Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Here are my observations after I played several games.
Overall the gaming experience is very good, there has been a fantastic improvement from the original game. Also the difficulty is higher. Obviously the beginning is the most difficult.
Old methods don't work any more. You can't buy a logging camp and start making beds straight away because natural resources are so damn expensive. Maybe there could be an option to buy some "rights" to use the resource and pay the fee progressively as you use it up. What do you think about this?

As it is, the best approach is to retail the seaport products right away and get into your expertise products as you build up some profit. The AI is really good at this early retailing and makes competition that prohibits you from having profits from seaport products for too long.

Manufacturing is really well done as well as the need to constantly keep researching. However the price of technologies is EXTREMELY low. Giving your competition that has 100+ more in a tech about $10M is ridiculous. Imagine Nokia paying Apple $10M for their latest Iphone tech. If you can get over $100M a year per product you dominate, the tech should be AT LEAST 10 or 20 times more valuable than it is. It would also make tech based companies more meaningful.

And the last point about media firms. I think the rating should be a lot more flexile, dependant on your content spending. The way it is the rating almost doesn't move. I think even a brand new media firm should be able to get a very high rating instantly if it spends a fortune on new content. And an established good rated television that doesn't create new content should loose it's customers very fast.

That's it for balancing issues. I'll post more ideas into suggestions.

One more thing I forgot about balancing.
The real estate market. It's a great addition but needs a little tweaking. It seems it grows unrealistically fast. The AI player invests $1bn in land and appartments and as soons as the buildings are laid down the company's value is about $2-3bn, because land value increases tremendously instantly as the buildings are laid down. That's not how it works.


I think the land value should only increase in time and only after the building are fully occupied and there is more demand for living there than "supply". Actually, in real life, once there are more empty apartments available, the residents have more to choose from and their cost decreases dramatically.

Another example: I want to build an industry park of factories and RD centers. It's better to buy all the land first and then start laying down the buildings. Otherwise as soon as you build one factory the surrounding land increases in price. It should do so perhaps after some years if the land becomes more attractive but it doesn't make any sense to increase instantly.

I would suggest that you create a separate topic for each of the balancing issue you see need addressing and set up polls at each topic, getting other players' feedback on the balancing issue, as each game play differently and the balancing issue may exhibit different behaviors in each game. This will allow for getting a more balanced and overall view on each issue.

Manufacturing is really well done as well as the need to constantly keep researching. However the price of technologies is EXTREMELY low. Giving your competition that has 100+ more in a tech about $10M is ridiculous. Imagine Nokia paying Apple $10M for their latest Iphone tech. If you can get over $100M a year per product you dominate, the tech should be AT LEAST 10 or 20 times more valuable than it is. It would also make tech based companies more meaningful.

+1

robinh wrote:Manufacturing is really well done as well as the need to constantly keep researching. However the price of technologies is EXTREMELY low. Giving your competition that has 100+ more in a tech about $10M is ridiculous. Imagine Nokia paying Apple $10M for their latest Iphone tech. If you can get over $100M a year per product you dominate, the tech should be AT LEAST 10 or 20 times more valuable than it is. It would also make tech based companies more meaningful.

I agree too with that point.

And I want to add also two more things :

1- I strongly recommend that you should be able to choose your product class expertise in the beginning.

2- Skills and product expertise should evolve over time. For example ; someone who has been working and dominating the farming field for 20 years cannot have a 0 point at his farming skill bar. I mean he should be able to build a farm with an advanced level directly. You can gain (or loose) rating points in the "Field of expertise" section over time.

FYI: http://www.capitalismlab.com/forum/view ... 5284#p5284