More than 4 products per store(floor)?

[Brutus]

Is it perhaps possible (with the current engine) that the stores sell more than 4 products per floor? Pretty plz? See image below for quick understanding.

Aisle&FloorSystemMockup.png (1.29 MiB) Viewed 1958 times

Story

I really love the fact that multiple floors were added to stores because now they can at least sell 12 products per store, a massive improvement imho. You can actually fill up a whole product class inside a single store and the store feels much more like a real store because of it. It takes up waaay less space in-game and keeps everything nice and tidy for the player.

In the original Cap 2, it always made me feel a little sad that my store only had 4 products it could sell despite its large size such as a supermarket, department store or worst of all, the discount megastore

I mean what discount megastore only sells

• chewing gum

• cola

• eggs

• cough syrup

It's also annoying when I use the digital age dlc and I MUST build at least 2 separate computer stores per city just to sell all the software products there are. I think there's like 20 of them which means I need at least 2 computer stores with 3 floors each just to sell a bunch of CD's and then I still need to sell all the computers so I'm usually at 3 or even 4+ computer stores in a city depending on city size and that's with multiple floors enabled. It doesn't matter if its a smaller city, I must get x amount of stores just to actually have a physical space and location to sell the products. That's the most annoying part really. Without the multiple floor system you're looking at 5 stores minimum just to sell the software alone ... crazy

I don't think it would be unbalanced if a store offered more product variety possible but perhaps less quantity per floor depending on the choices you make.

Currently a regular supermarket can provide the following product classes and I listed the number of products per class as well.

• Beverage 4 products

• Body Care Products 4 products

• Drugs 3 products

• Food 5 products

• Household Products 4 products

• Livestock Products 6 products

• Snacks 6 products

There's 7 product classes for the supermarket alone with a total of 32 products to sell.
That means in the original capitalism 2 you'd need a minimum of 8 supermarkets even in a small city just to sell all the different products and you'd need even more in a huge wealthy city due to the increased demand (2 or 3 times as many in fact). With the added 3 floor system this is essentially only 3 supermarkets now which really isn't that bad honestly, it makes it quite playable and interesting but it's still not that what I'd hoped. Add in some competition and you've got like dozens and dozens of supermarkets even in tiny cities. You could argue that you can sell lots of these products in specialty stores and that you should only count the products that can be sold exclusively in the supermarket. That would give you 25 products, which is still more than 2 supermarkets minimum per city with multiple floors enabled.`Or 7 supermarkets without multiple floors.

Now take the department store for example:

• Software 20 products

• Apparel 4 products

• Body Care Products 4 products

• Communication Devices 4 products

• Computer 4 products

• Cosmetics 4 products

• Electronics 4 products

• Footwear 4 products

• Furniture 3 products

• Home Appliances 3 products

• Jewelry 2 products

• Leather Goods 4 products

• Photography Products 3 products

• Sports Equipment 3 products

• Toy 4 products

• Watch 3 products

That's a total of 16 product classes and a total of 72 products. You'd need 18 department stores in a regular caplab game without multiple floor system. That is an insane amount of department stores. Now you will also have competitors in the game and they will also build their department stores and you're looking at rows and rows of department stores

Really even if you had 4 x the amount of products per store you'd still need more than 1 department store to sell everything there is to offer in this type of store and let's not even get started about the discount megastore ...

I propose therefore that it would be amazingly awesome if we had an aisle system in a retail store providing 4 times the product instead of 1. It would look really awesome if a supermarket was stacked full with all the different products it could sell. I think it would help the AI as well in making balanced stores because lackluster products could be mitigated by more well performing products. And Mods ... omg they would benefit the absolute most from this change because they add so many products with variable demand that it is impossible to fill up a whole city with every product because of it. This would save immense amounts of retail space.

Especially something like the discount megastore would benefit from something like enhanced product variety. It's strange that the largest store doesn't provide any more choice in product.

