Demand Bar doubt

[Cassius]

Hi,

I'm playing the game and i didn't understand well how demand bars are working now. I don't know if it's an problem or change of behavoir. I did a rapid search, but i'm not very good at english, so i couldn't find anything related.

I build a farm and begin to produce eggs, frozen chicken and frozen lamb (1 rasing, 1 processing and 1 sale for each). I also build a supermarket to sell the products. Looking at the demand bar of the products at the farm, i see that the supply bar is full and the demand bar is low (20%). The utiilization bar of the purchasing unit of the supermarket was low, so i put two more selling unit (1 purchasing unit to 3 sellings units).

What i notice is even the demand bar is low, the farm couldn't suplly the puchasing and my purchasing unit begans to wait for more product to be avaliable at the farm to purchase. I think it is wrong, afterall, i need more product and the farm can't suplly it, so the demand bar was supposed to be high and suplly bar low and not the other way around.

Sorry for the bad english.

Tanks

[Esoteric Rogue]

I'm playing the game and i didn't understand well how demand bars are working now.

Sorry for late reply. This is an important point of discussion, and I'd like to respond for anybody who has the same question. I've long played this game, but only really thought about a better way to think of it recently.

See, this demand bar does not indicate demand per the classic Supply vs. Demand theory. It is confusing because that is what we normally talk about, but that is not what it is in the game.

In the theory, demand is practically intangible. Nobody can show you demand. However, sales are tangible, and sales figures are readily available. And that is the basis of what the game's "demand" bars are actually showing you. The movement of products through the supply chain (e.g. sales) is used to form the demand bar, rather than the theoretical sampling of all consumers to see whether they happen to want a widget.

I think this misconception is most obviously demonstrate right off the bat in any new game. When you start a new game, there is no demand for anything. There is no demand for eggs. There is no demand for beds. According to both common sense and the theory of supply and demand, that makes no sense. How the game works is that there is no demand for a bed until you sell a bed.

Another good example of the fact that it's not the classical demand concept is that every stage of your supply line tends to vary. If it was the academic "demand of beds for all potential consumers", the demand would be the same whether you were in the manufacturing unit, the factor selling unit, the retail purchasing unit, or the retail selling unit. It makes no sense that "demand of beds for all potential consumers" would vary depending on where you were standing at the moment.

Again, this is not demand from the point of view of textbook supply-vs-demand, which would be determined by theoretical consumer desires. Demand in the game is determined by product movement through the supply chain.

In conclusion, what helped me understand this representation of throughput started at the sales unit. If I sell a bed, demand will increase. If I don't sell a bed, demand will decrease. It's that simple: the reason why a bed was not sold is not considered by the game. In the game, if we don't sell a bed because we ran out of beds, demand will decrease. According to the the game demand is low, but according to theory demand would be high.

I hope I helped!

[EDIT to add an everyday example that this -- practical demand -- is actually okay! ...]

Any manager of a grocery store who is responsible for ordering supplies and pricing products is really not going to bother ever getting into a discussion on the regional supply and demand balance for every brand of salsa, paper towels, and every other commodity in his store. If you ask him "what is the demand of light bulbs" he is going to answer with "we sell a lot of those." That's what the game is showing you. High demand bar of the retail selling unit says "we sell a lot of those." That's the practical answer; in the real world few people ever do actual theoretical analysis.

[Purifier]

A good discussion topic

Here are my thoughts:

English is my second language so i might interpret the meaning of some words wrongly (excuses if such thing happens)

Every product in the game has a certain % of necessity. I dont know on what time base that is (day,month or year etc.) but to me that means how much of the pop in a city has a need for that product (ie: the demand for that product). So this means that the amount of demands are "fixed" to the number of pop in a city. The only variable part in the demand is where the pop buy the product.
And here i come to the part at the start of a game, or realy at the start of a newly build store or newly started sales unit of a product. Although there IS a demand for that product, there are a couple variables which decide wether the pop buy the product from your store or not. Known variables are pricing, tech and a very important one branding.
Your product quality can be "high", your price can be "low", but like in the real world when you start a new shop or product line.... people dont know it, and thus are not swarming the store right away after opening/starting. It takes time for your product(s) to be known and people want to buy it in your store. This time can be varied by taking the price down or invest heavily in advertising.
So to me this looks exactly like a basic supply vs demand theory (sorry for directly opposing your explanation GiB, it wasnt my intend when i started typing :p)

Between the stores and factories/farms (or factories and recource sites/farms), its even more simple. Purchasing unit in the store needs/wants/demands a product and the sales unit of the factory can or cant supply it (easily, medium or hard).

Again this is only my thoughts/theory.... The only ones that can realy tell us how it works are David and the Devs :p
But im interested in this

[Esoteric Rogue]

So to me this looks exactly like a basic supply vs demand theory (sorry for directly opposing your explanation GiB, it wasnt my intend when i started typing :p)

It's all good -- discussion is the best way to learn more than one knows. I can say that we are talking about two different things, and we are both right from different perspectives . I was not talking about whether or not people will buy something, which is what you discussed. I was talking about what makes the "demand bars" rise or fall, which is about throughput, and not customer desires. I must agree that we have no good clue (other than necessity index) about the customer's purchases in game.

