Other ideas for new DLCs

Suggestions for new DLC projects.
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David
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Other ideas for new DLCs

Post by David »

You may post your ideas for new DLCs here.
ba127
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Re: New DLC project after the Digital Age DLC

Post by ba127 »

Here are some big ambitious ideas. I realize most or all of them probably aren't possible, but here goes (in no real order):

1. Personal use of funds: Currently I have no motivation to give my player a salary or have my company provide dividends, unless I'm trying to increase my ownership in my own company. Seems like the CES DLC helped this a bit in terms of politics and new cities. I don't have any good ideas on how to make this better.

2. Fleshing out shareholder influence: Right now, unless I hold over 50% or 75% of a company, I have no influence on a company -- even if I own more stock than the founder/CEO. This could maybe be expanded with board of directors or shareholder votes? A board of directors vote might be on something like, "We currently only produce computers and we would like to expand to producing milk, do you approve?" Shareholder votes could be around acquisitions, or being bought, compensation plans, board of director elections, etc. Admittedly, this probably quickly becomes "not fun," but it does cause a real consequence for the player if they go public. Mostly, I just want a way to influence AI companies if I own a signficant portion of their stock.

3. Redesign of retail stores: While it generally works for manufacturing, retail stores only carrying 3 or 4 products is bizarre. Multiple floors helped a ton, but it's still a bit off. This is obviously a core mechanic today, so I'm guessing this is an extremely unlikely pipe dream, but thought I'd put it here regardless.

4. Fleshing out stock market: Right now the stock market is mainly a means towards mergers/acquisitions. There's no being a Warren Buffet in the game, and with the upcoming Digital Age DLC, no being a venture capital firm. I think this is due to some combination of not having a say in the company (shareholder influence) and no real identity to AI firms. If AI companies could somehow tell me "these are my plans and priorities for the next 1 year, 3 years, and 10 years" it would give me that somewhat I think. Right now I generally know their area of focus, but that's very little information (particularly when they sometimes just ignore it). The stock market is such an awesome feature of this game that sets it apart from basically every other "tycoon"/sim game, it would be great to spend time making it even better.

5. Graphics/UI.. I think it's fine as is, but obviously a fresh coat of paint would attract more new users. Probably more of a "CapLab 2" type thing though.

6. Company management expansion: All player companies end up being huge conglomerates spanning many (if not all) industries, where in the real world this is pretty unusual or even illegal. I'm not sure if this is actually a problem or not, since that's basically the goal of the game. If it is a problem, is there some additional incentive to "spin-off" your companies or negative impact to have such a "wide" company? If it's not a problem, I'd like a better way to manage it. The Subsidiary DLC got really close here, but not quite. What I'd love is being able to have "divisions" of my conglomerate, that behave very closely to what like Subsidiaries do today, just with a shared bank account with the parent to avoid the movement of funds issue. For example, within my "Company A" I want to have a "Jewelry" division who's profit/losses come out of my master "Company A" balance. Ideally we'd be able to set a budget in some way.

7. More technology / company progression: I'm not exactly sure how to describe this one, but company growth seems a bit too linear or formulaic at times. I open a farm, and when demand exceeds supply, I open a second farm, and on and on, until I have 20 farms. In a few years, I've moved from being a small town farmer to this massive world dominating "big agra" corp and have barely noticed. The simplest way I can think to help that is incorporating random events/popups where you have to make a meaningful choice. Things like, "Now that you have 10 farms, they want to unionize. Do you agree?" -- where yes increases your costs and creates new pension debt obligations, and no decreases your productivity (or even a percent chance that the workers strike). Or questions about whether you adopt this new "organic" farming, or adopt new automated farming machines (which decreases your quality, reduces cost, increases quantity, brand hit). Or "Customers are increasingly nervous that your company is the world's largest oil producer and also the worlds largest beef producer. Do you take action?" where you have the option to spin-off your farms to a new company or take a big (or permanent?) brand hit. Or "You're retail stores are all 20 years old, do you refresh them?" Or "Your brand of Car has been the dominating the industry for 10 years, but people are increasingly looking for something new and different (-15 brand rating a year)" Or "Your board of directors wants you to focus on increasing market share in X industry". Obviously tuning these is going to be hard, but would probably would great if there was a framework modders could use with robust triggers.

Separate from all those ideas, the theme of the DLC's seem to be around incrementally expanding to new industries. Here's a few I can think of (in no real order):
1. Restaurants
2. Telecommunications (cell phone carriers, cable carriers)
3. Insurance
4. Utilities (power/gas for home/office use)
5. Hospitals (clinics, nursing homes, therapy)
6. Consulting firm
7. Transportation/shipping (both for your company's goods and/or residential)
8. IT services
9. Sports teams
10. Banking (other thread on this)
11. Hotels (other thread on this)
12. Media companies and/or media content companies (other thread on this)

I think city-wide services (telecommunications, insurance, hospitals, transportation, banking) are the most interesting ones on the industries list.

Overall though, I'd vote for more focus on internal company management in some way, like with pieces of the above list (progression/events, divisions, board of directors, etc).
brianwiz
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Re: New DLC project after the Digital Age DLC

Post by brianwiz »

I personally like

6. Company management expansion: All player companies end up being huge conglomerates spanning many (if not all) industries, where in the real world this is pretty unusual or even illegal. I'm not sure if this is actually a problem or not, since that's basically the goal of the game. If it is a problem, is there some additional incentive to "spin-off" your companies or negative impact to have such a "wide" company? If it's not a problem, I'd like a better way to manage it. The Subsidiary DLC got really close here, but not quite. What I'd love is being able to have "divisions" of my conglomerate, that behave very closely to what like Subsidiaries do today, just with a shared bank account with the parent to avoid the movement of funds issue. For example, within my "Company A" I want to have a "Jewelry" division who's profit/losses come out of my master "Company A" balance. Ideally we'd be able to set a budget in some way.

1. Personal use of funds: Currently I have no motivation to give my player a salary or have my company provide dividends, unless I'm trying to increase my ownership in my own company. Seems like the CES DLC helped this a bit in terms of politics and new cities. I don't have any good ideas on how to make this better.
--- [color=#red]Maybe owning Sports Teams etc?[/color]

2. Fleshing out shareholder influence: Right now, unless I hold over 50% or 75% of a company, I have no influence on a company -- even if I own more stock than the founder/CEO. This could maybe be expanded with board of directors or shareholder votes? A board of directors vote might be on something like, "We currently only produce computers and we would like to expand to producing milk, do you approve?" Shareholder votes could be around acquisitions, or being bought, compensation plans, board of director elections, etc. Admittedly, this probably quickly becomes "not fun," but it does cause a real consequence for the player if they go public. Mostly, I just want a way to influence AI companies if I own a signficant portion of their stock.


I want goals/I want to be fired... I want to thrive as a CEO LOL
Arcnor
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Re: New DLC project after the Digital Age DLC

Post by Arcnor »

Love # 2
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