An attempt at a guide to manufacturing for new players

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Timofmars
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Re: An attempt at a guide to manufacturing for new players

Post by Timofmars »

eleaza wrote:In theory perhaps, but in practice not that clear cut. And you cut off the assumption from the first half of my paragraph, it's under quantity over quality strategy. In specialized store, a lot of time as you noticed with demand beyond supply situation, there will be a constant shortage from time to time, and usually for a 4 small stores supplied by a single source, they will compete with each other to get goods. You might find you are in a situation where 3 of 4 stores is idle at one time, it would be rare for all 4 to have supply (otherwise this won't be a quantity over quality strategy). Unlike a large store, the irregular supply in 4 small stores will make their sales units' utilization stay low value. So under this situation and assumption, training 4 small stores are usually less efficient and take longer to reach the same overall throughput. It's nature of more chaos caused by different traffic indexes, different initial conditions, even the order of stores built, make the "fluctuation" worse for 4 small stores. (you can also use one purchase 2 sales in discount store anyway. The layout is really irreverent).

For a supply over demand, with higher quality over quantity strategy, then maybe in most cases it would be not much of a difference in training, and perhaps even easier to divide sales in small stores than an capacity-excessive discount store. My point is there indeed is a use for discount store in strategy than simply easier for management. The tall and high profit margin strategies suit specialized stores well, on the other end, low profit margin flat retail strategies, as much throughput as possible is the way to go.
I don't understand why a large store would be not equally affected by supply shortages as 4 small stores. If you had 3 out of 4 small stores idle, your large store should also be 75% idle.

Different traffic indexes aren't an issue for me because all the stores are in a group, and just being anywhere near the group is enough to reach sales capacity as long as there is market share available to be taken. Any time I sell a new product in a store, I discount it about 20 points below the local competition for about a month, and then it usually has reached max utilization with 2 sales units and I set the price back to give high profit margins.

And if there's insufficient supply, I'll change product or supplier (unless profit is still high and I want to deny competitors from getting the supply).

Also, I wouldn't think you can effectively use 2 sales units for one item in a discount megastore. I mean, is even your 1st sales unit reaching full capacity? I'm not sure the traffic index could ever be high enough to support 2 sales units in a discount store. I mean, I sometimes have 4 sales units of the same item in a specialty store, which should be equivalent to a discount store in total throughput, and I don't quite reach full capacity.
eleaza wrote:Maybe you can share the save files, with one from the beginning of the game before building anything, as well as the one you said to reach 60m profit, and we can compare with pure retail from specialized stores or a better location discount store make easier early profit. Each game has very different import goods affecting profit margin, there's no point comparing profit without the same initial condition.
I just have an old Cap version on my 10 year old laptop that I just use when I have to stay in a hotel for work. That's really the only time I play it. There's no multi-levels or anything like that. I never updated it after I got it, and I suspect the saves are not compatible. I do have the original day 1 save though, if you can use it (and the newest save too).

I can tell you that all my small stores (convenience, leather, and jewelry) were all earning at least 500k a month, conservatively. Usually 600k, but up to 800k. The medium stores, (department, supermarket, and electronics stores), were up to 1 million, but usually 700k. This is entirely with seaport goods. With some items in shortage now, small stores may be down to 400k as I change over to my own manufactured goods. But shortages are not really a problem, as I still must build more stores each month as I have plenty of money each month (mostly from a huge increase in credit limits each month) to open factories, farms, and mines.
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eleaza
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Re: An attempt at a guide to manufacturing for new players

Post by eleaza »

Timofmars wrote: I don't understand why a large store would be not equally affected by supply shortages as 4 small stores. If you had 3 out of 4 small stores idle, your large store should also be 75% idle.
This is why in earlier post, I said the much larger "stockpile" capacity in discount large store matters. No matter how little the stockpile is, as long as there's some, the utilization will count as its working. In practice you won't get perfect even splits between 4 stores, let's say if 20% of the time a discount store is idle and 80% of the time working due to excess demand, but in 4 small stores it could be 1 store working at 100%, and the other 3 stores between 40% to 70% (or even wider gap, depends on the difference between store). And even though the first store might train a little faster during its full 100% working period than the discount store, but the other 3 will seriously lag behind in training. Addition to that, the uneven situation can shift between these 4 stores, a store can work in full and drops to lower utilization in the long run, it will not be stable when traffic index changes over time and competitors joining in.

