Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Hi all,

Been a fan of the game since ages, but never had the time to play. Finally I bought the game with the DLCs and just finished the tutorial. I do have some questions lingering after finishing the tutorial.


Scenario: Any recommended scenarios for new players to get started on the game, vs a custom "open" game? Since the game has steep learning curve, if there's any scenario that is good for new players, I'd love to learn the game with baby steps.

Capacity: I'm not sure how to find the information in-game, but how do I know if I need a Medium or Large Factory. From reading around, it seems Large has 2x capacity as Medium. If I don't want to lose on training levels, should I just start off with Large Factory and slowly increases its utilization? The same question with the other buildings: apartments, mansions, etc. I assume the more expensive ones have more capacity. Should I wait until I can afford the largest and go with it?

Advertising: When do I want my branding to be Corporate/Range/Unique? I assume in a game where I plan to be involved in different markets (farm products + automotive + computer + fashion), corporate branding isn't ideal since launching a new product will inevitable drag the brand down, thus hurt your existing products? My initial impression is that Range branding seems to be the best since you save up on advertising and it won't hurt your other product class should you choose to diverge. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Also is advertising done based per city?

Training: When is max training not recommended? Based on the tutorial, it seems training increases your operating expense but will pay off greatly the sooner you start and the sooner you max the levels. As a follow up, once the units have reached level 9, does max training incur cost (and thus I have to set it to 0) or will it stop incurring expense automatically?

Manufacturing: Are there golden ratios I should follow? For example, for every 1 livestock raising unit, how many livestock processing units can it serve? Similarly for every purchasing unit, how many sales unit can it serve? I guess the better question is how do I identify the "limiters" in the chain? Is it by the brown bar that represents utilization of that unit?

Retailing: In the tutorials, I found that selling goods imported from Seaport is enough to make a profit. Often times the demand outstrips supply. In this case should I increase the price or build more stores and fill it with more purchasing & sales units of that product? Another question is if distance between stores matter or is it purely based on traffic? e.g if 2 stores have the same foot traffic, are their sales affected if they are located next to each other or across the game? If it's the later, then it's purely based on foot traffic and demand of a city as a whole, rather than each store having its own coverage area.

Relabeling: I read a few other threads and relabeling was mentioned. Is it simply buying a product (from AI) and sell sell it in your stores? As simple as that?

Warehouse: When is having a warehouse useful? When is it not enough to have your factories having its own sales units directly linked to stores with purchasing units? On a related note, if a purchasing unit in a store is unable to fulfill demand, is it possible to link it to different factories? if not then is it the main reason to use warehouse, since you can link it to 1 warehouse and have that 1 warehouse linked to several factories?

Expertise: With this feature, if I do want to branch out to other markets, is it better to create a subsidiary and use a COO with the corresponding expertise? I don't know if it's better to use 1 subsidiary specializing in 1 product class or just have my HQ compete in non-expertise products.

For now these are the questions I could think of. Thanks!

I'm a new player, too. Would really appreciate any pearls of wisdom from some of you experienced players regarding these questions. So far, I have found the manual, FAQs and on the site demos to be not as comprehensive as I'd like. Or maybe just unsuited to my learning style. So, add my request to this one.
Thanks

I would recommend that you check out the strategy articles at https://www.capitalismlab.com/resources/strategy-tips/ as well as the let's play video at https://www.capitalismlab.com/videos/

The post is old but anyways, might help someone :

I'm not an expert player, but my information come from the website and the manual
Don't hesitate to correct my grammar/spelling, I'm still learning English.

http://dly.free.fr/site/IMG/pdf/Capital ... Manual.pdf
https://www.capitalismlab.com/

Scenario: Never tried them sorry! Go for challenge game they're my favorite n_n

Capacity: Capacity for a big factory is twice as much as for a medium, which is itself twice as much as for a little. As for how much you need for one city it depends on multiple things, first the population of the city, then the demand for the product, you'll get a feel for it as you play. From my experience though, when I'm selling frozen chicken/lamb/pork/beef, for example, one supermarket (medium size retail) and its 4 products is enough for one city but it will reach full supply capacity slowly with training. On the other hand, if you set up a discount megastore you will be able to provide for a greater portion of the demand quicker, but might end up wasting its capacity when fully trained. Know also that in recession time demand will drop, especially for low necessity index products. It's not necessary to fully meet a demand though, and I seldom try to achieve that specifically because as I said, demand varies. Experiment and adapt your strategy! Mansions are cosmetic except if you want to resell it later after it's land value increased, the mansion price won't make a lot of difference compared to the land price, I like to have one for realism. For apartments the biggest are the best yes.

