Capitalism Lab Version 12.5

Highlighted New Features

• 🖼️Your Own Photo & LogoPersonalization — Use a photo of yourself as your character’s portrait and your own image as the corporate logo — carried inside the save file.
• 📊Cash Flow StatementReporting — A full, self-balancing statement of Operating, Investing and Financing cash, alongside the Balance Sheet and Income Statement.
• 🔬Radical Technology R&DResearch — A new R&D team type that gambles on a huge leap in a global technology, not just a product’s tech.
• 🔬Fast-Track an InventionResearch — Bet on inventing a new product years early — and risk it arriving years late.
• 🤖AI Radical ResearchAI — AI companies can now gamble on Radical R&D for outsized tech leaps, just like you.
• 🏢Holdings PageCorporate group — A new Corporations tab showing your subsidiaries as an indented ownership tree, with effective-interest at every level.
• 🏝️Improved Survival ModeSurvival Mode — Start in your own town while the AI grows a separate one — neither side can build in the other’s town until the isolation period ends.
• 🏆Annual Score RankingsRankings — The year-end wealth and influence rankings are now part of the base game.

Additional New Features and Improvements

• 🗺️Pre-defined MapsRegional Maps — Ready-made maps of real countries come with the game, and a map now loads with its cities in one step.
• 🎓The Your Expertise WindowNew game — Your expertise, its rating and its benefits in numbers, shown once at the start of every new game.
• ⚙️IPO Requirement LevelsNew-game option — Choose how hard it is for any company to go public — five levels, from Very Loose to Very Strict.
• ⚙️AI Expansion LimitsNew-game option — Cap how many digital firms and product classes each AI company may take on — keep the AI out of a sector you want for yourself.
• 💰Venture Capitalist OverhaulEconomy — VCs now put real capital at risk, take profit, and recycle their winnings into the next wave of startups.
• 📊By-Product-Class ViewsReporting — Group the Products and E-commerce screens by product class — plus new sorting for E-commerce.
• 📊More CSV ExportsReporting — Export the Products list exactly as displayed, and a bank’s or insurer’s income statement and balance sheet together in one click.
• ✨Show Active Company’s TechQuality of life — Point the product guides at any company you control, not just your main one.
• ✨Reset Layout PlansQuality of life — Clear a firm’s saved layout plans and copy the defaults back in one step — handy for tidying up a mod’s plans.
• 🔔Obsolete Product AlertAlerts — When a managed store drops a product because it has gone obsolete, the game now says so instead of leaving the shelf quietly empty.
• 🔬COO’s R&D Expertise Unlocks Radical R&DResearch — The COO managing an R&D Center can now unlock Radical R&D there with their R&D skill — not only your CEO or CTO.
• 🔬Radical R&D with the Digital Age DLCResearch — All three kinds of radical research now come with the Digital Age DLC too, so you no longer need the Subsidiary DLC for them.

Corporate Cash Flow Statement

The Income Statement tells you whether you made a profit and the Balance Sheet tells you what you own. The new Cash Flow Statement tells you where the cash actually came from, and where it went. It follows the layout of real-world statements: cash from Operating, Investing and Financing activities, adding up to the year’s Net Change in Cash, with a Year-to-date and a Last Year column.

Operating starts from the same profit as the Income Statement and takes out what changed profit without moving cash: revaluation gains, write-offs, the profit of bank and insurance subsidiaries, and the change in inventory. The Investing and Financing lines then show only real purchases, sales, borrowing and repayments.

Read the full guide →

The “Your Expertise” Window

Every character starts the game as an expert in one industry, but until now the game never told you which one. On the first day of every new game, the Your Expertise window shows your expertise, your rating, the products of that industry, and each benefit worked out from your own rating, for example “Product research is 80% faster.” A tip suggests starting your business there.

The window appears after the other start-of-game windows, in custom, scenario and Survival Mode games. It does not appear in missions, in the tutorial, after loading a saved game, or when your character has no expertise.

Read the full guide →

Radical Technology R&D

Radical R&D has always been able to gamble on a product’s technology. What it could never touch was the other half of the research tree: the individual global technologies that the Digital Age DLC introduces — the technologies your products depend on, researched by Technology R&D teams. Version 12.5 closes that gap with a fourth R&D team type: Radical Technology R&D.

