Business simulation - brainstorming

[Chris]

I'm thinking of making a BBG business simulation set in modern times. It's a very vague idea for now, so I'm gathering random suggestions.

Core design choices (can't be changed):
- round based, after X months everything is cleared and start fresh (no need to worry about "runaway leader" syndrome too much)
- modern times (no SF or historical)
- grand scale (not focusing on a certain industry (like cars only) but many products of various industries included)

How would you make such game? What would you include (separate, disconnected mechanics are OK)?

[Chris]

No ideas? OK, to make it rolling I will post my concept so far.

- there are several regions/cities, these are the places where players compete (transfer goods between regions will be allowed but it won't be free, probably players will be able to setup companies in more than one region/city).
- each region has a separate market where the goods are sold and bought, no auction, no direct exchange of goods, everything goes via the computer supervised market (already tested, works great: http://community.bbgamezone.net/coding-discussion/market-algorithm/ )
- there is no such things a quality of goods, everyone produce and sell standarized goods of identical quality (to simplify the market)
- everything (except half products) that players produce is sold to virtual consumers

- you construct "buildings" in the choosen region, these are various factories, mines, shops, services providing buildings. A building produce something as long as the resources are present in the player's warehouse (storage)
- you hire workers and assign to buildings (there are very few workers needed (like 2-5 per building) and each is a separate entity with stats)

[Barrikor]

I posted something on the Mmorpg.com forums about an economy system for an mmo. Basically my idea is that there are 4 or 5 "tiers" for most industries in an economy and that you could have skill levels and play-owned buildings for each "tier" of an industry:

Tier 1: Gathering resources
Tier 2: Refining resources
Tier 3: Item production
Tier 4: Item / resource sales
Tier 5: Any extra services needed for economy to function, transport, guards, utilities, etc.

Ex:
Tier 1: Mining gold ore; Tier 2: Smelting gold ore into gold; Tier 3: Crafting a gold ring; Tier 4: a shop that sells rings.

[Chris]

Tiers 1-4 are self explanatory, but the Tier 5 is tricky. Is transport needed for transporting goods between tier 1 and 2? In such case it can't be tier 5, more like tier 0. But it requires machines from tier 4 and gasoline from tier 2. I would just call these "special" since trying to attach it to any tier gives a headache
Unless you meant abstract final services provided to consumers (in such case it should be merged with tier 4).

Tier 1: Gathering resources
Tier 2: Refining resources
Tier 3: Production of final goods
Tier 4: Commerce (sale of goods and services) [note: consumer services, like hairdresser, are a special case since these are sold immediately upon production, so tier 3 happens on tier 4]
Special: Industrial services (transport, maintenance, security)



Bureaucracy
You assign the workers to factories/shops, but you also have your company's headquarters/main office. You have to assign office workers there too (or face efficiency penalties to all your factories). But the trick is it is increasing progressively (1 factory require 1 headquarters worker, but 2 factories require 3 headquarters workers). This should simulate nicely the inefficiency of the bigger companies where the owner can't supervise everything personally (plus limits the growth of older players which is always nice).

[Topazan]

I recall you place a lot of importance on precedence in your designs, so allow me to link to some other BBG business sims I've played:
www.miniconomy.com
www.simunomics.com
www.kapilands.com

The second two are pretty similar in their approach, miniconomy takes it in a different direction.

[Chris]

Yup, I always try to check the predecessors, otherwise how could I be sure that my brand new game is much better than the old dinozaurs?


Maybe post something about the games of that genre that you played? Especially, what you liked in these the most and what you hated the most.

[Topazan]

Be happy to.

Simunomics is probably the one I stuck with the longest.  It's pretty simple.  There are four kinds of structures you can build: mines, factories, research facilities and retail stores.  (Also farms, but they're mechanically identical to factories, despite being in a different category.)  With mines, you pay to buy land containing a certain number of resources of a certain quality from the system.  You can then extract these resources over time.

With factories, you can manufacture the resources into other products, and possibly use other factories to make more products out of those.  This is another process that takes place over time.

Research facilities let you do research that will automatically increase the quality of items you produce.

Retail stores let you sell finished products to the system over time.  The lower the price, the faster it sells.

What I liked about simunomics was that it was fairly straightforward and relaxing.   I'm not a fan of hyper-competitive games with constant resets.  The skill in simunomics was mostly about deciding which products to produce based on the availability of materials and lack of competition.  There was a fee to sell things on the open market, so it was advantageous to set up private supply deals with other players.

