After playing a vanilla game, to see how different it is from playing Cap 2, I went for software companies.
I'll use tech as a broad term from herein.
First of, even after reading the tutorials, some information were missing.
- To begin with each tech type is not visible unless one first build a software company and the required unit type (tech, manage or program) before being able to access the list. Even if city's quality of life and pay factors into availability, it'd be nice to be able to make a decision before making a choice.
Suggestion :
- Add where it's most relevant, I'd suggest by product, a tab showing available tech sorted by ranking per city.
The latest request comes from an odd ingame moment. After building and improving my OS company for a bit, I thought to branch off and create a spreadsheet software. As it takes more than one year to have a decent product for the market, I chose not to buy/assign neither a manager and program, money was still tight and competition fierce. So, when the research was done, I buy a manger and program unit but no manager was on the market, neither hire nor headhunt. Moved on to the next city, where after buying another lot and management unit, no manager again.
One city I count as lack of foresight on my part. But two?.
Suggestion :
- Add a unit to either software company/research lab enabling in-company education. The purpose of which would be to have a relevant type tech on the market after said number of years (one would either. Think of it as interning/apprentice. Minimal length of time would depends on what is sought, fewer for a tech, med for programmer longer for a manager.
To create a new OS, one needs to reach the given value of 30 in three different fields. It’s important to note for this very specific product that being the first entails some serious perks as all software relies on an OS to work on.
In each of my three tests so far, I’ve seen AI able to create a new OS within 2 years, and here’s the rub.
To be able to do so, one has to create tree companies each handling one OS’ aspect, Core, Display and Input with enough techs so 30 can be achieved in 2 years. According to the city of choice and luck I guess, we’re talking 7 tech unit at least, with one project manager and lead programmer to 8/9 strong tech factories, I haven’t toyed with advertisement yet.
This imply some serious starting funds compared to the mainstream factories/retail store fronts. AI competition is quite fierce, they keep on upgrading their product on a yearly basis ; unless I lucked out and was first on another software, best I could hope for was modest monthly income, more often balanced out once AI release the new version. Best case scenario, It’ll take around 6 years to have enough funds to open a second store in another city. Compared to vanilla, this is a bit odd. One is not expecting to become the next <insert big name here> in test runs, but this much struggling feels odd
Suggestion : No obvious fix here. Being the first in delivering an OS has to have some perks. The one idea I would offer would be to :
- Balance, meaning lower, AI’ improvement frequency.
- Introduce a generation gap so old OS working on, e.g 32b (old cpu, ram, 4/5G etc..), systems will find themselves having an harder time adapting to a new system meaning they lose tech level and allow a newcomer to slip in and corner a slice of the market. That would imply a new system specifically designed for tech, maybe not worth the time and effort.
