Experimental DLC — Tips and FAQ

The five features

Built-in advertising

One budget per product, not one per firm

The old model gave you a single advertising budget covering everything a firm sold. The built-in advertising unit replaces it with a per-product slider, and it occupies no space in the 3×3 layout — so it costs you nothing to add.

The slider is a percentage, not a sum

This is the part worth reading twice. Link media firms to the unit, and each product’s slider sets its share of the combined monthly budget. Three media firms at $100,000 each give a $300,000 pool; a product set to 20% receives $60,000 a month. Adding a fourth media firm therefore raises every product’s spend at once, without touching a single slider.

Factory advertising is finally worth doing

Advertising from a factory was rarely used before, because the unit consumed layout space that production needed. With a space-free unit that objection disappears, and promoting a product at the point of manufacture becomes a real option. See Built-in Advertising Unit.

Farm extension and equipment

Extend the farm you have

When a farm cannot keep up with demand, the Farm Extension icon lets you drag an area around it to buy the land and build new farming tiles. Every unit in the farm gains capacity, and the supply chain stays where it is instead of being split across two sites. The trade is that monthly operating cost rises with the tiles — hover the icon to see how many have been added and how much capacity you gained. See Farm Extension.

Farm Equipment splits quality in two

With the feature enabled, training and levelling no longer carry farm quality on their own. Product quality becomes a sum of three parts:

10 (base) + unit experience (up to 45) + equipment (up to 45)

The experience component is 5 × the unit’s level, so a level-2 unit contributes 10. The equipment component is 45 × (equipment quality ÷ 100) × (quantity purchased ÷ quantity required) — equipment rated 30 with all 15 required units bought contributes 13. Together that example yields a quality of 33. Both halves matter: perfect equipment on an untrained unit, or a maxed-out unit with no machinery, each leaves roughly half the score on the table.

Two rules that catch people out

• Crop quality is locked in at harvest. Upgrading a unit or improving its equipment after the harvest does nothing for that crop — the values used are the ones in place when it was picked.
• Livestock is calculated differently. Livestock raising and livestock processing units use different weightings in their formulas; the tooltips on their displays give the specifics.

Equipment is a business, not just a cost

Farm equipment sits in the Automobile product class and is manufactured in an ordinary factory. Early in the game there may be no supplier at all, which means building the factory yourself; AI companies gradually enter the market later. For anyone with large farming operations, making your own keeps the margin inside the group — and the B2B indicator on the manufacturer shows what share of sales goes to farms, your own and other people’s.

To buy, use the Farm Equipment icon → Add Supplier → set a monthly purchase budget, and the farm buys automatically until it needs no more. Clear the unit’s checkbox to stop it buying at all.

Tune the upgrade threshold to your priorities

Farms keep watching the market after they are fully equipped. The Equipment Replacement Quality Threshold decides when they act: set it to 10, and equipment rated 50 replaces equipment rated 30 automatically, because the 20-point gap clears the threshold. A low threshold buys quality and spends constantly; a high one keeps costs down and lets quality drift. See Farm Equipment.

Two settings that decide how much this matters

• Farm Equipment Cannot be Imported — seaports and import companies will never supply it, so somebody in the game has to build a factory. This makes equipment manufacturing genuinely strategic.
• Farm Equipment Purchase Multiplier — 100 is normal; the documentation suggests 150 or 200 to make equipment significantly more important, which also raises manufacturers’ revenue.

Note the balancing adjustment that comes with the feature: training costs for farming units drop to 70% of normal, to offset the new capital spending.

A world that keeps growing

New Cities Will Emerge removes the assumption that the map you start with is the map you finish with. Three settings shape it: the year emergence starts, the years between each new city, and the total number that will ever appear. Set the start early for a game that expands throughout; set it late for a mid or end-game surge of fresh markets.

The strategic consequence is that supply chains, logistics and regional dominance all have to be re-evaluated as the map grows — an early mover into a brand new city meets no established competition there. See New Cities Will Emerge.

Industry Expertise Only

This rule removes general skills such as retailing or manufacturing entirely. Instead every person specializes in one product class, and that specialization reaches much further than R&D. For a firm run by someone with industry expertise:

• Each expertise point raises R&D performance in that product class by 1%.
• Upgrading a manufacturing unit in that class to higher-level technology leaves the unit’s level unchanged — normally an upgrade costs you level.
• Manufacturing, purchasing and sales units in that class all run at higher levels.

A manager with expertise in Computers therefore improves everything you do with computers, from research to the shop floor to the till. It rewards building deep in a few classes rather than spreading thin. See Industry Expertise Only.

FAQ

How do I get the Experimental DLC?

It is free to players who own all four of the main DLCs: Subsidiary, City Economic Simulation, Digital Age, and Banking and Finance.

Is it stable enough to play with?

It is where new features are tried before they are released in official DLCs — the point is to experience them first. Every feature is switched on individually in the new game settings, so you can adopt them one at a time rather than all at once.

Why did my product’s advertising budget change when I linked another media firm?

Because the per-product slider is a percentage of the combined budget of every linked media firm. Adding a firm enlarges the pool, so each product’s actual spend rises with it.

My farm quality stopped improving even though the unit is fully trained.

With Farm Equipment enabled, training tops out at 45 of the possible score. The remaining 45 comes from equipment — its quality and whether you have bought the full quantity the unit requires.

I upgraded my equipment but the crop quality did not change.

Crop quality is fixed at the moment of harvest. The upgrade will show in the next harvest, not the one already gathered.

There are no farm equipment suppliers in my game.

That is normal early on. Build a factory and make it yourself — it belongs to the Automobile product class — or wait for AI companies to enter the market. If Farm Equipment Cannot be Imported is enabled, domestic manufacturing is the only source there will ever be.

My farms keep buying new equipment and it is expensive.

Raise the Equipment Replacement Quality Threshold. Farms replace equipment whenever something on the market beats what they own by at least that margin, so a higher threshold means fewer, larger upgrades.

How do I stop a unit buying equipment altogether?

Clear the checkbox on that unit in the Farm Equipment interface.

Does extending a farm cost anything ongoing?

Yes — monthly operating cost rises in proportion to the tiles you add, alongside the capacity gain.

When will new cities appear in my game?

From the year you set, at the interval you set, up to the total you set. All three are configured before the game starts.

What happens to my existing managers under Industry Expertise Only?

General skills no longer exist; people specialize in a single product class. The upside is broad — expertise lifts R&D, manufacturing, purchasing and sales units in that class, and protects a manufacturing unit’s level when you upgrade its technology.

Read more

Experimental features: Built-in Advertising Unit · Farm Extension · Farm Equipment · New Cities Will Emerge · Industry Expertise Only

The four DLCs that unlock it: Subsidiary DLC · City Economic Simulation DLC · Digital Age DLC · Banking and Finance DLC