Beiträge von Kahla

While that's true, the SuDe doesn't show norm prices for raw goods. In that case, what I would suggest is that you watch the market for that particular good for a day or so before setting up your industries that require them. That will at least give you a ballpark price for what you can expect to pay.

The one thing that makes a pricing guide rather useless (and impossible to make) is that the market can change drastically literally overnight. What was a good price at the beginning of the game has absolutely no bearing on what a good price is later on. It all depends on how many people are making it, how many are selling it on the market, how many need to buy it.

Zitat

Don't you sometimes wish steel cans could be melted down into steel?

Every time I run out of coffee beans and end up with a crap load of cans instead. Admittedly, that doesn't happen often. But you know how it is. Sometimes one just can't get back to the game in time.

Zitat

- Trying to stop Kahla from surpassing me

LMAO!!!

Zitat

How is everyone else doing?

I'm doing well enough to suit me at the moment. I nuked all but two cafes and replaced the others with four household stores. So far, I'm not having too much difficulty keeping the shelves filled, although ice boxes are tough to find at any price that allows me to make any profit at all. It's a matter of being on at the right time to catch those few that come on market at the lower price. Blink, and they're gone for the day.

I'm nearly finished with the RL that I wanted to reach. But I'm holding off. RL 36 will allow me to make washing machines, a reasonably nice profit maker. But I'll have to make room for those buildings, and I need to decide what to ditch in favor of them. My main focus this round is still working on QL, so I don't plan to raise my RL any further than that.

Speaking of QL, I did get around to putting up a research building. I'd like to add a second soon, but there again, I'll have to figure out what to get rid of in order to make space. The finances aren't a problem at this point.

I'm still doing much better on Best-Manufacturer than I am on Best-Vendor. I've tried to even that out a bit, but haven't made much headway. The products I'd -like- to buy are not readily available at reasonable prices. My tendency to want to "play it safe" hurts me in that way. I'm not comfortable relying on the market for more than one or two products per store, because the market can change drastically overnight, which could wreak havoc with my SV if I suddenly can't buy two or three products.

Looking for 34 cocoa per WU on an ongoing basis.

Also looking for 392 wheat every harvest.

Please contact me in English - it's the only language I know.

Thanks, dktc - that helps it make a bit more sense to those of us who are somewhat math-challenged. I added a line in that paragraph pointing to the correction posts.

Ah, thank you for that correction, Hal. That's far beyond my humble math skills.

I'm adding two questions that I see fairly often:

Warehouses -
You're given one of each warehouse at the beginning. No additional purchase is necessary. When you've played awhile, you might find that you're producing enough that you need more storage space. That's when you'd want to buy or rent more. Renting might make sense when you only need it for a short time, but buying one is far more cost-effective for the long haul. Buying a warehouse takes up one (invisible) space on your map - you won't see an additional building appear, but it still increases the number of buildings you own.

The difference between RL and QL -

RL (Research Level) gives you new choices in products and buildings. Raising your RL is a one-time cost.

QL (Quality Level) is different - you research the QL level on a particular product or material. Better quality allows you to sell it at a higher price. To raise QL on an item, you must first have a "Research Building" (under Build / Other), which takes up one map space, and also costs a hefty monthly fee even while in standstill. Some items cannot be researched until you have upgraded the research building to a certain level. Each upgrade level results in an increased monthly fee from then on.

Additional note about QL - (*** See below posts for corrections on this paragraph! ***) The QL of a finished (or semi-finished) item is an average of the QL of its required materials, up to the maximum of my product's QL. For instance, if I have researched cocoa to QL 10, but I am using cocoa beans and milk at QL 0, then my resulting cocoa will be at QL 0 because of the inferior materials used. So either I must research cocoa and all its materials to QL 10, or I'll need to buy my materials at that QL from someone else.

Thanks for the reply, Replikant. You were right. My prices must have been just a little high. I tried lowering the ones that were the most over-supplied on the SUDE by 10-20 and it worked. All four stores are selling everything at the same (maximum) volume now. =)

Maybe someone here can explain this, because I haven't been able to figure it out.

I have four of the same shop, selling all items at exactly the same prices. There is more than enough of all items in the product warehouse to supply them all. Yet ONE out of the four is selling less of every item.

All of these items are over 100% on the SUDE, but I would think that if it was a result of needing to lower my store prices, ALL of the shops would sell fewer, rather than only one. Or am I wrong on that?

Ah, thank you very much.

I didn't see this in the information. Hopefully I didn't just miss it.

How much does the purchase of a warehouse expand our storage space? It looks like 950, judging from what I have, but that's assuming it's a flat rate increase.

I'm debating on whether to destroy one of the expansions I made, but I need to be sure that wouldn't be cutting off too much of what I really need.

Aw, thank you, Dktc. That makes me feel a bit less newbish.

I managed to do some quick upgrading so that I now supply all my own iron ore needs. I had expected for the prices to go up, but seeing NONE on the market so much of the time blindsided me.

