Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

I appreciate the depth of Capitalism Lab, but micro-managing research becomes overwhelming, especially with the Real World Mod. I suggest adding a macro research option: a Research Headquarters building where players can research entire product groups at once, albeit at higher time and cost. Example: You research beverages all at once, and it adds 30 tech levels to each product in a year. You can tweak it to be more expensive than if individual research centres were built. The cost could be built on the amount of levels added and the number of products in its class. This maintains depth while reducing micro-management.
Additionally, integrating talent hiring for all cities would streamline gameplay. This enhancement would offer players a balanced, enjoyable experience, allowing for more strategic focus and less tedious management. It also can be toggled in the settings for those who would rather just micro. Once again, I love the game, and I am aware that it's not meant to be a fast-paced game, but I would love some more alternatives than placing down research centres and then sourcing talent for every individual product, especially with already having to set up supply chains and building tons of farms and factories.

I do think there is merit to this idea. Generally I find research to be a somewhat annoying process when the number of research centers grow larger. The basic problems I think may be summarised as follows:

- Every time a research project is done it will make a notification via speech or a sound. If you have over a hundred different research projects all at once this adds up to a large cacophony of unwanted noises. This is why I don't play with sounds for R&D projects finishing, it is just too overwhelming.

Can this be resolved? In part yes, I would suggest that each R&D has a feature - 'Notify if this R&D Project completes'. Basically if you want to know if a particular project is done you can still get notified, but if there are other research projects where you don't want to be informed of (because you don't care enough) you can just turn it off for that particular product.

- Another problem is that it is hard to coordinate various different projects. If you want to change your research from 6 month projects to 2 year projects for example you would need to track down the individual centre where that was happening, cancel the current project and redo it. This can be tedious for a large number of projects.

Perhaps adding an R&D Headquarters could solve part of this.

What I envision is something like this:

- Build the building - make a list of all of the R&D projects and group them by the category. So something like this: But it would be grouped by category instead of alphabetical order and so you could have a beverages list, a semi products list, etc.

But have checkboxes next to these listed products:

- Notify when completed.
- Renew research after completion (i.e you could choose to stop research after it is done).
- Raise salary of talent to loyalty level of 20 (if playing in the normal talent mode where going below 20 causes resignations, I use greatly simplified normally).
- There could also be a feature to switch research intervals, i.e change these ticked projects to go to 2 year research instead of 6 months. Have a message come up that asks the player if current research should be cancelled or if you would like to wait for the current project to finish.

One suggestion for R&D

Once you have researched a single product in a group, research for any other product in the same group should go faster or cost less or achieve more. Maybe the player gets to pick which one they wish to prioritize. You might need to bring a product to market fast, or trim the R&D budget or launch with a better product.

Setting up the R&D groups for me is the biggest hassle with the research system atm. If we had a one-click solution or a manager would be much easier.

This could get a tad complicated to code, but perhaps you could have a R&D HQ and be able to set R&D Facilities serve as "slaves" to it providing bench space.
You'd order research groups on certain goods or techs, and set what size you want the R&D group be (1-9 for instance) and it'll automatically hunt an empty lab set to slave mode and set up a R&D team there, preferably auto hiring talents, and perhaps an option to auto-poach if it can't fill the team.
Non slaved R&D labs can be run in manual mode for specific projects such as radical R&D, or existing labs that are added to the manager get added to its controller to avoid redundancy.
That'd at least give the CTO something useful to do, because the COO is so overworked and sure make it much easier to deploy my R&D teams when I decide to take over all the internet apps at once.

Djohaal wrote: Sun May 19, 2024 12:23 am Setting up the R&D groups for me is the biggest hassle with the research system atm. If we had a one-click solution or a manager would be much easier.

This is what this suggestion should be all about, in my opinion.

I guess there could be another building added (R&D headquarters, I guess?), but I'd rather that be avoided. A change to the CTO's existing headquarters screen would probably be best.

I'd like to see something more creative than just levels for product research, though.

FYI, there's an option to turn off notifications:

I like how the subsidiaries handle research by disabling some categories. Maybe something along those lines but in a CTO management screen?