Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Hi, I have been playing all the DLCs for a while now and here are some suggestions for your consideration to alter. Please take some time to read.

Interface
#1. I have noticed that under the stock exchange tab, it does not show your company and/or subsidiaries name in full when planning out which company is acquiring shares of others. For example, I had subsidiaries called "Red Rose Media", "Red Rose Industries", "Red Rose Apparel", etc. but the interface only shows "Red Rose" for all the companies with their cash amount due to limitations on number of characters which makes the stock acquisition game-play difficult for me to decide which subsidiary is which. Would love to see the full name shows up in every tab (corporation tab, corporate details tab, etc.) for as long as the number of characters is allowed for the name.

#2. It would also be good to have a tab showing an organization/group chart of all subsidiaries and/or minority interests in companies within the group, the current % shareholding in each company, brief financial info(cash,net worth, net profit, strategy, private/public, etc.) as well as the current CEO below the respective companies in order to have a master view of your entire corporation. (this is actually quite important to me as I get confused myself after incorporating multiple subsidiaries)

#3. I love to adopt a holding company play-style where I set up subsidiaries, each carrying out the respective services and/or industry to allow easier management on operations and viewing each industry/ service profitability separately (e.g. setting up Coca-Cola Company and focusing on manufacturing and selling only cola enables me to view the entire market size of the cola industry). One of the difficulties encountered in such play-style is that the equity, assets, liabilities, profits, revenue from all the subsidiaries are not consolidated up to the balance sheet of the holding company under the corporation tab which makes it difficult to have an overall combined financial view of all the subsidiaries. Consolidation should be enabled for any subsidiary holding of more than 50%. Also, the profit at the bottom of the main game-play interface always shows $0 because there is no business operations. I am of the view that it should also show the consolidated profits from all subsidiaries computed based on their respective shareholdings % to have a view of entire group's profitability. Cash-wise amount showed can stay at the holding company level as it is currently done now.

#4. Likewise, the income statement and balance sheet of all companies should consolidate the income statement and balance sheet of its subsidiaries. Bear in mind that there should be a minority interest amount for any subsidiary not wholly-owned. Any dominated industries of the subsidiary company should be added to the dominated industry list of the holding/parent company as the current situation does not show for the parent/holding company. Also the score for the overall group should add any dominated industry score from the subsidiaries.

#5. Wouldn't hurt to also have a company cash flow statement tab as well and consolidated cash flow statement. After all, this game is about being realistic in the business world.

#6. As it stands now, each subsidiaries have their own tech level for different products and has to be researched individually. While this is fair, I would like to suggest that the holding company show all tech upgrade progress of all its subsidiaries (at least 75% controlled). By viewing the tech list of my highest level holding company, I should be able to see all tech list of the entire group being researched. This provides an overview of which products are yet to be researched by the group.

#7. It will also be an added advantage to have an option under management policy to disable the CEO from adjusting prices of goods sold in factories/retails. This allows the player to have its own pricing decision on some of the subsidiaries and not have the CEO changing it later.

Corporate Take-overs
#8. Upon having full control of a public company (or at least 75%), we should be able to replace its CEO by termination. Public companies that are privatized (fully owned 100%) should be removed from the stock exchange interface and turned into a private company. It is kinda weird to see that I owned 100% of the company but there is still a share price tag to it and is trading up and down when by right, there is no more trading involved. Privatized company should then be able to go for IPO again, maybe 1 or 2 years time. Believe this would add more flavor to stock trading and corporate take-over strategy game-play.

#9. Upon merging with a smaller public company, players should have the option to be able to choose if the company should be maintained and be held 100% instead of just taking over all the company's firms, stocks, cash and loans while removing the company itself and its CEO.

#10. The merger option will automatically allow you to force the merger of the target company at the prevailing market price. To be more realistic, I propose for the force merger at say, 30% premium to market price for the remaining equity shares.

