INCINTIVES FOR UNPROFETABLE SECTORES

Ideas how the game could be improved and suggestions for subsequent versions of the game. (this is just a space for ideas! We can't guarantee suggestions will be implemented!)

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Guest

Post by Guest » 18.07.2010, 13:23

No matter how you look at it, there is no point in having a grocery.

Guest

Post by Guest » 18.07.2010, 14:11

There is, fruits and chickens can make OK profits in a grocery. :)

Guest

Post by Guest » 18.07.2010, 14:11

Interesting topic.

I produce pullovers on realm 1. Why? I want to be the best at one industry. Leather jackets would make me much more money but that isn't the point.

Grocery stores have one good profitable item: chickens. Chickens can make great profit in a large Grocery store when time is used to build the market. I remember people buying chickens for 40 + 1Q then retailing them for 100 +1.5Q each. Seeing grocery stores allow huge amounts of products that give a good solid profit.

I know people who make toothpaste and perfume. Both make a good solid profit. Not as much as some other industries but still good.

TV do make a great profit if you have suppliers. I don't see people bother to use the market that make TVs as it is a small industry that works closely together.

Guest

Post by Guest » 18.07.2010, 14:14

Azer Productions wrote:Grocery stores have one good profitable item: chickens. Chickens can make great profit in a large Grocery store when time is used to build the market. I remember people buying chickens for 40 + 1Q then retailing them for 100 +1.5Q each. Seeing grocery stores allow huge amounts of products that give a good solid profit.
I think fruits make quite good profits (especially in realm 2)... :wink:

They retail for just over market price which is quite good for retailing food. :D

Guest

Post by Guest » 18.07.2010, 16:46

sergiurocks506 wrote: I think fruits make quite good profits (especially in realm 2)... :wink:

They retail for just over market price which is quite good for retailing food. :D
Yeah but you'd need a few large grocery stores to make a decent profit out of fruit since you'd only be making 2-5 caps on every unit.

Guest

Post by Guest » 19.07.2010, 16:55

Euanind wrote:
sergiurocks506 wrote: I think fruits make quite good profits (especially in realm 2)... :wink:

They retail for just over market price which is quite good for retailing food. :D
Yeah but you'd need a few large grocery stores to make a decent profit out of fruit since you'd only be making 2-5 caps on every unit.
This is exactly what I am saying, giving different retail stores bigger chance to make profit... If you say fruit makes 2-3 caps for example , that's very little profit. but if the store have a bigger holding capacity, that will make double or trible the sales, then fruits are ok in profit. and the same for other retails EXPAND THERE HOLDING CAPACITY TO MAKE THEM EARN....
I started up with grocerys and drug stores, later i had to sell them and ended up with furniture stores.......

Guest

Post by Guest » 20.07.2010, 09:03

I think the programming people should make it take a lot less time to expand a grocery store than it does any other store. :wink: That would be a good solution.

Guest

Post by Guest » 30.07.2010, 08:19

NYK wrote:... the sausage guy in saudi comes to mind however he's happy and i've never seen them complain about the profits once.
I suppose that's me, even though I'm not a guy.
Yes, I sell sausages and minced meat to the R2 Kapi-Arabs. It's not great profit at all. Honestly, if my latest calc is right, sausages make me lose money. But I do it for fun. My leather jacket business (in the arabic world) covers all losses. Just need to keep an extreme balance of production and retail.

But I agree that the current settings make people want to go mainstream and not do crazy things like myself. But then again, it's a choice. If someone wants to explore so called less profitable products then they're entitled to.

Guest

Post by Guest » 30.07.2010, 16:28

If someone wants a challange, he should do something like cars :)
many parts, slow expension, unprofitable in the beginning...
That's interesting :wink:

Guest

ils

Post by Guest » 31.07.2010, 02:39

r u suggesting making, or selling cars. If your on about selling them , then i just buy auto motives and sell them in my stores for same products just to keep the trading of vechiels going.

Guest

Post by Guest » 31.07.2010, 13:14

producing... you'll need kazillion of sub products.

Guest

Post by Guest » 03.08.2010, 10:47

I've got into producing and retailing cars. Once you've got the 20+ stores required, it's amazingly profitable. :)

Back on topic though, I started out with fruits and plantations, and slowly moved, over time, to cars, via a few disaster areas.

I think it's working out well... Since new players can't afford to get straight into the more advanced production opportunities, starting with fruits and cosmetics, etc. is a great starting point.
Not only does it give the chance to get some caps behind you, it gives you foundations towards leaning into more advanced options later.


Can anyone make cars without seeds for their tyres? or for their cotton/textiles? Can anyone make the steel without the chemicals that 'were once used for toothpaste' ;)

half the buildings I have, and use for my cars, were once used for strawberries and then computers...

If the grocery industry stopped, something else small and light would have to replace it... without the low-level industries, new players could never grow to major standards in a thousand lifetimes... without, of course, surviving through constant contracts with major league players, and relying on the unstable overpriced market.

I don't provide constant goods on the market, nor do I wish to provide constant contracts with other players. I wish to produce my goods myself, and sell them in store myself. I'm proving that's easy... but it was only easy BECAUSE I was able to start off making money from cheaper, smaller industries.... namely the grocery...