I'm up to 100 buildings again, mainly because every time I streamline, I end up deciding to add something more in order to put that freed space to profitable use. While that's a good thing in itself, it also complicates matters somewhat when I find I need to switch production or start a new line. But so far, so good.

I went ahead and upgraded a couple of cafes. Upgrading to lvl 3 increased the sales from each by $86775 per WU except during the winter months. Definitely worth it in my opinion, since I'm likely to at least keep a couple of cafes going for awhile yet.

Now that I'm finished with all the upgrading, I'm getting back to increasing my RL. I'm sure I'm a good bit behind most people - I just hit RL 19 today.

Household shop is doing fairly well. I'm producing all products except for ice boxes, which aren't always easy to find at prices that allow any profit at all. The sales from it isn't nearly equal to a cafe, but at least it's been more of a success than my furniture store fiasco. It seems easier to find reasonable prices on a lot of products at night or early morning (at least in EST).

Well, this is definitely a glitch in my strategy. I'm up to 100 buildings again, and suddenly there hasn't been any iron ore on the market since this afternoon. This is not good. Last time this happened, there was plenty by the next morning. I'm hoping that's the case again. Otherwise, I'm going to have to do some mad scrambling!

Hmm. At this stage in the game for me, upgrading a couple of cafes might be worth it, then. Nothing else is profitable enough yet to warrant that. My household store is making roughly half what my cafes do, and I don't plan on keeping that one longer than necessary. Once I get into the big leagues, I imagine that upgrading the shops a bit will be more worthwhile.

I haven't upgraded any shops to date. Can anyone tell me whether it's worth the cost and the downtime?

Dktc can't leave, there are questions to ask that we haven't even thought of yet!

Look at it this way, John, you've already accomplished some of the research you set out to do, even though you ended up destroying the building. You'll just put the rest off for later.

Personally, I've put further RL aside for the time being. I decided to concentrate on upgrading my current product lines as far as possible instead. That way, I'm freeing up space for whatever new venture my RL leads me into. If I step into another fiasco like my previous furniture store, then I'll still have the cafe income to bolster things. I suppose it's somewhat like the QL strategy you described earlier, John - it makes more sense to me to be prepared to use the RL before I spend the money on it. In the meantime, I'm leaving most of the excess buildings in production - I can sell that on the market for a bit of extra income. And some of them may come in handy when I decide on my next venture.

Speaking of the FAQ, I'm finding that the manual is coming clearer, bit by bit. As someone else posted, I certainly can't fault the writing - it's well organized, concise, and covers a great deal of what a player needs to know. It's very difficult to explain such a huge amount of info thoroughly while still keeping it as short as possible. But that's what people tend to want - short and sweet. And then some things are difficult to comprehend until a person has played a bit. So I'll continue to re-read it now and then to see what else pops out as information that I wasn't able to absorb before.

Playing style is certainly different when we're stuck with long periods offline. I hate it during upgrade stages - I like to barrel through them as quickly as I can, and I stagger things so that I generally need to be here at least every 1-3 updates to keep things moving.

Zitat

Kahla, yes, I too abandoned the furniture shop. Frankly, the cafes do very well still, though I'm by no means unhappy with my toyshops. I've furry pets and dolls going too, now. Have 10 level-3 cotton farms feeding 1 level 4 textile plant, and I buy the occasional very tiny amount of cotton at market.

I'm on a new round of upgrades, and I wouldn't even have the space for dealing with cotton at the moment. I'm still avoiding it like the plague. Maybe next round I won't still be so sick of it.

Every time I look over the alternatives, I decide to put off venturing into other types of shops. I might just end up waiting until I have high enough RL to try anything new. I tried a bookstore last round, which did alright, but I ditched it when I discovered my cafes were more profitable. Textiles made more than the cafes, but but then, having all those plots eaten up by so much cotton is prohibitive.

Zitat

I've got tricycles going too still, though I supply the shops more thinly than before, and rely somewhat on cheap imported steel. Rely on that for the coffee cans too, else the markup isn't so hot.[*]

I ended up in a bad spot at one point when I was buying all my iron ore. There was a short-lived stretch when there was literally NONE on the market at all. I ended up going for two updates with no ore, which really upset my coffee and white coffee lines. I might have waited a bit longer to see whether it would be temporary, but I really needed to get some sleep. So I ended up having to quickly build mines to prevent having to go without it overnight. Wouldn't you know it - there was plenty on the market when I woke next morning.

Now, during upgrade periods for my steel mills, I'm stuck with huge amounts of ore that I end up having to sell below what it cost me to manufacture them. I'd be better off if I was still buying from the market instead. But now that my mines are upgraded so high, it would be too much of a waste to destroy them.

Zitat

Nearly went bankrupt today. Last night I left my purchasing "for later" and there was no "later" till noon today! Ran out of iron, steel, pulp wood and all harbor products while still paying for the two research labs, one of which did nothing for 10 hours.