#11. Also, while we are at the privatization mechanics, it should also be possible to have your own character privatize public companies using personal fund and control it separately from your main company. As it stands now, there seems to be no incentive to have lots of personal fund apart from buying a few fancy mansions. This may also explain why the owner of all my competitors ended up buying all of their own company's shares till they own fully. May need to look at expanding the stock market size by including more public companies or including companies from other nations owned by the top 100 billionaires list limited up to 49% (assuming the 51% held by the owners) to allow for only minority investments. My feel is that the size of the stock market is currently too small.

Financial Actions
#12. All companies should be able to issue one-off special dividend to its shareholders. This allows players to adjust the ROE by leveraging and paying out dividend. Furthermore, this should also solve the issue of having incorporated a subsidiary company and any subsequent capital injection but unable to reverse the action.

CES DLC
#13. Similar to renaming subsidiary, we should also be able to change its logo and for CES DLC, players should be able to change the name of existing city (perhaps provided you have the mayor on your side) and your controlling party name/logo. Likewise, players should be able to rename their nation. Currently, it shows as "my nation" and unable to change.

#14. Allowing players to set up city pension funds and investing in real estate and stocks of public listed companies to generate profits certainly adds new color to the game-play for government mode. Given the size of government funds, perhaps we could impose a restriction of acquiring more than 20% of a single public company. Further, it would be interesting to see government able to IPO its business and real estates such as media, hospitals, education, banking, seaports, etc.

#15. Would also like to suggest that players able to select their own political members and not have them selected by default.

Financial and other services (this may be pushed to later stage of DLCs as I understand it can be hard to implement now)
Financial Services
#16. Similar to acquiring media firms, there should be several banking institutions which players may acquire or build. Perhaps we can include a government permit required to be obtained first prior to owning a bank. Acquired licenses amount can be added into the intangible asset of the company's balance sheet. If you have the mayor on your side, players will be able to influence the acquisition of such permits by adjusting the number of licenses to be given out in a city. Upon controlling a banking firm, players can decide which bank to borrow money from and adjust the interest rate pricing given out by the acquired bank based on certain % above the central bank's interest rate and manage the bank's profitability.

Other industry / services
#17. Could also be fun to have casino licenses and allow players to privatize / build and operate its own private schools, hospital, sea ports, airports to create an entire new business class segment and generate revenue to players. Players will be able to decide on the raw materials and other products to be imported and exported out of the city via controlled sea ports and airports providing more economies of scale to your manufacturing, farming and raw material production facilities. Currently, airports seem to be there for esthetic purposes only. Could add airlines business into the fold, but perhaps at later DLCs. Any private hospitals, schools built should also add to the city's quality of life attributes. This gives players more flexibility in improving the city's expansion without putting too much burden on the government, just as it is in real life.

#18. Last but not least, any improvement to the graphics is always good to have.

In my opinion, this game come closest to the real-world business simulation game, especially the take-over strategies and corporate structure but making the above adjustments will be a step closer to reality. Have spent quite some time writing this and hope to hear from the developers on implementing these changes. Please leave any suggestions and feedback to help improve the game-play further.

Thanks.

Also want to point out that the subsidiary can't seem to acquire tech from its immediate parent company. Issue arises when I want to spin-off specific business class segment into a subsidiary to IPO (e.g. All production facilities producing toys into a subsidiary) but unable to transfer the tech. Not sure if I missed out on any option for this.

Also, radical r&d doesn't seem to be available for my r&d centre in my subsidiary if I hire a CTO with the required expertise on my subsidiary level. Seems like I must hire the CTO on my main company before the radical r&d becomes available for my subsidiary level.

Would also be great if we can have any capital injected into subsidiary be recorded somewhere in the balance sheet of the subsidiary to allow us to keep track of how much total capital has been pumped into the subsidiary. This is especially useful if the subsidiary is investing into stocks and real estate. Perhaps we can record any capital injection as advances from holding/ parent company under liabilities and subsequently to have an option to repay them just like taking out a loan.

Thanks and have a great day ahead.

Also want to point out that the subsidiary can't seem to acquire tech from its immediate parent company. Issue arises when I want to spin-off specific business class segment into a subsidiary to IPO (e.g. All production facilities producing toys into a subsidiary) but unable to transfer the tech. Not sure if I missed out on any option for this.

