AI Makes the game unplayable

[David]

The closed beta v11.1 has the following option implemented already. We are now waiting for closed beta testers' feedback on it.

New Competitors Setting
The new setting “AI May Change Strategy” has been added to the “Competitors” page of the New Game Settings menu.
This setting controls whether AI corporations are allowed to change their strategies during growth and expansion. You can view an AI corporation’s strategy in the Corporations report.

The script command for this is: AI May Change Strategy=<Yes>/<No>

For example, when this option is enabled, retail focused AI companies will never change their strategies to Diversified.

[Zakaa]

Thank you David.

Could this setting be expanded to include a chance as follow:

“AI Change Strategy Chance”
1. Never
2. Very Low
3. Low
4. Normal

[TheOscar]

What about buffs and de buffs for something like efficiency depending on the percentage for each type of product or firm? Kinda like being specialized leads to productivity enhancements or brand recognition.

For example, if I’m 100% farm, I get a bonus productivity or cost or brand to my farms. If I diversify to manufacturing, I start to loose the bonus.

If I’m manufacturing soda, I get a bonus. If I were to retail soda, that is still ok. But if I start mining my own aluminum or open up a computer store, I start to loose that bonus.

If I am manufacturing 10 different products, I should not get a bonus. If I’m manufacturing, selling, doing real state and others I will start to get some inefficiencies and get a debuff negative brand, lower productivity.

Ideally vertical integration is what you want to encourage as in the real world. This can also lead to spin offs so I can increase the efficiency of my core products and outsource others to my subs for their own efficiency. This will also give a stronger base to smaller companies if they specialize so they can compete with larger conglomerates. Which is a valid business strategy to play aside from just making the starting pay higher or lower.

Note, there is already a similar system in the game for retail stores as the more you have of a particular type of store, the bonus to traffic/“brand recognition”. Expand this to products and to farms/mines, etc.

This would be even more profoundly seen in late game when conglomerates just keep buying up new competitors in the market to maintain their market share. The one way I do use to compete against them is to lower my price to cost or even make it a cost leader by selling under cost. I can do that because I’m a conglomerate myself. New/smaller companies can’t do that.

[kbanifaz]

The closed beta v11.1 has the following option implemented already. We are now waiting for closed beta testers' feedback on it.

New Competitors Setting
The new setting “AI May Change Strategy” has been added to the “Competitors” page of the New Game Settings menu.
This setting controls whether AI corporations are allowed to change their strategies during growth and expansion. You can view an AI corporation’s strategy in the Corporations report.

The script command for this is: AI May Change Strategy=<Yes>/<No>

For example, when this option is enabled, retail focused AI companies will never change their strategies to Diversified.

Sounds good David, thanks for the update. Look forward to trying it out

[amuse]

The closed beta v11.1 has the following option implemented already. We are now waiting for closed beta testers' feedback on it.

New Competitors Setting
The new setting “AI May Change Strategy” has been added to the “Competitors” page of the New Game Settings menu.
This setting controls whether AI corporations are allowed to change their strategies during growth and expansion. You can view an AI corporation’s strategy in the Corporations report.

The script command for this is: AI May Change Strategy=<Yes>/<No>

For example, when this option is enabled, retail focused AI companies will never change their strategies to Diversified.

Looking forward to the open beta for v11.1

[David]

The closed beta v11.1 has the following option implemented already. We are now waiting for closed beta testers' feedback on it.

New Competitors Setting
The new setting “AI May Change Strategy” has been added to the “Competitors” page of the New Game Settings menu.
This setting controls whether AI corporations are allowed to change their strategies during growth and expansion. You can view an AI corporation’s strategy in the Corporations report.

The script command for this is: AI May Change Strategy=<Yes>/<No>

For example, when this option is enabled, retail focused AI companies will never change their strategies to Diversified.

Looking forward to the open beta for v11.1

The next major open beta version will be version 12.0 which includes all the announced features of 11.1 (It skips v11.1 and goes directly to v12.0 for the open beta).

[amuse]

The closed beta v11.1 has the following option implemented already. We are now waiting for closed beta testers' feedback on it.

New Competitors Setting
The new setting “AI May Change Strategy” has been added to the “Competitors” page of the New Game Settings menu.
This setting controls whether AI corporations are allowed to change their strategies during growth and expansion. You can view an AI corporation’s strategy in the Corporations report.

The script command for this is: AI May Change Strategy=<Yes>/<No>

For example, when this option is enabled, retail focused AI companies will never change their strategies to Diversified.

Looking forward to the open beta for v11.1

The next major open beta version will be version 12.0 which includes all the announced features of 11.1 (It skips v11.1 and goes directly to v12.0 for the open beta).

Oh, that's good, thanks for confirming

[dosenöffner]

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.

I don't think a more focused AI is weaker. Often the opposite is true.

Look: for every single Product you like to produce and sell you have to
1. have the right Expertise (for R&D-Boost and Manufacturing-Boost - thats absolute essential!)
2. do initial Research
3. Build Factorys, Farms, Logisticchains
4. Build Retailshops + Brand-Reputation (in every single City you like to do business!)
5. keep R&D up to date

That are huge initial-costs and specific requirements just to set things up for one Product and/or one Product-Class in one City.
The only reasonable choice is to stay with that class, in which you have expertise, until you brought your products to every city in the game.
And then you have to keep/maximize your market-share.
If that is done, you can move on to the next class (in the best case with a COO/CTO and his expertise)

AI tends to go half-assed for 30 products in 20 product-classes at the same time - instead of using her expertise and initial-investments (R&D, Brand) in a Class for their own profit.
And that's why the AI is weak.

So, yes, some Companys can go this way and bring mediocre products in many classes.
But they will always lose against a specialist - and that's mostly just the player.
Extremely seldom that an AI-company is really competitive (at least against the player) with a certain product or product-class.
As soon as i focus on it, the AI is outmaneuvered.

I think it could be a good Idea to add a more specialised and focused AI-Type.
It doesn't have to focus "just on Retail" or "just on Banks", but use their expertise a bit smarter and diversify when the time has come - and not per default as a "strategy", since that is no "strategy" but just aimless.


Just as an example, take a look at the attached picture.
What's going on with Round Petal, or Maple Five?
They have a far superior Product! And just don't promote it! Make no use of it!
It's their core-business! They can make millions of dollars more, scale their business up, set a few new service-points, easily, with just a bit more advertising and focusing.
But they "diversify"?
(to be fair: they can not produce as much hamburgers as i - since no one had the idea to build a tomato-farm. Everyone buys tomatos from seaport, therefore they are all low in tomatos. But the potatos for French Fries are availible, and they don't focus on it either, even if they have a superior Product)

[David]

You may check out this post https://www.capitalism2.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10499 about the new setting “AI May Change Strategy” in the upcoming version 12.0, which will result in fewer AI companies using the "Diversified" strategy.

[Antonin1957]

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.

I roleplay this by pretending the AI companies are like the old Japanese and Korean industrial groups. Many years ago my job required me to follow those groups, and the way they operated was really fascinating.