Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

I’ve spent many hours in Capitalism Lab and usually play on “Tremendously Harder”. I can beat every scenario, but I keep running into the same distribution bottleneck in the late game. I want to hear how other experienced players handle this when cities get big and demand explodes.

Here is my setup.

For each product I build one dedicated chain:
• 4 factories producing the same single product
• All four feed into 1 warehouse
• Warehouse uses 4 inputs, 1 inventory and 4 outputs
• This single warehouse supplies all cities

On the retail side I organize everything per product class, not per individual product.
I usually run about 6 stores per city per product class.

Example.
The product class Computer consists of:
Desktop Computer
Notebook
Printer
Tablet

Most product classes in the game have exactly four products once fully researched, so each store in that class ends up selling those four items.

This structure works perfectly up to around four cities.
Factories scale easily.
Warehouses scale easily.
Supply stays balanced everywhere.

The problem starts when demand outgrows what retail can absorb.

Each store can only sell 4 products.
If a product class has 4 products, the store is full.
All 4 slots are taken.
If one specific item in that class has huge demand, I cannot feed more supply into the same stores because there is no fifth slot for a second chain of that product.

Result.
Factories have spare capacity.
Warehouses can handle more volume.
Cities want more products.
But retail becomes the hard cap and the whole clean structure breaks down.

So my question to the community.
How are you organizing late-game distribution across multiple cities?

• Do you switch from “per product class” stores to “per product” stores when scaling up?
• Do you add local warehouses per city instead of using one global warehouse feeding everything?
• Or do you use a completely different structure that scales smoothly in the late game?

I’m looking for clean and repeatable setups that still work when running full product classes in 4+ cities with very high demand.

It can be quite tricky, normally I partly get around this issue with multi floor and shopping mall setups precisely because it is really tricky to gtet high volumes in retail stores. Especially if the busiest land is already taken up by existing stores from competitors.

Some ways to mitigate the issues:

- Charge higher prices to lower demand, perhaps you are selling products too cheaply.
- Build more retail stores nearby (if you can).
- For high demand products I just build extra stores to try and sell that high demand product, even if it might not be in the optimal location due to crowding.

I use multiple floors just like Stylesjl.
Then you can give 1 floor exclusively to the high-demand-product.
But it should also works if you build an additional retailshop with just that 1 product on one floor.

Your setup sounds just like mine at the beginning.
But i'm now more a fan of on-site production since i had the same problems that you describe.
Once the distribution-warehouses are at capacity-limit it is hard to get everything supplied...

So what you can do in that case:
1. on-site production (easiest and best working option IMO)
2. split/duplicate your centralized production up to 2-3 production-sites in different cities (1 for europe, 1 for asia, 1 for america etc.)
3. duplicate your centralized production on site with your current one and let your COO "look for better supplies from own or subsidiary" with "prefer warehouses over factorys", so he can switch if necessary