Advertising: First, don't bother heavily advertising your products if they're low quality. Also, 3 ad/day is a minimum for the advertising to have any effect (look in corporation detail > advertising).
You bring up range awareness when you advertise your product AND people buy it. Then if the product is low quality, brand loyalty decreases, otherwise, it increases. I think, though I should verify, that the loyalty decrease is greater under range strategy and greatest under corporate brand strategy.
Corporate brand ratings grow the slowest. A cheap strategy as your advertise for all your goods at the same time, it's the hardest to set up and maintain though as any low q good you sell or any inconsistency if the quality of your supply of ANY good will negatively impact brand loyalty.
Range is in between, you advertise product classes and quality inconsistencies will only affect products of the same class.
Unique brand grows fast but can be very expensive if you need to advertise many goods, quality inconsistencies don't affect other goods' brand loyalty though!
As for when to use which strategy it depends on your playstyle and your goal. For a total market dominion I'd go for corporate branding while trying to own all the media firms to kill the expenses, otherwise, I usually do range brand. Another tip I like to use is: if you can get high-quality goods at the beginning, use a warehouse and private labeling units. It will relabel a competitor or seaport good as your own, the good need to be your own if you want to advertise it! Otherwise, it will still work but you'll only advertise the individual good. For example, imagine I'm using range brand strategy, if I buy bread from a seaport and advertise it without first relabelling it, it will advertise the bread but only the bread, not the whole food class.
Media firm range is city-wide yes, for the newspaper, radio, and TV, but in the digital age DLC, there are also internet media firms that advertise in every city.

Training: I always train as much as possible, I think it's always cheap enough, though I might be wrong. At level 9 units will stop incurring cost even with a full training bar so no worries on that side.

Manufacturing:
1 purchasing unit - 2 sales unit
1 livestock unit - 1 processing unit
That's the ratios I've tried myself, they work. As for the others, I didn't experiment yet but it seems to be always 1 - 1 (like 1 unit manufacturing flour for 1 unit manufacturing bread).
To see bottleneck is the supply chain look for sales unit at 100% utilization (that's where they are them 90% of the time), labeling units bottleneck often too. If the bottleneck comes from that I just wait for the unit to level or build more. Sometimes the bottleneck is the raw material or semi-product supply.

Retailing: Importing from seaport can be unreliable or not depending on your setting but yes at the beginning they can make you a profit. When demand outstrip supply wether augment the price (try to stay competitive with local business and other retailers though) or build more, though I wouldn't recommend building more unless you know you won't meet the demand even with a fully trained retail store or if you can use this new retail firm later to sell other things.
Retail stores don't affect other retail store sales even if they are next to each other, the only thing that matter when placing them is the traffic index. The only way a retail store can affect another retail store sales is... well... if they sell the same product and thus compete for the market hehe :p Retail stores will augment traffic index in their area when they have clients.

Relabeling: See Advertising. You can relabel product to sell them into your store, or not and sell them unrelabelled, depends on your strategy.

Warehouse: I personally use warehouse for private labelling (3 input unit, 3 labeling unit, 3 output unit, it seems that each labeling unit needs its own output unit or it won't work), especially when a product from the seaport is in a product class I want to advertise (when I use range brand scope strategy). I find them useful to store "seasonal" products like anything that comes from farms and wool as well, because without if find the supply will be disrupted sometimes (but maybe it's me being bad at playing lol) and also because the farming unit will actually restart sowing and destroy last year unharvested product if not moved fast enough. Then later I use them to store a specific product coming from many factories. It comes it handy as purchase unit can only select one input. As an added bonus the warehouse handles goods at a faster rate than any sale unit.

Expertise: It is better to use a COO with the corresponding expertise of course, it will give you an edge. But it's not mandatory, though it will make things harder, especially in late game. It's not necesarily better to have subsidiary specializing in one product class (though most of the time it's a very good strategy) but yes, you can do that, or something else, make your own strategy and enjoy !