Quick Start Guide for Kapilands Players

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Quick Start Guide for Kapilands Players

Post by Guest » Sat Apr 05, 2008 6:46 pm

This is intended to be a reference for Kapilands players who are getting started in Kapi Regnum. The two games are very similar in most things, so it seemed a good idea to try to list those areas where the game mechanics work differently. Many people know that I came to this game from Kapilands and I have been asked about the differences many times, so finally I took the time to try to write them down.

Please add comments and suggestions on things I have missed or mis-stated, so that this can become a good document rather than just one person’s opinion.

1. No Red/Yellow/Green countries. This makes things a bit simpler, and helps new players avoid mistakes when placing buildings.

2. Research is slower. In Kapilands, if you have a 3000m research building in red and want to research from Q30 to Q31, it takes 80 hours. In Kapi Regnum it takes 100 hours.

3. Advertising erodes. The amount varies based on the amount of ad points you have in the building, and it also seems to contain a random factor. The minimum erosion is around 8-12 points per day, and the maximum erosion (for a building with 40000 ad points) is around 50-80 points per day. Note that I have not tested this for several months, so there is some change they have changed the formulas a bit.

4. Supply/Demand ratios are important. In Kapilands, the supply ratio doesn’t have much impact on selling time until supply approaches 100% of demand. This only happens in a few items like diamond rings. For everything else, the supply ratio does not noticeably impact selling times. This is not the case in Kapi Regnum. In Kapi Regnum, there is a big increase in selling time for a good with 40% supply ratio vs. something lower like 15%. Perhaps the best example of this is chairs vs. shelves, which are two very similar goods that use exactly the same raw materials. When Kapi Regnum first started, chairs were more profitable than shelves. Naturally more people started making chairs than shelves, and the supply ratio for chairs rose to where it is now usually the highest of any good in the game. This completely changed the profitability, and shelves are now much more profitable than chairs. Edit 4/7 to note that per Wrdoff sales of shelves did recently surpass chairs for a day

5. More even profitability across goods. In Kapi Regnum, the programmers made an effort to better balance profitability across different goods, and it definitely made an impact. You don’t see one product like wardrobes that is made by 2/3 of all the top players. This is not to say that all goods are evenly profitable, but there are now a lot more solid options.

6. Employee costs vary by building and are higher. Instead of employee costs varying based on red/yellow/green, they vary based on the type of building. Costs range from $2000 to $10000 each.

7. Employees need housing. Before hiring employees, you must build housing for them. This is not a big expense, but it can catch you off guard if you are unable to staff up a newly expanded building.

8. No employees in sold buildings. You must fire all employees before selling a building.

9. Maximum awareness is 87%. There is no way to reach 100% awareness in market stalls. You reach 87% awareness at 40000 ad points. As far as I can tell, having 87% awareness in Kapi Regnum provides the same impact as having 100% awareness in Kapilands.

10. No bank or stock market. These features were deleted, perhaps because of low usage in Kapilands along with long-ago history of market manipulation.

11. Commission on selling buildings and research via market. Unlike Kapilands, you have to put up a commission amount when listing buildings or research on the market. The commission is 10% on research. Edit 4/7 Per racingtiger, the commission on selling buildings is around 3%.

12. Transport costs. There are transport costs on all sales by contract, unlike Kapilands where transport is free if you sell to someone headquartered in the same country. Edit 8/19 This changed with the introduction of guilds a couple months ago. Transport is free if both players are in the same guild.

13. Addition of Live Chat feature


Edited 4/7 to update commission on selling buildings from racingtigger
Edited 4/7 with additional info on chairs vs. shelves from Wrdoff
Edited 8/19 with impact of guilds on transport cost
Last edited by Guest on Tue Aug 19, 2008 4:27 pm, edited 5 times in total.

Guest

Post by Guest » Sat Apr 05, 2008 7:12 pm

Fantastic! :D

Btw, today's Supply/Demand of chairs is less than shelves, and is the first time in the English version of Kapi-Regnum.

When it compares to wardrobes in Kapilands, I think it is beer that the most profitable product in Regnum since in the allod of top 10, at least 7 cities produce beer :) Fish, dried meat is also profitable, too.