When you set up a team in an R&D Center you now choose between four types:

How the gamble works

Setting up the team is a three-step choice: pick the technology, then the target multiple, then the research period. The multiple decides both your prize and your odds, and how high you may reach is capped by the R&D skill of your CEO, your CTO or the COO managing the R&D Center — whichever is highest:

When the research period ends the gamble is settled. Success applies the whole multiplied gain to your company’s level in that technology. Failure applies nothing at all — the period’s work is lost, and the team simply starts the same project again. As with the existing Radical R&D, a run of bad luck doesn’t last forever: after enough consecutive failures the next attempt is guaranteed to succeed.

Fast-Track an Invention — the Radical R&D Time Gamble

Inventing a new product has always taken a fixed number of years, and putting a Radical R&D unit on the job made no difference — its gamble applied only to advancing a product’s technology, never to invention. Now a radical unit can gamble on time itself: aim to invent a product years early, at the risk of it arriving years late.

Choosing how hard to push

Click R&D New Product on a Radical R&D unit, pick the product, and a new window asks how aggressively to fast-track it. Each risk level cuts the normal development time by a percentage; a failed gamble adds back twice what you tried to save — so you risk exactly as many years as you stand to gain:

The window spells the bet out for the product you picked — the target time, the success chance, and the total time if it fails — and only offers the levels your R&D leadership is skilled enough to attempt.

A worked example

Take a product that normally needs 10 years to invent, and choose Aggressive (a 30% cut):

The gamble is rolled once, at the target time. Either way an event-track alert tells you how it went — how many years early it arrived, or how far the project has slipped — and the extended completion is then certain. You never lose the invention itself; you only ever win or lose time.

AI Companies Can Now Do Radical Research

Radical R&D lets a company gamble on an outsized technology leap — targeting a large multiple of the normal tech gain (up to several times over) against a success roll, rather than the slow, steady climb of ordinary research. Until now this was a player-only tool. In 12.5, AI companies use Radical R&D too, running it alongside their traditional research.

The upshot: AI competitors can now make the same kind of sudden technology jumps you can, so leaving a rival behind on tech is no longer a safe bet. The AI weighs the gamble itself and mixes radical projects in with normal ones, making the technology race across the whole economy more dynamic and less predictable.

The AI plays the new options too

Everything added to radical research in 12.5 is available to your competitors as well, so the two features above are not a player-only advantage:

Corporations Report — Holdings Page

Own a company that owns a company that owns a company, and it gets hard to keep the picture straight. The new Holdings tab — the fifth tab on the Corporations report, after Firm Overview — draws your whole corporate family as a single indented ownership tree, rooted at your main company and branching down through every subsidiary, including nested holdings several levels deep.

What each row tells you

The distinction between control (a majority chain) and effective interest (your true economic slice) is something the game surfaced nowhere before — and it’s exactly what you need when you’re deciding whether it’s worth buying out the minority holders of a deep subsidiary.

IPO Requirement Levels

Going public used to be available to almost any company. Version 12.5 adds a new-game setting — IPO Requirement — that controls how large and profitable a company must be before it can hold an IPO. It applies equally to you and to the AI companies, so a stricter setting means a market where only genuinely substantial businesses reach the exchange.

The five levels

A company qualifies by meeting either the annual-revenue bar or the annual-net-profit bar, judged on its most recent completed fiscal year:

How it plays

• Set it up front: choose the level when starting a new game (on the Subsidiary Settings page). The default is Moderate.
• Clear feedback: the IPO screen shows a requirement panel with the level name, the two thresholds, and your company’s actual figures — green when a bar is met, red when it isn’t, plus an overall Qualified / Not Qualified verdict.
• First year excepted: a company can’t IPO in the very first game year, since it has no completed fiscal year to judge.
• On top of the usual gates: the existing minimum market-cap and positive-equity requirements still apply — the new test is an additional bar, not a replacement.

Venture Capitalist Overhaul

If you play with VCs turned on, they now behave far more like the real thing. Previously a VC was a one-and-done seed investor: it bought in at a company’s founding and then sat on those shares for the rest of the game — quietly locking a chunk of every AI company’s stock off the market and letting its money sit idle. Now VCs are an active, self-recycling part of the economy.

What’s changing

How it feels in-game

• A VC starts taking profit once a holding is worth roughly 3× its founding cost, and unwinds the position gradually — a slice each month — rather than dumping everything at once.
• Exits are staggered across the different VCs, so they don’t all rush for the door in the same month.
• VCs still hold private companies patiently — there’s simply no market to sell into until a company goes public or is bought out.
• A buyout pays VCs in full, whether someone buys up the company’s shares or acquires a private company outright — so an acquisition is a clean exit for them too.