Ouch! I'm glad you were able to get back in before the worst happened. That's one thing I dread, especially since I'm relying so heavily on harbor products right now. Since I'm on dialup and live in a rural area, that's a real concern. In summers past, we've sometimes had connection problems during holidays or rainy periods. That sort of thing could easily bankrupt me, since it's been known to keep me off for anywhere from several hours to a few days in previous years. They've been working on improving the phone service out here, so I'm hoping that will be a thing of the past. But even so, there would still be the possibility of power outages.

I can commiserate, John. That's exactly how I got burned with high QL wooden furniture. A couple times. I would have thought that very high QL would mean more price stability, simply because far fewer people would be selling at that QL. Definitely an incorrect assumption - that's not how things work. I tried to experiment a bit with that furniture shop, but the price was too volatile. I couldn't find a dependable modifier because the price didn't remain steady for long enough to get results from different QLs for comparison. I can't say I was all that reluctant to bulldoze that shop when things became too crowded.

On a side note, I'm not sure how high I'll research my RL this time. My focus is still mainly going to be on developing QL, so it's a matter of how high that RL needs to be in order to fund my research buildings. The higher the RL, the more prohibitive the cost to raise it, but at the same time, I surmise that I may have to "keep up with the Joneses" on that regard in order to maintain high enough profits. One of the unknown factors is how high most players raise their RL. We know the very low RL products will continue to be flooded, but there may be a point at which certain high-profit item prices will remain relatively steady. I doubt that the majority continue all the way up to RL 50. But then again, I may be wrong. I'm doing comfortably with four cafes at the moment, but that isn't going to raise enough cash to maintain multiple research buildings, especially since I'll want to upgrade one to level 2 at some point. Still, becoming familiar with a variety of higher RL products will be to my advantage in the long run as well.

I've been doing a LOT of upgrading lately, because I was starting to get close to that limit. I don't imagine everyone goes about it the same way, but I'll share what I do.

The choice of what to upgrade first depends on several factors - look at what will cut into your profits the least, what will take less time to complete upgrading, and what will benefit best from upgrading (i. e. free up the most plots upon completion, etc.). Sometimes one of those three concerns outweighs the others.

First I sit down and make a plan. I figure out what level each building should be upgraded to, in order to make the production numbers even throughout each production line. This early in the game, I'd rather keep it to upgrade level 5 or below if I can. Down the road, when I'm approaching that building limit again, I'll upgrade them further. But for now, I'd rather not spend all that time and cash on higher than that unless it's necessary.

Once I've done that, I'll look over my list to get an idea of some good choices to start with. If I can over-produce it first and save up a stockpile, or if there's a steady supply at a decent price on the market, then I'll still be able to sell it in my shops while I'm upgrading those buildings.

That's not always possible, of course. If I can't come up with a stockpile, I might only upgrade a section of the production line at a time - such as upgrading one cattle farm and one icecream factory, rather than all the icecream production buildings at once. It'll still cut into my profits, but not as much as if I shut them all down at once. I'll also keep a close eye on the market to see if I can catch any replacement in the meantime.

The higher along the production line you go, the less buildings are needed. To make tea, for instance, I needed quite a few logging camps in proportion to the number of food industry buildings. Sometimes it makes sense to start with the bottom and mid level buildings. I'll use a stockpile of mid-level materials to keep my factories working. Once I've got those bottom buildings further along, I'll start upgrading those factories (preferably with a stockpile of the finished product to sell). If I don't time things exactly right, my bottom and mid level buildings might be ready before those factories are. But any excess materials I produce from those can be sold on the market, so I'm not all that particular about it.

The reason I often do it that way is because when I've tackled the entire production line at one time, I've generally ended up with the end buildings ready far ahead of the others. That can mean that some have to sit at standstill while the others catch up, which is somewhat of a waste. But that's not always the case either - sometimes I can get the mid level material from the market so my factories won't sit idle. Either way, of course, it's a bit simpler to do the whole production line at once - it requires less planning and less watching.

I'm not terribly concerned with the scores right now, apart from learning how each of them are determined. It's interesting to see how we're doing in each category, and it's pleasant when we discover we're doing better than we expected in one of them. But they really won't matter until the end of the game.

Some categories are just going to be much easier or much more difficult at different stages during the gameplay, depending on how we're going about things. But trying to maximize every category score now would be too limiting - it would mean that we'd be forcing ourselves to invest in things that just aren't as profitable at the time, in order to keep a score up.

Right now, concentrating on profit is the key, I think, because the more capital we have, the more we can invest in things that will ultimately help us raise those category scores. That being said, experimenting and getting a feel for the different facets of the game (including those scores) is a good thing, since everything that we learn gives us that much more advantage later on.

I try never to have over a few hundred thousand at the end of a WU, because money sitting in my account isn't working for me. (Obviously that only happens when I'm logged on - a girl needs to sleep at some point!) I'll invest it somewhere instead, so it can multiply the profits I get each update. If I suddenly find I have to switch gears, then I'll have started the new hour with fresh profits to work with. And if it takes me two or three updates to complete a changeover, then so be it, as long as I'm still making profits from other things in the meantime. Now, that's just my own current strategy. It certainly doesn't hurt to keep a cushion of extra cash handy, and I very well might find that I need to do that later on - I just haven't really needed to do that yet.