Alternate System based on Store type/size

You could even set it up in such a way that convenience stores only provide the regular 4 products per floor, supermarkets 8 products per floor, department stores 12 products per floor and the discount megastore 16 products per floor. This would provide a much needed separation between the uses of these stores and make them more interesting imho. Or even better, let the amount of floors be dependent on the store type itself.

If you divided the product box UI that currently exists into 4 separate boxes each, the UI would stay relatively the same and these boxes had always been extremely large so dividing them up by 4 leaves plenty of room to view the products.

Is such a thing even possible and do people even like this idea of added product variety per floor? Personally I'd love to see this implemented more than anything really.

Hope to know what you all think and plz vote for what you'd enjoy the most. Thanks for reading if you managed this far. I'm a bit long-winded when I post ...


TL:DR: 4 x the amount of products per floor, each regular store product placement would now become an aisle of 4 products or 16 per floor) providing more product variety potential and more configurable product supply. Maximum of 48 products with 3 floors. Alternative method, only allow larger stores such as supermarket (2x), department store (3x) and discount (4x) to provide more product variety than currently by allowing (#x) more storefloors and potentially less floors for smaller stores.

[Brutus]

Quick note:

I actually realized it might be a better idea to have 4 x product variety as the standard but limit the amount of floors per store type instead.

> Convenience stores would have only 1 floor but that floor would have 16 possible products for example (or 4 aisles per store). Promoting the idea of setting up large chains of these stores to sell all your product citywide at convenient places.

> Supermarkets would be made more special if they allowed two floors, depicting their greater variety in goods compared to convenience stores but not yet massive in scope.

> Most specialty stores would keep only one floor, as this not only fits their smaller size, they usually don't have a large product variety at the moment to cater to anyway. (potentially allow a 2nd floor to increase supply for large cities but not a third floor to keep these special for larger stores)

> Department stores due to their larger setup costs and nature should have a larger variety of goods so two floors should actually be the standard build and for the discount megastore it would be 3 floors standard at build since those really represent the gargantuan stores which provide massive product variety for attractive prices. They should be made a bit more expensive though, as currently they are too cheap to give them extra floors for free.

> Computer stores and Electronics also have a nice image that supports multiple floors as well, it should probably start at 1 floor but allow up to 3 floors due to its massive product diversity.

To David: Can I add this option to the poll or would that destroy the current votes in the poll itself

[cantdownloadit]

If this is applied, factories and R&D centres would in my opinion needed to be expanded the same way.

After all how many large factories make only 1 product, i would suggest for instance a factory is split into 4 zones same as your basic store, giving 4 lots of 3 by 3 "production lines"

[Brutus]

They could add extra floors (and call them zones) to the factory to recreate the same effect mostly. I don't think the engine can support more than 3 input items per manufactured good though, at least it definitely can't right now, that is why I was wondering if the engine could support this idea at all when it comes to input/sales units for retail.

For R&D centers I totally agree,and if I may add it would be great if they gave multiple floors to software firms and internet firms as well. It would be extremely beneficial and I think these firms would benefit a lot from them in terms of ease of use for the player.

I only think they need to up the setup cost of the extra floors. I'm thinking something like a 2x factor for every floor or heck even an 3x factor would be fine.

Example
Base building: 1 million
2nd Level: on x2 mod it's 2 million to expand
3rd level: on x2 mod it's 4 million to expand

Total: 7 million for a level 3 building, which is quite significant. But it is still way cheaper than buying more land in almost all cases. Especially when it is in an expensive city or the city center. It's always better to build a new floor right now than it is to buy a new plot of land because of this. Upping the cost may actually create situations where this is no longer the case but it would still be extremely rare because land is just so much more expensive in this game.

[saffgee]

This would actually tie in nicely with some of the other concepts being punted around, eg. industrial parks, shopping centres, etc, which are trying to add this very thing but somehow still leaving the existing game mechanics mostly intact.

