Surviving 5 years at 510% difficulty in survival mode & bugs

[eleaza]

I was trying to see how difficult Capitalism Lab can be in survival mode, and I decide to start from the highest difficulty. If I got crushed I'll drop the difficulty and try again. The highest possible difficulty is 579% difficulty. And sadly, my city got broke, and my mayor get kicked out, and the replacement AI mayor start to spawn civic building out of control (by the way, there's a bug, where a city is broke and no way out of the debt when all the bond is issued, there won't be another new AI mayor to replace the previous AI mayor. The city's cash just stay negative forever. However if your party get elected, your mayor will be immediately replaced on day 2 in the office, due to the city being broke. I think it will run forever in debts.)

But I got real close to pass the difficult transition period of early civic investment, where the population is just too low, hence I dropped down Public Expanses Index from 199 to 130 (in fact I tried 150 first, and that's actually when I figured out I came very close to balance the city's budget). And the difficulty is 510%. And this time I did survive the humanly impossible challenge, mostly due to all the lessons I learned from the failed higher difficulty game. Game setting of 510% difficulty is at the bottom of the screenshots.

510 difficulty 5 years.zip

(1.44 MiB) Downloaded 69 times

This is the city view after 5 years. And my businesses is going OK, and I'm the only corporation that has a positive operating profit. And I always like a small and compact city. Feel more like a home town. And I don't like giant corporation either, managing them is tiresome, but beautifully balanced tiny and focused businesses.

510 city view 1995.jpg (820.07 KiB) Viewed 2109 times

I must say playing with a completely empty city from the start is a lot fun, and a lot of micromanagement. And it doesn't feel like playing Simcity type of city building game, but actually more like running a business. The trick to survive is to achieve goal early on to get bonus cash for the city, and carefully choose which civic building to start with, not all civic buildings are necessary from the beginning, and some less important buildings can be skipped like high tier sports, and keep quality of life high. Try to eliminate emigrating issue, just by keep those ratings above 50 in the yellow preferably but at least in the purple. And once have enough city budget from bonus, build media firm immediately to balance the city budget. Use your own corporation's capital to build houses for the city. The one thing very difficult to get rid of is Goods supply problem, but I guess for very low start-up capital, there aren't many option to provide all the goods, most of my investment goes to providing enough food.

510 City Quality of Life.jpg (245.99 KiB) Viewed 2109 times

One of the interesting thing in this game, is that one AI competitor Touch Base acted like a Real Estate focused corporation, so the city get a huge income from Proceeds from Land Sales at one point, and that's how it got nearly 200m cash in one sale (but even without that deal, the city is still in surplus overall).

One of the interesting thing is that, since AI competitors have too much start-up capital, it actually make the "difficulty" much easier. Since they can operate in the negative for so long. And they can provide raw materials for goods they produced. But on the other hand if there's no competitors or competitors' businesses are small, then my corporation can make more profit on my own, but it would take a longer for me to provide all those different goods myself. Which make my business easier, but the city's growth and quality of life harder. And I do feel a little frustrated by the AI. Not only AI mayor is very incompetent, if you don't micromanage them manually, they will spawn like crazy and broke the city in an instant. And seem to place civic buildings everywhere like random. And I don't know if its a bug or simply I manage the Public facilities too well, that Real Estate Corporation spawn an apartment in the middle of his land in nowhere. But it somehow get 100% occupancy. But the city's own apartment in much better location, got 0% occupancy, which is very odd. I'd think people would move out of nowhere into apartments next to public facilities and shops, once they are available (and actually cheaper, I only set at 70% to market price rent, and the base rent price is also cheaper, perhaps those tenants already signed timed contracts )

And I really don't like how AI can just grab such large area of land and carve out that big of an empty space, where no civic buildings can be placed there, and make the facility coverage rate low, since I can not take care of those houses inside AI's territory. Maybe civic buildings should be allowed to build inside corporate purchased land, and the city pay reimbursement for the land. It happened in real life city all the time. (since the ability to build civic buildings is shifted from private corporations to the government)

