New Gameplay Mechanism

[David]

Is it possible that 40 competitors is too much for a small nation?

Should we be using less competitors for the ces dlc?

We will reduce the maximum number of AI competitors in the next patch v4.2.08.

[klasanov]

Is it possible that 40 competitors is too much for a small nation?

Should we be using less competitors for the ces dlc?

We will reduce the maximum number of AI competitors in the next patch v4.2.08.

Any ideas on what number would be more ideal?

Someone alluded in another thread that AI doesnt expand as it could, not seeking market share in products when it can. Is the amount of competition the issue or is something broken with the AI in the ces dlc?

[eleaza]

Is it possible that 40 competitors is too much for a small nation?

Should we be using less competitors for the ces dlc?

We will reduce the maximum number of AI competitors in the next patch v4.2.08.

Any ideas on what number would be more ideal?

Someone alluded in another thread that AI doesnt expand as it could, not seeking market share in products when it can. Is the amount of competition the issue or is something broken with the AI in the ces dlc?

Better AI or balancing their production is probably more important than the maximum number of competitors. With such small population, and focusing on 1 product class, most AI corporations don't make much, even if there's no competition.

[David]

Better AI or balancing their production is probably more important than the maximum number of competitors. With such small population, and focusing on 1 product class, most AI corporations don't make much, even if there's no competition.

I will forward your comments to the dev team.

You are probably right that it may make better sense to keep the current maximum number of competitors and instead make it easier for the AI to make a profit.

[eleaza]

Better AI or balancing their production is probably more important than the maximum number of competitors. With such small population, and focusing on 1 product class, most AI corporations don't make much, even if there's no competition.

I will forward your comments to the dev team.

You are probably right that it may make better sense to keep the current maximum number of competitors and instead make it easier for the AI to make a profit.

One easy fix could be making AI friendly merger much easier. Right now it's the most efficient way for AI corporation to cross multiple product classes. But the choice of merger target need to be more precise. Like toward those similar in production like within the same megaclass, since they usually share semi-products, or raw materials.

BTW, I find something very weird in mansion building. AI persons seemingly love to build mansions within the same city (usually the first city on the city list), and very occasionally in other cities. Like 24 in one city, and 2 in the rest 6 cities. Anyone else also noticed this odd behavior?

[klasanov]

Better AI or balancing their production is probably more important than the maximum number of competitors. With such small population, and focusing on 1 product class, most AI corporations don't make much, even if there's no competition.

I will forward your comments to the dev team.

You are probably right that it may make better sense to keep the current maximum number of competitors and instead make it easier for the AI to make a profit.

I actually just started a game with 4 competitors, all public, to see how they may fare.

I need sleep so haven't played it too much yet. will do so more tomorrow. I am on holiday from work until next wednesday.

[klasanov]

Better AI or balancing their production is probably more important than the maximum number of competitors. With such small population, and focusing on 1 product class, most AI corporations don't make much, even if there's no competition.

I will forward your comments to the dev team.

You are probably right that it may make better sense to keep the current maximum number of competitors and instead make it easier for the AI to make a profit.

How far out are we expecting a patch? I would like to give less conpetition 15-20 years to see what happens before the new patch comes out.

Would a save file help of this scenario after 10-20 years? Would it help if i saved every year or every 5 years? Really would like to help the dev team make the ai better

[David]

The AI's performance is quite decent if you set the AI startup capital setting to High or Very High.

Below is a screenshot from a test game I ran. More than 50% of the AI companies are profitable.

[eleaza]

I also run some test games, and feel like it really isn't about how many competitors, but how aggressive AI person is. And not just in the game setting to very aggressive, which is just a prerequisite for "aggressive personality" persons to appear, I would even say it's better to have more AI competitors than fewer since there are always a bunch of conservative, and moderate persons exist, the fewer the competitors, like just only 4, there's a good chance none of them actually has "aggressive personality". I find it's even better to have very aggressive setting, and many competitors (but not to the max, about 10 to 22, since there's no specialized focused AIs in CES DLC yet), and most importantly set to have inverse inflation (or inflation, but less ideal) and give AI competitors low to moderate start-up capital, so some of the too aggressive or too conservative and make losses can go bankrupt, allowing newcomers to join in.

