several issues

[anjali]

i am 25 years into a game now and used spreadsheets to record all kind of stuff including A.I.'s performance for every company ingame

issues i did step across:

1. CTD's mainly happen on linking products (go into a shop, select purchase button, click the <link> and once you double click on the product ya wanna sell) you get once in a while a CTD with just a windows message that caplab had to be closed due to unexpected error which is very annoying when ya roll out a product worldwide which are way over 1000 clicks hence 50 dozen times to save to make sure you not doing it over n over again and never get the product rolled out due to crashs. same happens with canceling the building menu (open building menue, select i.e. apparel shop .. check locations for customer index and the right click to leave the building menu) sometimes i get it twice in a row very annoying especially when ya forgot to save 2 or 3 month ingame time. any other CTD's havent happened anymore since 3.0.21

also when CTD's happening due to linking products in purchase units, the saved game appears to be totally altered... like a few times i know i did set up 10 factories linked them to warehouses renamed stuff and so on ... in this example all done by december 2020 and a ctd in februray 2021 and suddenly in the savegame from january 2021 6 of those factories arent there and everything else i done from in roughly 6 month appears to be gone. happened a few times allready. thats about 2 billion in assets thats totally missing. game over ... restart another game to get bored again over n over .. thats all i keep doing never managed to finish a game due to this ctd's and stuff gone and after a while i just cba to redo it all over again and renew all spreadsheets for a few hours before i can build anything.

2.once ya use custimazation (even if its just a mistake as the button is right next to the button to select what product to make) its better to rip down the whole factory or atleast all manufacturing slots and rebuild to get 1 product back esle its just a mess, rather pay 20 million write offs then perma trash the 2nd product that suddenly appears in the sales, blocking the other manufacture slots from selling and no shop gonna pull this 2nd product from that factory as its not linked.

3.Is it only me, or is research totally obsolute with the custimization? Invention and thats it, q7 to q19 products and in every town medium factory allready level 6 (5 manufacture units) + 4 shops each on level 7 sales units and i can not keep up with supply whilest the A.I. Is selling brand 100, q85 with tech 1500+ an overall product rating of 100+ , loacal competitors have overall ratings of 80+ and i am market leader due to the shear amount am selling at a product rating around 40-50 or even less. as the A.I. is too stupid to produce more you probably sell q1 items at good profit, didnt came to test this as i was running the 20 R&D's and started the research higher techs as 1 A.I. company got quite big.

4.Market Dominance fullfilled once you got dominance on the invented products (i.e. Nothing invented at all = game over on 1st day as you got total dominace in everything) in capitalism plus, market dominance in a given class was only achieved, if you did invent all possible products in this class and dominate every single one of them.

5. again A.I.'s Brainstorms! this time i did run spreadsheet for every company n its annual profit and watched what they re doing n where the issue might be.
yes A.I. companies are capable of running a good company... but ... only until the point that they have 1 to 4 factories and a dozen shops to it. even got 1 company pulling twice the profit i did and did raise to about 2 billion in assets (including TV station) but thats gonna be over the moment they get a supply issue.
instead of checking where the issue comes from, they put up more stores, that can not be supplied by the crazy overstretched seaports / factories (rawmaterials from seaport totally overstretched aswell and rarely a mine is put up to cover the huge demand) they end up by 10-20 stores per factory (not counting the retailers stores) and the sales still dropping. next clever action: oh i loose market share i must ADVERTISE!!! 500k budget per sale slot on every single shop/item if this doesnt kill the company, well we got more ideas how to destroy cash. now they pull heavy profits with factories, and spend more on advertisement then the whole revenue of all shops - super strategy (and they not turning off the advertisement even when they are at over 100 brand overall rating (capped at 100 i noticed).
now they keep running this until cash 0, turn down the advertisement? nooo way we need more sales hence full advertisement, lets rip down our R&D's ... the monent they got back to 3 million cahs, set up R&D = out of cash, rip down R&D instantly and a few shops to get back to 1 $v in the pocket. this continues until the company has only 5-10 shops, then they rip down factories if they arent bancrupt yet, which will result in more A.I.'s getting this brainstorms as there sales gonna drop with ripped down factories.
Now, the company wither go bust or a stronger company gonna make friendly merger, this company was running mostly 8 years profit, now they seem to get the brainstorm virus as well and do exact the same thing the othjer A.I. did to kill his company, profit times over now we pull 200 million loss a year. that goes on endless. in the end it makes the whole A.I.s just a nice edition to say "hey you got competition" but its not competition at all just run your q7 products at huge profits and if a company gets too powerful, just wait 5 years and they gonna go bust.
i can add provide spreadsheet, where all anual profits/mergers/brancruptcies are accounted for over 25 years and you can see a continuity in this ... in my opinion the A.I.s have a problem with Supply/Demand as all of them act the same stupid way once their sales drop because more and more companies putting up too many shops for too less factories thats how it always starts.
if there would be a way to tweak this problem the A.I.s would be much more competent else its even better to start with your corporation and 0 A.I./s to not have to bother with them littering the city with there buildings, thats the only effect they have at present.