Indeed, I think it is a misnomer to call a business unit's throughput indicators "supply" and "demand", it's misleading and causes confusion (such as this?). I would call them input and output. Output is not demand

[N.B. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throughput_%28business%29 ]

[Purifier]

Hi GiB,

Im confused about your posts now .

The wordt throughput doesnt have a direct translation to dutch (i found one translation that says: "throughput is the speed of which the total process generates money from sales". Beside that i used this as an explanation of the word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throughput_(business)

While the first "translation" does make a bit sense when talking about capitalism, i absoluty see no connection between both explanations and the "supply/demand" bars ingame.

You are talking about input/output of a products at a firm, but how can the output be higher as the input (ie: demand bar higher as supply), that is simply not possible (only by frauding )

The bars do show the supply/demand because (to me..) they follow the basic supply/demand rules:
The input/output of products is related to supply/demand though, but its not shown by those bars.

To me it looks like the bars follow these supply and demand rules:

The determinants of supply follow:

Production costs, how much a good costs to be produced (ingame, duh)
The technology used in production, and/or technological advances (ingame, tech lvl and product quality)
A good's own price (ingame, sales price)
Firms' expectations about future prices (build in the gameengine, not visible, as far as i know)
Number of suppliers (ingame, duh)

The determinants of demand follow:

Income (ingame, see wages)
Tastes and preferences (ingame, branding)
Prices of related goods and services (ingame, duh :p)
Consumers' expectations about future prices and incomes that can be checked (build in the gameengine, not visible, as far as i know)
Number of potential consumers (ingame, neccesity lvl combined with citizens amount in the cities)

As i said in my first post the variables that change the bars ingame, work as the supply/demand theory explains.

Beside this, i think we both forgot to answer Cassius question about the bars lol.

Cassius, with only the info you gave me i agree it looks strange, but i cant say for certain it is. I am missing some info to get to a conclusion.
Like what size is the farm, what lvls are all the units, how much time has passed since you placed the products in the supermarket.

Do you have a savegame i can take a look at ?

[Esoteric Rogue]

Beside this, i think we both forgot to answer Cassius question about the bars lol

No, actually all my information was to directly address his "confusion" regarding demand bars, and I hope he responds with more questions if I didn't help. If I'm wrong about what caused his misunderstanding, then all of this is off topic.

I must say I hate discussing this because my whole point is that X is not X. And even when we completely agree what X is, we might accidentally mistake one X it for the other X from time to time. I felt Cassius was confused by demand bars, which I used to be, despite my education. You, Purifier, are not confused by demand bars. So perhaps I can explain it to him, but not to you. I had to adjust my "textbook" definition of demand to fit the game's definition. If you're already using the definition that the game uses, there's no sense in me explain what's wrong about what you're thinking, because you're not thinking about it wrong. Right? I deleted an hour's worth of discussion because it detracts from the original subject and is not important, imo. Alas, that was my mistake in the first post. I should have said much less, but I always ramble.

Those "demand bars" do not show demand. They show output.

It appears to be demand, because if there is no demand there will be no output. But that is a poor definition, because, lack of demand is not the only thing that causes lack of output, so the demand bar is not a direct correlation at all.

And the bottom line is: "demand bars do not show demand, but they do indicate demand". Now, that's obviously going to be something complex to explain, and us getting technical about it... when we both understand it... is not going to be productive, I feel.

I was trying not to directly contradict you, because it's just a matter of definitions or perspectives. You have already have the right perspective. ***The following was edited. I could not prove my original example*** But, your claim that "there is no demand for new product because they don't know they exist" is no good for me. There is no demand because it's not precisely what I would call demand. In real life, there is a demand for personal teleportation devices, but the product does not exist. An easier argument, I guess, would be that local competitors are already selling them before I do. The lack of "demand" until I make a sale is one proof, for me, that it is not *my* definition of demand, even while you explain why it meets *your* definition of demand. That is very fine and good because, after all, it is *the game's* definition that matters. Believe me, since Hostess has stopped producing Twinkie's demand has risen. (American situation, sorry if you don't know it.) I'm sure we know that limiting supply to increase demand is the basis of "price gouging".

Regarding why output might be greater than input, I had typed more than three possibilities and explanations, but understanding how inputs and outputs are measured is barely important past the basics of the game, and I don't see a need to discuss it here. (I might posting something in another older thread tho, lol). I had no intention of explaining how the bars work, my only intention was offer Cassius another way of thinking of "demand bars", which help me. It was important, to me, to understand that "demand bars" do not directly show "regional consumer demand per product."

Maybe that will be a key point for Cassius, and perhaps others, too. Yes, I, too would like at least a screen shot from Cassius. Hope he's still around!

[Cassius]

Tnks both of you for your replies.

Esoteric, i'm aware of what you were saying about the meaning of the bars, but to clarify my understand of the functioning of the bars. There is two bars, the "supply bar" and the "demand bar" or "sales bar".