Top 10(S/D) popular product
product demand supply S/D
silk 290,100 76,514 26.38%
shelves 2,528,376 663,427 26.24%
chairs 2,885,916 653,357 22.64%
dried meat 3,582,046 767,035 21.41%
herbs 9,721,687 1,692,659 17.41%
grain 10,232,056 1,646,633 16.09%
casks 1,277,525 192,366 15.06%
beer 46,869,680 5,728,243 12.22%
quills 1,782,581 195,378 10.96%
fish 11,935,363 1,165,629 9.77%

You have to notice that "popular" products doesn't definitely mean it is profitable. It just have the chances to be profitable things.
Last edited by Guest on Sat Apr 05, 2008 7:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Guest

Post by Guest » Sat Apr 05, 2008 7:34 pm

An important feature:

Beer is much more profitable in Kapi-Regnum than in Kapilands. Apparently, citizens are crazy for beer in the medieval times.

( ̄▽ ̄#)﹏﹏

Guest

Post by Guest » Sat Apr 05, 2008 7:52 pm

wrdoff wrote:Fantastic! :D

Btw, today's Supply/Demand of chairs is less than shelves, and is the first time in the English version of Kapi-Regnum.

When it compares to wardrobes in Kapilands, I think it is beer that the most profitable product in Regnum since in the allod of top 10, at least 7 cities produce beer :) Fish, dried meat is also profitable, too.
Thanks. Yes, after I wrote this I did notice that chair sales were extremely low today. Guessing we will see a spike up above 1 mio of them tomorrow...

Also agree that beer is the most dominant product here, but as you mention there are some other good options. In Kapilands the options seem few and far between.

Guest

Post by Guest » Sat Apr 05, 2008 8:48 pm

miauwally wrote:Apparently, citizens are crazy for beer in the medieval times.
They were ;)

In the Middle Ages, Beer was one of very few sources for Protein, especially among the poor .. It was also quite a necessity as water typically came straight from the river and was usually very murky.

It certainly seems to have been reflected as such here in Regnum.


Otherwise though - Great Work, CiK

Guest

Re: Quick Start Guide for Kapilands Players

Post by Guest » Sun Apr 06, 2008 6:54 am

Cash is Kingdom wrote:11. Commission on selling buildings and research via market. Unlike Kapilands, you have to put up a commission amount when listing buildings or research on the market. The commission is 10% on research. I think it is the same on buildings, but it has been a while since I listed one so not 100% sure.[/b]
The commission on selling a building is less than 10%...I put a building on the market a few days ago, and I think it was about 3% that was charged.

Guest

Post by Guest » Sun Apr 06, 2008 7:44 am

Therian wrote:
miauwally wrote:Apparently, citizens are crazy for beer in the medieval times.
They were ;)

In the Middle Ages, Beer was one of very few sources for Protein, especially among the poor .. It was also quite a necessity as water typically came straight from the river and was usually very murky.

It certainly seems to have been reflected as such here in Regnum.


Otherwise though - Great Work, CiK
And beer was a lot cheaper to produce than wine. As for the popularity of beer among the poor, you can go as far back as Ancient Egypt to see the popularity of beer, as it was often part of the evening meal for the workers who were toiling away on the tombs and later the pyramids of the pharoahs. The beer was unstrained/filtered, so had a lot of muck on the top (what we now consider the head of a well-poured glass), so the Egyptians would use a straw to drink their beer from the bowls they were served in. Also, the beer was considered safer to drink than the water that came out of the Nile.

Guest

Re: Quick Start Guide for Kapilands Players

Post by Guest » Mon Apr 07, 2008 2:31 am

Cash is Kingdom wrote:4. Supply/Demand ratios are important. In Kapilands, the supply ratio doesn’t have much impact on selling time until supply approaches 100% of demand. This only happens in a few items like diamond rings. For everything else, the supply ratio does not noticeably impact selling times. This is not the case in Kapi Regnum. In Kapi Regnum, there is a big increase in selling time for a good with 40% supply ratio vs. something lower like 15%. Perhaps the best example of this is chairs vs. shelves, which are two very similar goods that use exactly the same raw materials. When Kapi Regnum first started, chairs were more profitable than shelves. Naturally more people started making chairs than shelves, and the supply ratio for chairs rose to where it is now usually the highest of any good in the game. This completely changed the profitability, and shelves are now much more profitable than chairs.
Interesting. I haven't been watching that closely, so are you sure that swing is based on supply / demand and not simply a result of the big shakeup that happened a month or two ago?

The reason I ask is that supply / demand only changes with any significance when people shift products. Simply from growing, demand grows as well so the ratio is for the most part rather fixed. And I think chairs have always been more produced than shelves, so I'm not yet convinced that's the primary factor.

Guest

Re: Quick Start Guide for Kapilands Players

Post by Guest » Mon Apr 07, 2008 10:23 pm

Knolls wrote:Interesting. I haven't been watching that closely, so are you sure that swing is based on supply / demand and not simply a result of the big shakeup that happened a month or two ago?