Show Active Company’s Tech

The three product guides — the Manufacturer’s Guide, the Software Guide, and the Internet Guide — can now show the technology figures for any company you control, not just your main one. A new Show active company’s Tech checkbox appears on all three.

How to use it

1. On the bottom info bar, point the cash/profit display at one of your subsidiaries — the same company selector you already use down there.
2. Open the Manufacturer’s, Software, or Internet Guide and tick Show active company’s Tech.
3. The company-specific figures — Your Tech, Overall Product Tech, and the Missing Required Tech check — now reflect that company. Untick it to return to your main company at any time.

Until now these guides always reported your main company’s technology. If you owned several companies, there was no quick way to ask “does my electronics subsidiary actually have the tech to make this product yet?” — you’d have had to shuffle which company was your main one first. Now you can line up any company you control against any product, right from the guide, and compare at a glance.

Improved Survival Mode

Survival Mode now begins with a town-isolation period. The game starts you in your own town and puts the AI companies in a separate town. For a number of years that you choose, neither side can build in the other’s town: the AI stays out of your city and you cannot expand into theirs. When the period ends, every company can build in every town.

The result is a game in two acts. Phase 1 gives you room to establish supply chains, build cash and claim the best land without a rival undercutting you on day one. Phase 2 opens the borders — the companies that were growing in the AI town can now move into yours, and you into theirs.

During isolation, trying to build in a town that isn’t yours turns the placement marker red and shows how many years remain until the towns open. The rule applies only to companies — your public and government building as the town’s mayor is never restricted. The AI, meanwhile, spends the period developing its own town, so it emerges as a real competitor when the market opens.

Pre-defined Regional Maps & One-Click Loading

The game now comes with pre-defined regional maps of real countries. They are made from real-world elevation data, so mountains, plains, lakes and coasts sit where they do in the real country, and each map places the country’s largest cities at their real locations. City populations are scaled to the game (100,000 to 500,000 people), and wages, growth and seaports follow the real cities.

Loading any regional map is also simpler:

• Two tabs. The map window has a Pre-defined Maps tab for the maps that come with the game and a User-created Maps tab for your own. It opens on the tab you used last.
• One click. When you load a map, its script (the .TXT file of the same name in the same folder, which places its cities) is loaded with it. The separate Load Regional Map Script button is gone.
• Readable names. Maps are listed by their title instead of only their file name. Your own maps also show how many cities their script places. The file date column and the Sort by buttons are gone.

By-Product-Class Views & E-commerce Sorting

Two screens that list products can now organize that list by product class, making a long roster far easier to scan when you deal in many different goods.

Corporate Detail → Products

The Products screen gains a new view mode that lists by product class. Instead of one flat list, products are grouped under their product class heading, with the individual product types shown beneath each class — so you can take in your whole product line-up class by class at a glance.

E-commerce

The E-commerce screen gets the same treatment: a new by-product-class view mode that groups product types under their class. On top of that, the E-commerce screen now supports sorting, so you can order the list to bring the entries you care about to the top.

More CSV Exports — Products, Banks & Insurers

Version 12.5 extends spreadsheet export. The Products list export now follows the new by-class view, and a bank or insurance company can hand you its income statement and balance sheet together. Both write plain CSV files that Excel and other spreadsheet programs open directly, into the game’s Export folder under My Games\Capitalism Lab.

Corporate Detail → Products

The Export to File icon on the Products page writes the list exactly as you are looking at it, with no dialog in between. It now follows both of the page’s selectors:

• The Production & Retail / Production / Retail buttons decide which firms’ figures are counted.
• The Show Product Type / Show Product Class + Product Type toggle (see By-Product-Class Views) decides whether you get a flat list or a grouped one.

Rows come out in the same order and sort direction as the screen, so sorting by Annual Gross Profit before you export gives you a file already ranked that way. Grouped exports gain a leading Product Class column: each class heading carries its own totals, and every product row repeats its class name, so the file stays easy to sort, filter and pivot once it is in a spreadsheet.

The file name records which view produced it — for example Beam Products (Production) 1990-06-19.CSV, with by Class added for the grouped view. Export the same day from different views and you get separate files rather than one overwriting the other.

Bank & Insurance Headquarters → Financial

The Financial page of a Bank Headquarters or an Insurance Headquarters gains a pair of icons at the left of the column header row:

Exporting them automatically

The two financial statements can also be exported on a schedule. Open Data Export Options and set:

One setting drives both statements, for both kinds of company: switch it on and each company in scope contributes its bank’s pair, its insurer’s pair, or both. A company that owns neither is simply skipped. Files land in a sub-folder named after the game, at the start of each period, with no message box interrupting play.