For aggressive personality AIs (or most moderate AIs) to success in expanding, they don't need too much start-up, the start-up capital only serve as safety nets for them, since they do need time to set up, and it takes short time for aggressive AIs (running the risk of sometimes the "wrong" expertise will cause aggressive AIs to go bankrupt, it's quite product dependent). Modeset AIs will take like 20 years to reach full potential, like in the first 5 to 10 years to level up tech, and usually stay within their expertise product class for the rest of the game (at least for the tests I ran for 60 years). And this is where too many competitors might hurt their profitability, too many corporations' CEOs have the same expertise class will make their profit margin all drop, and they don't move on to other field easily. But if they are aggressive personality CEOs, they will very quickly move into other categories regardless of their tech level, and expand their R&D centers quickly, but once they are setup, they can expand into several product classes, even unrelated ones (and aggressive AIs will keep growing and diversify, just not as "aggressive" as human players, they expand very fast in the first 10 to 20 year, but their expansion slows down after that, especially when they start to build their own media firms). A good indicator whether AI stops its expansion is to check when AIs start to venture into media. Only mature business start to build more and more media, like they don't know what to do with the excessive money (and it serves well for city population growth, if players build enough apartments for the city, AI expand into commercial real estate more than residential, sometimes this need AI mayors to assist building more). BTW, giving enough seaport imports industrial goods, and just 1 consumer goods port, let AIs perform better, since they don't need to run raw material facility, which they often over build, or don't build them for a long time (even never), and left some product classes or products completely empty.

We should run and test more games and see what's the range of good combo in game settings lies.

[eleaza]

Just broke the 1b valuation mark, and acquired mutual group.
Am still a private company.
if i go public now, my market cap goes to around 2b, and I get around 400m cash.
400m cash money to invest in media or a bunch of new cities
Hell i could probably make the real estate sub go public first and then I go public and then have mad amounts of cash.
Probably going to wait a few more years before I turn this card, as I'm only 16 years in, and still need to be mayor in one more city.

Before updating to the latest buggy patch, I'll leave a detail report of pure real estate and media firm corporation for version 4.2.07 here.

At the end of 2013, the 23rd year of operation right before the 4th election, where all the mayors in the nation belong to my political party. All real estate has been privatized, and I owned all the original high rating media firms (generate about 2/3 of the current total media revenue in all cities). The total profit is over 750m, revenue close to 1 billion, and net worth over 7 billion. All the loan has been paid back with over 400m cash at hand, and throughout the game kept as a private corporation.

Revenue Profit Net Worth.jpg (189.44 KiB) Viewed 2889 times

The profit from all apartments in 7 cities is over 350m, all the commercials is over 200m. All my media firms generate around 200m profit. As described above, my media firms consist about 2/3 of the media market, thus in theory I can get about 300m profit if no other media firms exist. Thus I can estimate the total profit of real estate and media combined combined could reach 850m. But all the cities over 23 years have grown significantly, the total population is about 4.8 million now. So if I work backward and estimate the total real estate plus media profit at the beginning of the game with 3.5 million total population, the combined profit would be about 620m. I made a crude estimate at the beginning of the game, and find the profit from apartments in one city can reach about 40m a year, commercials half that at 20m, and media firms about 30m, so 7 cities in total would be about 630m, which is very close to the actual testing result.

Revenue Profit breakdown.jpg (258.11 KiB) Viewed 2889 times

One thing I find interesting is that AI corporations start to build their own media firms like crazy after generating enough profit, and they only tend to build their media firms in cities when I already privatize all the original government media firms. It feels like AIs want to avoid using my media firms even though I set the CPM quite low with very good rating, and they just build their own poor rating media out of spite and get massive losses. But I guess it makes some sense in a way, since owning media firms meant in theory they can recover the advertising expenses. However the problem is the total advertisement budget with such a small total population and product demand in CES DLC doesn't cover the overhead of media firms if an AI just produce 3 to 4 products. Only those have products across multiple classes actually make their media firms profitable.

The balance sheet tells me, without cash my business assets would be about 6.85 billion Working backward, at the beginning of the game the combined real estate and media firms assets would worth about 5 billions. And even though I made over 8 billions earnings throughout the game, I also paid my person over 1 billion dividend (since I only use personal cash to fund political campaign, this way the profit margin of the corporation can stay high, and have higher credit limit for bank loans). At one point my total loan exceeded 1.5 billion, just for buying out all the medias in newly "acquired" city after elections.