6. last but not least, ressources ... lets say i get a Gold mine, paying down for the land $355 per oz thats by 88.000 oz more then $31million straight out of the pocket, now when harvesting the gold i am paying another $355 per oz thats $710 per oz and another $100 per oz minimum to cover the monthly operating cost by roughlt 6.000oz harvested a month. seaport even sells at $300 its a bit harsh, i guess it was ment to reflect the land purchase cost in the harvest expanses, in capi plus the reduction in natural ressources went of the passiva, therefore it didnt effect the activa like in cap lab which makes ya pay twice for the ressource as the reduction in land value (natural ressources) will still take place in the passiva the write off the upfront cash paid down for the land.

what seems fine now:
1. was running also 20 R&D centers with roughly 50 R&D jobs and in 25 years not a single incorrect research finished message - exellent!!!
2. stock market runs fine, tested and couldnt fined any bugs - great job

[David]

Could you please provide me with your save game for testing the CTD?

[anjali]

Could you please provide me with your save game for testing the CTD?

sure, savegame is janury 1st ... crash happened beginning of february, kinda sure that i did save before setting up the new factory as i got used to save before any factory or shop is put up du to the random crashes that occur on linking supplies. i used a alternation of the realworld 10.30 mod for this scenario and as i am blond i failed badly on attempting to upload the mod to modd, and cant upload here as the .res file is 14mib. i did upload it to http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 1382943376 any other solution to provide this scenario to the folks be great as i havent gotten my static IP yet to get my own server online. even a hint how to upload it on moddb be great as i got totally stuck there.
btw the crashes did always occur no matter which mod i used and even without mod. but since 3.0.21 it seems limited to crashs on linking items in purchase units and canceling building menu, after a building was choosen and canceled with a right click, on previous releases it was also happening on different actions, like leaving a firm to return to city screen with a right-click
its not like crashes occur permanently but if i set up like 40 shops a year or more thats thousands of clicks and the one or the other gonna do the trick and crashs

[David]

I loaded your save game and tried several times but haven't got a crash yet.

Where exactly did you right-click to trigger the crash? Screen1 or Screen2 in this post's attachment?

[David]

CTD's mainly happen on linking products (go into a shop, select purchase button, click the <link> and once you double click on the product ya wanna sell) you get once in a while

I loaded your save game and tested linking products in a retail store as you described (see attached). I tested it over 20 times but haven't got any crash.

Is there any specific retail store where the crash is more likely to be triggered if you attempt to link a specific product?


p.s. anybody else experienced the crash?

[anjali]

building menu... i did select a building i;e; apparel shop then when looking for a high traffic spot with the building and right click to cancel the building i selected it does crash randomly ... lets say it can go well 50 times but can also crash twice in a row. most of the time it happened when holding the building across the town for a bit longer before you right click. when selecting a building and instant right click i never crashed.

linking products (shops/factories purchase unit) same here can go well sometimes i can roll out 2 products across 40 shops without a crash but then you got the nice ctd when ya didnt save after been through 30 shops and on the next it ll rash once i double the item to link it and ya and up with all the 30 shops to be redone. as i mentioned both of those crash are randomly can take a while to get a crash.

