David Archer RJ: BallC CO: BallC Post Rating: 18 + / - Total Posts: 142 Karma: 135 Joined: Apr 11, 2012 |
Posted on May 28, 2012 (Last edited on Jun 30, 2012) .
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Brent Goode RJ: BB Goode CO: BB Goode Post Rating: 15 + / - Total Posts: 506 Karma: 180 Joined: Apr 5, 2012 |
Posted on May 28, 2012 I believe you are incorrect about one thing here, goods are available if you interrupt a production run. I do it all the time. You have to restart it, of course, but if you stop a 24 hour run for some reason at 13:46 hours, you get the production as it stands at that moment.I do agree that there are certain inconveniences in the mechanics. I am particularly annoyed at not being able to share technologies within privately held companies. But there are more important things for Scott to work on than internal sales/production transfer chains at the moment...like getting the stock market ready for prime time, and refining some of the factory/product chains and lists. Not to mention building a consumer base that isn't 128.48% satisfied with only 380 players in the game. As for production runs, I like checking in everyday to play, so I set my runs for about 24 hours, based on my RL schedule. I try to anticipate my resource needs a couple of days in advance, but I am beginning to build a small stockpile of key resources for certain products. I have a central industrials company that produces metals, plastics etc... for all the other companies I run...which is two since I sold the electronics company to stream line as I get ready for the new server and the probability that it will take over more of my time. I have learned to check the Export markets before I sell to myself on the B2B. Nothing drives me nuts more than Exporters snatching stuff I list at higher than wholesale!!! (If "writing my own abstraction layer" means bots, you know you will get no sympathy from many of us here. The biggest hurdle after the Exporters to my moving goods from one company to another, via the B2B, is damned bots.) I do agree with your general assessment on getting big quickly on the factory floor. The EoS bonus is a great thing. But, while I can't argue with the principle of of larger is better on research, I would dispute the idea that you can't compete under level 30 quality. It isn't the easiest, but I compete just fine to sell my wares in the markets at Q's in the 20 range quite often. Since I am not trying to own a market, just make my money in it, it seems to work just fine. The point being that I don't know that you need to jack up your labs to 500m2 right away. I have never understood the race for dollars in this game, as there is not a built in purpose or notion of winning the game. Of course, I don't play the game as a number cruncher, nor will I be a spreadsheet slave, even as I consider developing a couple, but the race for excessive piles of cash I have always found curious in many of these sorts of PPBG's. It's not like we can buy votes in congress, or a single rare art work, or diamond, or build a altruistic museum or donate to a favorite charity for the fame of it all. It's just numbers on a screen to me so far. The real fun and payoff is in the process of building and running the enterprises. Anyway, you wrote a great post full of good things to think about. So I will go ponder some of them further now. Thanks! |
Brent Goode RJ: BB Goode CO: BB Goode Post Rating: 14 + / - Total Posts: 506 Karma: 180 Joined: Apr 5, 2012 |
Posted on May 29, 2012 I have been thinking about this all night, and while I have been able to do just fine with a lessor Quality rating, I think it is probably a good idea to get a solid Q rating fairly quickly. I still can't see popping research to 500m2 immediately, but I can definitely see the need to use more than 30-50m2 for the first 3 months of an enterprise too.I think it is really important to have three or more stores, and a number of factories to support them, all up to size, before I worry about mega-labs. You can sell anything at any price if you are willing to wait it out. I have made mistakes on the B2B and mistakes in entering prices. (Once sold Q15 fans for 1499 due to a typo, not during frenzy, came back next day and I had actually sold a couple hundred of them!) But I have come to believe very little is as important as lots of floor space and some advertising for pushing out the product. I also think that you can still be a retail-only enterprise. You just have to plan for the fluctuations appropriately. Build a reserve inventory, etc.. Every strategy needs select investments of various types, and that would be one for retailers. Not optimal to tie up your cash that way, I realize, but doable never-the-less. The new server will likely not have as many synthetic fluctuations as we have experienced in Beta. One can only hope, anyway. |
Bob Malone RJ: Bob Malone CO: Malone Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 341 Karma: 191 Joined: Apr 17, 2012 |
Posted on May 30, 2012 Thanks for your posts, I was also thinking on how I can start on new server, trying many strategies, and it gave me headache :)