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The income statement shows the overhead of real estate and media is really low compare to other industries, operating profit margin can reach about 80%, it's unrealistic. The salary of the media firms is neglectable as well. And even though I try not to interfere with other corporations in stock market, I still made some stock return due to I need to "transfer" some real estates under 2 AI corporations to fully privatize them, literally. Once I reach 75% of their stock shares, I sold all their stocks. Originally I thought I would make quite a loss for doing this, since I have to buy those stocks at premium price, however during selling those stocks, other AI corporations somehow came in and bought whatever I dumped to the public, and kept the selling price high. I guess it's a good thing I gave all AIs very high starting capital. And after all these years with inverse inflation, there are still hundreds of millions left for most of the AIs. None of them are facing bankrupt any time soon, since even the most poorly run AI corporation only lost about 58m a year, and haven't touched its loan credit.

Also once my corporation step into media businesses, the tax deduction no longer kept the same as total loan amount. I guess only real estate income wasn't included in tax calculation in version 4.2.07. And my corporation paid over 1.1 billion for loan interest alone throughout the game, but just paid a little over 40m profit tax in total. I guess national bank would thank me a lot more than local governments (even though I sort of run them both behind the scene anyway).

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My personal wealth reaches 8.18 billion, and finally enter the first page of top 100 billionaires at 29th position. Most of my wealth is in the form of my own corporation's stock, 800m in cash where almost all came from dividends, and throughout the game donates over 200m to my political party to run elections. The last city is the toughest, spend almost 100m in that election campaign, since it's one of the rare mayor who actually ran the city well and had a good rating over 75%. I had to send out 2 candidates with full campaign funds just to knock out his high support rating faster, if I didn't send out 2 candidates, I might not win the election, since in the last election at year 20, most AI persons are rich and corporations have enough profit, the original mayor's party actually have enough campaign funds to last the whole campaign. Once I squeezed the old mayor's support enough, I picked one of my candidates to focus on (political candidates right now are like clones, doesn't matter who I picked). In the end, after I won the election, I actually felt sorry for the old mayor and felt kinda dirty, like I bought my way into the mayor's office. That's capitalism for you. It's everywhere, even in politics.

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The Quality of Life in most of my cities is over 75%, only one city has a mere "65%" due to pollution. It's also the largest population city with over 728k citizens. I only later found out why there are so many factories in that city (71 out of total 178 factories), due to I forgot to rise the corporate tax rate back from 0 when I tried to solve unemployment problem before, and AI corporations flooded toward that city, and there's still job opening left.

All my civic facilities have at least 80 supply/demand index, and over 70% coverage for location convenience (mostly just sport facilities have lower coverage, since it's very difficult to put them in the right place in already developed cities. Other civic buildings have almost perfect coverage, which take me ages to relocate them due to most AI mayors are incompetent). And in order to balance city budget, I put all the facilities upgrade budget as low as possible (this also took me a long time to adjust, since every time I place a new facility of the same type, the upgrade budget resets itself). Over all, if you wish to privatize all money making real estate and media under your belt, you better adjust civic building budget carefully to prevent heavy losses (especially educations and hospitals)

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The total population of the nation is growing at a steady pace (once my party's mayors got elected, the initial downward trend quickly rise back up to growing). And I am proud that I can keep unemployment as low as 4.32% on average, while also has a healthy 2.90% GDP growth, and wage rate slowly climbs up to 42.29. One interesting observation though, the net import of my nation is over 430m, I assume because all the AI corporations do NOT produce raw materials themselves, but from seaports (there are just 2 mines in the whole nation, no oil well, no timber yard). And obviously it's good enough for AIs, although a lot of products' markets aren't fully saturated yet, some even left in blank for some reason. Like eggs, frozen pork (which should be very easy to produce), and eye shadow, leather belt, cereal bar, chewing gum, etc. A lot of the farming raw materials are seriously lacking, while others over supplied. I don't know why no AIs realise the lost opportunities here.

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Economic Graphs.jpg (326.83 KiB) Viewed 2889 times

As for AI corporations' performance, 19 out of the 40 have positive profit. Even those with losses aren't serious, with few hundred thousands to a couple millions, and some were simply caused by tech purchases. Only about 5 to 6 is really running in the red constantly, and due to their high starting capital, I think they can stay as zombies for another decade or so. Most products have competitions, quite a few are solely supported with seaport goods, only a handful have monopoly in production, and those AIs who have monopoly products also have higher profit in general. I doubt even if I choose to enter manufacturing game now, I won't be able to make much profit for such heavy competitions from 40 AIs, but probably would still outshine the AIs for a mile (like making about 100m profit for myself at least, instead of 10m or 20m for AI corporations).

I added the save file below, and if you wish to revert back to older version, I also added the old 4.2.07 patch in the attachments.