The row names only what your game actually has. With banks and insurers both enabled it reads Bank & Insurance Statements; with only one of them, Bank Statements or Insurance Statements; with neither, the row does not appear at all.

Your Own Photo & Corporate Logo

Your character has always had to be one of the game’s built-in portraits, and your company one of its built-in logos. In version 12.5 you can bring your own: a photo of yourself as your character’s portrait, and your own image as the corporate logo. Both are picked from your computer during new-game setup, and both are stored inside the saved game — send the save to a friend and they see your face and your logo, with no extra files to pass along.

Click the YOUR PORTRAIT or CORPORATE LOGO box on the PROFILE tab of the new-game setup, then Import Photo… or Import Logo… and pick a PNG file. The image is cropped and scaled for you, and appears everywhere the game shows your portrait or logo.

Read the full guide →

Reset the Layout Plan Library to Default

The Layout Plan Library — the window where you save, load and manage a firm’s interior layout plans — now has a Reset to Default button in its header, to the right of the product filter. It clears out the saved plans and copies a fresh set from the game’s standard plans, so you can undo a messy library in a single step instead of deleting plans one at a time.

This is especially handy when working on a mod: a mod’s layout plans can drift into a broken or cluttered state during testing, and one reset restores them to a clean baseline.

What it does

Clicking Reset to Default asks how much to reset:

Either choice clears both the pre-defined and user-defined plans in scope and copies the default set back in. Auto-generated wildcard plans are left untouched, and the change is saved automatically.

Alert When a Store Drops an Obsolete Product

Open one of your stores, find an empty shelf where a product used to be, and wonder what happened — this release answers that question. When a store run by a manager stops selling a product because the product has gone obsolete, you now get an alert message saying exactly that:

The behavior behind it is not new. When a newer product supersedes an older one, demand drains away from the old product year after year; once almost all of it has moved across, a managed store gives up on the old product — it drops the supply link and its sales unit clears the shelf. That is the right call, since nobody wants a store full of goods that no longer sell. What was missing was any word of it: the store simply went quiet, and working out why meant digging through the product guides.

Where it appears

It arrives as an ordinary alert message. The alert indicator on the info bar lights up; press F5 or click the indicator to open Alert Messages. Go jumps straight to the store, and Ignore / Ignore All dismisses it like any other alert.

When it fires

Annual Score Rankings in the Base Game

At the end of each year, the Wealth and Business Score Rankings show where everyone in the game stands — personal wealth, the value of the companies they control, and the industries and products they dominate — with each person’s score last year and the change since. The Influential People rankings follow, ranking political power and philanthropy. Until now both needed the Billionaire Life DLC; in version 12.5 the wealth rankings are part of the base game, and the influence rankings appear whenever the City Economic Simulation or the Billionaire Life DLC is enabled.

Read the full guide →

AI Expansion Limits

A successful AI company keeps branching out — into software, the Internet and telecom, and into one product class after another. Three new-game options now set a ceiling on that growth:

Each is a slider whose far-right end means Unlimited — the default, so nothing changes until you move it. The limits only stop new expansion: an AI company never closes or sells a firm because of them. Tighter limits make the game easier, so they lower the difficulty rating.

Read the full guide →

COO’s R&D Expertise Unlocks Radical R&D

Radical R&D, Radical Technology R&D and fast-tracked inventions need someone with an R&D skill of at least 20. Until now that had to be your company’s CEO or CTO. In version 12.5 the COO who manages the R&D Center counts too. A COO with strong R&D expertise can now unlock radical research in the R&D Centers they run, even when your CEO and CTO could not.

The highest R&D skill of the three — CEO, CTO or the managing COO — also sets how high a target multiple (or invention risk level) you can choose: 20 for 200%, 40 for 300%, 60 for 400%, 70 for 500% and 100 for 600%.

Radical R&D with the Digital Age DLC

Radical R&D used to come only with the Subsidiary DLC. It now also comes with the Digital Age DLC, so either DLC is enough. This covers all three kinds of radical research: Radical R&D, Radical Technology R&D and fast-tracked inventions. Radical Technology R&D still needs the Digital Age DLC, since that is where global technologies come from. You still need a CEO, CTO or managing COO with an R&D skill of at least 20, and AI companies follow the same rule.

At a glance: where to find each feature