You may acquire tech from your subsidiary via the menu in the headquarters.

Also, radical r&d doesn't seem to be available for my r&d centre in my subsidiary if I hire a CTO with the required expertise on my subsidiary level. Seems like I must hire the CTO on my main company before the radical r&d becomes available for my subsidiary level.

We will fix this issue in the next post-release beta patch v4.5.28.

1. I have noticed that under the stock exchange tab, it does not show your company and/or subsidiaries name in full when planning out which company is acquiring shares of others. For example, I had subsidiaries called "Red Rose Media", "Red Rose Industries", "Red Rose Apparel", etc. but the interface only shows "Red Rose" for all the companies with their cash amount due to limitations on number of characters which makes the stock acquisition game-play difficult for me to decide which subsidiary is which. Would love to see the full name shows up in every tab (corporation tab, corporate details tab, etc.) for as long as the number of characters is allowed for the name.

This is due to the limitation of screen real estate on the stock exchange interface. One solution is to allow the player to change the short name of a subsidiary company. We will look into this.

Services, especially Financial Services, would be a good area to "deepen" the game in terms of finance. I posted this below but in a section about retail DLC expansion I believe. I want to re-post it here with the hope that it is seen. If any of the information below has been discussed previously I apologize ahead of time. I am excited about the Banking DLC, including all the discussion results centered around it. Adding a Investment house (or company) has been mentioned in a lot of what I have read thus far. However, I cannot admit to having read everything n the boards involving future DLCs. Adding insurance (fixed/variable) products would work to deepen the finance portion of the game. This could allow one to generate much revenue and almost play the game solely as a financial adviser (simulated).

The big winner here would be the full service Investment house that has its fixed product support its variable side in which funds/ or index have people paying into one pot that is used by the financial house to go to the stock market with to multiply that money to pay a return to policy holders (Whole life, Index funds, retirement policy anything that pay out a return). That "Premium" pot of money based on policy's sold would be awesome under an Investment house UI. Like any type of life insurance not everyone that pays into the pot draws on their policy payout (of course that what the actuary is for right? to make that call)

With Finance services - It is also critical to the automobile business as GMC, Ford, Mazda, Nissan etc. make more money off their credit/finance companies as they do off their actual product (cars/car service). Credit is the true profit machine here in the auto business. No longer just "Fordist" production the object but the financialization of this manufacturing process or the retail side through credit services to auto customers.


Re: New Retail Store Function
#33 Post by NFortuna3110 » Tue Mar 12, 2019 6:12 pm

Is it possible that the Service DLC will add fast food stores/chains/franchise possibilities? Also I think it would be interesting to have Medical Clinics. This could affect city health ratings without the over head or costs of a fully operated Hospital. Due to the freight element of transporting Franchisee materials to stores (this could be interconnected with the Transportation DLC). In addition, a Funeral home would also make sense (service), along with a Graveyard business.

The ability to sell fixed product financial instruments would also be interesting (if not overtly complex or cumbersome). You could have like Car insurance and term life health insurance (fixed policy products). The insurance firm could specialize in one area/market of insurance or be a Insurance/Investment firm that does it all (sells medical insurance, Whole Life insurance, Long Term Care, Business insurance, Key Person policies-- all policies that are manged by the Larger Investment/Insurance firm would be subject to management performance within the stock market (with premiums available for management in the stock market- by a hired CFO with analyst that you hire like a researcher to work under the CFO person). The main suggestion here is to augment the "Financialization" of the economy (as in FIRE = Fire, Insurance, Real Estate) using both fixed and variable products. This would take advantage of the awesome stock market you guys have created!

Supposedly the Glass Steagal Act had separated Finance firms and Banks from being run under the same house. However, I think Dodd-Frank bill tried to ease that possibility and the dangers it can bring about with all that money available to invest and back variable products for sale to the public. Of course if you guys added this then Home & Flood insurance could also be fixed products that could be sold and then having Real Estate firms would be interesting.