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Gamma Alpha RJ: Gammatron CO: Gammatron Post Rating: 21 + / - Total Posts: 104 Karma: 62 Joined: Apr 7, 2012 |
Posted on May 30, 2012 My basic strategies which helped me in building a fairly large company (6.25G worth) and become an industrialist with net 40G in 8 weeks or so.1. Find a good niche with high demand. In my case it was sporting goods, then textiles. 2. Invest all you've got and pay no taxes. 3. Always have at least 2 facilites of one kind. Sell/produce in 1, while expand the other(s). 4. Don't waste time and space on producing everything you need for the final product (minerals -> chemicals -> plastic -> clock: skip minerals and buy chemicals to produce plastic for your clock. I produced most of my goods in factories of 3 kinds: textile, petrochemical and sporting goods. 2 weeks ago i bought the 15th parcel and started producing 60q lumber because of this crazy frenzy:) 5. Research to the max, get rid of unnecessary buildings while reaching certain Q. 6. Don't sell on b2b market if you can sell for higher price in your store. (unless you produce vast quantities of various goods) 7 diversify your offer as much as you can so you can quickly produce other goods of the same kind to fill up your store. 8. Initilally i produced in 10 hours cycle, lately 48h was efficient. 9. Expand everything. All the time. |
Brent Goode RJ: BB Goode CO: BB Goode Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 506 Karma: 180 Joined: Apr 5, 2012 |
Posted on May 30, 2012 Gamma's strategy is basically mine as well. I did build a company to strictly supply industrial materials for my other three companies, though I am not sure it is really what I wanted it to be.I also agree that it is good to buy some resources from the B2B when you need them, or can't justify a full production facility. I paid a lot more for butter this morning than I wanted. A hell of a lot more actually. But the end result was still an inexpensive item that will add about 40 cents to my final product. A pittance, really. It just depends on the resources you buy and the percentage they represent of your final goods. Many of these strategies will be amplified in various directions when the new server goes up. It is one thing when you are trying to supply 350 players, and have them supplying you. It is another when there are 3500, all with differing needs and offerings. I anticipate a really dynamic B2B and the import markets will be too important to be messed with very much. I also foresee a more vibrant service out of the export markets. They were an invaluable source of revenue for me my first week as I found I was making far more than I could sell. It was a tripling of my cost(or better) with immediate cash-back. It helped me get off the ground running, and still becomes a great place to unload junk from my warehouse for immediate cash. By the way, is it just me, or is the use of G for billions kinda stupid in a economics game? Doesn't it expose the nerdishly tekkie side of the game vs a real feel for the world of finance, in which B is still the preferred designation of choice? I never saw $14G on the front page of the WSJ.(Probably never will, either, since tekkies are just high-priced meat whose jobs can also be outsourced, or HB1'd, like everyone else to your average Wall Street mogul.) |
Gamma Alpha RJ: Gammatron CO: Gammatron Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 104 Karma: 62 Joined: Apr 7, 2012 |
Posted on May 30, 2012 Currently, I don't see much competition going on, as goals of the game are, as somebody mentioned it elsewhere, "enjoying the management of the process of production and selling goods". Keeping that in mind, it does not matter if you grow fast or not, if only the demand is high enough so you can sell your goods in stores or on b2b market. My Gamma company was growing steadily and quiet fast even if my strategy was intuitive and had certain flaws. Firstly I enjoyed just reselling goods which I bought on B2B market with about 100% margin in the old store system, now I'm able to sell just my own goods, produced mostly with my own raw materials (or with help of some B2B supply) keeping the production chain relatively short. With margins reaching 1000-5000% in certain sectors the growth is even faster and I've got serious surplus of cash, which lets me speed up reaseaarch of certain goods to Q60 with just a couple o clicks. Sure, there are faster ways and vertical strategy is definitely one of them. Actually I experimented with it at another company, producing my own jewellery completely from the scratch and at Gamma Fibers, producing my own lumber and then paper goods. Both of them have been developing pretty fast. I regret that we've got to move and start from the scratch and actually I'm not sure I'm able to invest my 2 months to develop my new business there from almost zero level (counting some beta tester bonus) :-/ |
Edwin Quintanilla RJ: EdqMaster CO: Edqmaster Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 74 Karma: 9 Joined: May 3, 2012 |
Posted on May 30, 2012 My stragety is to not tell anyone my strategy oops....
