Incompetent COO media firm management

[counting]

I was testing my 1 product Loca-Cola company with an annul profit of 300m and getting bored, so I bought up all the available media firms tv/radio/news in 7 cities. After fine tuned each one of them with a health 100m+ annual profit, I got tired of micro managing these medias every month, so I decided to hire a COO with roughly the same salary expense about 110m, thinking she can act like my dedicated media sub-sections without making much lost, and my company's profit can reflect only my cola profit. But after I assigned every media firm for her to manage, she became the most incompetent COO I ever seen. My company went from 400m annual profit to negative profit in just months, which means my COO make more than 400m lost from my 20 media firms. I tried to change her tendency toward max profit, max market share, or balanced, without any effect at all.

I wonder what the hell is going on with COO's AI regarding media firm management? (Her expertise should not be a problem, she has every aspect 80+ and a lot of them to 100 max). I remember they used to do an OK job in earlier version like 2.3.09 (I haven't meddle with heavy media focus for a while), but they are just plain stupid at current version, like setting the CPM to outrageously high so no AI company use my media, not even local use. Or set the content budget to max even when it's already 60+ quality. Really really incompetent COO media management.

[David]

Could you provide us with you save game for our examination of the COO's AI behavior on media firms?

And it will be helpful if you could provide another save game prior to your assignment of the AI to run your media firms where they were profitable, for comparison purposes.

[counting]

Right now I only had the afterward save file, I'll try to reproduce the same result in another save game in the new patch version.

[counting]

Sorry for the delay, I've been busy till yesterday. And here is a recreation of this problem. 3 save files before and after, and human manual tuning. Started from Aug 2007, and ended 1 year later in Sep 2008. The base profit is about 510m, by my estimate the whole cola industry without media is about 410m, and 100m from media (I didn't have time to fine tuning to the teeth, but I think it has potential to reach 150m). The COO I hired has salary level 240m. So you would expect if the AI preform on par with human I would end up with a profit of 270m. Sadly incompetent COO drive my profit to just 155m, which means the AI not only performed poorly, but actually drive my combined media profit to negative. Compared to my manual tuning 1 year later, I kept the profit at 510m, even without doing anything and let it run at speed 5, it stills keep the combined profit in the positive.

Although when I examine exactly what the AI did to my media firms, I realize it didn't always screw up but rather performed inconsistently. Some screw up big time like this, driving 2m positive profit into 5m negative

COO media 1.jpg (138.2 KiB) Viewed 1004 times

Some surprisingly find very high balancing points where human players dare not to set, since usually it won't stay that high. Checking and tweaking every month is just too tiresome (The exact reason why in the beginning I want to use AI to assist me)

COO media 2.jpg (124.29 KiB) Viewed 1004 times

And AI does thing like this and drastically jumps the budget, hence end up with months of huge profit followed with several months of mass debt.

COO media 3.jpg (140.58 KiB) Viewed 1004 times

My suggestion is that currently it's very unwise to let AI managing your media firms (especially don't hire one to mange media for you), it performs very inconsistent and ignores the big picture. Only use AI management on a highly profitable media that balanced above 10m profit and don't want to waste time tweaking. Also if you owned majority media firms in a city, don't let AI manage them all, or it would make a combined loss and in the long run even massively in the red. It's best leave all of them manually balancing at low CPM price.

BTW, I wonder if we can give CMO more option as the media firms manager, at least give it a better AI.