Re: An attempt at a guide to manufacturing for new players
Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 4:13 pm
I don't understand why a large store would be not equally affected by supply shortages as 4 small stores. If you had 3 out of 4 small stores idle, your large store should also be 75% idle.eleaza wrote:In theory perhaps, but in practice not that clear cut. And you cut off the assumption from the first half of my paragraph, it's under quantity over quality strategy. In specialized store, a lot of time as you noticed with demand beyond supply situation, there will be a constant shortage from time to time, and usually for a 4 small stores supplied by a single source, they will compete with each other to get goods. You might find you are in a situation where 3 of 4 stores is idle at one time, it would be rare for all 4 to have supply (otherwise this won't be a quantity over quality strategy). Unlike a large store, the irregular supply in 4 small stores will make their sales units' utilization stay low value. So under this situation and assumption, training 4 small stores are usually less efficient and take longer to reach the same overall throughput. It's nature of more chaos caused by different traffic indexes, different initial conditions, even the order of stores built, make the "fluctuation" worse for 4 small stores. (you can also use one purchase 2 sales in discount store anyway. The layout is really irreverent).
For a supply over demand, with higher quality over quantity strategy, then maybe in most cases it would be not much of a difference in training, and perhaps even easier to divide sales in small stores than an capacity-excessive discount store. My point is there indeed is a use for discount store in strategy than simply easier for management. The tall and high profit margin strategies suit specialized stores well, on the other end, low profit margin flat retail strategies, as much throughput as possible is the way to go.
Different traffic indexes aren't an issue for me because all the stores are in a group, and just being anywhere near the group is enough to reach sales capacity as long as there is market share available to be taken. Any time I sell a new product in a store, I discount it about 20 points below the local competition for about a month, and then it usually has reached max utilization with 2 sales units and I set the price back to give high profit margins.
And if there's insufficient supply, I'll change product or supplier (unless profit is still high and I want to deny competitors from getting the supply).
Also, I wouldn't think you can effectively use 2 sales units for one item in a discount megastore. I mean, is even your 1st sales unit reaching full capacity? I'm not sure the traffic index could ever be high enough to support 2 sales units in a discount store. I mean, I sometimes have 4 sales units of the same item in a specialty store, which should be equivalent to a discount store in total throughput, and I don't quite reach full capacity.
I just have an old Cap version on my 10 year old laptop that I just use when I have to stay in a hotel for work. That's really the only time I play it. There's no multi-levels or anything like that. I never updated it after I got it, and I suspect the saves are not compatible. I do have the original day 1 save though, if you can use it (and the newest save too).eleaza wrote:Maybe you can share the save files, with one from the beginning of the game before building anything, as well as the one you said to reach 60m profit, and we can compare with pure retail from specialized stores or a better location discount store make easier early profit. Each game has very different import goods affecting profit margin, there's no point comparing profit without the same initial condition.
I can tell you that all my small stores (convenience, leather, and jewelry) were all earning at least 500k a month, conservatively. Usually 600k, but up to 800k. The medium stores, (department, supermarket, and electronics stores), were up to 1 million, but usually 700k. This is entirely with seaport goods. With some items in shortage now, small stores may be down to 400k as I change over to my own manufactured goods. But shortages are not really a problem, as I still must build more stores each month as I have plenty of money each month (mostly from a huge increase in credit limits each month) to open factories, farms, and mines.