If I meld your idea, those ideas and the existing mechanics, then the logic would be that each retail or factory building allows for the concept of both floors, as well as aisles (or wings/annexes maybe for factory). So the current floor concept essentially becomes the new aisles/wing concept and we add in another level of detail that allows for floors/buildings.

Eg translating the current floor system into aisles.
- The current convenience store does not change per se as it is a single story shop, but it can have up to 3 aisles (for a total of 12 products), ie just like it currently would have under our existing floors system.
- The supermarket is allowed 2 "floors", so it can have the 3 aisles x 4 products x 2 floors = 24 products
- The hypermarket and department store can have 3 "floors", so they will have 3 x 3 x 4 = 36 products

I think in terms of interface this would simplify it a bit, as then the existing old "floor" GUI can still function as it is as the new aisles/annexes/zones, and all that would need to be added would be a way to access the new floor/zone/building system, which could also function as the basis for the ideas with industrial parks and shopping malls. It feels as though putting these things into the game together might be a better way of doing it as both will require interface changes. There is also no reason why the floors cannot be extended beyond 3 - a 7 story department store is not at all ridiculous for example. However imo having the aisle concept as the current floor system really simplifies the GUI and programming changes that would be needed to potentially make this work.

One way to have the new floor system implemented would be to have the gui open up an entirely new window for each floor (aisles will be represented as the old floors currently are, remember, so no changes there) except that the game would know these two windows are actually part of the same store complex (eg. Madrid department store 1_a, Madrid department store 1_b, etc) and can then feedback the relevant information that way (eg profit, costs, etc). In a sense this mechanic would be like "chaining" multiple stores/factories together which is a concept I have long lobbied for....the advantage is that the "new" store needs no actual footprint on the map.

[Brutus]

Interesting proposition Saffgee

The easiest method I can think of too implement this is as you said to actually add an extra sub-menu to the side. I've created a mock-up to hopefully somewhat resemble what you anticipated it to look like. (Image 1)

I've also added my slightly altered proposed version below it after some inspiration from you so you can see exactly what I have in mind. (Image 2)

Propositional Ideas.

Proposition A/Image 1. The Modified Floor Focused system inspired by Saffgee
(A) = Floor System Sub-Menu, one can Add Floors as one did before up to a maximum number defined by the building type.
(B) = Floors are renamed Into ''Aisles'' instead.

StoreFloorSystemEdited.png (1.24 MiB) Viewed 1962 times

Proposition B/Image 2. The Modified Aisle Focused system inspired by Brutus
(A) = Introduction of the Aisle System, where there was 1 product , there is now an Aisle. Clicking on Aisle switches you to that Aisle's Units Setup (B) (the original 3x3 layout for that Aisle is really the old Floor mechanic just called an Aisle instead and the button to click on a floor has become the original product image box)
)A+) = You Add Aisles just like one would add a product previously except that now adding an Aisle has an associated cost with it. (You're mechanically adding a Floor but it's just renamed to an Aisle instead.
(B) = Unit Setup, Ordinarily this would be the setup of a Floor of a store, in this setup it would be called the setup of an Aisle of a store.
(C) = Would be removed and replaced with (D) to keep the UI simple and visually navigable as 4 aisles together make up a nominal floor now (but not a mechanical one in terms of how it is done currently in vanilla, this is just a visual and UI gimmick to separate chunks of 4 floors)
(D) = Floor System Sub-Menu, one can Add Floors as one did before up to a maximum number defined by the building type. (All you are really doing is separating chunks of 4 mechanical floors into nominal floors for the UI and user)

AisleSystemFinish.png (1.29 MiB) Viewed 1962 times

Also after your comment I realized you only need to visually tweak 1 element of the entire UI to make my system actually work with a tiny bit more effort as your system would take and that element that needs the change would be the Product Select Menu. Under the current floor mechanic you could as you made clear just add more floors to simulate ''aisles'' so to speak, all you would need to do to make my proposition work, is alter the output of the individual product results of each floor and cram them into one product box Image 2 component (A) and let the switching to ''Aisles'' be done by selecting the Aisles ''Box'', thus creating a user interface friendly way switching between ''Aisles'' (which are just floors in disguise) and regularly add floors on top of that. You don't even need to alter the unit input logic or anything weird like that under this new system. You'd just expand on the floor system itself. I only realized that thanks to you.