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Richard Ripberger RJ: Rip CO: Rip Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 153 Karma: 78 Joined: Mar 28, 2012 |
Posted on May 30, 2012 Here is my master strategy.1. Buy stuff 2. Make stuff with it 3. Sell stuff 4. ???? 5. PROFIT! :) |
Edwin Quintanilla RJ: EdqMaster CO: Edqmaster Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 74 Karma: 9 Joined: May 3, 2012 |
Posted on May 30, 2012 @Ballc you must of missed the oops... part its hard to type in a joke but whatever. I used no strategy at all all I did was produce stuff never kept to much cash since I know producing,or selling stuff always gets you more money. |
Lorenzo Boccaccia RJ: Mon Opoli CO: Mon Opoli Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 80 Karma: 71 Joined: Apr 10, 2012 |
Posted on May 31, 2012 EoS has a limited ROI, so there is no need for a super long production batch.the sweet spot for me is about 12 hours runs for 100mq factories. larger factories can use the scale bonus in less time, but I don't want to micromanage much so I usually don't get under the 12 hours batch (maybe on weekends when I can precisely time production to make all component fits and build a buffer for the next week production) at start there is almost no gain in making productions longer than 12 hours, even if you loose a bit of cash, you need it to expand, before taxes eats your earnings. I start production and expansion before year end for that reason. The less cash/warehouse items you have on year end, the more efficient you are. |
David Gray RJ: graydoo CO: graydoo Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 11 Karma: 29 Joined: Apr 19, 2012 |
Posted on May 31, 2012 10x 500m^2 plantation - 25 million6x 500m^2 farmers market - 30 million 1x 500m^2 Agricultural R&D - 10 million 65 million to take a company up instantly to full production. 10 million to add a new company. Allow 5 million for electricity/research/water. That is 80 million for a company that only ever has initial build times (that are cheap with influence if you do it straight away). I have tried this out with just the one company, http://www.ratjoy.com/eos/firm/6161 I plan on attempting this to quickly rise to 9 companies. The first companies will expand past 500m^2 only when they have shop stocks and funds to expand all of the factories for a full week. The 10th company slot is to do something different and become my flagship. The other companies can be sold up or go public and sell off my stock when I grow bored of them. This feels very abusive of the free expansion but it remains to be seen if it actually gives any longterm advantages. |
Brent Goode RJ: BB Goode CO: BB Goode Post Rating: 13 + / - Total Posts: 506 Karma: 180 Joined: Apr 5, 2012 |
Posted on May 31, 2012 This feels very abusive of the free expansion but it remains to be seen if it actually gives any longterm advantages.What it really does is point out the silliness of the free expansion system. Scott gets in a hurry to see his projects mature, I think. He doesn't seem to have the patience to let us go through the process of actually building stuff. It would be fine to do this to 200m2, maybe, but 500 is kind of a lot. Coupled with a refined, sensible quest system to gain influence, and you may have something that works better. I thought it was humorous to have the prices of accelerating building jacked up, then have the 500m2 thing kick in too. Still, I guess it is a smallish thing given other issues he should be, and probably is grappling with. I am wondering if it isn't better on the new server to let a few days go by before jumping hard into research, since it will then be an accelerated pace due to the higher averages brought to fruition by the folks who go after it right away. A kind of research "drafting", for you race fans out there. Sailboat racers excluded, of course. |