Maintaining supply deals could be pretty difficult in the long term, however.  The way it was set up, your factories could only use one brand of raw materials at a time, so the customer either had to buy all their supplies from one person or none.  In order to maintain the relationship, the seller had to grow as fast or faster than the customer.  All things considered, having a private supplier wasn't that big of an advantage to begin with.  These supply deals were pretty much the only social aspect of the game, so the difficulty in maintaining them was one of my biggest frustrations with the game.

I didn't play kapilands very long.  From what little I saw, it was very similar to simunomics, except a little more complicated.  The graphics were much fancier, but I was already too invested in simunomics to stick around.

Miniconomy was a completely different type of game.  For one thing, it had regular resets.  Instead of buying raw materials from the system, they spawned on a map at the beginning of each round.  There were a few NPC buyers, but the focus was on selling things to other players.  There were no factories.  Each player started with skillpoints that they could spend to make a certain product cheaper.

Miniconomy had a number of towns, each town had a player-elected mayor who placed streets.  Shops and other buildings had to be built along the streets, and if you wanted to buy something, you would have to scroll through the shops street-by-street.  Shops on major roads were much more likely to have business for this reason.

Of the three, miniconomy was by far the best simulation.  It had a mostly player-run market, player-run politics, player-run crime and more.  It was also much more of a game of skill.  If you didn't price your goods at a price players could pay, they probably wouldn't sell.  It also had a lot of neat extras.  You could buy cars and boats, and charge to transport people and goods between cities.  You could build a house, and buy a computer to keep better track of your businesses.  You could set up a bank and serve other players with deposits and loans.

But, I really didn't like how much success in miniconomy was based on the "land rush" at the beginning of each reset.  If you managed to score a section of a major road, or waterfront property to build a harbor, you had a major advantage over people who weren't online at that time.  If you ask me, success in an economic game should be based on something other than sleeping schedules and internet connection speeds.  I also felt like miniconomy had a lot of interesting content and mechanics that felt wasted in a game with such short rounds.  There was a lot of gameplay that seemed like it would be really interesting to explore, but the time in between how long it takes to gain enough money and the reset felt too short.

[Chris]

Simunomics is probably the one I stuck with the longest.

Weren't you annoyed with the old companies being at the top literally everywhere? I checked it and there was one that was the first on each category of product... Also, I got bankrupt immediately because I have chosen wrong industry (200% of demand met, and the cost of products was higher than the price I could get via my retail shops ).


How to design the "sale" (selling of goods to virtual consumers for profit) system? I have a working player to player supply & demand driven market system, I would definitely want to use it for player to player trade of raw resources and half products. Now I wonder about the virtual consumers buying finished products...

[saljutin]

maybe some sort of this:
- player can own shop
- shop sells end goods
- each player registered contribute to number of maximum buyers
- some sort of function that tells % of max buyers that will buy some goods with some price = function(% buyers, goods price)
- add geolocation

Something like this:
you have some city which has 3 car shops (same brand, same model, same all!)
you have 10 people who want to buy such car
1. whats the price
2. how they like shop, staff
but again....if one shop has really low price they will all buy there...hmmmm!

[Topazan]

Simunomics is probably the one I stuck with the longest.

Weren't you annoyed with the old companies being at the top literally everywhere? I checked it and there was one that was the first on each category of product... Also, I got bankrupt immediately because I have chosen wrong industry (200% of demand met, and the cost of products was higher than the price I could get via my retail shops ).


How to design the "sale" (selling of goods to virtual consumers for profit) system? I have a working player to player supply & demand driven market system, I would definitely want to use it for player to player trade of raw resources and half products. Now I wonder about the virtual consumers buying finished products...

Are you taking about Allmart?  That's the NPC company they use to soak up extra demand.  Anyways, it didn't really bother me.  I guess it's just a personality quirk, but I don't really feel the need to be at the top of any game, or at least not a game like simunomics where there's plenty to do no matter where on the ladder you are.  There were always niches that the older companies had neglected waiting for a new company.

Just out of curiosity, what city were you in and what were you selling?

As far as the formula, I seem to remember hearing one idea about that awhile back.

I meant something like this:
- you build a shop you are getting 10 customers per day
- you click upgrade shop button which cost 100 gold (each next upgrade cost more) you get +1 customer per day
- if you reduce price by 50% of average price of other players you get 3 times more customers
- if you run marketing campaign you get +10% customers (cummulative with other bonuses)

[Chris]

Yes, Allmart. Now it makes much more sense I was attempting to sell cars, don't remember the city.