Interface Improvement Suggestions

[David]

Thanks for your suggestions.

I would recommend that you create a poll for your suggestion to gauge the community's interest in it. There would be a higher chance that the dev team will implement it if the interest level is high.

You could see some examples of the polls in the Suggestions forum at http://www.capitalism2.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=14

[Yimmy]

David:

I have another suggestion for an interface improvement.

Once a Layout Plan has been selected, use it to focus the supplier list on the choice shown in the plan's
"purchase" square. For example, for sofa, one of the plan's "purchase" squares shows "leather" The suggestion is
to automatically bring the supplier list to leather suppliers. For "timber", the list would automatically start
at timber suppliers as opposed to the current situation where the supplier list always starts at the alphabetic beginning of
the suppliers list and you must scroll down to timber to make your choice. This could save a great deal of time
when choosing suppliers in a game with hundreds of factories.

Note that my suggestion already is done when changing existing suppliers for a product, but it would be extremely helpful when choosing suppliers for new factory products.


Question: What is the purpose of DVD as a semi-product? I don't find any use for it. I ask because I noticed that the AI actually paid good money to upgrade its technology for DVD in a recent game I played in CapLab 6.3.07. Is this a bug?

[David]

Once a Layout Plan has been selected, use it to focus the supplier list on the choice shown in the plan's
"purchase" square. For example, for sofa, one of the plan's "purchase" squares shows "leather" The suggestion is
to automatically bring the supplier list to leather suppliers. For "timber", the list would automatically start
at timber suppliers as opposed to the current situation where the supplier list always starts at the alphabetic beginning of
the suppliers list and you must scroll down to timber to make your choice. This could save a great deal of time
when choosing suppliers in a game with hundreds of factories.

This is a good suggestion. I've forwarded it to the dev team and they told me that they will implement it in the next version 6.4.06.

Question: What is the purpose of DVD as a semi-product? I don't find any use for it. I ask because I noticed that the AI actually paid good money to upgrade its technology for DVD in a recent game I played in CapLab 6.3.07. Is this a bug?

DVD is for making packaged software products.

[Freemarket]

Once a Layout Plan has been selected, use it to focus the supplier list on the choice shown in the plan's
"purchase" square. For example, for sofa, one of the plan's "purchase" squares shows "leather" The suggestion is
to automatically bring the supplier list to leather suppliers. For "timber", the list would automatically start
at timber suppliers as opposed to the current situation where the supplier list always starts at the alphabetic beginning of
the suppliers list and you must scroll down to timber to make your choice. This could save a great deal of time
when choosing suppliers in a game with hundreds of factories.

This is a good suggestion. I've forwarded it to the dev team and they told me that they will implement it in the next version 6.4.06.

Question: What is the purpose of DVD as a semi-product? I don't find any use for it. I ask because I noticed that the AI actually paid good money to upgrade its technology for DVD in a recent game I played in CapLab 6.3.07. Is this a bug?

DVD is for making packaged software products.

This is a great feature, but it would be nice to exclude this algorithm from retail stores and warehouses because when changing / replacing a product, you have to scroll through the entire list of names, even taking into account the filter of your Corporation

[David]

This is a great feature, but it would be nice to exclude this algorithm from retail stores and warehouses because when changing / replacing a product, you have to scroll through the entire list of names, even taking into account the filter of your Corporation

It currently already excludes those. Did you mean "include" ?

[Yimmy]

David:

The price synchronization option that was created for 6.4.07 gives me another idea for improving management of firms. I often use training differently for various firm types. Retail stores get a small amount of training; factories, warehouses and farms lots of training and raw materials zero training. I often forget to apply training when setting up a firm; having an automatic option to apply the same amount of training by firm type would be helpful.

Therefore ,I would like to see an option that allows you to apply the same amount of training across individual firm types. Like the price synchronization option, you could choose all or none, retail, factories, farms, etc. The training slider bar could be beside each firm type, set as a default, and would be applied to each firm upon creation. A player wouldn't have to use the option, but it would save time for those who do apply training to firms.

