then the supermarkets purchase from the warehouses?

Shipping directly from farms to factories is just fine. You'll save on the freight (double shipping) and monthly cost of not having that warehouse just sitting there, serving no real purpose. You also save the codt of building the warehouse in the first place and setting it up.

I only use warehouses for ads.

Actually it depends on many factors, like number of farms, number of supermarkets selling, number of cities and customers, wage rate difference between cities, demand quantity (affected by rating and price), and most important of all locations between each others.

For a situation where there are many cities, you would need lots of farms. Since average population is 2 million, monopoly in 7 cities generate about 4 level 9 dedicated frozen chicken large farms worth of demand at average 30+ rating. And if you place all large farms in a super low wage city to cut overhead and salaries, it make sense to use a centralized warehouse near those farms to delegate the demand of 7 cities and many supermarkets from 4 large farms, otherwise it will be difficult flipping through farms and sometimes required more farms than needed.

However, if you choose to spread out your farms in different cities, and provide frozen chicken locally, than you better stick to direct farms to supermarkets design, unless there are cities with small population and local farms are excessive. The freight cost depend heavily on distance between cities, so no clear cut to which is better. Usually if you can supply 2 cities with just 1 large farm than 2 medium farms, you don't need a warehouse. However if you need 3 medium farms to supply 2 cities, and 2 large farms produce excessive supply, use a warehouse to balance out the supply of 3 medium farms is preferable (for frozen chickens, probably local farms are still better, since freight cost is quite heavy for frozen chicken across different continent cities, also the rating mostly depend on price and quality)

There is no clear way to tell which method is better, but using a warehouse generally keep things run smoothly and not affecting the profit too much, sometimes even increase profit margin due to smooth supply and reduce number of farms required. Generally speaking, warehouse make management much easier (reduce micro management a lot), since you only need to choose from warehouse instead of multiple farms, also you don't need to sacrifice space for inventory units in farms to smooth fluctuation of demand due to economic cycle.

P.S. I am curious though, which would perform better with the same setting, centralized frozen chicken farms with warehouse, or local farms without warehouse. Perhaps we should run experiments to figure it out.

[jondonnis]

Now using the Warehouse Showroom strategy to make the failing retail stores make a profit. Working nicely

[counting]

Now using the Warehouse Showroom strategy to make the failing retail stores make a profit. Working nicely

Remember one firm making profit doesn't mean your over-all profit margin increases. You just shift expenses from store to "showroom", nothing is changed (actually cost a little more since warehouse has it's own overhead and salary expenses). And sometimes place advertisement to all media firms are not ideal in the long run. Over time new firms will continued to be built by AIs. When there are more than 1 firm of the same type, usually you'll need to "rotate" through different media firm if you want to be cost efficient with advertisement expense (Or if you are rich enough in the very late game, just buy out all media firms and max-out advertisement budget, since you are paying yourself)

[counting]

This is a map seed I generated that has clusters of 3 cities near China, 2 cities in USA, and other 2 far away cities in New Zealand and South Africa. Should be quite good for testing whether distributed local farms, or centralized farms/warehouse, or regional sharing farms worked better for frozen chicken. Only use farms for frozen chicken and retail stores, no other firms or HQ to affect the experiment result. I'll do a few testing games myself later.

Frozen chicken cities.jpg (158.86 KiB) Viewed 1692 times

[jondonnis]

I would do more testing like this myself but still don't understand the mechanics enough.

Was struggling with the on going business because it's now 2071. Lots of people have high R&D but I'm holding my own. Thought about going into the jewellery business but the R&D was massive that someone owned and wouldn't sell. I attempted to make him go bankrupt or ruin the business by buying his silver and gold and storing it. Then tried to buy some of his jewellery and relabel it that was a stupid idea. The buying up the silver somewhat worked as he ended up buying it back off me after I took it off internal sale. I gave up the fight.

A while back bought up a lot of shares where there was a recession. Borrowed $9billion from the bank to do so. Slowly paying it back but was down to $200million. Then someone wanted to buy some shares back which gave me just over $1billion. The warehouse showrooms seem OK but thought about what was said to my post, that if I own the media firms I'm paying myself for the warehouse showrooms.

