If we're talking about Telecom, I completely agree with opening posters issue.
The AI doesn't seem to think logically when it comes to setting up telecom businesses and the game doesn't seem to function all that well around this service either.
I have one city where there are 8!!! other Telecom businesses aside from my own and the initial starter ... so 10 in total ... at this point I think the AI just builds one if it has enough cash to do so
Meanwhile the other 2 cities in my game don't have any telecom competitors. The AI just build them all in 1 city. Granted it is the BEST city with the largest population but having 8 other competitors doesn't make any sense. They are all bleeding money. The cities, Paris bestest city with 4 million (good wage rate) has 10 total, Rome with 2 million (same wage rate) only has 2 (1 is mine) and Kuala Lumpur only has the 1 the AI builds in the beginning and no competitors.
Even as I built a telecom myself pretty early on it just never got much traction no matter what I did with the prices. In Rome I set the price to half that of the competitor. Still the numbers barely budge each month. It's like people don't want internet for half price or something.
Then in the end I just set it to 10 cents in Paris to see what would happen ... and let it run for something like 10 years and I finally got 50% of the market share ... yay ... the first ai competitor that the game spawns in initially to build a telecom still sits at a comfortable 30% (with $9 sub) and the other 8 telecoms have the remaining 20% to split between them.
[Edit]
I tested some variables and even when I set the price to 10 cents, I can at best gain 1% market share per month at best. But more likely roughly 10% per year ... that's ... disappointing ... for free internet mind you ... well $0.10 (I'd given it for free at this point lmao)
[/Edit]
To summarize:
> AI's too eagerly build telecoms in one city, regardless of pre-existing competition.
> AI's don't pull out of a failing telecom/media business causing them to bleed money.
> Consumers don't switch provider nearly as fast as they should and are barely price sensitive.
> Increasing infrastructure spending also is ludicrously expensive and slow to build up. It takes decades to provide service for a large 5 million pop city. If I set the slider to max, I expect to provide service to the entire city within 10 years, heck 5 years is totally realistic.
> Another big problem I just noticed is that when you have expanded your infrastructure it increases the overhead costs (that's fine) BUT you can never get rid of this overhead again. This means that even if you fix all the previously mentioned points, if you suffer from too much competition and market share loss, your telecom will implode on itself because it has to pay overhead for consumers that no longer exist. Your only option would be to delete your telecom and build it all over again. That again makes no sense. Instead of have the infrastructure spending be ''upgrading Infastructure'' only it should be more of an ''expansion AND maintenance'' slider. Set the slider to max and the telecom will try to expand to the max population that can be serviced. Set it to half for example and it will expand to half the city population. If you already have more capacity then you can service (due to competition for example) have your actual infrastructure degrade back down if you set the slider down. This way you can actually slim down your telecom and reduce overhead costs.