Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Regardless of how long I have training on that unit will always be level one. Almost every firm type suffers from not being able to lvl up one sales unit.

Capitalism Lab + Subsidiary DLC
Real World Mod 10.31

Because you have too many sales units. The last one is always idle, never received any goods from manufacturing unit. Those workers in that unit has never seen a pasta in all their days working there.

But why is it idle if the demand is higher than the supply.

It has to do with utilization and throughput of different units in the factory. Supply and Demand is just the end result of how many are requested, and how many are produced. And the high demand is exactly why no goods flow through the last sales unit (and priority is from top to bottom, left to right). Lack of supply means not enough production to get goods to the last sales unit.

Sales unit is extremely efficient, but manufacturing unit is roughly only half as much. If you put a single raw material product in a line with 1-1-1 input-mf-sales, and try to match the supply roughly equal to demand, you will find that about half of the time the sales unit is idling and waiting for manufacturing unit to finish its production. (i.e. the throughput of sales unit is about twice the amount of manufacturing unit, if they are the same level).

In this layout (2 manufacturing units linked to 3 sales units), if demand exceed the production capability of both manufacturing unit combined, almost all products go to the first (the left) sales unit. But since it has training budget, the manufacturing unit level up faster than sales, thus extra throughput put some goods into the second (the middle) sales unit, however since demand is high, they get picked up immediately, and in the meantime output unit leveled up as well, and as long as demand is high enough, no goods will flow into the last (the right) sales unit. And since no goods flow into that unit, it wouldn't get trained.

Interestingly, if the demand is lower enough than supply, then it is possible for goods to accumulated in the last sales unit (i.e. if the demand is less than the first sales unit can put out), but once later on the demand increases again, goods will be taken out from the last sales unit (when demand exceed both two sales units can provide). And if this fluctuation of demands goes back and forth enough times, then the last sales unit could still get trained up.

If you want a more reasonable layout, Just use the wildcard factory layout for 3 raw materials input type (i.e. switch the center middle purchase into manufacturing, and bottom middle sales unit into the third purchase), you will see the difference. And this will increase the whole factory output by 50%, and you will still see the left side sales unit level up faster than the right one, since 3 manufacturing to 2 sales units is still out of balance for sales units, but at least it wouldn't be idle if the demand is high enough.

Hmm. So the training of a unit depends on how active it is. Good to know.

Regarding the idle unit, if what you say is true, I find the visual information to be misleading. Shouldn't that unit be empty of the horizontal graph indicators? How do you know in advance that only 2 sales units are sufficient enough to cover the production?

There may be a bug with the display with the utilization indicator. We will look into the issue.

BuySellBuySell wrote:Hmm. So the training of a unit depends on how active it is. Good to know.

Regarding the idle unit, if what you say is true, I find the visual information to be misleading. Shouldn't that unit be empty of the horizontal graph indicators? How do you know in advance that only 2 sales units are sufficient enough to cover the production?

You don't have to take my word for it, you can setup different layout with different ratio, and test it yourself, like I suggested. Try a 1 manufacturing to 1 sales, 2 manufacturing to 1 sales, or even 3 manufacturing to 1 sales. See how products are accumulated or have shortage, and how each manufacturing units actually move products between them. And as far as I know, this ratio of 2:1 existed since Capitalism II, and stay that way (although when reaching lv 9, the ratio is a little bit off).

David wrote:There may be a bug with the display with the utilization indicator. We will look into the issue.

The utilization bar is always a little bit off. It only seems to change when there are products inside that unit. If the total supply/demand is initially very high, it kinda starts at 100%, and stuck there, if no goods even enter that sales unit.

Our programmer is currently working on fixing the bug and will release a patch soon.

David wrote:Our programmer is currently working on fixing the bug and will release a patch soon.

The bug is the utilization bar? if so I can cut some sales unit in a number of firms