I guess I really don't understand supply and demand...

[City Builder]

Okay so I have:

1. farm producing frozen chicken and beef, it shows a full yellow supply bar and a half full demand bar
2. Supermarket, that shows a full demand bar and a half full supply bar.

My supermarket is buying from my own farms, so I guess I just don't understand why my supermarkets only show a supply of half a bar but my farm which is producing the products that my supermarket buys is showing only a half full demand bar.

There are no AI players buying the products that my farms are creating and no production or sales is anywhere near full capacity, so why is my large farm that shows only half demand bar not able to keep up with the full supply bar on the retail supermarkets for those products?

[David]

You may send me your save game file and I will take a look at it.

[megapolis]

I think that purchasing units in your supermarket are at 100% capacity. It means that there is supply from your factory. There is demand from population and space in supermarket. But purchasing units simply cannot transfer goods with your desired speed.

[anjali]

by large farms, if they can not keep up with demand and only your 3 or 4 shops are pulling from them the supply bar will only show approx half capacity, only if the demand is way too high, i.e. have 20 shops pullling, the farms supply/demand bars would show it. i use in the farms for lifestock instead of 3 sales units, an inventory unit and 2 sales units, that way the 3 processing units can always unload to inventory without delay and am able to store overproduction when the demand is going down sometimes. and with this setup the supply demand bars also show only half utilization even with empty inventory and 3 shops with each 1 purchase- 2 sales units are pulling of it and yes shops purchase unit.
like in the current game chicken lvl 6 inventory empty 1,237,000.00 units sold by the farm monthly, demand bar roughly 60% 3 shops a 1 purchase / 2 sales all level 9 supply /demand on purchase is about 1/3 utilized and sales overstretched marketshare about 70% thats only 1 town.

[City Builder]

The market and the farm Where is the bottleneck?

[City Builder]

Never mind, I see the bottle neck is in the sales dept, I swear it wasn't like that last night when I noticed this but now that I've loaded the save it's showing that the sales are maxed out.

[David]

Do you think the supply/demand bars are a bit difficult to interpret ?

Do you think the game should provide an option for displaying it alternatively?

Instead of 2 bars showing demand and supply. Perhaps just one bar showing:
-if the supply is sufficient or not, for purchasing units (if the bar is less than full, meaning that the supply is insufficient)
-if the demand is sufficient or not, for sale units (if the bar is less than full, meaning that the demand is lower than supply)

The display option can be toggled in the Options menu - whether it should display the original pair of supply/demand bars or this new way of displaying it.

What do you guys think?

[anjali]

personally am quite happy with the supply/demand bars they actually interpret supply/demand quite good, just in farms they seem not to display the actual demand vs supply. as i stated above, when a farm only feeds 3 purchase units it shows around 60% demand by 100% supply but the famrs are actually sucked dry and cant keep up with the 3 purchase units

also i ve seen in the picture above that more then one processing unit is attached to a livestock raising unit, is there anywhere a ratio for each livestock as its not possible to calculate this by checking the .dbf files.
since cap lab, its not possible to determine ingame whetever the livestock raising unit can supply more processing units as they dont have any supply demand bars in their field anymore. in previous capitalism versions you had those bars and some livestock raising units could supply up to 4 or 5 processing units, whilest others needed atleast 2 livestock units for 1 processing unit to work efficient (cashmere and wool)

[megapolis]

David, current bars are ok. No need to change them unless you are planning to re-create the interface from a scratch like it was done in Cap2 after Cap Plus.