firm handling

[dimon22]

First of all thans for a nice game, I have spent couple of weeks building electronics empire (producing computers, phones, electronic devices, home electronics, etc.) - with realworld mod these are about 20+ products easilly available. Now I am at the point where there are 50+ factories, around 25 warehouses, more then 80 retail stores and it can become a headache in doing some individual tasks with them.

Here are my suggestions to improve micromanagements in handling with individual firms:

1. There is need for a report on firms like report on products - what is annual income and annual revenue of each of them. If I want to know what of all my retail stores has made most of profit in the last year, this has to be find out of individual firm reports. In this report you should also see names of firms.
2. I think even if you do not assign names, game still should assign individual unique number for each firm (just in order - first firm gets number 1, second number 2 and so on) - this will help search for specific individual supplier and individual retail store. This also can help dealing with R&D centres, if you have many of them, you can assign one for each of your products and just need to know which number you assigned for which of them.
3. If a technology research is finished at R&D centre, it is automatically prolonged for next period. But if I cancel research at this time and again assign same tech for the same period, final technology level becomes a bit higher.
4. If you have COO assigned for a firm he can do two things that you cannot prevent him - first, he can start to buy your products directly on the factories, so when you are rearranging your logistics some warehouses may temporarily lose supply or products will be moved to other warehouses, so after all changes you have to check all your shops if they switched to factories or not. You should be able to clearly limit purchase in stores for a specific product to warehouses only. I also think that it should be possible to limit sales on a specific factory not just to internal sales, but to a another specific factory or warehouse (or shop).
5. Second bad thing comes if you are agressively coming to a market with a new product or want to increase market share for an older one. So you usually set a lower price for it to get higher product rating, and want to keep it for some time. With COO available I have to assign all firms to myself to make it happen, otherwise price will change back very soon. There should be a way to freeze price for a specific product withount de-assigning a whole firm from COO.

[rmax]

1. There is firms report in detailed corporation report, with annual profit and annual income for each firm.

4. There is an option to prefer ordering from own warehouses over own factories in COO settings.

[dimon22]

Thanks for your reply.
about 1 - there are anual premium and revenue for all firms of the same type, but if you go inside this report to see list of all stores, for example, there are no longer annual figures available - only lifetime profit and lifetime revenue.
about 4 - even with this option set up, your store still can be turned to a factory instead of warehiouse if warehouse is having temporary supply problems due to logistics rearrangements. What I mean here is to add strict rule that specific product can be bought only at warehouses intead of factories no matter what, or limit factory sales possibility to a specific firm only.

[David]

2. I think even if you do not assign names, game still should assign individual unique number for each firm (just in order - first firm gets number 1, second number 2 and so on) - this will help search for specific individual supplier and individual retail store. This also can help dealing with R&D centres, if you have many of them, you can assign one for each of your products and just need to know which number you assigned for which of them.

This is an interesting idea. Perhaps you could set up a poll and see how other users think about this suggestion. If there are enough people demanding this feature, I will forward it to the dev team for consideration.

There are some design issues that need to be determined. They include:
-How would you like the description text to be generated? <Firm type> + <id.> e.g. "Retail Store 1" or more specifically "Toy Store 1"?
-When you merge with another company, the firms from the merged company will not have any descriptions. Should the game automatically generate descriptions for the merged firms?

[sportydude]

-How would you like the description text to be generated? <Firm type> + <id.> e.g. "Retail Store 1" or more specifically "Toy Store 1"?

Toy Store 1 (Shanghai)
Toy Store 2 (New York)
Toy Store 3 (Shanghai)

Sort By Number Sort by City

-When you merge with another company, the firms from the merged company will not have any descriptions. Should the game automatically generate descriptions for the merged firms?

Toy Store 1 (Shanghai)
Toy Store 2 (New York)
Toy Store 3 (Shanghai)
.
.
Toy Store 15 (New York)
Toy Store 16 (Shanghai) (Merged)

Same for factories and the rest of the buildings.

[dimon22]

I have done a poll in the first post about this quetion.

-How would you like the description text to be generated? <Firm type> + <id.> e.g. "Retail Store 1" or more specifically "Toy Store 1"?

Numbering by shop type will be fine, so you may have at some point of your game "Toy Store 1", "Leather Store 1", "Leather Store 2" and so on.
Also you may have "R&D 1", "Factory 1", "Warehouse 1" and "Factory 2".

-When you merge with another company, the firms from the merged company will not have any descriptions. Should the game automatically generate descriptions for the merged firms?

Like suggested in previous post - they should be added to the end of existing list of your firms with next numbers.


The only questions remains, if you destroy some factory for example - should then next one get its number or it will be better to leave it as non-used, and next factory will get next free number.

For sure all firms already assigned a number should never change it.

[DavidRusson]

There are 2 major additions that I would like to see implemented:-

1) the ability to identify each individual unit ( store , farm, factory etc ) either by user enabled input to change description or by automatic numbering as the units are introduced into the Game. Myself , I would appreciate the opportunity to rename every Store/Farm etc with my own naming convention.At present I get confused trying to match goods in a store with a particular factory etc if the player has a number of outlets producing the same good.

2) I am not certain if this is incorporated but if I construct a factory on one continent and build say a store on a different continent , then i would like a Seaport in the second continent to be able to show imports that I am producing so that my store can obtain my own produced goods.

David Russon

[David]

Update: the implementation work on this feature has been started. We will post an announcement when it is ready.