Factory sell locally only option

[WilliamMGary]

As some of you may know, I enjoy operating in every market and sell internally only. The issue I had with reselling to the AI, is that if I had more then one factory they would find the cheapest factory to buy from rather then based on proximity. A way to define that a product can only be brought from within the city would be very useful.

I'm not saying make it impossible for the AI to buy locally and wholesale it via their warehouses to their retail stores outside of the local market.

[ceomoses]

I like selling to AIs because many of them have more retailing experience, so their stores can buy a lot more at a time than my own retail stores (until my retail stores gain more experience). I believe the AI also considers shipping costs and supply/demand factors when deciding on which factory to purchase from. So if a factory has a much higher demand than what it can produce, stores won't get a steady stream of supply costing the stores money with empty shelves, so AIs may purchase product from a pricier factory it gives them a steady enough stream of supply to make that decision more profitable. I would need to defer to the programmers to know for sure, but I've been able to more evenly distribute which factories AIs buy from by factoring in those things when I choose how much to sell at, but its not perfect. For the most part, it ends up being as simple as if demand is much greater than supply, increase the price. If demand is much lower than supply, decrease the price. If supply is similar to demand, leave it alone.

I don't recommend selling to your own retail stores exclusively. I know its a pain when my own stores can't get enough supply to keep shelves full, but that's actually a good problem to have. It means I should build another factory to increase supply and gain even more profit. Selling to AIs helps with you significantly with domination of that market. Internal sales on certain inputs to keep your factories churning makes sense.

I did notice a change from Cap 2 to Cap Lab in how what cities seaports can sell in that I'm not too fond of. Before, you couldn't buy from a seaport in city 2 if you were in city 1. This required me to buy product and private label it in city 1 before I could resell it to other cities. Profit from doing this was minimal and actually came in at a loss most the time, but I liked that mechanic.