azxcvbnm321 wrote:The AI is going to be the hardest to improve because all the factors are so complex. Do you have enough supply and retail stores available for the AI to drop prices? I agree that there's a lot of room for improvement, but I hardly have a problem with making money with COO. The COO is not good with choosing supplies because it'll choose the nearest factory with supplies available, but if a lot of stores set that factory to be the supplier, that factory will be overwhelmed pretty fast. You really have to set links manually and have a system, say one factory supplies X number of retail stores and you build a new factory every time you exceed X retail stores using that factory.
I know there's limitation, and its not hard to have a company still making money when production is up to scale, even way back in Cap2 where you don't have much control with COO. Doesn't have to be precise to make money. The problem is AI COO is mediocre at best, but annoyingly bad in tight spot, even shrinking overall revenue and losing market shares with all the advantage at hand (better brand, better tech, better quality source, own media firms etc). It generally can perform well enough when products have monopoly, but really bad at competitions, or more precisely to say, very mechanical with its respond, so players are forced to follow "AI logic". I don't like hire a "helper" but still have to manually tune details myself and follow "its rule", it should be the other way around.
azxcvbnm321 wrote:
The biggest positives to having a COO is that you don't have to manually set prices which will change all the time because AI competitors will adjust prices constantly to fight you. That leaves me free to build the supply chains. The second positive, and maybe the best to some people, is the bonus you get from their expertise. It's so valuable in fact, that I have to rehire a COO immediately if one quits because my sales will drop off.
It's easy to fend off competitions and don't have to chase its price, sometimes its worse to enter a price war like COO would do (and other times COO would just gave up and hand over the entire market to competitions, you can check the save file in the original bug report, and try to set Desktop Computer price with $150 to $200 range manually, and then assign those stores to COO management, and see how AI "fine tuned" the price and get squeezed out by competitions, and there's enough production to supply at least 1/3 of the city's demand at that rating with that setup, and definitely enough retails even with just level 1 or 2 sales level). And COO is no better at adjusting prices, it just gradually tuned up and down, and you have to manually reset to a better price range every now and then, otherwise it just behave like factories and retail stores run separately, when there are tons of extra production, it doesn't scaling up; In a tight spot, not raise the price to squeeze profit. Only a dumb slider with all the products at once, and COO not even doing a good job with these supposed function. (And if I have the time to plan my supply chains, choose good retail locations, then I can spare few seconds to set an ideal price with "apply all", no need for a COO who eats 10% revenue)
And I agree AI expertise is good (and probably the only benefit it can provide), so IMO a better way is to just make COO stick with these passive benefits similar to CMO/CTO, and divided the task job into smaller parts, like CFO to control budget, Sales VP to watch out competitions and respond, HR VP to speed up training, etc. Not just roll all the half-cooked functions into one big fat COO.
