Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Investment funds and REITs
These can work similarly to the investment-focused companies, where the manager would use the assets under management to invest and turn a profit, but the money comes from investors (aka other companies, individuals or city population)

Stock market
Stock exchanges, stock brokers, mutual funds, ETFs, commodity trading, futures, options, derivatives, stock compensation, market makers etc

Construction companies
Make building new firms take more time and pay the building cost towards these construction companies.

Entertainment industry
Movie studios, book publishers, music publishers etc. It could work similarly to the software industry.

Healthcare and pharma
Produce drugs, medical equipment and supplies. Build private hospitals and clinics. GPs, dentists, therapists.

Hotels and traveling
Tourism agencies, hotel chains, theme parks, museums etc

Transport and logistics
Expand the logistics feature to more breath including: last mile delivery, freight and maritime transport, public transport, airlines, couriers, food delivery etc

Energy and utilities
Build nuclear/coal/wind/water power plans, distribution grids, transformers, substations, water pipelines, gas pipelines, gas/oil extraction and rafineries etc.

Petro-chemical industry
Extract oil, gas, make chemical products, use these as semi-product inputs for other products.

Education industry
Build schools, universities, student accomodation, sell online courses, attract sponsorship from companies for research and human resource training

Military industrial complex
Build tanks, airplanes, guns, munition, drones for the government

Waste management
Garbage collection, recycling, garbage disposal, specialize waste collection for electronics/medical/nuclear waste

Sports
Sports teams, clubs, league organizers, broadcasting rights, merchandise retail, team sponsorships from companies etc

More diverse service industry with custom implementation
Law companies, accounting services, financial services, wealth management, property management. E.g. buying another company would require lawyers and investment bankers. Each company would pay for accounting services monthly, wealth individuals would employ managers to handle their wealth.

Good suggestions. Which ones do you think have the most appeal to CapLab players?

Additional Suggestion - The AI Revolution: A True Late-Game Money Sink with Scaling Costs

Hi all,

Seeing these great ideas for new industries, I'd like to propose an additional one focused on Artificial Intelligence to solve a core issue in Capitalism Lab: the lack of a true, scalable late-game challenge.

Right now, once a company is making billions, R&D and expansion costs become trivial. The game needs a meaningful way to invest massive amounts of capital. The AI industry would be that money sink.

1. The Foundation: High-Tech Infrastructure

-Introduce a new, capital-intensive supply chain: High-Performance Chips (advanced semiconductors) are built into Server Racks.
-These racks are installed in new, expensive Data Center buildings (maybe different sizes, expandable?) which consume immense amounts of power and water (cost relative to compute power). This creates a challenging and costly barrier to entry.

2. The Core Mechanic: Exponentially Scaling R&D

This is the key to enhancing the late-game economy.

Training AI Models: Instead of a fixed R&D cost, training an AI model inside a Data Center is a project with exponentially scaling costs.
- Training a basic "Logistics AI" might cost a few million.
- Training a competitive "General AI" could cost billions.
- Reaching the absolute cutting-edge to dominate the market could cost tens of billions, making it a challenge even for the largest corporations.
-This creates a perpetual R&D arms race. There is always a more advanced, more expensive AI model to develop, giving players a reason to keep investing their massive profits. Competition here should be essential - as long as there is competition, margins should be low. (Maybe when something like AGI is reached, domination becomes easier and invests pays off). At first, it should be a cash-burner, but pay-off should be worth it.



3. The Payoff: Market Domination

The massive investment yields game-changing advantages:

-Automation: Use advanced AI models to enhance factories, drastically cutting labor costs and out-competing players who haven't invested in AI.
-New Products: Develop and sell new, ultra-high-tech products like Humanoid Robots for the consumer market or industrial robots, which require the best AI models to function.(could benefit from higher tech ratings, like some devices do in real world mod)
-Licensing Revenue: Sell your trained AI models as a new type of software, generating huge licensing fees from other companies.This could be Subscriptions, or API-usage based. (Maybe option to open source, for faster development, public awareness, or brand?)

(All use cases should increase demand for compute, making scaling essential)

This entire loop—costly infrastructure, exponentially expensive R&D, and a game-changing payoff—would give the late-game a strategic depth and challenge. It would finally give us something meaningful to do with our billions. It would highlight real changes in real life and late stage capitalism, with rising dominance in tech-sector.

i saw the word AI and switched off lol, I am sick of companies shoving useless AI crap into everything.

@cantdownloadit
You've got a fair point. The general skepticism towards the "AI" buzzword is understandable, as it's often just used for marketing.
My main goal here wasn't just to solve the well-known late-game problem of having no meaningful financial challenges. It's also about offering a different way to expand that moves away from the massive click-fest the late-game can become.
Right now, if you want to dominate a new industry with 7+ cities, it often means tediously setting up hundreds of retail stores. This AI expansion would offer a more strategic, centralized approach:
* Streamlined Production: The necessary hardware (chips, server racks) is made in factories, which are far less click-intensive to scale than massive retail chains.
* Strategic Infrastructure: Instead of retail stores, you would build a new class of building: Data Centers. These wouldn't just be passive buildings; you could actively manage them – deciding which hardware to install or what power levels to run, creating interesting trade-offs between cost and performance.
* Centralized R&D: The core of the operation would be a new "AI Studio" headquarters. From here, you could manage your high-stakes research projects, poach top-tier researchers from competitors for immense sums, and make strategic decisions, all within a single interface similar to how banks or software firms are managed.
The whole point is to simulate that high-cost, highly competitive race for the next big thing – be it AI, fusion power, or something else. It would shift the late-game focus from repetitive retail expansion towards more engaging, high-level strategic management.

I think putting in a full AI industry thing would probably be quite complicated and I don't really see any gameplay advantage of it. The other issue I have is that we don't really know if the AI business model is actually profitable or not. For all we know it could just be another Dot Com Bubble in the making.

Overall however I do like the idea of scaling up R&D costs over time. Perhaps it might be useful for R&D costs to keep rising as tech levels get higher, with diminishing marginal returns on tech until the costs get so high that the underlying products are not really profitable to sell anymore (or rather the human and computer players will stop before it gets to that level).

I shared the original post's message on reddit to get feedback there:
https://www.reddit.com/r/capitalismlab/ ... s_for_new/

C0Mr4d3 wrote: Sun Aug 10, 2025 11:02 pm Construction companies
Make building new firms take more time and pay the building cost towards these construction companies.

This post also suggests construction companies: viewtopic.php?t=10451