below are some of the settings the game:
- 7 Cities in the 1990s with Inflation
30 Competitors
Very Low Start-up capital for everyone
Very High competence of local competitors
1 Seaport per city, 1 non-constantly supplied low-quality product per seaport
So as a result, most of my competitors cannot survive - I can't really survive either.
(I must admit that I'm not a very good player)
I got on track by establishing a leather farm, getting AI players to buy them, producing leather goods, made money, survived for 30 years (that's not important).
At around 2020, only two fairly large corporations were left, both were leather goods specialists - and my corporation was the leather supplier. Most of the remaining 29 competitors were either bankrupt and restarted, or in the amidst of bankruptcy.
I wanted to move onto another industry at this point. Realizing my specialty was cosmetic products, I wanted to try starting to produce the easier perfume.
Perfume requires Glass and Chemical minerals, and glass is manufactured using silica. No one was mining them, seaports are not reliable and they're not selling it anyways.
Then I saw these land prices - $800,000,000 for a chemical mineral mine and $500,000,000 for a silica mine (Inflation was at around 600%).
My company was making $150M at that time, making it fairly impossible to do anything else rather than continuing on producing farmed products.
I started a new game with the same settings to check the land prices, silica and chemical mineral site land prices were fairly consistent at around $100M, more or less the prices for an oil mine (actually, oil mines were actually slightly cheaper)
Below are some prices for your reference:
Silica: $55M, $62M, 70M, $90M, $90M, $100M, $100M; Average: $81M
Chemicals: $84M, $100M, $110M, $125M, $125M, $140M, $172M; Average: $122M
Oil: $106M, $90M, $87M, $134M, $94M; Average: $102M
Coal: $14M, $10M, $11M, $15M, $12M, $13M, $11M; Average: $12M
Iron: $10M, $9M, $10M, $7M, $7M, $9M; Average: $9M
Silver, Gold, Timber and Aluminum were around the $30M - $40M range
That makes chemicals the most expensive mineral to mine.
I started a new game in Cap2 to compare prices, Silica and Chemical Minerals were around 2M, sometimes up into the $10M range if they are huge deposits.
I understand that it was a "Improvement" as mentioned here:
http://www.capitalismlab.com/natural-resources.html
To prevent having too much supply of raw materials flooding the market, the cost of acquiring a new natural resource increases significantly as the number of sites in existence increases, thus making it harder for companies to keep acquiring new natural resource sites in an attempt to monopolize the industry.
But then, I can't even acquire the first site, where comes monoploy?
I therefore think that the price of acquiring new sources of raw materials must be reduced.
It became kind of boring in my game where no one can produce anything other than leather goods.
For those interested in the situation of my game, you get grab my save file here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32908624/CapLab/GARY_002.SAV
