Service Products

Suggestions for new DLC projects.
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Arcnor
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Service Products

Post by Arcnor »

Here is my suggest for a major change in the game:

I have always thought that one major improvement would be to allow the creation of products at a semi retail/factory firm. For example, if I wanted to a create a "Subway" company, I would currently have to have a factory make sandwiches from food purchased at farms and then transport these sandwiches to my retail locations. This makes sense if everyone bought frozen foods, but a more realistic way to do this is to allow the creation of products at special retail locations.

I suggest that a new firm class be created under retail where these specific retail buildings would be able to purchase food from farms directly and then make this into sandwiches to sail immediately to the public.

This doesn't just work for food either. In my own mod, CAPWORLD, I sell insurance products that have to be made at factories and then resold at retail. Obviously insurance is a complicated product, but its something created and sold directly out of retail locations. Its not made in a factory off in another city, like many products today.

2. Allow mods to set what products specific factory buildings can make. If in my mod I want to have a special assembly plant that I want to only be able to produce cars then I can customize that building with different costs structures that would make the specific industry more competitive (i.e. I could set monthly expenses to be higher which will drive up the cost of production and require cost of vehicles to lower to stay competitive).

For instance, in the current mod I use, I have created a new "farm" building that is a University. This farm grows "Accountants." I did this because the farming mechanics most closely resemble the process of training employees. This building is more expensive to operate (universities are not cheep obviously) and the Accountants "crop" takes a longer time to produce. I then use these trained accountants to provide Accounting services as a product.

I think this is a way to introduce services. Have companies create training facilities that recruit new employees to be taught a new skill and then upon completion go out and produce a service (i.e. accounting, medical, law, etc.). The quality of this product would be determined by the training of the staff. A company could decide to cut cost and do quick cheap training and the result would be a cheap quality product that has to be sold at lower prices. The opposite could also be true. Market share would be determined based on the quality expected vs price (i.e. you might live with an okay sandwich for a cheap price, but will pay top dollar for medical services to have the highest quality).

What I've done in my mod game is to combine my Accountants with paper to produce accounting services, but I could do this for other services too. The better way of doing this in my mind is to allow special retail stores to create products.

I believe this would be easy to implement from a code perspective. It would only require:

1. Copying the code for the Manufacturing unit on factories and making it available as a selection in these retail firms (perhaps rename it as "create" or "prepare").

2. Copy the code that sets specific retail stores can sell specific classes of products and add this feature to factories and farms.

3. Add Training Facilities as a new firm type that would have a user interface similar to farms and media outlets. You would set what to produce and then have sliders to set investment/content development.
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David
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Re: Service Products

Post by David »

3. Add Training Facilities as a new firm type that would have a user interface similar to farms and media outlets. You would set what to produce and then have sliders to set investment/content development.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how you would like to see this implementation in terms of user interface and its gameplay effects? Should it be just more or less the same as a farm or have some unique characteristics of its own?
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