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Store Balance


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Random Tester
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In summary: more choice, less work.

The choices will be kept the same, but you'll clearly have to made a decision as to what to put on the shelves.

Syncing the price change isn't an issue after the quality squashing, so you'll only have to set the price once as you do now.

Syncing the stores won't be put in as that'd actually reduce choice, and you're free to rename those stores to fit with what you're selling in them.

As for the different stores costing differently and having the same # of shelves, that's a good point, I'll adjust the store prices after the change. Also note stores for higher end products will still cost more - simply because there's a slight advantage to the selling speed vs. value for those goods.
Andrew Turner
RJ: Thomas Lazygun

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Scott, when you're working on the user interface for stocking the stores, I have a small suggestion. I did think about writing a bot to do it but it would have been fiddly and hit the server too many times for a single page update. But you wouldn't have that problem if you implemented it yourself.

Next to the quantity in the store, I would like to see an indicator of low stock. That is, based on current sales rates, if the store will run out of something in the next day I want to see something like a red arrow pointing down. And a yellow arrow if it would run out in 3 days or less.

And then since the idea is now out there, how about an indicator of overstock too? Like a yellow upward arrow if the stock will sell out in 9 to 27 days and a red upward arrow if it'll still be on sale after 27 days.
Nwabudike Morgan
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The "slight" advantage of expensive products is more than an order of magnitude for many comparisons. I make 10x as much selling caffeine as I do on selling cans (similar demand, both imports), and I make 17x as much selling cars as I make selling caffeine (cars have much worse demand, still both imports). Or for a stronger comparison: if the demand calculation were equal, I would make around 500x as much profit per tick selling cars as I would selling cans, and even with current demand, about 175x.

Currently, a lack of "shelf space" (# products) helps limit the more valuable products, which tend to be stocked in stores with less item slots. If the number of shelves per store is fixed, this trade-off will go away, and the best items to stock will always be the most valuable ones.
Random Tester
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and thus increasing the supply beyond 200% and lowering the sales in time.

But I'm not worried about this, small tweaks on building cost and product sales speed can be done any time.

Stock indicator will be possible and efficient using the shelf system, so there's no reason to leave it out.
Bob Malone
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I am really worried about the fact that the B2B market will become pointless with the possibility to have several shelves for the same product...
Random Tester
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If that ever happens and the B2B prices drop below the bottom, I'd happily run a retail empire off of those low priced goods.
Bob Malone
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I am afraid that even if B2B prices drop, it would be never cheaper than your production. By the way, it will maybe even never come to B2B Market as it will be sold in the store.
Herb Derpman
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I think what Bob is trying to say is he's afraid people are going to stop putting their products up on the B2B market at all, and instead just use multiple shelves to sell all of whatever they make themselves.

I could see this happening, too. If I'm making a bunch of donuts, and I could have a supermarket with nothing but donut shelves and sell them all myself, why would I sell them to anyone else?
Bob Malone
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A trade off would be to limit the number of shelve for a product ( like 4 or 5 ), meaning that we still have to go to the B2B Market to optimize the sales.
Andrew Turner
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Here's a possible tweak for later, that ought to encourage retail diversity. Having a good selection of products on its own will draw in the customers. Some goods are staple products that drive business into your store. A supermarket that doesn't stock bread and milk will likely lose sales of everything to one that does. A gas station without gas will see a drop in sales of everything else. Other goods support each other: golf clubs and golf balls, for example. A few products are rivals: the more you sell of one, the less you sell of the other. Milk cartons and milk jugs is the obvious example.

Have a table that shows the effect certain goods have on the sales of other goods nearby. Lots of zeroes, some ones, a few higher numbers and very few negatives. Use this in the sales formula to boost sales. Something like slot effectiveness = store_size*(1+sum(boosts)/100)
Random Tester
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slot effectiveness = store_size*(1+sum(boosts)/100)

I see lots of potential on this one and have a rough idea on how to implement it. But as you mentioned it'll come later since it'll take a lot of planning and manual input to get a cross-product relations table up.
Lorenzo Boccaccia
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Th problem is, as usual, how to communicate to the user the content of that table. I mean, I can guess that serrling carrots along jet isn't the best of things, for both.

But I can't really notice if canned mango hurts lemons, unless store tells me.
Nwabudike Morgan
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Right now, you have a "sell time" variable that is a divisor of the quantity of items sold in a store.

$selltime = $base_value ^ 0.65 / 20

It might be a good idea to raise both the exponent and the divisor a bit, resulting in better sales for cheap items and poorer sales for expensive items. As I mentioned above, there are huge disparities in item sales rates. Suppose we change sell time to the below. This would make the very cheap items (cents or single dollars of wholesale value) sell much more quickly and decrease the sales of expensive items (appliances, electronics, vehicles), which would help balance the limited shelf space, but still retain a small sales advantage for larger, more complex items.

$selltime = $base_value ^ 0.9 / 100

Can (Wholesale: $0.05): Sells 10.57x as quickly as now
Tungsten Powder (Wholesale: $2.50): Sells 3.98x as quickly as now
Wheel (Wholesale: $80): Sells 1.67x as quickly as now
Car (Wholesale: $11.5k): Sells 0.48x as quickly as now
Passenger Jet (Wholesale: $30.0M): Sells 0.12x as quickly as now
Innocent Bystander
RJ: Matthew Matician

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While I can appreciate where you're coming from on this, I don't think that expensive items need a hit to profitability. To take airplanes as an example, the cost to build factories, stores and R&D is astronomically higher than low-value items, and the amount of factory time (combined with the fact that airplane factories take 3 times longer to build) that they take is so large that it the time and cost wouldn't be justifiable if selling time was nerfed.

My impression is that all the recent changes to store_category and multipliers based on numItemsPerStore were meant to balance low-value and high-value things already.
Nwabudike Morgan
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Expensive items would still be considerably more valuable with my suggested formula, which was intentionally a bit extreme. Also note that aircraft and watercraft would see an increase in sales per unique item, since brokers sell less than 8 unique items each. The recent changes in item sales rates were primarily based on the difference in number of items sold per store, but every store is going to have exactly 8 shelves, so maybe reverting that change will be appropriate.

My primary motivation with the above suggestion was this: in the current system, a more expensive, unlimited supply import item will always be more worthwhile than a cheap, locally-made item in the same store.
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