Local suppliers and import companies

[fraszoid]

It's all well and good that I can build a powerful corporation and make lots of money doing it, but I want to give back to the community I'm based in. My thought is can I use local suppliers to provide my needs for materials in building things, mostly modeled after the automotive industry. There are hundreds of parts manufacturers to build parts for a car, I want to be able to source the parts from the local city to provide the spin off benefits of more work for the city and improving the economic conditions, so they would fare better in a recession due to continued well paying work. Flip side being I can pull a “GM leaves Flint” where I just pack up things and throw the city in to a recession, possibly as a cost cutting measure or to screw with my competition by tanking the economy.

Mechanically it could be that things start out linked to seaport quality wise, and increases as time goes on with money being pumped in to local suppliers via purchases from them. As with all things, supply is limited and increases as they do business and grow, and maybe capped tech wise in exchange for a lower cost per unit than building yourself. Another downside to local producers being longer production time, since rather than all the machines for building them in one place, they are spread a bit and takes longer to build the item. Building yourself gives you access to the best tech you have, and exclusive access to the productions, since local suppliers aren't owned they do business with anyone, possibly a reputation could be added to have them prefer longtime customers over new customers. Perhaps you could give them new tech to boost them up, the risk being its available to anyone, but if you tie up all the production then you should be safe. EG. Apple bought 2 years of production from their glass supplier for the iPhone so no one else could get them.

Same could be done with agriculture products, buying from the small farmers, just a single pool that you can buy and rebrand for sale. Lower cost and limited supply limited to maybe 80 quality when maxed out so when starting its a feasible way to get up and running making money but long term its best to build your own stuff.

In the event of stopping purchases the quality and supply will go down as they have to cut costs and can't afford new equipment to maintain peak output. Likewise constantly running them at full capacity leads to steady growth of them either to a max size or to a point then you get diminishing returns. Possibly building, and spinning off factories for local production could boost output, though not sure if that's possible in the context of the game. Either build a factory and set it up and train the staff so you can turn over a level 9 steel mill for example, or just build a factory and the AI determines what it should be used for.

Comments are welcome!

[David]

Would you like import companies to be added to the game?

The game design of import companies can potentially be based on some of the ideas originally suggested for local suppliers in the first post.