Location importance of retail stores placement

[Black]

When i'm placing my stores in a city, i just put them close to each other to get buff for customer traffic index. I am selling the same products there and still can achieve almost full market share in that city. But it is not like in real life - why a customer from other side of a city would come to my store to buy bread, if he has other store with bread 10 meters from his house?

So my suggeston is to add another index (city coverage index) that will be higher the more coverage of a city your stores (selling the same product) have. And this index should boost demand in your stores in the same way as customer traffic index does.

Example:
1. Selling bread in 4 stores in different places in a city - (bread) coverage index = 80.


2. Selling bread in 4 stores placed near each other - (bread) coverage index = 35.


This index should be computed for each product you selling in a city, based on a stores in which this product is offered. Some products my benefit more from it (like bread), and for other it will not be so much important(like cars). It can be displayed near product's supply/demand like on this picture (or just somewhere as a number):




I posted this because i think that placing 4 stores (selling the same product) like this on picture above is kind of dumb .

This is a solution that my brain came with, but feel free to post your thoughts here, maybe you have some simpler solution

[counting]

I like the idea

I personally always tried to spread out my retail stores as much as possible to cover every corner of a city. I know it's not optimize but it feels right. I like to see this actually been implemented. But this will require some major change about residences, and a circle radius is not easy to calculate.

I also think different type of retail stores should have different radius. Obviously a convenient store can not have as much range as an automobile retailer.

Also this may help AIs to spread their stores more evenly into all corners, rather than squeeze in the same area.

[Black]

Range of the store does not have to be in a circle shape, this above is just an example. As we have already cities based on square road layouts, i think it would be even better if range of a store would be in square shape (easier to implement also).

About coverage index, im not sure, maybe it's too much complicated, waiting for other suggestions.
Would be nice to be rewarded in some way when spreading stores in a city.

Retail store placement in real world seems to be very important, and i think it should be somehow added to the game.

[counting]

I think the problem is less about implementing some kind of coverage index, but more like how to "cap out" purchasing power. A store no matter how high its traffic index is, should not be able to take over 100% of the market share, if its "coverage range" doesn't cover 100% residences.

Hence an easier way to implement this idea in current traffic index system is to "normalize" the market share base on a city-wide aggregated traffic index with the aggregated traffic index inside the radius of the current placement coverage.

The next problem will be how to calculate the overlap coverage? Although its obvious that the effect should be half inside the overlap of 2 stores, however if there are dozens of stores from different companies, then the calculation of overlaps could be complicated.

[Black]

The next problem will be how to calculate the overlap coverage? Although its obvious that the effect should be half inside the overlap of 2 stores, however if there are dozens of stores from different companies, then the calculation of overlaps could be complicated.

Actually, it shouldn't be that hard. As citties in game are based on square tiles, all you need to do is to use 2-dimensional array.

Let's have 6 overlaping stores selling the same product ( yours or competitors, it doesn't matter) :



For each tile a store covers you just increment value of corresponding array's cell by 1, so you will end up with array like this:



And from this array it is very easy now to calculate actual demand in every store in a city. You just have to count how many of every numbers are in each store coverage area, and multiply those by 1, 0.5, 0.33 (based on how many stores share the same tile).
If non overlapping store have 100%(64 tiles with value 1) of the demand in it's area, then:
-> red store will have
46 * 1 + 14 * 0.5 + 4 * 0.33 = 54,32 -> 84,875% of covered area demand.
-> green store will have
19 * 1 + 33 * 0.5 + 12 * 0.33 = 39,46 -> 61,65% of covered area demand.

These calculations doesn't get into account customer traffic index, which they should, but i wanted to make it easier to understand.
You just have to apply custommer traffic to it somehow, and thats it

Having the array like this, can be easly used to display coverage area of product in city on minimap, just like you can see land value. That would be awesome.

Hope that someone can understand what i mean

[counting]

I perfectly understand your idea. However my concern is not just with overlapping coding, but also overlap problem between "different companies".

It's understandable if two store sells the same item at the same price with same quality, then they will share the coverage. The trouble begins when they are owned by different companies with same product, but different price, different quality, different brand awareness. It doesn't make sense that half of the people inside the overlap are always tided to one particular store no matter what. We will have to multiply the factor of current competition function inside it. (You can think of the overlap area act as a mini-version of the current competition to the whole city, just at a smaller scale)