"As seen on TV" DLC

[Max]

What if players could literally come up with new products? Here is how I see it working. You have all the base recipies, but there can also be a list of optional ingredients for example, soup still takes at a minimum chicken and aluminum, as you need a simple broth for any soup, but you can create a new product with a half-new market by adding things that would be good for soup, like beef, corn, and milk.

A player could get a new type of cola by adding things like citric acid, grapes strawberry, or choose to swap out the aluminim cans for plastic bottles.

Any appliance or electonic device can be made smart by cramming a CPU into it. Soaps, detergants, and lotions can all contain fruit aromas. Hand in your boring cigarettes for a super-cool e-cigarettes, or novelty cigarettes that swap out the tobacco for sugar. cornflakes for a chocolaty way to start your day, and with enough RnD, you can add a scoop of electronic components to a car to make it electric.

The way I see it working is that each product will have a list of features you can unlock from RnD, some more costly than others. Some features will do nothing to the production prossess, like a sleek form factor, while others will substitute or add a component to the manufacturing. Every product has a list of features to enable or disable.

Selling a product with a particular feature eats into the markeshare of that product without that feature, and vice versa, but this dosen't have to be balanced. For example, chocolate cereal is a much better substitute for regular cereal more then regular cereal is a substitute for chocolate.

This "substitution percent" depends heavily on how much the feature changes the experience of the product for consumers. For example, canned cola verses plastic bottled cola might be 80/90% substitutes for lne another, while adding a new flavor could cause them to eat into eachothers sales by only 20% over traditionally flavored colas. Diffent flavors are harder to substitute from one another, but canned verses bottled dosen't change the problem the person is trying to solve. However, switching over to plastic bottles might make sence for supply chain reasons.

Some features customers will pay a premium for, like a golden wristwatch over a silver one, while others might change the importance of the brand-price-quality ratio. The salespitch of any smart air con unit is that it will work to save you electricity, so it better do what it sets out to do on the box. Sometimes, it might even have an effect on the marketshare avalible for grabs. Not many people I know like coconut in their chocolate bar, or chocolate flavoring in their colas, but the market certianly exists. However, most features will simply be a 1 to 1 copy of the old market, but with the twist that they halfway eat into eachothers sales.


This means that the player can bootstrap more markets to conqcor from the same population, and makes it easier to take on a blue ocean strategy. But with each product roleout, the players own products will slowly eat into eachothers sales. Assuming 5 flavoring additives for icecream, think about how many combinations you could make! They could keep cranking out new combinations of ever-elaborate flavors till the sun explodes, but there comes a point where it dosen't add much marketshare.

[David]

Interesting ideas!

The current version of the game already supports multiple production blueprints for the same product type. So it is possible for you to experiment with it via modding and see how it works.

As for inventing new production blueprints of substituting products via RnD, I am not sure if it is supported in the game. But you could give it a try via modding.

It seems to me that the critical part of this design is how to determine the amount of quality boost that a new production blueprint with added ingredients or components will have compared to the original one.

Would you please come up with some examples, listing the optional ingredients that can be added, and their amounts of quality boosts?

For instance, will chocolate cereal always have X points of quality lead over regular cereal, provided that their production tech levels are the same?

If you could figure out which aspects of the your design are already functional in the game, and which aspects need to be implemented, it will be easier to make the case to the dev team for their consideration. For instance, if the implementation mainly involves adding a quality bonus to an advanced product (e.g. 5 points of quality bonus for chocolate cereal), then it seems to me that it shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

[Max]

Well, the "Phase out" thing is what I was thinking on piggybacking off of. It's a very similar concept to sublimentary products in economics.


Basically, imagine you have 2 products which are similar. For example, Cola and a diet cola. People have a diffrent reason for using one or the other product, as one is for people who want something sweet, and the other is for someone trying to loose weight. However, they do sort of compete with eachothers sales.