AI lonesome appartment.jpg (655.73 KiB) Viewed 2109 times

CIty's empty apartment.jpg (550.79 KiB) Viewed 2109 times

I feel like with an empty starting city, you will have to focused more on growing and managing the city, than your own business at this difficulty, there isn't much I can do with limited start-up capital. It's more like my company serve the city than the other way around. I wonder how long would it take for this city to reach 1 million population. In my other game with a developed city as source of income. I only managed to grow a new city to pass 1 million for more than 50 years. Perhaps I will try a 7 developed cities next, and see if it's really possible to diversify each city, due to pollution issue. (By the way there's a typo in the tooltip of Environment in Quality of Life, it should be "pollution level" at the end, not "population level")

typo of pollution.jpg (49.94 KiB) Viewed 2109 times

And here is the game setting screenshots.

510 difficulty.JPG (201.66 KiB) Viewed 2109 times

510 Environment.JPG (97.9 KiB) Viewed 2109 times

510 Competitors.JPG (91.13 KiB) Viewed 2109 times

510 Products.JPG (70.84 KiB) Viewed 2109 times

[David]

I have loaded your save game and you seems to be doing really well - your company is profitable and the city enjoys a high quality of life rating and has an ample cash reserve.

The programming team is currently working on fixing the apartment occupancy bug you reported and will move on to fix other bugs after that.

[eleaza]

I have loaded your save game and you seems to be doing really well - your company is profitable and the city enjoys a high quality of life rating and has an ample cash reserve.

The programming team is currently working on fixing the apartment occupancy bug you reported and will move on to fix other bugs after that.

Like they say, third time's the charm. Understandably I wouldn't post the failed attempt. And those 2 fails with 199 and 150 Public Expanses Index did teach me about how to squeeze tight the budget early on. Even just a simple lowering the civic building upgrade cost when they are not used much, make a huge difference. Especially those damn expensive hospitals (which I cannot skip, health is just too important in QoL). And after this try, I believe I can challenge the higher 150 Public Expanses Index setting again and able to balance it before the city go broke, since I learned a few tricks in this try.

Also another interesting thing about building media firms as quickly as possible, is that they provide jobs, lots and lots of jobs. The spike in jobs and sudden drop of unemployment all correlate to when I built media firms. And unemployment is so difficult to control with empty city start combined with low start-up capital. I can not just spam factories, or mines like I did with developed city start where I have revenue base. And low unemployment rate is so crucial to attract immigrants. And speaking of unemployment, why is there a hard lower bond unemployment of 2%. I know there are theories about natural unemployment rate, but a fixed lower value doesn't sound right and looks weird and unnatural in the city charts. There should be some kind of worker shortage mechanism, not just pure unemployment, which in the real world is also as bad as high unemployment.

I also think it would be fun if education isn't just part of an index for QoL, but also server real functional. Like in Simcity games, where certain jobs require certain level of education to fulfill. Is there similar mechanism already in place in the background, just not visible to us players?

[David]

I also think it would be fun if education isn't just part of an index for QoL, but also server real functional. Like in Simcity games, where certain jobs require certain level of education to fulfill. Is there similar mechanism already in place in the background, just not visible to us players?

Yes, the average educational level of the citizens will affect the staff training efficiency in all civic buildings in the city.

[eleaza]

I also think it would be fun if education isn't just part of an index for QoL, but also server real functional. Like in Simcity games, where certain jobs require certain level of education to fulfill. Is there similar mechanism already in place in the background, just not visible to us players?

Yes, the average educational level of the citizens will affect the staff training efficiency in all civic buildings in the city.

I didn't notice that, it explain a lot why civic building skill level skyrocketed after a while, but pretty slow at the beginning. However is it depended on the whole education index value, or is it actually track the university/high/middle/primary school education population composition to calculate the weight average? I got a feeling it did. If so, perhaps we could have a system, where jobs opportunity has a composition depends on what kind of firms requires them. Like when opening mines, the unskilled worked required has a composition like 80%, and the university highly educated one is less than 5%. Or for university jobs, they required very high education composition (only few low skilled jobs for janitors or something?). Just matching the composition of the unemployed population with the job opening composition, and find out if certain educational level of jobs are filled, and some have shortage, so there can be some "natural unemployment rate" calculated based on this? And sometimes some job opening will persist, when there is not enough worker in that education criteria? (And obviously higher education population can fill in the lower requirement one, but would it create some unhappiness, due to unfulfilled ambition?)

