How to dominate retail sector without any manufacturing

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There had been a discussion in Chinese forum about how to dominate retail sector without manufacturing any products, similar to the real world Walmart. AI does a pretty good jobs using retail focus, but rarely be able to dominate. Can human player do better?

Personally I think you can, with lots of different type of stores, and constantly watching out high quality/rating products. Also you nee to get as many top traffic index spots as possible early on. Using corporate brand to reduce ads expenses and private label to stamp top quality goods as core products, and aggregate different AI sources in intermediate warehouses. You need to be quite careful about other AIs' tech level though, and watch out everyone's tech progression compare to each other. Any sign of one AI suppress the other, you need to switch suppliers.

The concept sounds easy, but actually would require some efforts to achieve pure retail sector domination.

[WilliamMGary]

There had been a discussion in Chinese forum about how to monopoly retail sector without manufacturing any products, similar to the real world Walmart. AI does a pretty good jobs using retail focus, but rarely be able to dominate. Can human player do better?

Personally I think you can, with lots of different type of stores, and constantly watching out high quality/rating products. Also you nee to get as many top traffic index spots as possible early on. Using corporate brand to reduce ads expenses and private label to stamp top quality goods as core products, and aggregate different AI sources in intermediate warehouses. You need to be quite careful about other AIs' tech level though, and watch out everyone's tech progression compare to each other. Any sign of one AI suppress the other, you need to switch suppliers.

The concept sounds easy, but actually would require some efforts to achieve pure retail sector domination.

This would cause a lot of management which would take away from the benefits from such a strategy, in addition to that the retail company will be overly expose to economic cycles both from a revenue/profit perspective as well as supply chain as their manufacturers cope with the new economic cycles. This would be near impossible to accomplish.

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So it's another challenge then, the Walmart challenge. I'll add it into the Strategies an Tactics Collections.

[WilliamMGary]

So it's another challenge then, the Walmart challenge. I'll add it into the Strategies an Tactics Collections.

The challenge game system would be nice if you could set conditions such as no factories.

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I originally thought to just allow retail stores and HQ. But on second though, perhaps warehouses should be allowed. Then there are still commercial, apartments, and public facilities, that can boost traffic indexes. Media firms that can boost brand. Also, the farms and raw material buildings give incredible controlling power for downstream industry.

Hence I think the challenge should exclude factories, farms, R&D centers, and natural resource firms.

[WilliamMGary]

I originally thought to just allow retail stores and HQ. But on second though, perhaps warehouses should be allowed. Then there are still commercial, apartments, and public facilities, that can boost traffic indexes. Media firms that can boost brand. Also, the farms and raw material buildings give incredible controlling power for downstream industry.

Hence I think the challenge should exclude factories, farms, R&D centers, and natural resource firms.

It would be interesting to see how CEOs would succeed in such an environment.

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Too early to tell if I can pull it off. The starting part is easy, the hard part is to dominate retail, and keep dominating without breaking the bank

BTW, the definition of "retail dominate" is also debatable. If it's just default game dominate setting of total retail revenue, it's easier (since you can sell some high price products to bloat the revenue). But if it's dominating all products above 50%, it will be extremely hard.

[David]

So it's another challenge then, the Walmart challenge. I'll add it into the Strategies an Tactics Collections.

The challenge game system would be nice if you could set conditions such as no factories.

I wonder how often you guys use the Challenge Game feature. If I can gather more information about how people like the challenge game system, I may be able to persuade the dev team to implement the above suggestion.

[counting]

I wonder how often you guys use the Challenge Game feature. If I can gather more information about how people like the challenge game system, I may be able to persuade the dev team to implement the above suggestion.

Current challenge game system can not script some rules easily like my middlemen challenge, or this retail empire challenge. And a lot of time it's not comparable between players. Some can deal with low capital easily, some like max AIs, some may include some features, but some don't.

If they are to be implemented, the current script system has to be drastically improved for extreme customization, so players can design their private challenges easily.