I'd be happy with either solution. Of course I am biased towards my own idea because my brain came up with it but I love your idea as well. Your solution definitely is easier to code and implement I think but I just like the idea of having all those products instantly visually accessible through the interface without having to jump through hoops and menus and I feel it is a lot more user friendly. Since David is already proposing altering some of the UI I think it would be great if this was implemented together with the revamp. We still haven't heard from him sadly. We'll have to wait and see what he says about it.

Brutus Out!

[saffgee]

Ah, look at us happily redesigning the UI.....now we just need Enlight to have an appetite to make some changes.

I do think the goal is the same for either (or all) methods, so we should thank your brain for coming up with this, but I guess it remains to be seen if any of them are even possible to do. It certainly remains a fact though that implementing a more streamlined building interface to manage more products would have many advantages, not least of which would be build space.

[Brutus]

Your mod also adds a lot of products which have a much greater variability in demand. This means that in smaller cities you'd be wasting precious store space by allocating part of a floor for products with less demand for it compared to the big boys. In the new proposed setups you could have a lot more variability in space usage and it would make even products with less demand much more attractive as a niche product to sell. If the modifier that adds extra customers to stores is also tweaked (so its not overpowered) then selling a larger variety of product even in less demand becomes much more attractive.

[David]

The marked increase in products per store would require an overhaul to the firm level subsystem as all the retail stores are adhered to the 3x3 layout structure.

To realize your vision without altering the game system at such a deep level, the Shopping Mall feature announced for Real Estate DLC seems to be the only viable solution. Did you have a chance to read about it at viewtopic.php?f=49&t=5754 ?

[Brutus]

I wasn't suggesting altering the 3x3 layout or mechanic at all, I did think that was necessary at first but you don't need to do that at all and you can circumvent this entirely and keep the entire code intact. Not a single piece of that code needs to change in fact.

I am suggesting that each Aisle becomes its own Floor mechanically speaking in terms of coding and keeping the 3x3 layout intact as is. So when you click on an Aisle it actually just switches you over to another Floor instead with its own 3x3 layout. This way a store with 4 aisles on the first floor but only 3 aisles on the second floor actually in reality has 7 floors in mechanical code speaking terms (one for each Aisle). It's just that they are organized differently visually and the user experiences it differently because the user sees 4 aisles per floor possible and thinks that each floor is a real thing when it is just a visual user interface gimmick keeping the mechanical floors separated by chunks of 4 and each chunk is just nominally called a floor but not an ''actual'' floor as they are used currently. I hope that makes sense.

In terms of actual UI changes. You'd just be cramming the 4 product information boxes of a whole floor into a singular product box where a normal product is displayed right now and extending the amount of floors way up in number. Shift some of the UI product select-able and floor selection actions around and that's all. It would take a few days or a week of coding at best including hammering out bugs. This would be much much more efficient than the shopping mall system proposed. Don't get me wrong, I think that's very cool idea and I want to see that in-game as well, but this mechanic would actually save so much space and not bring any complex code into the game that the shopping mall does.

Saffgee's proposition is also excellent if you think even changing the UI a little bit is too much. Then Saffgee's idea would circumvent all that work on the UI completely and just add a floor selector menu for which there already is a art available for with the extra panels in the information center. It would require a days work of coding and a days work of testing.

I honestly don't think this would take too much time or effort if you do it smart, we're not reinventing the wheel, we're just shifting some of the UI around to create a new pattern of organizing floors really. Plz consider it or show this to the head coder and let him give a conclusive answer on the feasibility of this proposition. If he reads this message and sees the mockup I posted, he should have a clear indication of what I am advocating and he would know instantly how realistic it is or not.

Thanks David for your response,

Signed,


Brutus