Hi.
I just bought the game and played few games, I've read the forum and strategy tips but I still have some questions.
First of all, how do you organize your factories? I'm really lost when I have more than 2 products made by myself with few factories.
Also, how to increase the brand and quality of my products?
Thank you.
Few questions from a beginner
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azxcvbnm321
- Level 3 user
- Posts: 95
- Joined: Fri Dec 07, 2012 9:13 am
Re: Few questions from a beginner
I have my factories producing only one good each. When I grow large enough and have several factories producing the same good, I then use a warehouse to buy up all the goods from my factories and distribute them ( as a distribution center) to my retail stores.
Increase the quality by using R&D. Set up R&D firms and have them research the product you are producing. Once you have a superior product in terms of quality, then you can advertise to increase your brand. DO NOT advertise low quality products because that will only give you a negative brand rating (people will find out your products suck and avoid them). Even without advertising, if your products are good quality, they'll gain brand loyalty (through word of mouth). This is slower than advertising though, a lot slower.
Increase the quality by using R&D. Set up R&D firms and have them research the product you are producing. Once you have a superior product in terms of quality, then you can advertise to increase your brand. DO NOT advertise low quality products because that will only give you a negative brand rating (people will find out your products suck and avoid them). Even without advertising, if your products are good quality, they'll gain brand loyalty (through word of mouth). This is slower than advertising though, a lot slower.
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anjali
- Level 4 user
- Posts: 196
- Joined: Tue Nov 03, 2015 9:00 am
Re: Few questions from a beginner
there are many strategies how to organize factories/ how to brand it
for myself i aim for maximum effectivness and cut expanses where i can to achieve a high profit margin.
therefore any product that has higher freigth cost then the raw materials will be produced in each town seperately, saves me also a ton of warehouses which would, added up, create a lot of exspanses. for most goods a medium facory is sufficient per town and it will cover at level 9 roughly 60-80% of demand, which is not a problem as i can just adjust the price upwards at high quality/brand to reduce demand and you mostlikely not gonna have a 100% coverage anyway.
for goods like jewelries, the freight costs to ship it all around the world are tiny and the ressources are widely spread across the world as well, for products like this i use centralized production with a warehouse to feed the the factories with ressources from multiple mines (to mix the quality of all raw materials for constant quality level) and then a warehouse to distribute the product from those 5 large factories as i use always an inventory unit in the warehouse to shuffle the quality once again, because the shuffle of different qualities isnt that effective unfortunately. reason for the split of production into centralized in decentralized ones is simple the fact that freight costs for many products are incredible high and can cost you on some products more then 60% of your profit and the centralized production will also need rawmaterial input from across the world, raising the production costs too. freight costs for finished products can hike to 3 times to price of the product if transported across the world leaves you not much of a profit at high quality/brand, cant turn a dime at low quality or low brand in this case.
just to name an example:
producing a bed in the city with lowest wages might sound good as you drop the production cost from $103 to $98.45 per unit.
but now we need to import timber from around the world and paying 1.29 freightcost per timber instead of 0.17 which will raise the production cost to around $200 per unit and on top you also gonna pay 144.82 instead of 37.18 local freight cost. so a local bed would cost including freight $140.18 from scratch to have it sitting in your shop while the imported bed from a centralized factory will cost you more then $340 and we not even took into account the warehouses you need to run for distribution of centralized rawmaterial/finished products that would raise the price by another few $. that said you already waste $200 of your profit margin which will be 50% of your total gross profit of your bed (factory+shop) if you got high qquality branded product. if its low quality zero brand, you gonna take your personal wallet and squeeze $40 into your company for every bed you sell. by 20k beds sold in a town the additional costs for centralized product will be alone for this 1 product about 50 million per year and there are products/raw materials with much higher freight costs in comparisation to the value of goods. jewelry on the other side the transport fee in a super armored cash transporter with 50 armed security guards (joking) will cost ya about a dollar per unit to move it around the globe, ressources are spread across the world and not aleways local availible, in this case a centralized production makes most sense, preferably in a town with 2 gold deposits to cut the huge freight costs on the gold. both systems have its pro and contra and wisely mixed can result in high profitability of your corporation
for brand, again different strategies but as pointed out above, no point to have an advertising budget for low quality products it will raise the brand awareness but also the brand loyality will go negative so the total brand effect of advertising is quite low.