The reason I ask is that supply / demand only changes with any significance when people shift products. Simply from growing, demand grows as well so the ratio is for the most part rather fixed. And I think chairs have always been more produced than shelves, so I'm not yet convinced that's the primary factor.
Yes, in the grand scheme of things there should be a fairly stable supply/demand ratio for a given product. And indeed, on the demand side it is quite predictable. However, on the supply side there is a surprising amount of variance from day to day.

Here are some stats on chair supply over a 7-day period. It is from a few weeks ago since I am at work at the moment and so only have older versions of my spreadsheets, but you could pull updated info from marketwriter to see that this isn't a wildly unusual set of days. As you can see, daily swings of 20%+ are common.

3/10 quantity 912,183
3/11 quantity 755,313
3/12 quantity 1,277,761
3/13 quantity 1,003,645
3/14 quantity 651,801
3/15 quantity 1,492,260
3/16 quantity 989,017

The shakeup a month ago did create a significant one-time impact, but I am fairly sure that supply/demand changes also have a significant impact on pricing. The reason is that I check pricing in market stalls every day in order to maintain a constant rate of sales/hour, so I constantly see the impact of these daily swings.

In the beginning, I used the same market pricing process as in Kapilands, and the results made no sense. It was not unusual to see a situation where in going from day 1 to day 2 average price would rise, average quality would decrease, and yet selling time at a given price would increase. It only made sense once I factored in the change in supply percentage between day 1 and day 2. (By the way, the core of that pricing model is based on a certain wonderful post by Knolls on Kapilands :D ).

On your last point, yes there have always been more chairs produced than shelves. However, since no one could make either until hitting bourgeois, in the very early going the supply ratio for both was close to 0. This is the time frame when I did my original analysis that chairs were better than shelves. I'm not sure when exactly it changed, but it hit me in the face in January, when chairs took off and hit 40% while shelves were hanging out at 10-15%.

Guest

Post by Guest » Tue Apr 08, 2008 6:33 am

Excellent study!

That is very interesting, that sufficient people piling on a product will change the results. I don't think it's enough to change the fact that there are tiers of products, and that the best will (chairs, shelves, beer) will always be above the second tier (pears, wine), which is above the really unprofitable products (water, milk). But if it means that two things in the same tier can pass each other, maybe it's a good idea not to woo people to your industry.

(By the way, beer is great. Everybody go make beer.)

I would like to run with this at some point, but I've been busy lately. And I'm occupied with a current theory on choosing among competing product lines based on expansion time.

Guest

Post by Guest » Tue Apr 08, 2008 5:08 pm

Knolls wrote: That is very interesting, that sufficient people piling on a product will change the results.
My personal belief is that it was a very deliberate change by the programmers. There were comments made when this game first started that they wanted a broader selection of "top tier" products than existed in Kapilands, and tinkering with the NPC selling formulas this way is a step in that direction. As a side benefit, it also makes the game behave more like real life, where a massive increase in supply certainly depresses profitability. The way the math works in Kapilands that more people in a product makes the product more profitable has always felt rather odd.

Guest

Post by Guest » Tue Apr 08, 2008 9:13 pm

Oh it's definitely a deliberate change, and a good one at that.

Now here's another consideration to ponder: if getting more people into your product increases the supply vs demand, but lowers the average quality, how does that balance out? (The answer of course would depend on how much of a move in each direction.) Because personally I wouldn't mind if a bunch of folks came in and started selling q0 fish for a very high price. ;)

Guest

Post by Guest » Wed Apr 09, 2008 8:26 am

Quick understanding of S/D:

S/D Price Q
10% 250.00 5.00 Supposed that you can sell something at about "250"(in the same market, the same time)
11% 250.00 5.00 For this case, you can sell only 249 or less(lower than 250)
30% 265.00 5.00 The prices rises. However, the S/D increases very much, you can sell it at about 235.
30% 250.00 5.00 You can sell only 230 or less, I think.

Guest

Post by Guest » Wed Apr 09, 2008 7:44 pm

OT, but there's little protein in beer. It was good for people to drink it primarily because the water wasn't safe.

Guest

Post by Guest » Wed Apr 09, 2008 10:51 pm

The Beer back then had much more protein, It was brewed diffrently, no chemicals like most major brewers of today. The beer was left to naturally ferment and all, like the small micro breweries scattered around the world, a few in England, Ireland and USA, where it is not mass produced but more attention to taste, diffrent years can taste diffrent (like vintage wine).

Cheers for the advice Cash, it could also help if you going the other way, from Kapi-Regnum to Kalilands.

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