David wrote:As the Digital Age DLC has reached at the final beta phase, the dev team now has time to revisit the various ideas for a potentially new DLC project.
The Service DLC is among the top 3 DLCs with the most votes at
http://www.capitalism2.com/forum/viewto ... =49&t=4166 and it potentially could be the new DLC project.
Right now, there are some good ideas about the DLC, including primarily Arcnor's idea for a new retail store function. In order to justify being a full DLC, it needs to have a lot more content, either on par with other released DLCs in terms of the amount of new features and content, or to be released at a lower price point if the amount of content is relatively smaller than other DLCs.
So I would like to hear what you guys think about the types of features and content you want to see in the Service DLC, if it is a product that you would consider buying at $9.99.
Here are some of my initial thoughts on expanded content:
1). Similar to how the City DLC allowed for the Govt to fund education, this proposed Service DLC would expand on this by allowing for the recruitment and training of people for specific skills. For example, those Universities would train future employees in Banking, Medicine, Culinary arts, Acting, Engineering, and Management. Basically, the Universities would train citizens in those fields (plus more that can be added later) and then Companies would work to recruit those professionals through an updated HR function in the Co. HQ. You can also send your Co. executives back to university to expand their skills and increase their expertise through training in Management (i.e. take your COO from a rating of 20 in retailing to 80 through paid education).
2). Based on those educated fields you can then build service products. For example, let's say I want to start and run my very own Walt Disney Company. I would recruit employees educated in acting to make movies at my studio. I would then provide two different services: feature films and tv programming. As a studio, I would have several different inputs I would need to make a movie. I'd need the actors, I'd need cameras, costumes, and sets. The cameras, costumes, and sets I could purchase from other third-party companies. You'd then have a blending of physical products (which the game already does great) and human capital to make your service product. In this case the keeping of Actors on my company could work similar to how I keep my researches on in R&D. The actual making of a service like films and tv programming could work similar to how the game makes software. I'd hire a director and editor to make the movie. I'd select the genre (this can work similar to how we have different software classes). Once the movie was made it could be distributed to Movie Theaters and then combined with DVD's to make Home DVD's that could be sold in retail stores. The theaters would be a new service firm. The user would have a selection of movies to show (similar to selecting products for resale) and agree to pay a fee per customer to the studio. The user then could set the price based on combined 1) product quality 2)banding and 3) service quality. The service quality would be based on his customer service ratings, training of his employees, and the venue quality.
Basically, the service quality and pricing is what the service firm can control and is the deciding factor in obtaining customers. If your customer service sucks then in the above example customers will go to a different theater. If you haven't spent money to upgrade your theaters then your venue quality will suffer.
This would support the creation of firm upgrading. Similar to how we can expand floors on retail firms, the user/AI would upgrade their facilities to increase their venue quality. Venue upgrades could be unlocked based on your level of research. Same goes for training of employees.
This could be done also for running a chain of hospitals. The inputs would be the various drug products, the doctors, and then research of medical procedures. The firm attracts customers by having the best employees (doctors), availability of drugs, and having multiple levels of medical procedures available.
I'll try to put some diagrams together that better explains how this could work.