Snack and Food Expertise Seriously Overpowering

[skkni28]

I have found the easiest start in the game is to have Expertise in either the Snack or Food markets. Either of these comes with a farming bonus that quickly allows you to dominate the commodity livestock market...and then to dominate the entire game. Starting farms at a level 4 (or whatever) just makes it too easy to compete quickly...even with low capitalization. I would suggest lowering your farming skill by at least half if not completely eliminating it altogether.

No other strategy even comes close to how much you can earn as fast as you can with these expertise. Everything else requires so much more capital to get off the ground (with maybe the exception of the furniture strategy or leather).

To me the most interesting part of the game is the start-up phase. Once you become a medium sized company you are unstoppable and can just roll over the AI. (around 8-12 dominate products) At that point it goes from being fun into a micromanagement point and click nightmare.

[Dav3]

Even without expertise its pretty easy to succeed in the livestock product market this is how I always start the game because its a quick cash grab to be honest. If you dominate the farm product business you are almost unbeatable but its hard to tell if it really needs tweaking. What I found out in the new version of the game the training level of the units its much more quicker than before. Right now im almost immediatly at level 2 just a few seconds of selling a farm product in my supermarket or at the farm production. Someone noticed that too?

[counting]

I didn't notice training speed differences, but I haven't played many games in new beta-release versions. At grand scale, food and snake although have low entry, they do cap out quite quickly in early game. Pure pasture products are the real reason to its effectiveness since Cap2 due to they don't need R&D to increase quality. Even in the old days of Cap+, most farm related products are over-powered. (Actually the lowest entry is the retail business, but it's micro intensive from the beginning). Beverage like wine and cola are also low entry products with inanely good profit margin.

However, comparing profit margin, food and snack can't compete with others since most of them have high freight cost and low brand awareness, their price is fairly fixed and hard to scale up. It is very "flat" if you want to scale up production and hard to borrow other AI's resources. IMO it isn't about how over-powered food and snack is, but the lack of vertical integration with other AIs for a fresh start game (without script). The age old B2B problem hinder some strategies to work without 10 to 20 years of AI head start, since industrial goods eventually come from mines/well and AIs almost always start off with retail and R&D first. If custom games start from relatively "mature market" instead of blank slat, food and snack will be less effective and probably not a very good start-up if you wish to compete (AIs are not completely fool, they do recognize the potential and will fill in the blank after 3 to 5 years)