[David]

David:

The price synchronization option that was created for 6.4.07 gives me another idea for improving management of firms. I often use training differently for various firm types. Retail stores get a small amount of training; factories, warehouses and farms lots of training and raw materials zero training. I often forget to apply training when setting up a firm; having an automatic option to apply the same amount of training by firm type would be helpful.

Therefore ,I would like to see an option that allows you to apply the same amount of training across individual firm types. Like the price synchronization option, you could choose all or none, retail, factories, farms, etc. The training slider bar could be beside each firm type, set as a default, and would be applied to each firm upon creation. A player wouldn't have to use the option, but it would save time for those who do apply training to firms.

You can already do this in the current version - please see the attached screenshot.

[buells]

How about some kind of screen that lets you look at your capacity for a given product in a particular city vs. the total market for the product in that city? Could look at retail capacity and production capacity separately. Perhaps the capacity could be bucketed by product quality as well.

The reason I think this could be useful is that it can sometimes be difficult to gauge over/undercapacity. I can look at my market share graph and see that I have 75% of the market, but do I have 75% because I only have enough retail space for 75% of the goods or is it because my competitors have been able to hold that much despite me having excess capacity? If it is the latter, maybe I should be cutting my prices but I probably don't need to add capacity.

[Lerura]

It would be nice to have more filter options for the Dominance report.
It could be by 3 dropdown boxes handling production, market share and dominance respectively.

The first dropdown:
All
Producing
Not Producing

The second:
All
With Market Share
Without Market Share

And the Third:
All
Dominated
Not Dominated

And maybe a checkbox that allow the inclusion of Non-costumer products.

This way you can have an overview of for which items you have to improve, by selecting "with market share" and "not dominated", and you can check if you have any production that you have forgot to add to a retail store , by selecting "producing" and "without maket share" and so on.

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Theres should also be a way to filter out layout plans that are not valid due to your selection of a mod or not (i.e. playing vanilla).
Two of the popular mods ( Real World and Modern World ) each have 500+ products, which makes it almost impossible to even remotely remember all of them, wherefore it is beneficial to add you layout to the layout plans.

But if you have played e.g. Real World for a while and shift to Modern World or go vanilla, them you will, with the only available filter option: "all inputs avaliable" see a bunch of layout plans that are not valid for this mod selection, and vice versa.

Similarly there might be some layout plans for which all input are available, but you can't use them because you haven't researched them output product(s) yet.

And also some plans that are shown because one of the AIs produce one of the inputs, but you can't get access to the input because they have set it to internal sale.

Here it would be nice to have three different: All plans or just only those with all inputs available (the current filter options ), All plans or just those where you have researched the output, and lastly All plans or just those that are valid for this selection of mod.

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Occasionally you have a business relations with one of your competitor, because an input was only available through trade when you set up a needed production, or that Auto Link Supplier chooses to buy from a competitor or a seaport, even though you produce the input yourself.
You can under Business Relation see that you are current trading with a competitor, but the are no way to see which trades are currently active and whether you are the buyer or seller.
A detailed list of trades , in the form "<Building Name> buys/sells <Product> from/to <Company>/Seaport", where <Building Name> is th e firms description e.g:
"Factory 001 (New York) sells Steel to Sage Bloom". It would be nice if there also was an amount graph and a money graph on this list too.

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The COO adjusts selling prices from you factories, retail stores etc, but it would be nice if he/she would also adjust the E-Commerce prices.
Currently the prices is set based on the retail prices that were active when E-commerce was initiated, but after that they don't change at all, unless you do it manually. And one of the purposed of a COO is to adjust prices for you automatically, so why not for E-Commerce too.

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It would be nice if there was a way to manually add a software producing unit.
Currently the only way is to set up a software production by the button at the top which creates a factory that are way too efficient.
I have tried linking a software manufacturing unit to Paper and DVD. but it doesn't allow for production of software, even though it is the only thing you can make from Paper and DVD.
Whether it should be possible by a speciel software manufacturing units, or a simple change that allows software to be produced in a standard manufaturing units if linked to Paper and DVD is up to you.

[foxtrotf]

Hello! Is it possible to implement button "Save as Template", when creating new game with customized parameters? Which will save all that values, so you can edit them and extend with more specific parameters later.