[MOD] Future World v1.0

[Djohaal]

I just recently finished my own take on customizing capitalism lab. Given that going to the past for more tech unlocks seemed a bit too difficult, I realized: why not going to the future?









This mod features:

• 170 new products

• Beautiful images from the bowels of mad AI painters.

• Futuristic products inspired by several sci-fi tropes.

• Purple

• Careful balancing courtesy of rlqhd5256 amazing spreadsheets 's

• Expanded OS hardware platforms for OS potential market*.

• New obsolescence chains in the auto sector and communications.

• Dozens of new products and semi products have to be researched, making for a more dynamic unlocking of new goods.

• Did I mention PURPLE?!

Technical musings and compromises:
The mod is basically finished as far as a 1.0 release would go, except for more throughout testing than I could accomplish. The balance is tight, with somewhat lower profit margins, but overall market sizes are similar to vanilla, apart from some specific goods I slightly underbalanced as special cash cows, such as the whole prosthetics sector you get to unlock in the late game. I did playtests from 1990-2010's which experienced economic boom and bust cycles, unlike the perpetual boom sometimes experienced in Real World.

Most products categories were upgraded with up to a total of 12-ish products, namely my target since its the capacity of a 3-floors retail shop.

* I sought to split up the OS market into OS-PC, OS-Mobile and OS-Implants, while I did manage to set up 3 different OS systems all sorts of UI weirdness happened with three types of OS systems, I think the game wasn't meant to deal with that yet. As a compromise I just (tried) to make OS compatible with all prospective hardware while abstractizing the porting efforts.

Some numeric details such as quality source %s and customer concerns from goods could use a second attention pass, so please report anything you find funny.

While I defaulted it requiring the cities and subsidiary DLC as I basically tested it under the three big DLCs + Finance, I think you can get by editing the mod.txt and playing it with only

Last I'd really like to thanks Enlight Software at the Discord server (David?) for their invaluable assistance helping me sort out errors in my budding mod efforts.

Download and installation:
Cickty me here - unpack/unRAR the file at your /caplab/MOD folder and it should be good to go.

This was built for use with the beta 10.0.x (preferably 10.0.21+) builds

[cantdownloadit]

PURPLE - Downloaded

[David]

Hi Djohaal,

Thank you for creating this amazing mod! I really like imaginative designs of the new products!

David

[govgilbert]

Downloaded and trying out the Mod now. Looks awesome! Thanks for the hard work you've put into this, and I'll provide any useful feedback I can as I play through it.

[Stylesjl]

Looks pretty good! Just downloaded it and while I haven't tested it extensively I did notice a few things:

Expanded OS hardware platforms for more OS wars.
I can't see this anywhere. It looks like it has still has the base game OS - or is this just not featured in the game's Software Guide?

Also:

- Smart Boots are instantly at the game start:

SmartBoots1990.png (138.7 KiB) Viewed 1385 times

I think this should be from 2005 onwards (it needs Embedded Systems, which are invented in 2005).

Also: Are Service firms available in this mod? It does not look like it has the Pizza/Cake/Coffee/Fast Food shops even when Service firms are switched on.

--
Also this

Cybertoaster.png (63.84 KiB) Viewed 1385 times

--
Will give this a more thorough test later.

[Djohaal]

Looks pretty good! Just downloaded it and while I haven't tested it extensively I did notice a few things:

Expanded OS hardware platforms for more OS wars.
I can't see this anywhere. It looks like it has still has the base game OS - or is this just not featured in the game's Software Guide?

Also:

- Smart Boots are instantly at the game start:
SmartBoots1990.png

I think this should be from 2005 onwards (it needs Embedded Systems, which are invented in 2005).

Also: Are Service firms available in this mod? It does not look like it has the Pizza/Cake/Coffee/Fast Food shops even when Service firms are switched on.

--
Also this
Cybertoaster.png

--
Will give this a more thorough test later.

