Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Not sure about gameplay wise, but realistically-wise shipping costs are far too high. Items like canned corn and soup cost 20% of retail to be shipped from one city to another? Realistically that is 1% shipping from China to the US.

ECs and CPUs have stratospheric shipping costs. In C7 build a desktop computer factory in Harbin along with ECs and CPUs. Then build a desktop factory in St Louis. The cost to ship the ECs + CPUs from Harbin to the factory in St Louis is equal to 70% of the cost to ship a desktop computer from the factory in Harbin to retail in St Louis. When in reality on a per computer basis the cost would hundredths or even thousandths of a penny.

I disagree. I think the shipping costs are reasonable enough since manufactures can take advantage of the low labor cost in Harbin.

I've run the numbers with Harbin in challenge 7 which is a huge gap in labor costs and it doesn't make sense to build in Harbin for any products. Land cost in the early game is the only reason to do so - by the end of the game to max profit you'd have to move all your factories or lose at least 5% of revenue in profit. And labor costs differences should shrink by the end of the challenge as well.

I'll add cocoa and sugar to the list of odd shipping prices. I would never have thought I'd need a cocoa farm in every city, but the added cost of the freight of cocoa is huge in the final products it is involved in. Taking 10% of retail revenue because you shipped the cocoa to your factory from another city is quite excessive.

*NOTE - perhaps cocoa is expensive to ship and I simply don't know it. Adding a page about the various products including shipping costs or whatever would be educational and useful in game.

Just do a simple comparison in game and post your results here. It will help people to save time as otherwise you must test freight costs for everything as you can't know in game beforehand which will be excessive or not. As I noted 20% retail in shipping from China to the US for canned chicken is vastly overstated as to real life.