If you're doing all your trading on the market, of course the profit of power selling is more than just about everything else... People are selling it for 10 fold profit, just because there's nothing the needy can do without it.
If everyone grabbed their own power plants, the power profit margin would plummet, because there wouldn't be such a need for it.
The same applies to water, and other raw resources.

This, in turn, affects the price margins of basically every other product on the market... If you're buying power at 10x its value, that's going to push the secondary resource you make into an overprice... which means nobody is keen on buying it because in turn, they can't profit.

I mean just look at the prices. Water for 0,25? it costs me 0,1 to make.
Power at 0,26? costs me 0,3 and seeds for 0,26... again costs me 0,3...

That puts water profit at 25 fold... but then EVERYTHING made with that water, increases in price.
It just so happens that many grocery products require seeds, power AND water to complete... that means buying from the market to make those products, would turn your pocket inside out.


If you read to the bottom of this lecture, you're extremely patient...

Guest

Post by Guest » 04.08.2010, 03:54

To be honest, i've thought a little bit about the Kapilands economy over a period of time, and the problem really has nothing to do with the rate of sales, it has to do with the caps on supply and demand.

Lets take wardrobes for example, when producing wardrobes, i can make a joinery and a furniture store, then buy wood and steel from NPC and sell the wardrobes in my stores for a good profit. This is literally 50-75% of all large companies. Supply and demand would dictate that the price of wood and steel would skyrocket, because there is much much much more being used than being produced. This would lower the amount of wardrobes made, because it would no longer be so profitable.

Wardrobes is the exception industry, which is why it's popular. As far as retail is concerned, everything in Kapilands relies on a system where the higher the adverage price, the higher the price will go in a city for retail. This system is wrong (economically), because it allows a LARGER supply to make the price grow faster, if everyone works together to raise the price.

A long time ago, i was very dominate in r1 gas in France. To be more exact, i had ~80% of the daily sales. Boy, did i ever move the price. In 3 months of that, i had the price up 30-40, then i took a month off of the game. The prices dropped like a stone. In just a little while the prices were right back up when i came back. Higher supply made prices go higher, it makes no sense.

The only way to really balance this game is to allow supply and demand to work it's way into the system. First of all, the NPC price has to be directly related to the amount of sales the NPC has. If NPC has a lot of sales for some reason, the price should go up over time. This would make those industries grow like a weed, until someone steps into the shoes to fill the industries (as the prices of power hits .75, don't you think people would produce?).

After you let all the supplies go their own way, then you have to set a linear curve where price goes up in relation to the lack of met demand. In other words, in Germany R2 right now, there is a demand for 820m coffee powder. The supply is 1. The price should be going up by leaps and bounds, until the supply gets closer to the demand. Since the price is only 16.74 right now, it's not worth doing. What if the demand caused the price to go up to 200? 300? 5000? Gosh, i'd make it :).

The next step would be to reduce the amount of supply needed to fill demand on just about every product. You want demand to be filled sometimes, because you want retailers to hurt when they are selling the wrong thing.

The next step would be to make every building in each category (ie. farm, factory, retail) expand at the same rate. I don't even care what the rate is, but it has to be the same. TVs are profitable, as mentioned in this thread. The reason TVs don't work is because e-facts take double expansion times. You cannot keep up with your own demand from your stores because your factories are too busy expanding.

The last step would be to allow each building to be switched to a different building in it's type. Ie. a platation could be switched to a cattle-breeding, or a factory could be changed to an efactory, which could be changed to a textile factory or a power plant. Infact, everything could be allowed to switch to anything, or maybe seperate production and retail. This would allow companies to MOVE their business based on the market. Lets be honest, no one wants to expand for ANOTHER year because the market changed, only to find out that it changed again. This would allow business to diversify across the game and populate each sector. This should take a small amount of time and cost a decent amount of money.

Think about this. Imagine how much more fun this game would be if you could change? What if you had to change to survive? What if you wouldn't be allowed to just play the same game plan the entire time you play? Wardrobes shouldn't be in style like they are. A player should be affected by a growing economy. Players being affected = players thinking = more fun = more subscriptions = more purchased coins.

Yes, those are my 2(00000) cents :).

APCE

Guest

Post by Guest » 04.08.2010, 04:27

APCE

One of the best pieces I have read on this subject. Some very good points. Switching within industries is a great idea. And I thought the whole idea was to have a "true" supply/demand game. I don't know if having every building cost the same in time-to-build makes sense, but if you could switch factory types, or farm types, that would certainly help things tremendously.

I also like an earlier idea of having demand changed in different economic zones, but I have to think about it more. It does "feel" right, however.

An economic game that is not truly dynamic is a game that needs work. I have only played for a bit over a year, so I am still figuring all these things out myself. I have made myself a "contest" company. And that has worked well for me. But it also seems to defeat the aim of the game.

Guest

Post by Guest » 04.08.2010, 04:29

The only reason i suggest to make expansion times equal is that expansion times are what KILL certain industries. Why would anyone make TVs for profit if it takes 2 years to get a good building size? It's not logical. Also, if you could switch from a factory to an efactory, then you could just bypass the expansion speed by building a factory and switching it.

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