AI Makes the game unplayable

[kbanifaz]

One thing that bugs me and I'm not sure if there is a work around to this, is that the AI companies are far from being logical/realistic. For example you have a company that is in Farming primarily, and then it's trying to develop software??
A company that's in Telecom and banking, and of course retail and farming. This is not realistic, if any one has a way of making AI companies behave more realistically I'd love to hear it.

[David]

I understand that some users do prefer a playstyle like you described, though the game will be much less competitive, because the player can expand to all industries and sectors but the AI companies will not.

I recommend that you post a suggestion on the Suggestion forum with a poll about adding a script command for making the AI only expand to businesses that match their expertise or something like that.

If there is enough demand from users for each a script command, the dev team will consider implementing it.

[Zakaa]

I agree, it gets quite boring and unrealistic at late game when all companies are diversified. Lower the chance of companies spawning as diversified and lower the chance of companies switching to diversified unnaturally. If a company merges with another company that's a natural way to switch to diversified.

Something could be done if we look at how real companies work. Why isn't Samsung investing on producing its own cheese products?

[TheOscar]

AI CEO’s do have a specialty, like Apparel or Cars. Can this effect be made stronger? Maybe a setting so we can choose how strong this bonus can be?

If high then their R&D, special store, and manufacturing get a stronger bonus compared to how it is now.

[Stylesjl]

Perhaps there could be a feature to change the AI company's propensity to diversify. A low setting means that they still stick to their original focus and rarely diversify (and are adverse to mergers that are not in a similar industry) and a high setting means that they are likely to diversify and expand into new industries (including mergers).

Diversification could occur at different levels:

- Product Type (Automobiles only for example).
- Industry (Media only for example, or only sticking to industry/retail).

[Zakaa]

I wish more companies stayed pure retail focused to try and dominate the retailing industry without trying to produce something themselves etc.

Some other focuses I'd like to stay true to their original business:
- Investing focus
- Farming focus
- Natural resource focus
- Real estate focus

And also increase number of max AI companies if possible please. I want brutally hard competition.

[mdemircan2]

Perhaps there could be a feature to change the AI company's propensity to diversify. A low setting means that they still stick to their original focus and rarely diversify (and are adverse to mergers that are not in a similar industry) and a high setting means that they are likely to diversify and expand into new industries (including mergers).

Diversification could occur at different levels:

- Product Type (Automobiles only for example).
- Industry (Media only for example, or only sticking to industry/retail).

good idea.

[cantdownloadit]

Would be nice if we could have a config file for each company under its name Yes/No if its an area they can expand into

[David]

I've brought this suggestion up to the dev team and had a discussion with them and I would like to share with you about what we have discussed:

Unless the player company is also restricted in a similar way, from a purely competition point of view, this will be equivalent to handicapping the AI and make the game less challenging (there will be much fewer competitors in each product category) and probably less fun for players who are looking for a challenging game, as evidenced by the number of posts we have seen from people requesting AI improvements.

A major concern is that players using this configuration, if implemented, might complain that the AI feels too weak. From a development point of view, it is not wise to implement a feature that may lead to complaints.

So I think it is important to recognize that such a configuration will only appeal to a small subset of players and ensure that it will not result in giving the broader CapLab user base an impression that the AI has become less challenging.

The original poster of this thread found the game not enjoyable because the AI was too strong. Actually there are many ways to address that, including having fewer competitors, and setting the AI competitors' start-up capital to Very Low. You will be less likely to find many AI companies diversify into all industries as they are limited by their capital.

I wish more companies stayed pure retail focused to try and dominate the retailing industry without trying to produce something themselves etc.

Some other focuses I'd like to stay true to their original business:
- Investing focus
- Farming focus
- Natural resource focus
- Real estate focus

And also increase number of max AI companies if possible please. I want brutally hard competition.

As suggested in the above post, to compensate for the lack of diversification, if it is implemented, there should be more AI companies. Otherwise, it will be too easy. The statement itself is logical but from the practical perspective, there will be problems with the implementation. The vanilla game has 24 product classes. If most AI companies focused in a single product class only, to have a decent number of competitors in each market (let's say 3 competitors) , we will need to have 72 AI companies, not including those focused in media, banking, real estate and service industries. The base line the number of companies that are required to make the game reasonably challenging would be in the range of 80 to 100 in this projection. This will lead to another problem - the UI is not designed to navigate so many companies and it will inevitably lead to user complaints of the UI. MODs have additional product classes and it will exacerbate the problems.

This is not to say that it will never get implemented. We just have to brainstorm and suggest to the dev team a practical way of implementing it.

[kbanifaz]

Perhaps there could be a feature to change the AI company's propensity to diversify. A low setting means that they still stick to their original focus and rarely diversify (and are adverse to mergers that are not in a similar industry) and a high setting means that they are likely to diversify and expand into new industries (including mergers).

Diversification could occur at different levels:

- Product Type (Automobiles only for example).
- Industry (Media only for example, or only sticking to industry/retail).

I like this idea, sounds like I'm not the only one who feels this way. I think this could be a simple code change, and would bring more realism in the game. The game is old, but clearly has great frame work, but this change could make it a better simulation