Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections
Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2015 8:03 pm
I just ran a game where I opted to engage in no R&D or marketing, having my products compete on Price alone (mostly).
I opted to go into the food industry, and was initially planning on seeing what would happen if I sold all my goods at rock-bottom prices. I carefully set the internal prices on my farms and factories to ensure they would operate at a small profit, allowing me full flexibility with retail pricing. I deviated from this slightly because the cost of training my farms was so low, I couldn't see any reason not to do it at 100%. This gradual influx of quality ended up saving my butt.
Initially I was able to dominate every market I set foot in, able to lower my prices to a level where I could match and beat the Ratings of my competitors and still make a profit. Running at minimal costs was fun! I made a boatload of money this way, but eventually my revenue started shrinking after real competitors entered the market and I was fighting just to stay above 50%.
I had a panic moment when a competitor started selling 80 quality Cereal Bars backed up by a 100-strength brand rating. I lowered and lowered my prices and only just barely managed to get a comparable rating to his. It was in that moment that I realized the fundamental weakness of this strategy: If your product doesn't have a high enough rating, you can drop your price all the way to Zero and still be unable to compete.
Fortunately my farms had matured by this point to produce high-quality crops, and so I had enough quality-points from the ingredients to be able to compete while making a tiny fraction of a profit. If I hadn't had a source of Quality within my own production chain, I would have lost that market.
You can make a lot of headway early on selling goods with a high "price" rating in price-conscious cities, but you will eventually realize that dropping your price from 10% default to 0% only earns you ~10 rating points. You will eventually need a second source of ratings, and that can only come from Farm-training, R&D, or Marketing.
I opted to go into the food industry, and was initially planning on seeing what would happen if I sold all my goods at rock-bottom prices. I carefully set the internal prices on my farms and factories to ensure they would operate at a small profit, allowing me full flexibility with retail pricing. I deviated from this slightly because the cost of training my farms was so low, I couldn't see any reason not to do it at 100%. This gradual influx of quality ended up saving my butt.
Initially I was able to dominate every market I set foot in, able to lower my prices to a level where I could match and beat the Ratings of my competitors and still make a profit. Running at minimal costs was fun! I made a boatload of money this way, but eventually my revenue started shrinking after real competitors entered the market and I was fighting just to stay above 50%.
I had a panic moment when a competitor started selling 80 quality Cereal Bars backed up by a 100-strength brand rating. I lowered and lowered my prices and only just barely managed to get a comparable rating to his. It was in that moment that I realized the fundamental weakness of this strategy: If your product doesn't have a high enough rating, you can drop your price all the way to Zero and still be unable to compete.
Fortunately my farms had matured by this point to produce high-quality crops, and so I had enough quality-points from the ingredients to be able to compete while making a tiny fraction of a profit. If I hadn't had a source of Quality within my own production chain, I would have lost that market.
You can make a lot of headway early on selling goods with a high "price" rating in price-conscious cities, but you will eventually realize that dropping your price from 10% default to 0% only earns you ~10 rating points. You will eventually need a second source of ratings, and that can only come from Farm-training, R&D, or Marketing.