[David]

However is it depended on the whole education index value, or is it actually track the university/high/middle/primary school education population composition to calculate the weight average? I

I have put the requested info on the following web page on the official site:
http://www.capitalismlab.com/university ... ation.html

Please take a look and let me know if you still have any questions.

[eleaza]

However is it depended on the whole education index value, or is it actually track the university/high/middle/primary school education population composition to calculate the weight average? I

I have put the requested info on the following web page on the official site:
http://www.capitalismlab.com/university ... ation.html

Please take a look and let me know if you still have any questions.

So the education level is the average of highschool and university educated percentage average, then is there some sort of penalty for city with lower percentage of middle school, grade school education? I notice they put a cap on going higher up in education ladder, but is the effect just poor education index and nothing else? Would it affect unemployment rate?

[Spac3y]

Very good going Eleaza !

With this you got me intrigued. So I thought Id have a bash at 579 % Difficulty. currently 7 years in population in city one is circa 300k.

Running around 3.5m a year profit at the moment, QOS is around 57%. City is running a surplus currently of circa 25m a year (I have expanded alot of services so I can actually increase the surplus comforably).

Actually I have learned a ton today just reading this post, I now understand the supply index and that is very handy when coming to balance over/underspending and whats actually missing in terms of QOS. I was initially increasing the slider to 150 on the supply index thus giving me leeway to grow the city without it dropping too low.

One thing and mabye this is me but on the sports facilities, the slider isnt actually moving. If you click on the pound sign, the value does move david so the spending is increasing, just a small thing but my sliders arent physically moving.

You are correct Eleaza on the media firms, actually, its almost explotish in terms of job creation (Im at 9 media firms at the moment).

It would be nice to see David how many jobs are created by a business function. (If 3 media firms create 50K jobs which seems to be the way, surely factories etc should also offer this scale ?)

[eleaza]

Very good going Eleaza !

With this you got me intrigued. So I thought Id have a bash at 579 % Difficulty. currently 7 years in population in city one is circa 300k.

Running around 3.5m a year profit at the moment, QOS is around 57%. City is running a surplus currently of circa 25m a year (I have expanded alot of services so I can actually increase the surplus comforably).

Actually I have learned a ton today just reading this post, I now understand the supply index and that is very handy when coming to balance over/underspending and whats actually missing in terms of QOS. I was initially increasing the slider to 150 on the supply index thus giving me leeway to grow the city without it dropping too low.

One thing and mabye this is me but on the sports facilities, the slider isnt actually moving. If you click on the pound sign, the value does move david so the spending is increasing, just a small thing but my sliders arent physically moving.

You are correct Eleaza on the media firms, actually, its almost explotish in terms of job creation (Im at 9 media firms at the moment).

It would be nice to see David how many jobs are created by a business function. (If 3 media firms create 50K jobs which seems to be the way, surely factories etc should also offer this scale ?)

I actually didn't manage to survive at max PEI of 579% difficulty. Sometimes I made little mistakes here and there and didn't want to reload and try again. And I am always too nice to my citizens and try to max out their QoL. How's your city looking? Can you share a screenshot of your city, pls? I like seeing other people's works

[Spac3y]

Its amazing how you start out with a clear idea of where you see you town Elezza, then you suddenly loose a little focus and it mushrooms !

The big problem as I realised is that in the in the short term it is very difficulty to sustain a retail business. So what I though would make sense, was to let the Mayor take alot of the work (and cost out of it by using its capital for the apartments).

Commercial just doesnt make the money, so, once the mayor (me) has bough the apartments, and plenty of as lets face it, the biggest tax payer is the residents of the city, once they were profitable, I got my company to start buying them.

Upto 20+m now which in Cap Lab wise is a walk in the park, but at 579% difficulty, makes such a difference

I have attached the save below so you can see/play where Ive gotten to and let me know your thoughts

Weirdly, some of the sports sliders now work, some dont, although this is still only physical on the slider movement, not on the monetary funding as that does work.

Would love to see your feedback on the city and possibly where it goes from there with regards to production.