First of all: Cap Lab is a very nice game, where you can have much fun!!! Really good!
But there are some different things and bugs which needed to be improved. This post is about the AI of the personal staff in the HQ.
I play version 5.4.12
I just have bought the original game recently plus all DLCs and played it, that's it.
(Sorry for my bad english, I hope my text is understandable)
I'm a person who allways try different things out in order to see how thinks work and wether they work... . I dont rely blind on things... .
I have to figure out - everything - in order to be able to have confidence.
They are two things in the HQ, which simply doesn't work but they are extremely important.
They realy should replaced with functionale ones... :
First, the COO:
The bar/slider to adjust price politics:
Its simply doesn't matter how the adjustment is...., the COO always sell products to prices according to his own rules... .
I have tested and observed it with different products. The COO doesn't make any changes or even make changes in the reverse direction. For example: when i adjust the price politics bar/slider to minimal prices for maximal market shares (adjustemt before: maximal prices), the COO even make prices more expensive instead of cheaper like he is setting his own prices anyway the whole time. That's mean for me, setting the bar/slider has not any effect.
(I guess the bar/slider below, which refers to fright cost, doesn't have any effect either... . It's difficult to test it. But it's not that important to me.)
Also this page doesn't work either:
(This page is to have special adjustments for specific products)
One example:
The COO always sell my Oil to it's minimum price..., but an oil well is really expensive.... .
An oil well should make at least no losses with maybe a bit profit.
I want the COO care about my oil wells too, but not with his personal price politics.
There should be bars/sliders, which really work!!
Secondly, the CMO:
The bar/slider to adjust the "Target brand rating" is firstly stupid (doesn't really make sense) and secondly it has not any effect, doesn't matter which adjustment you test, nothing happens.
Explaining:
You always want to get the most out of your products. That means that you want to target the highest brand rating anyway. The faster you optain that, the faster you have advantages, the faster you can set the product price a bit higher.
The slower you obtain that the more financial losses you have.
After the branding of a product is about 95+, you (or the CMO) set down the advertising anyway, because you have reached the max. Why give money for expensive advertising then?
Suggestion:
There sould be instead (maybe 2) bars/sliders.
One bar/slider - the important one - is for adjust the advertising intensity (how much money you monthly spend in generall for advertising in all of your advertising units).
The bar/slider in the CMO unit of the HQ where you can set the advertising spending for one time is not very usefull, when the CMO set the value afterwards back to the half again, like he is simply always setting the advertising value to the half.
See this picture:
And the second maybe redundant bar/slider is a functionale bar/slider(,wich simply should work!) to adjust exactly the target branding the player want. For example a branding of 95 (let the player decide what the smartest value is).
One further suggestion reffering to oil wells/gold mines/iron ore mines etc.:
After an oil well is absolutly empty and depleted, so there is really nothing left what this mine can sell... . If you have commissioned the COO to take care about an oil well or mine, he should closed down the mine/destroing the mine by its own, because that structure has absolutely no sense to exist anymore. There is really nothing what the COO can do wrong in this specific case.
A factory for example can restructured to produce something else or whatever. But an depleted oil well/mine has not any sense anymore.
I mean, I understand that the programmer of the game should really careful of programming the COO AI in order to make the COO at least not even a problem for the player. And that is really good and important though, but in this case there is nothing that the COO can do wrong. It's just an improvement.
And if someone don't want the COO to do that for you for whatever reason, simply doesn't commission the COO to take care about your mine.
(A other possibility would be a checkbox, where you can adjust, wether the COO shall do that for you or not.)
Those improvements would make the COO/CMO make more sense.
Or in other words:
The right to exist of a COO/CMO in the game (and in my company) would raise and make more sense with those improvements, so that the COO has really a more weight, a more importance, if he is more usefull! That would improve the game.
And also: he should do something for his expensive salary!
The next:
According to these 4 buttons in the COO unit of the HQ:
There are just strict options, either the COO shall just look for better supplies in the own company or he shall direct look in all companies for the best supply and so on. That's very strict and restrective. The player is forced to decide between "incomplete" options but nothing completely fits.
Of course, the following is very reasonable and actually natural:
There should be an option with following charateristics:
COO should at first look for better supplies in own firms, is there nothing to find, then look in all the other firms. Maby between: before looking in all other firms: as a second steb in subsidiary firms. Is there nothing too, then the third step: look for any other source... .
It's simply the same like in the CMO unit, where there is a button, where the CMO look at first for own media companies, and then for everything else if there are no own media companies.
This option should really be implemented. Actually I wondering why such a button was forgotten for the COO.
Ok, I hope my english was understandable.
Thanks for the attention!! Let me know what you think.