From the point of view of a retail store, when my purchasing unit buys a product (eggs for example), the supply bar appears as full and the demand bar or sales bar is empty (no product was sold yet).

As the game goes on, the sales bar goes up, but there is a limitation of supply, so, if my store has the capacty and can sale more than the purchasing unit can buy, the sales bar reaches the maximum and the supply bar begins to decrease. When this happen, i see that the sales unit begins to run out of product for a while because the purchasing unit can't supply the sales unit, either for the lack of the product or for the capacity limitation of the unit (the purchasing unit can't buy enough product for all the sales linked to it). I person has two aways to solve this equation e make both supply and sales bars on top:

1) We can make our store sells more products of that kind (this can be done by several ways, depending of the capacity bars of the units and avaliability of the product)

2) We can rise the product price, this also can lead to a full supply and sales bars.

This is my understand of the meaning of the bars.

My questions was:

For me, this behavior was the default for all types of buildings, if i create a farm to produce eggs, at the very begining, i have at the sales unit of the farm, a supply bar full and a sales bar empty. As the game goes on, the sales goes up and if the production can't supply the sales, the sales bars reaches the top and the supply bar begins to decrease and this can occurs for the same two reasons cited earlier (my sales unit do not have the capacity to sell all the product i produce or i doesn't produce enough product to supply the sales demand).

In this example what a see was a diferent behavior between the farm bars and retails bars (thats was my doubt), because i see the case that my farm didn't produce enough eggs but the supply bar was on top and the sales bar wasn't on top (i see my purchasing unit wating for eggs to be on the farm sales unit for some days, or lack of product on the farm, but the bars of the farm doesn't reflect that situation according to the supposed default behavior).

I was busy this days and can't play since the release, maybe this has been corrected, or the behavior is really diferent depending of the type of unit, thats was what i looking for to know when i post.

[Esoteric Rogue]

I was busy this days and can't play since the release, maybe this has been corrected, or the behavior is really diferent depending of the type of unit, thats was what i looking for to know when i post.

Well, without getting in to the specifics of the bars, let me say:

For retails, I usually have a 4 purchasing : 4 sales : (1 advertising)

For livestock, I usually have 5 livestock : 2 processing : 2 sales

The optimum is argued, since without exact quantities reported, it's hard to be certain.

I will try to video some eggs soon, but not a real test, just observational.

[Cassius]

I'm using the following setup:

I have a farm with 3 rising, 4 processing, 2 sales, 2 precessing for eggs and 2 for frozen chicken. That's the way i get fully supply my sales unit, so my limitation is the sales capacity of the sales unit and not the lack of the product, but you can do the test, using just one processing unit and you will see the lack of supply not get reflected on the supply bar.

For food i don't advertising (2% is too low for me), so my supermarket has 3 purchasing units, 6 sales units (the purchasing unit can have 2 sales units without getting full capacity).

For products that i need advertising unit, at the begining i use one of the sales unit to for it and when i get money, i build a warehouse to concentrate advertise (8 input units and 1 advertise unit).

[Esoteric Rogue]

I have a farm with 3 rising, 4 processing, 2 sales, 2 precessing for eggs and 2 for frozen chicken. That's the way i get fully supply my sales unit, so my limitation is the sales capacity of the sales unit and not the lack of the product, but you can do the test, using just one processing unit and you will see the lack of supply not get reflected on the supply bar.

For food i don't advertising (2% is too low for me), so my supermarket has 3 purchasing units, 6 sales units (the purchasing unit can have 2 sales units without getting full capacity).

I made a video. The first time my computer crashed (BSOD) and I lost the video, the second time the game crashed so I was cut short. So, I'm fully frustrated and no more testing right now! One point I didn't get to check out is how (if) things change with level 9 units. I was testing everything at level one first. And, I got distracted with building my first warehouse ever, hooray!

Thanks for the opportunity to re-evaluate 2:1 retail... boy I hate that!

I believe my commentary in the video doesn't make your point, but I'll get to that after this paragraph. Using no farm layout can I fully supply a sales unit. I didn't try 7:1:1 that was an oversight (Edit: added video of 711). but 6:2:1 did not, nor 5:2:2 nor your 3:4:2. You said 3:4:2 right? We can tell the sales are not at full capacity because the sales units spends more than one tick with zero blue stock/inventory boxes; they are wait for supplies and not at capacity. Those stock boxes are the only thing I need to look at really... the bars are less objective.

When products are moving quickly, specifically for my video that's while the stores (and market) are being initially stocked, the yellow supply bar of the sales unit does look like it's lying. The supply bar will be full at 100%, but we know ... we can see by the boxes, that the supply is lacking. Was that your point? That does eventually reach a balance where the supply bar settles around 50 or 70% however, which does indicate the lack of full supply. And, after I built warehouse it was again at 100% for a long while, but it did go back to 60% some time later. *shrug*

Is this what you mean?


I think the best point I can make right now is if you want to ensure what's going on with an SBU (individual unit), looking at the blue boxes will tell the story better than the bars.