Game Theory

Tycoon World is fabulously complex, but it is lacking in key element of game theory. What do Rock-Paper-Scissors, Starcraft, and Civilization IV all have in common? Each game has distinct strategies that will lead to victory and each strategy has a weakness. Rock beats scissors, but is bested by paper. Zerglings beat Dragoons, Zealots beat Zerglings. In Civ you can win by military might, by colonizing Alpha Centauri, or culturally. But in Tycoon World there is only one path to victory - make cars, maintain a steady stream of ROI avoiding days of low or negative ROI. It's the lack of diverse methods of attaining victory that is the games biggest weakness.

Not only is victory restricted to those who make cars, it's also restricted to those who sell little of what they make to other players. You can't win by making loads of steel and selling it because you won't get enough vendor score or manufacturing score. You can't win by making loads of cars and selling them to other players because you won't get a high enough vendor score. This narrow path to victory reduces player interaction and squelches alliances and cooperation.

The questions are how to introduce new paths to victory and how to reward cooperation. One thing is for sure, any changes that are made to the game need to be balanced and well thought out. Any path to victory should be able to provide a clear advantage if few people chose it, and a clear disadvantage if many people chose it.

(I sure hope you have the game "rock, paper, scissors" in Germany or my analogy will be lost). In Tycoon World we only have rock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock-paper-scissors

I agree with you about the alliances. On the other hand I think the game would work a little better if the materials providers (steel, bauxite, etc..) could do better. The reason you want to buy that stuff is because making it yourself doesn't make for the best score. Also, unless you can get online twice a day, every day you'll end up taking huge hits to your ROI if you buy a lot of material off the market. So the game is set up now to discourage heavy trading. It's too bad because I think the markets in the game would work better if it were more beneficial to make trades.

With respect to careful ROI management as a way to win the game: It still is. This round I routinely sold products for half of what I could have to keep my company value low. Once Stora Enso was about 1,000 points ahead of me and had twice my company value, I accelerated the profit making so I'd consistently make more ROI than the leaders. In a few day's I'll finally stop all my money wasting methods and concentrate on ROI for the last month.

It's funny, in a previous post a player said that playing without quality still offered a good chance at winning. I think that's true for quality in the lower levels, but being able to sell a city car for 400,000 instead of 250,000 when it suits your needs is incredibly powerful.

I think you did so well last round because the other players vying for high score just went for maximum profit for the whole round while you made much less money in the beginning. We couldn't compete with you in the last month because our company values were so high our ROI could never match yours.

*************** edit:
WRT the idea of changing factory type. That would be handy. I don't really care about spending the money on the upgrades, what hurts the most is the hit to ROI and the subsequent hit to high score. If you could tear down and upgrade without destroying your score that would be enough for me. The way I would do it, is to be able to shutter buildings - put them in storage as it were. You'd be able to pay 50,000 per wu to store a building and not use it. so for 500,000/wu you could have 10 extra buildings that you could swap out. That way you could shutter your Bauxite mines when the price dropped too low and make more cars. Then when the market's supply dried up or the price went too high, you could shutter the extra car building capacity and reopen the mines.

This thread is a bit wide ranging so I'll tidy up the ideas a bit.

- Add a feature that will defeat the auto is king path to victory while keeping auto as a possible path to victory through a rock-paper-scissors dynamic.
- Maintain the ability to win without creating alliances.
- Give folks a better incentive to product unfinished goods (bauxite, steel, etc)
- Add production flexibility so ROI and high score don't get creamed in retooling
- Introduce economies of scale. Increase production when many building produce the same thing (1+N*0.02).
- Add "Total Revenue From Trade" to the Business Reports Page.
- Add "IT-Top Trader" to the high scores page.

I like all of these idea, although the first 4 ideas are so loosely defined that they could be good ideas or bad ideas depending on how they're implemented.

I like the idea about economies of scale. Suppose you had 90 buildings of the same type, then you'd make 280% as much as a player who only had one of that building. This could do quite a bit for cotton, wheat, grapes, hops, leather and the like. For those products you can fill you whole map with the same item and just produce it by the metric ton. It's still not a path to high-score victory, but it makes trade more beneficial, and I think having more trade makes the game work better. It makes the markets more fluid and prices more stable. This change would, however make alliances more useful. Right now alliances don't work well because It's hard to maintain a constantly superlative ROI when you trade large values of materials. If you can't log in for half a day, you can destroy your score for the whole day. So with this change the path to victory for the heavy trader is still difficult because of ROI problems, but it is made easier because of improved manufacturer score. On balance I like this change because it brings two separate paths to victory closer together (although they still both go through autos).

The last two suggestions look easy to implement, and good for the game. They're more bells and whistles, and they give players more categories to shoot for. It's always cool when a game recognizes they way you like to play.