So after a bit of messing around with mines forcing premium rates and gaining a bit more money I've been going round buying up the media firms. Close to making $1billion profit a year now up from the $400million.

As a new release is out I might considering retiring soon and start all over again.

[counting]

Pure jewelry business isn't that great, especially when it has competitors. Most of it's profit comes from the gold and silver ores themselves, which in term directly affected by mine setup cost. The thing with late game is that AI able to survive that long usually can afford to lose profit and maintain it's market share. Players usually can not do and will not do.

If you are thinking about businesses like fighting a war. Any confrontation with opponents always end up cost something. Direct price war cost you profit. Buy out their upstream source cos purchasing expenses, unless you can turn their resource to your own use and sell them at profit. (relabeling finished good in late game usually not easy, since troll stamp works better when there are still empty market to sell relabel products). The real issue is which tactics are most cost effective. Will you try to hit them directly, or indirectly? Or will you settle with a draw in small market share and marginal profit? Or just fight in another "battleground"? Fight in capital market is also a good strategy since sometimes you can gain more with borrowed capital.

[counting]

Personally I don't bother with the absolute amount of profit my corporation makes. It varies with inflation setting, number of cities, local competent, etc. I've done countless games to dominate every single product everywhere, it's actually not that "FUN" when there's nothing else left to do. I usually come up with experimental settings and personal rules to let things more interesting and somewhat "realistic". A lot of time I even deliberately left other AIs to survive within their own "specialty market", and observe how they survive and do business. I enjoy watching them happily doing their own businesses parallel with mine. I'll even help a weaker one against a bigger one and see how they deal with AI-to-AI competition. I must say AIs are suicidal and very single minded by human standard, and usually do things the hard way. However from time to time AI can still surprise you.

One of my personal experience is, one AI had a very high tendency to buy back its own stock, and originally has a tech focus strategy, so it quickly buy back all it's stock and own 100% of it. After it researched a bunch of techs and trade all kinds of tech over decades, it suddenly changed its focus to diversity strategy, and started manufacturing products and boomed like crazy. One by one took away most market I left for other weak AIs. It became such a monster, it almost reached 1/3 of the total market (I controlled over half, and the rest is shared by all other poor weak AIs).

It bothered me so much, I spent more than a hundred years to take it down, using all the tactics and strategies I know. And it's really really hard. I used tech jump strategies, like 3 R&D centers 9-units connected 10 years project with the same product, several years finishing date apart to deal with it's tech lead product, maintaining product competitive and tech jump at the same time. I used warehouse hijack tactic to cut off it's upstream supply and cut down it's market profit (in the cost of mine). I used freebie products with $0.01 price to nuke its most profitable products. I used warehouse wholesalers tactics to trick other weak AIs to join my fight and sell my products with all our combined retail stores numbers against it. I bought up all possible media firms and spam new ones so it has to put most advertisement spending through my media. And finally I was able to turn it's profit into negative and exhaust its cash, and it had to issue new stock, so I can buy its stock and control 75% of it. It's a real tough fight, but a lot of fun.

The most funny thing in the end, is that once I was able to buy it out, I have to help it grew back up again and sustain itself, otherwise there is no point controlling a doomed corporation. I had to trace back what I have done, and slowly gave back selective area I intended for it. It's one thing to fight a war, and another to rebuild, especially when it's a former enemy. It didn't even have the backbone to maintain monopoly in empty market I left out for it anymore (it closed down a lot of firms at the end of our fight to gain some capital), and other weaker AIs quickly filled them in.

The most regrettable thing is that another weak AI also owned 100% of its stock, but wasn't "lucky" enough to be a threat (since it only manufactured one class of products in the competition area), became collateral damage caught in our crossfire, and went bankrupt. I was sad not able to save it. I think we need reverse strategies not to defeat AIs, but help them without direct capital inject through issuing stock to parent company. It's a lot harder than you think. Even buying AI's products to sell sometimes doesn't help, when it lowers the price at suicidal level. I would like an flag or a signal to AI that it would understand I come in peace, and baring good will (for now )