a good start brand is range brand, as it would raise quite fast without advertising at all but gonna get stuck somewhere around 40-50 brand rating (150k/month advertising each product class or so called product range) unless you increase spending on advertising. for a large corp with high profits unique branding is mostlikely the best way to go as each product is rated seperately but each product will need its own advertising spending, so a huge budget is necessary to advertise.
for myself i aim for maximum effectivness and cut expanses where i can to achieve a high profit margin.
therefore any product that has higher freigth cost then the raw materials will be produced in each town seperately, saves me also a ton of warehouses which would, added up, create a lot of exspanses. for most goods a medium facory is sufficient per town and it will cover at level 9 roughly 60-80% of demand, which is not a problem as i can just adjust the price upwards at high quality/brand to reduce demand and you mostlikely not gonna have a 100% coverage anyway.
for goods like jewelries, the freight costs to ship it all around the world are tiny and the ressources are widely spread across the world as well, for products like this i use centralized production with a warehouse to feed the the factories with ressources from multiple mines (to mix the quality of all raw materials for constant quality level) and then a warehouse to distribute the product from those 5 large factories as i use always an inventory unit in the warehouse to shuffle the quality once again, because the shuffle of different qualities isnt that effective unfortunately. reason for the split of production into centralized in decentralized ones is simple the fact that freight costs for many products are incredible high and can cost you on some products more then 60% of your profit and the centralized production will also need rawmaterial input from across the world, raising the production costs too. freight costs for finished products can hike to 3 times to price of the product if transported across the world leaves you not much of a profit at high quality/brand, cant turn a dime at low quality or low brand in this case.
just to name an example:
producing a bed in the city with lowest wages might sound good as you drop the production cost from $103 to $98.45 per unit.
but now we need to import timber from around the world and paying 1.29 freightcost per timber instead of 0.17 which will raise the production cost to around $200 per unit and on top you also gonna pay 144.82 instead of 37.18 local freight cost. so a local bed would cost including freight $140.18 from scratch to have it sitting in your shop while the imported bed from a centralized factory will cost you more then $340 and we not even took into account the warehouses you need to run for distribution of centralized rawmaterial/finished products that would raise the price by another few $. that said you already waste $200 of your profit margin which will be 50% of your total gross profit of your bed (factory+shop) if you got high qquality branded product. if its low quality zero brand, you gonna take your personal wallet and squeeze $40 into your company for every bed you sell. by 20k beds sold in a town the additional costs for centralized product will be alone for this 1 product about 50 million per year and there are products/raw materials with much higher freight costs in comparisation to the value of goods. jewelry on the other side the transport fee in a super armored cash transporter with 50 armed security guards (joking) will cost ya about a dollar per unit to move it around the globe, ressources are spread across the world and not aleways local availible, in this case a centralized production makes most sense, preferably in a town with 2 gold deposits to cut the huge freight costs on the gold. both systems have its pro and contra and wisely mixed can result in high profitability of your corporation
for brand, again different strategies but as pointed out above, no point to have an advertising budget for low quality products it will raise the brand awareness but also the brand loyality will go negative so the total brand effect of advertising is quite low.
a good start brand is range brand, as it would raise quite fast without advertising at all but gonna get stuck somewhere around 40-50 brand rating (150k/month advertising each product class or so called product range) unless you increase spending on advertising. for a large corp with high profits unique branding is mostlikely the best way to go as each product is rated seperately but each product will need its own advertising spending, so a huge budget is necessary to advertise.