However, this could be the result due to the nature of utilization calculation. The new utilization calculation favors working status and will drop not jut when no customers buying goods, but also when there's no goods in sales unit while the demand is still over supply. In the past the utilization stays at 100 and training will continue regardless (it's no longer the case after patch 3.5.05 I believe). Also stockpile capacity and transfer time between purchase-to-sale units and the "freight time" between different firms also play a major factor, it's like a mini warehouse in discount store, but with much quicker transferring goods rate, hence the inherent delay is much shorter. Sometimes the idle time in retail store is purely caused by delay in firm-to-firm freight time (which can be up to 10 days, hence nowadays it very rare to see 100% utilization in sales unless it's balanced very precisely with warehouse to buffer the fluctuation)
Timofmars wrote: Different traffic indexes aren't an issue for me because all the stores are in a group, and just being anywhere near the group is enough to reach sales capacity as long as there is market share available to be taken. Any time I sell a new product in a store, I discount it about 20 points below the local competition for about a month, and then it usually has reached max utilization with 2 sales units and I set the price back to give high profit margins.

And if there's insufficient supply, I'll change product or supplier (unless profit is still high and I want to deny competitors from getting the supply).
This is again, just one strategy for a particular layout to play the game, it works for this setup, but as strategies in general, we shouldn't count out all the other possibilities (when there's insufficient supply situation, reasons can be many, and the responses may not be always the same and possible, as you said there are situations where it's preferably to keep in short supply for other reasons). Unless you can provide solid evidences with save files demonstrate discount stores really under perform in these cases, then we need to inform David that this is close to a bug in the base game mechanics. Or we could come up with a "Balancing MOD" that changes the overhead and operating cost for larger stores (like large factory which is in fact cheaper if fully utilized), that would be interesting and doable with current modding capability.
Timofmars wrote: Also, I wouldn't think you can effectively use 2 sales units for one item in a discount megastore. I mean, is even your 1st sales unit reaching full capacity? I'm not sure the traffic index could ever be high enough to support 2 sales units in a discount store. I mean, I sometimes have 4 sales units of the same item in a specialty store, which should be equivalent to a discount store in total throughput, and I don't quite reach full capacity.
If previous reply you said in some setups 4 specialized stores need 1 purchase to 2 sales to fulfill the need, then in those cases the discount store will certainly also needs 1 purchase to 2 sales to fulfill the same demand. Here, you said in other cases, only 1 store with 4 one-to-one sales pairs (similar to 4 specialized stores with 1-to-1) is enough, then obviously it's still an 1-to-1 setup in discount store to fulfill the need, otherwise it won't be exact 4 times as efficient. And there sure are situations where one-to-one setup for a discount store won't fulfill the need in a very large population city for very high overall rating products.

BTW, there is another possibility why 4 pairs in a small store weren't all working though, there are different "maximum" throughput per product for a given size store on top of sales units capacity combined. At some point, it won't matter if you add more sales units for the same product, they will just idle and do nothing. I think this cap is about 3 fully trained level 9 sales units capacity per product per store (for most stores anyway, some stores have much less capacity, like automobile retails)
Timofmars wrote: I just have an old Cap version on my 10 year old laptop that I just use when I have to stay in a hotel for work. That's really the only time I play it. There's no multi-levels or anything like that. I never updated it after I got it, and I suspect the saves are not compatible. I do have the original day 1 save though, if you can use it (and the newest save too).

I can tell you that all my small stores (convenience, leather, and jewelry) were all earning at least 500k a month, conservatively. Usually 600k, but up to 800k. The medium stores, (department, supermarket, and electronics stores), were up to 1 million, but usually 700k. This is entirely with seaport goods. With some items in shortage now, small stores may be down to 400k as I change over to my own manufactured goods. But shortages are not really a problem, as I still must build more stores each month as I have plenty of money each month (mostly from a huge increase in credit limits each month) to open factories, farms, and mines.
Well, there are a lot of changes over the years, and CES DLC seriously change the balance a lot. Even adding a smaller type of general store that can sell every product types (mini-mini discount store). And there are some patches very recently dealing with utilization in the core game, I think it might cause the differences in observation we see. And for CES DLC, AI usually over produce their goods from the beginning (thanks to smaller starting population), so we can now choose to sell AI produced products instead of purely rely on seaport goods, and this changes a lot for the starting retail strategies with much more retail potential, and a lot more capital needs to go into developing cities than expanding businesses too. Also in CES DLC the salary and base cost as well as overhead cost changes from very cheap (1/10) to the full price when a city grows in population, and stores can be trained and level up very quickly where it only has 1 worker per unit at the beginning (I am not sure which this changes favors though, the larger one or smaller ones? New patches in CES DLC might again change things in the future)
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paunboli2
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Re: An attempt at a guide to manufacturing for new players

Post by paunboli2 »

this post is very informative for me thanks for sharing .
utaziano
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Joined: Tue Aug 16, 2022 7:29 am

Re: An attempt at a guide to manufacturing for new players

Post by utaziano »

This document will help those just starting out in the game, and provide tips and advice on how best to start and manage a factory. I fount it helpful!
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