[David]

building menu... i did select a building i;e; apparel shop then when looking for a high traffic spot with the building and right click to cancel the building i selected it does crash randomly ... lets say it can go well 50 times but can also crash twice in a row. most of the time it happened when holding the building across the town for a bit longer before you right click. when selecting a building and instant right click i never crashed.

Please test by pressing [ESC] key to exit the Build mode instead of right-clicking and see if it will crash too. This testing will help us narrow down the potential causes of the problem.

linking products (shops/factories purchase unit) same here can go well sometimes i can roll out 2 products across 40 shops without a crash but then you got the nice ctd when ya didnt save after been through 30 shops and on the next it ll rash once i double the item to link it and ya and up with all the 30 shops to be redone. as i mentioned both of those crash are randomly can take a while to get a crash.

I loaded your save game and browsed through your warehouses, and linked each Input unit to a different supplier. In total, I think I have done the linking action for well over 100 times but didn't get a single crash.

1) Did the crash happen to you when you linking a warehouse Input unit to a different supplier ?

2) Did you experience any of the two CTDs that you mentioned, in version 2.7.22 and version 2.6.38 ?

3) Which version of Windows OS are you using?

[anjali]

Please test by pressing [ESC] key to exit the Build mode instead of right-clicking and see if it will crash too. This testing will help us narrow down the potential causes of the problem.

gonna try it and let you know

1) Did the crash happen to you when you linking a warehouse Input unit to a different supplier ?

it did happen when i.e. i set up a 2nd leather farm , then used a warehouse to bundle both leather farm inputs to a single warehouse output and change the supplier in factory from farm to warehouse (was at the 8th town when it trigger the ctd the 7 before went well)
in shops i only sel my own goods all purchased directly of factories when rolling out new product the purchase slots are created by double click, then link the item by double click so its by 40 shops and 2 products up to 340 clicks to get it set up sometimes crashfree especially if i save every 4 shops, but mainly it happens if i forgot to save every 4 shops.

2) Did you experience any of the two CTDs that you mentioned, in version 2.7.22 and version 2.6.38 ?

yes those crashs were also existent in previous versions 2.7 onwards (2.6 no idea as i started straight on 2.7 when i found out about cap lab) in addition there were also random ctd's by leaving a firm with a right click in previous versions which did not happen anymore since 3.0.20

3) Which version of Windows OS are you using?

still P4HT Rambus system and Windows xp pro sp3 (german) (sp1 cd + the 328mib huge Win-XP-SP3-X86-DEU administrator patch file)

[David]

2.once ya use custimazation (even if its just a mistake as the button is right next to the button to select what product to make) its better to rip down the whole factory or atleast all manufacturing slots and rebuild to get 1 product back esle its just a mess, rather pay 20 million write offs then perma trash the 2nd product that suddenly appears in the sales, blocking the other manufacture slots from selling and no shop gonna pull this 2nd product from that factory as its not linked.

You could resolve this by setting the same customization on all manufacturing inits in the same factory that produce the same product type.

3.Is it only me, or is research totally obsolute with the custimization? Invention and thats it, q7 to q19 products and in every town medium factory allready level 6 (5 manufacture units) + 4 shops each on level 7 sales units and i can not keep up with supply whilest the A.I. Is selling brand 100, q85 with tech 1500+ an overall product rating of 100+ , loacal competitors have overall ratings of 80+ and i am market leader due to the shear amount am selling at a product rating around 40-50 or even less. as the A.I. is too stupid to produce more you probably sell q1 items at good profit, didnt came to test this as i was running the 20 R&D's and started the research higher techs as 1 A.I. company got quite big.

I did not quite understand what issue specifically you wanted us to address. Could you please explain?

[David]

In response to your comment on the AI in this post:

The game's AI performance may vary on different user MODs. To get the best possible AI performance, I would recommend that you play the game with the following settings:

-Disable the stock market
-Set the game's difficulty setting to the maximum
-Do not use any MOD

If you still find the AI not challenging enough, you may create a script with the following statement.

Years of Advanced Start for AI=<0 to 100>

Details: http://www.capitalismlab.com/script---s ... rules.html

If you like, you may upload a game that you played with the above settings, and we will take a look at it.