Been playing a ton, and have some feedback

[eleaza]

- City's don't grow fast enough. When you initially manage to win an election with your party, your city can receive a huge boost from you placing out more civ and sports buildings, and cranking up the capacity levels. However, once your city reaches around 1mil population, things seem to slow down, and you lose control of how to keep expanding. 1mil is not a lot in the game, so it seriously restricts how big you can grow your company. Also, growing a city from 500k starting point, to 1mil, I *think* takes around 30 years game time?

I can grow my city quite big, I've once grown my town into 2 million population, but you are right it's quite slow, it took me like 60 years. And I wonder what do you mean by lose control of expanding? You run into unemployment issue? Poor planning of civic buildings lead to poor coverage of convenient of access ratio, end up having low quality of life? Or you run out of space (that I highly doubt it, since I have no problem squeezing them, I think up to 3 million, even 5 millions is possible, if I move some production facilities out and spread them in different cities)

- Once you're the mayor of a town, the other political parties become pointless. This isn't a huge thing, and I don't see how it can be expanded in any way, but it seems that once you win a city, the other parties become obsolete. Rival companies don't invest money in them or anything, and ..yeah.

This I think has more to do with AI corporation not highly profitable at the time for a starting total 3.5 million population in CES DLC (think about in the core game, the population of a single city might exceed that, not to mention total 7 cities), for a company to donate like 100m to 200m to compete with human players, it has to make that much profit a year I presume. And in early elections AI corporations rarely reach that high of profit. However I've run a game in the past, in the 4th election in the 20th years, some corporations start to reach that kind of profit by then (and only 1 city left open for grab). During that election, most parties start to have cash for 2 to 3 million a month of campaign funds that can last half a year or more. If not for my insane profit from all the real estate from the rest 6 cities, I couldn't win that election (and I win it due to I sent out 2 candidates to spread the votes from current mayor, otherwise a strait election with just 1 candidate probably won't cut it). And I believe further in the future, say like 40 years, some city's election will become harder, due to higher profit corporations start to merge into few giant competitors, and total population of all cities is much higher (I skipped the manufacturing entirely, just to test AI corporations's profitability)

- R&D blocks still cost full price, and don't reflect the lower costs of everything else in the city. Is it because of inflation(?), but when you start a new game, everything costs way less than normal. This also means that the market is smaller, and you're making less money. WAY less money. R&D doesn't seem to have received the same price reduction, so expanding in R&D becomes incredibly expensive. I think it's $100k per block? Doesn't seem right.

Scientists need to eat, regardless of the small population, and I presume they are "foreign experts" in a starting almost empty town. I don't think R&D is that expensive, and they should be. Giving the starting town with no starting local competitors, you can sell poor and expensive goods/food as you want. If I had to say, lowering R&D might benefit the AI corporations much more than players, since AIs don't optimize their R&D well, and usually over-build them causing a lot of expenses (which might not be a bad thing actually).

- When you open a new city, you should have the ability to plant trees and other random buildings found in the usual cities. Not a big thing, but I noticed that when you start a new city on your own, you're given a plain landscape on which to start placing city buildings. The generated cities, however, are full of houses and other small buildings that make them much more realistic. Maybe this ability needs to be added in order to be able to expand cities faster in point 1 of this post?

I've build a mod, to allow you build small houses, car parks, etc. in a new city. I've always want an aesthetic mod, but right now, I'll still pondering where to classify the "trees" in firmtype. The default PARK or other firmtypes don't work. Not reasonable as real estate, and as mansions, AI persons like to place them in very bad locations, and couldn't move them if I want to. Any good suggestions what trees/parks/gardens should belong to? Right now I'm incline to place them as "FARM" , I'll release v 0.1.1 when I'm able to balance the "tree/park/garden farm", and "products" associated with them. (It would be much easier if civic buildings can be modded, right now they can't)
http://www.capitalismlab.com/forum/view ... =39&t=3863

Bugs & Glitches:
- Only serious bug or glitch I've noticed is that you can't play with user scripts, and sometimes, apartments and commercial buildings don't get the correct stats. For example, I can build a commercial building right next to the CBD, and it will receive 0 on the "Distance to CBD" stat.

I thought the CBD distance bug is fixed in 4.2.08B, and only happens before 4.2.07B? And what do you mean the apartments don't get the correct stats?

Suggestions
The only realistic suggestion I can come up with that would make this game even better, is if there were more things to spend money on, once you start getting money. Maybe there should be a way to spend money on an actual marketing campaign, to make it easier to introduce a new product to a market? Or maybe a way to pour money into a chance of getting a huge R&D boost?

There's a way to spend a lot more money for the city, start a university project to specialized a product class, and make R&D of that class much easier, it's like 3 millions a month per class, quite expensive. And a good boost, if you don't have the expertise, and try to compete with an AI that have. Marketing campaign is interesting suggestion, perhaps a one time very expensive boost, like extensive training, that can be perform in the HQ?, and the "brand rating" will be temporary, instead of permanent (only brand loyalty stay, once the effect wears off)

[klasanov]

I run heavy r&d dedicated to one product (9 slots, one product), sometimes for products i wont release 5 years into the future, and do moderately well. With a nation of 4m people i can pull around 30m or so annual profit for a product class.

If you run real estate you could run a lot of losses in research because it becomes practically free money very quickly.

[eleaza]

But I guess the high R&D cost partially explain why most AI corporation running pure automobile class industry in CES DLC rarely making profit, since they required not just one finished product technology to be researched, but every level of the semi-products (car body, engine, wheel, steel, etc), so either AI spend too much on RD making expenses too high, or not enough (even none) on semi-products making the quality too low and have to sell cheap with low income.

[klasanov]

i dunno. the demand is also very low unless they fixed this.

I used to live in a city of 50k people and literally had 4 car dealerships all next to eachother. There were also others, in town.

this town is in the middle of nowhere so there isnt an outside market.

if 50k people need more than 20 cars a month, then 500k people should be buying a lot more.

[eleaza]

i dunno. the demand is also very low unless they fixed this.

I used to live in a city of 50k people and literally had 4 car dealerships all next to eachother. There were also others, in town.

this town is in the middle of nowhere so there isnt an outside market.

if 50k people need more than 20 cars a month, then 500k people should be buying a lot more.

Ya, that's a bit of low, at current version it's about dozens a month of cars sales per 500k city, and the total revenue for automobile class is way less than any other class (perhaps except tobacco). In real world in 2015, 90 million vehicles of all sizes were sold around the world, that about 13 per 1000 people, assume just 10% were analog to cars in the game, a city of 500k should consume more than 54 cars per month. And that's the whole world population average, in a "developed" or "developing" country, this number should be a lot higher.

[David]

The low demand problem is a bug and will be fixed in the next patch v4.2.09.

[klasanov]

i think the bigger issue is that when city competitiveness is low, its hard to get any research going, at all.

even with high product expertise.

i have noticed that city competivieness plays a much more critical role, and I'm not sure if the AI spends any money on getting industries set up through universities.

[eleaza]

i think the bigger issue is that when city competitiveness is low, its hard to get any research going, at all.

even with high product expertise.

i have noticed that city competivieness plays a much more critical role, and I'm not sure if the AI spends any money on getting industries set up through universities.

Even without University to boost city competitiveness, if there are R&D centers research center product class, that city would still get the competitiveness growing over time, just very slowly. So AI would eventually get better at its research. However, I never see AI mayors change university focus, since I don't think current parties other than players belong to any corporation from the start. As least I haven't seen that before.