1: I was unclear, I meant that there's more OS platforms for a larger userbase. Almost all computing devices count as potential OS platforms, assuming the porting part was hidden. The game doesn't support multiple OSes at the moment.

2: Yeah something went wrong with the smart boot, I need to refactor it.

3: Afterlife is an amazing game.

[Stylesjl]

So I have done some playing around with this and I have some additional comments:

I did playtests from 1990-2010's which experienced economic boom and bust cycles, unlike the perpetual boom sometimes experienced in Real World.

I also tested this and I agree that while the economy does grow much larger in total than in the base game, it is still quite volatile overall. Big reason I think is that while there are so many products in this game, it still staggers out the availability (i.e decades to research) that it allows the economy slow down (even if temporarily).

Example here, which does show mostly growth, but it is not smooth or very high:

NationGrow.png (157.75 KiB) Viewed 1052 times

Perhaps some new internet services that can only be unlocked progressively up to the 2070's?
New Software? Games?
More sci-fi goods in general?
Emulate a space program in the factories and mine asteroids for rare resources? Too inelegant though.
Furbies?

New Software and Internet Services would be interesting. Some ideas:

After 2020:
AI Chatbot (Subscription)
AI Art Generation (Subscription)
AI Music Generation (Subscription)

After 2030
AI Video Game Development Assistant (Services Fees)
AI Software Development Assistant (Services Fees)
AI Novel Writing (Services Fees)

After 2050
Simulated Reality (Subscription)

--
Software

Computer Games would be great as software I think such as RPGs, First Person Shooters, etc.

------
Aside from all of that I have a few comments and observations:

- Making money is much easier in the game, part of the reason why (aside from less competition due to the wider product variety) has to do with the fact that the AI cannot handle semi-product chains properly. The AI will for example develop a new technology such as an Electric Car Body but they don't research the Electric Car itself, which causes them to waste their money. I suspect that this might be an issue with the AI in the base game in general which might not be equipped in the code to rationally handle scenarios that where semi-products are researchable.

Another thing, Seaports have High Tech Semi-Products which have not been invented yet:

FutureSeaport.png (420.87 KiB) Viewed 1052 times

Overall though, a pretty good mod.

[Djohaal]

Thanks for the throughout review.

On the balance front the mod is still quite generous with B2C profit margins, I might do a batch refactor of all its pricing to make it a little tighter.
I expected AI to fumble with reserachable semi products, but I guess that can't be helped with a mod.
The seaports importing high tech goods is weird, I made sure to verify that all new goods were not importable. I'll have to double check the files, code gremlins like to have fun.

Have you encountered an issue where new researches stop showing up on labs for discovery? In my save it stopped showing up anything beyond 2020 (the qbit specifically) for research, I had to pack up the mod and save and hand over to David for troubleshooting.

[Stylesjl]

Have you encountered an issue where new researches stop showing up on labs for discovery? In my save it stopped showing up anything beyond 2020 (the qbit specifically) for research, I had to pack up the mod and save and hand over to David for troubleshooting.

Not sure what you mean - do you mean that you run out of people to hire or do you mean that the R&D a New Product button does not appear? I had a problem with the former, but that is due to the sheer numbers of labs researching tech even with a 500% talent bonus.

--
Another observation I found as well: There are no Service Firms in this mod even with Service Firms = On.

[Djohaal]

Have you encountered an issue where new researches stop showing up on labs for discovery? In my save it stopped showing up anything beyond 2020 (the qbit specifically) for research, I had to pack up the mod and save and hand over to David for troubleshooting.

Not sure what you mean - do you mean that you run out of people to hire or do you mean that the R&D a New Product button does not appear? I had a problem with the former, but that is due to the sheer numbers of labs researching tech even with a 500% talent bonus.

--
Another observation I found as well: There are no Service Firms in this mod even with Service Firms = On.

The new product button disappeared for me. I couldn't research anything that came after 2020.
I haven't added service firms... yet?