New Feature: Product Class Expertise

[David]

Product Class Expertise
Persons in the game, including the player character, may possess expertise in certain product classes. The expertise will give the person advantages in running a company – there will be an increase in R&D effectiveness for products in the expertise product class, boosting the company’s competitiveness.

In the original version, when the game has run over a long period of time (e.g. 80 years), it is likely for a corporation to dominate most of the markets. With product class expertise, it would be significantly harder for a single corporation to achieve dominance on most industries, as companies with expertise on the markets they specialize in will be a much stronger force to reckon with.

From the player's perspective, when it comes to hiring COO and other managerial positions, it will be preferable to pick persons with strong product class expertise.

This new element changes the game dynamics in a significant way and offers players new challenges.

This option can be disabled in the new game setting, for those players who prefer the old style of gameplay.

The below screenshot shows an AI person having an expertise in Jewelry. The expertise value can range from 20 to 100, and it is 70 in this example.

[Skeptical9]

will it be possible to alter those during gameplay? Like very-slow increase with training or experience?

[Inarius]

Instead of giving an "expertise" level, why wouldn't you give an "expertise" bonus which would be gained with time and specialisation ?

I explain myself :

At the beginning, nobody has expertise. After years of making shoes, you have expertise in making shoes.

Expertise should be gained with 2 conditions :

- The bigger the corporation, the fewer the points of expertise gained (because if your company is too big, the "corporation spirit" disappears, that's why some SME are so competitive)
- The more activities you have, the less you gain specialisation in your different activies.
- Out of a certain limit in size and diversity, you actually lose specialisation.

What do you think of this ?

[David]

We have also considered the same idea you suggested, but we found that it will drive the gameplay in the opposite direction than we wanted.

The design goal of the currently implemented feature is to prevent a single corporation from dominating all the markets too easily. If we allow the most successful corporation's CEO to further develop his/her expertise, it will be even harder for other corporations to catch up.

[Inarius]

I don't think so (or perhaps I haven't explained myself well)

Expertise in my proposition is not determined by success but by time.

If you develop in only ONE domain, it doesn't matter whether you are good or not, you develop an expertise.

This expertise will fade after time, when your size grows too much (more or less, when you have too much success). And also if you are too diversified.

What is important is that after a certain limit you LOSE this expertise. Not a rule "after XXXXX of profit, you lose everything", but instead of gaining X points of expertise every year, you lose. And the bigger (or the more diversified) you are, the sooner and faster it happens.

It means that a corporation can develop a "niche market", where it will have a significant advantage on large and diversified corporation...exactly what you propose, no ?

[David]

The exact purpose of why we are calling the add-on Capitalism Lab is to allow us to experiment with different game features and settings, as well as collecting feedback from users and further improving it.

I now understand your suggestion better, but there are nuances in the gameplay that can't be explained easily at this moment.

I would suggest that you keep this in mind and when we release the new version, you can test it and write new comments about your thoughts on this.


I will try to explain this a bit here though it may not be straightforward to understand it:
-In the original Capitalism 2, the company does increase the technology over time by doing research in R&D centers.
-so it is possible to build up advantages over time in a specific industry in Cap2 already.

-this new feature is to make it more efficient for persons with expertise in certain product classes, who are CEO of those companies, to perform research in R&D centers. (in short, better R&D outputs with the same cost.)

[David]

FYI, here are some previous design ideas we have considered, but we didn't find them compelling enough to make themselves into the game. If you have any inputs or suggestions, please share your thoughts here.



A RPG-style character development enhancement to managers.

The player can increase attributes of the player character.

The player can also increase the attributes of managers that he has hired.

Managers will also increase their own attributes over time.


Earn assignable attribute points
The player can earn assignable attribute points from the following ways:

<to be defined>

[Inarius]

Ok.

But instead of "R&D" (which is closely linked to growth and money invested in), my idea of specification decrease over time when you grow too much or when you are too diversified.

R&D contributes to monopoly and ultra-big corporation.

I keep my idea, i hope it will be tested !

[David]

The Product Class Expertise actually may provide to a solution to the situations where players found their corporations growing too large at the later stage of the game and micromanagement has become excessive.

With Product Class Expertise and the increased company limit (max 30 AI companies in a single game), instead of keeping growing their own corporations, players may choose to take control of AI companies, making them subsidiaries of their corporations.

Previously, there can only be a maximum of 7 AI companies, so it is impossible to have more than a handful subsidiaries.
Also, the AI's focused markets may overlapped with each other.

With the introduction of Product Class Expertise, the AI companies will always first focus on their product class expertise, then expand to other markets if they have additional resources. Since the game initialize the AI to have unique product class expertise, the subsidiaries you control are likely to be focusing on different markets, thus making sense to keep controlling them as subsidiaries without merging them.

As such, you can keep your main corporation lean, while still have a strong presence on a broad range of markets.

This will potentially reduce micro-mangement and there will be less of a need to have the new company divisions feature as previously suggested.

And extensive testing will be needed to prove whether the above assumption will work or not.

[Bigcat]

I suggest to add one more concept - Product's design rating and interactive with Product Class Expertise.

In the game, the product's overall rating come from brand, quality & price. And quality rating come from raw material quality and technology rating.

I suggest the New product's overall rating come from Design, brand, quality & price. However, the design rating will be decreasing and return to zero. After new design ia available, we needs to re-apply the new design from design workshop.

As like as 'R & D centre', we can built 'Design Workshop' to create good Image design and improve design rating of products.

However, the maximium design rating of products will now depend on Product Class Expertise Level.

For example, the success of fashion industry does not only base on the advanced garment technology application and the best brand name, but also the attractive appearance design. I just want to say, we can add one more concept to the game that is design rating to make the game more funny.

"The currently implemented feature is to prevent a single corporation from dominating all the markets too easily. If we allow the most successful corporation's CEO to further develop his/her expertise, it will be even harder for other corporations to catch up.", this statement will be achieved, if design rating applied.

Finally, if we can add design rating to the game, it will make the game more strategical variety.