If they are 50% subsitutes, what that means is that for every Cola sold, the market for diet cola shrinks by .5 cans, and vice versa


Essentially, another layer will be addded to the taxonomy of products. Superclasses, classes, products and product varieties. Product veriaties will be markets so close together that advertizing for "Cola" advertizes for your diet and regular. The catch is that the sale in one market can have an effect on the others. Not so much that the products are in the exact same pie chart. Every single combination of features is a potential market for a subproduct to tap into, but this will eat at the demand for every other product.

When I said that chocolate cornflakes are superior to regular ones, it's not because the coacoa adds a flat amount of quality to it. But rather, it's less sencitive to the sales of regular cornflakes. This is because Chocolate Cornflakes are a better subsitute for regular cornflakes then regular cornflakes are a subsitute for chocolate cornflakes. Or, if every cornflake sold shrinks the market for chocolate cornflakes by 40٪, every chocolate cornflake sold reduces the market by 60%.


Here is a good list of features that need to be added in order of importance.

barely fuctional
-determine feature categories in each product. The idea is to make these resuable (for example, sugar, corn syrup, and chemical minerals could be options for "sweeterners." Flavoring could have "stawberry, grape, coacoa, citric acid, and a blank flavoring.")
This is because these sorts of features can be reused between products."Smart chip" might be a feature where you can use either nothing, or a smartchip to make "smart appliences", ect.


-rewrite the product recipies so that they are written in terms of base ingredients and features, as I think leaving room for 3 inputs, and max 3 features slots is good flexibility for modders. Also, each product can have repeat feature slots. For example, icecream is a product known for a diversity of flavors, so all 3 feature slots can store icecream.

-we need to determine how features interact with product quality, because the ingredients would be shifting around. I'd say a good approach would be each recipe assigns a weight to a feature that yses the quality of whatever input you need for that feature. (Whatever ingredient we use as the flavoring contributes 20%, whatever ingredient we use as a sweetener contributes 10%, the quality of eggs also contribute 10%, and technology contributes the remaining 60%)

If a recipe dosen't include a feature in an optional slot (for example, if you make detergent with no aroma), the weight of other qualities are scaled proportionally to keep their sum at 100%.


baseline balancing
-this is one long step, but I'd argue the most crutial, because it's the underlyingrules for how features interact. To keep things simple, each option in a feature type competes with all products that don’t have that feature verses all products that do. I'd imagine this would be like a booliean list of all the features. Does it have a chocolate flavor sloot, does it have a orange dlavor slot, does it have a bottle slot with glass bottles, does it have one with plastic bottles, ext.

If a product contains a diffrence in a feature, it end up in a diffrent market. So there needs to be a 2-way value to determine how these are related For example, every product with chocolate might be a 40% subsitute with a product without chocolate, but every product without chocolate might be a 60% subsitute by the ones that do. On the flipside, there are features that might work the opposite, where there is a niche market, but one that might be worth taking advantage of. For a modded example, A pizza with pineapple might be a 60% subsitute for the ones without it, and pizzas without pineapple might be a 95% good subsitute for the pizzas with it. Of pinappple is really cheap, Depending on the pizza market, you might take advantage of adding a unpopular feature, just to squees

With these two numbers in each feature called "ingoing competition" and "outgoing competition", you can magically program in all sorts of market behavior for features. But what if the product varieties have 2 or more diffrences in their features lists?


Product veriaty A is a glass-bottled cola sweetened with sugar with no flavors, while product veriatiy B is a plastic bottled cola sweetened with chemical minerals with no . There are technically 4 diffrences in features between these two products. Product B excludes a glass bottle and sugar, while including chemical minerals and a plastic bottle, and vice versa for A. So, you can compile whether these diffrences warrent using a features for ingoing or outgoing subsitutability for each siffence.

