Natural resource capacity

General Discussions about new beta versions of Capitalism Lab
kiev79
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Oct 11, 2014 1:50 pm

Natural resource capacity

Post by kiev79 »

Hi I just downloaded Capitalism Lab last week for the first time, having played Capitalism and Capitalism II for many-many years. The new game is a great effort to improve on a great game. However, at larger city sizes and numbers natural resource management becomes impossible and really disrupts the experience. It should be really easy to fix with adding more capacity to mines, perhaps, allowing players to pay to reset capacity to maximum, once mines run out? Otherwise, after about a decade or two my game devolves into constant pausing, building of new mines and resetting of industrial links. That really makes the experience unpleasant after a while and makes growing the company to gigantic levels impossible.
ceomoses
Level 2 user
Posts: 33
Joined: Sun Nov 17, 2013 10:37 pm

Re: Natural resource capacity

Post by ceomoses »

Glad to see you're playing again! There are a number of improvements in CapLab. One of which is the warehouse, which may help you with keep having to reset your links.

What you can do, is build a warehouse with 1 input, 1 storage, and 1 output. You point the input at your mine, and then you set all of your factories to purchase from the warehouse. Then when your mine runs out, you would build a new mine and point the warehouse input at the new mine. This saves you the hassle of going through all your factories and pointing them all at the new mine as they are already pointed at the warehouse.

The warehouse is also great with helping you manage and keep a steady flow of products going to all of your retail stores. We'll use cold pills as an example. What you do is build a warehouse with 1 input, 1 storage, and 1 output like we did with the mine. You point all of your retail stores to purchase from the warehouse. I like to set my factories to internal sale only so that competitors that want to purchase from me purchase through the warehouse also. Then, when your demand in the warehouse becomes consistently greater than the supply, you can create a 2nd input unit in the warehouse have it point to the same storage unit, build another factory and start producing more cold pills. You point the new input unit to your new factory. This way, you have 2 factories working together to produce supply for all your retail stores through the warehouse. If the storage unit has a lot of inventory and you're still messing with high demand in the warehouse, you can create a 2nd output unit to help offload your storage.

The same works for keeping a consistent supply of inputs to all of your factories as well, like plastic and electronic components.

Some people "hack" warehouses to centralize management of advertising. You can set up 8 inputs, each pointing at a different product, and put an advertising unit in the middle. In addition to making management of advertising easier, this will free up that extra space in your retail stores that are mainly used for advertising, and put another input or output unit in there.
WilliamMGary
Level 9 user
Posts: 1052
Joined: Mon Nov 12, 2012 8:00 pm

Re: Natural resource capacity

Post by WilliamMGary »

I've found it easier to use warehouses (maybe two inputs) to manage large operations. Have you tried this?
counting
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Re: Natural resource capacity

Post by counting »

Ya, currently using warehouse is the best solution.

Still, there's a point to increase certain natural resource's capacity. Like logging camp, with full range of all products, logging camps can run out in months. It's even annoying using warehouse to manage it. Or oil well, real world giant oil fields on average have hundreds to thousands million barrels in reserve. And although currently in game it can sustain the small demand of plastic and others, if we want to add energy and transportation section in, its capacity certainly needs to be increased. Chemical mines also run out pretty quickly usually just several years, with initial investment so huge, pure mining company need to have quite a high cash reserve (or enough leverage to borrow) to rebuild mines/camps/wells constantly. Gold/Silver mines also run out pretty quickly and not quite profitable.

Generally speaking, natural resources will need some balances when city simulation expansion is out.
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therealevan
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Posts: 178
Joined: Sun Jan 27, 2013 11:37 pm

Re: Natural resource capacity

Post by therealevan »

I've been saying it for years, but natural resources needs a overhaul. :)
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counting
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Re: Natural resource capacity

Post by counting »

With new advanced MOD, we could try to create a mod specifically for game balance. But it might take a lot of players to test its balance with various situations.
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