Store Policies & Hours

[WilliamMGary]

Okay so to some this may sound stupid but I've been thinking of these things for a VERY long time.

1. It would be nice to be able to implement corporate store policies like Lawaway, Loyal Cards, Membership Clubs, Return Policy, Focus on Customer Service, Focus on creating an in-store experience.
2. Able to determine if your drug store is 24hrs or not or if your department store is opened after 10PM or close on Sundays.
The store hours I think would be most helpful for smaller companies to reduce costs and for those extra small markets where a full 24/7 store cannot be profitable.

Let's discuss and ridicule these ideas for the City Economic Simulation DLC

[City Builder]

I'm really starting to think that some of these "finer" ideas are simply going to be lost in the overall playing of the game. For example, (and this is only the way that I play, and I recognize that everybody plays different), I don't really care if my convenience store is initially losing 50k a week when in the overall scheme of things my company is pulling in 150,000,000 a month and I know that ultimately it will be producing a profit if I have placed it anywhere even remotely decent.

So having these finer controls over the stores seems more and more that it's going to ultimately go unnoticed by the average player, where as the player that likes to tweak every thing (i.e. the min/max players) might benefit from this, but is the development time justified in such a niche market to begin with. Also I don't think that the game gives enough details to determine how much fees you've made in lay aways or not, sure they could probably add it in, but what do I care if my store that's already making a healthy profit makes an additional 50k a month from lay away fees or if they've had 10k in returns that month or not when like I said, my corp is bringing in 150,000,000 or more a month anyway. Again, the min/max player might enjoy it, but to me it's just something that is likely to go ultimately unnoticed after the initial first 30 to 60 minutes of playing and something that becomes more of a chore to have to setup on a store by store basis to where I stop using it all together since my corp is making a profit I can usually just wait until the store starts to make a profit.

I'm just not sure that this fine of a micro management is where I would want to see the game heading towards. They'd really have to have made the game for that micromanagement bandwidth instead of what I like to think of the Cap games as more of a broad stroke, with minimal micromanagement when desired (i.e. setting up what products to sell in retail if you're not producing them yourself).

Ultimately I think they need to work on a more broad stroke with the paintbrush when dealing with an economic city simulation DLC rather than a micro managed finer brush stroke where we're tweaking individual store policies.

No offense, just my opinion of course.

[WilliamMGary]

The store policies could be "Broad Strokes" where you set it at the corporate level for all stores.

I have One store in the ultra small markets simply as a defensive play making most of the money via manufacturing but would love the ability to try and lower/eliminate the losses on the store. These wouldn't be features you will start brother with right away, it will be once you have a 150 billion corp and you just want to try and maximize performance and its something that could make integrating stores/corps a little more complex but for most users I agree they won't care or notice but may find it cool once they discover it.

Considering we're introducing politics for us max/mins this would be a nice bone to throw to get us to buy the DLC lol

[megapolis]

Totally agree with City Builder.
I already asked in another thread: is it a Business Simulator or RPG?

I am not here for a Sim City or Sims or World of Warcraft. For me Capitalism is a game of chess. In chess King is not a person, he even does not have a kingdom or any personal traits. He's a placeholder. But he runs the game. All other pieces have to save him no matter what.

I haven't seen watches in game interface, only a calendar. So no open hours or 24 hours.
I don't care if my shops work on weekends or not. I only know that average salary index in the city is say 78% (x$2000) and that an average consumer will buy 0.5kg of meat per month. That information is sufficient to run the business.

Use Occam's Razor, please. I don't know how it should be said in english but google translate says "it is not nesessary to produce the essence". I mean that no need to create new properties, entities unless they are needed. What do you want with this or numerous other brilliant ideas? Create a totally realistic world? You can play The Sims, Sim City or even Cities:Skylines. I definitely recommend the latter. It is much better than latest Sim City and you can create a city with 500k people and manually rename everyone, rename every store etc. Quite real. You want the ability to fine-tune your income model comparing to AI? C'mon, you can beat any number of AI on any difficulty setting even with current set of instruments. Ah, I forgot another game you can play. You can go outside and have a life. It is quite realistic simulation of everything. The only problem is that you cannot save it and reload later. But since it is rather popular, people got used to it.

Cheers,
megapolis

[Slimp]

Actually I stopped playing Capitalism and one of the main reasons is that there is no challenge left. In my opinion it is way to easy for experienced players to build up a big company with a lot of revenue, even on the highest difficulty level. In this sense I agree it does not make much sense to add further fine tuning tools.

But if there would be implemented kind of a survival mode, with adjusted cost and revenue structures exactly those fine tuning tools would make the difference. For instance there is a huge difference in terms of cost and revenues whether u have a convenience store running 24 hours or a computer shop.

[WilliamMGary]

But if there would be implemented kind of a survival mode, with adjusted cost and revenue structures exactly those fine tuning tools would make the difference. For instance there is a huge difference in terms of cost and revenues whether u have a convenience store running 24 hours or a computer shop.

Agree but maybe there will be a micro manage DLC.

[megapolis]

Never heard about a game where micromanagement was more interesting than the game itself.

[WilliamMGary]

Never heard about a game where micromanagement was more interesting than the game itself.

RollerCoaster Tycoon, Cities XL, SimCity etc but not the point I'm trying to make also not "more interesting than the game" but having the ability to micromanage doesn't take away from the game either.

[megapolis]

Are you kidding me?

This game already has so many micromanagement that you will never be able to master it! And you want to add functions that only adds additional micromanagement and nothing else?

Nevermind. Looks like I am talking to a brick wall.

[WilliamMGary]

I understand that you don't like the idea, that's fine but some players may appreciate a feature like this just as some users like them in the other for mentioned games.