To combine them into one number, just multiply them all the diffrences together. If all 4 diffences in our cola example had 50%, the total substitutablility of one product for another would be 50%*50%*50%*50%, or 6.25%. Every 1 unit of product A sold per year, means that the public will buy 0.0625 less units of product B. This is not realisitc, but the subsituteability scores can be played with to make this work.


-add RnDability and give the proper insentives to AI. Honestly, I have no idea how this will work. I think you need to use RnD to unlock a feature wich applies to all products, but I think the same logic can be ripped from the basegame and applied to this new context. After all, a AI understands RnDing products that aren't unlocked normally. The only difference now is that they unlock multiple kinds of product veriaties at a time, under multiple product umbrellas.

Flexibility and added depth

Ingoing and outgoing subsitutability In addition to ingoing and outgoing demand, I reccomend adding 3 other ways to tweak how feature slots the base product.

-nessessity index modifier: adding or subtracting a certian % to the base necessity index. Chocolate cornflake demand would "Take a bigger bite" out of regular cornflake demand, but drop more then regular cornflake demand in the event of a reseaxciom. In microecon, this is called an inferior good.

-BP and RDP modifier: some features should make some items more or less expensive. For example, making an appliance smart might add 50 RDP, and 100 BP.

-Price, quality, and brand weight modifier: Self-explanitory. Adding real gold buttons to clothes shouldn't just increae BP and decrease nessessity, but brand is probably of increced importance, too. These modifiers should all add up to 0, so the bonuses add up to 100 still. (For example, the modifiers P: -5%, Q:-5%, B: +10% leave the importance of the weights at 100% still)

-add in a way to exlude certian features for products. For example, bottled milk flavored with chocolate makes sence. But bottled milk flavored with citric acid? Probably not.


QOL and nice to have

-certian features will change the product icon. Like bottletype actually being reflected in what you see.

-shipping cost modifiers for features. A gold-plated smartphone shouldn't be any more expense to ship then a regular phone.

-Inaccessable marketshare: have some way of displaying not only what slice of the pie the player has, but how big the pie is. I think a good way to show it is by turning the pie chart into a piechart ring that gets thinner, so that the total area funtions like a gauge to the theoretically max demand.

-Other complimentary and substantiary goods: while you are working on all these complex interactions between how products interact with eachother,byoy migbt want to increase the flexibility by adding other complimentary and subsitutionary goods. Chicken soup can be a very slight substitute for cold pills(they are both used to treat sickness), while cookie sales could increase the demand for bottled milk sales.

-Seasonal demand changes: while we are adding more nuance to consumer demand, we might as well add seasonality. we would expect demand for flipflops, icecream, golfclubs, and AC units to be higher in the summer months and demand for socks, soup, and game consoles to be higher in the winter months, while sweaters, backpacks, and frozen meats will peak in demand in fall, as people go back to school and prepare for Thanksgiving.

Each products demand cycles uses a modified cosine wave for its seasonal demand and 3 variables ranging from 0 to 100: offset, peak multiplier, offset, ranging from 0 to 100 that determines the peak demand of the year, as well as the peak multiplier, which could be up to an additional 100. Finally, "snap", which is how close the peak is. A black friday sale on appliances wouldn't gradually build up over the year and drop off, but instead quickly increase the demand for a couple of days. If T is the years since Jan 1 1990, it would be ([1+cos([O/100]+[T/2pi])/2]^[(S-50)/S])*M, where O is the offset, S is the snap factor, and M is the multiplier.

-Specialty Brand strategy: If corperate brand is a way to cover a superclass, range brand is a way to cover a class, unique brand is a way to cover a product, then logically speaking, we need a new brand strategy to cover a single product veriatiy. Specialty brands would be extremely specific, but offer a massive advantage over other brands in their limited marketshare. Not only will it increase advertising speed, but unlike other strategies, brand loyalty is much easier to generate, harder to loose, and brand gets additional weight over price and quality. If you want to generate a fleshed out mythos and prestige to each product, then thus strategy might br for you. It might be powerful for companies that specialize in electric cars.