Beiträge von John Smythe

Thanks all so much for the replies! =) And for going into such detail. I think I'm now very clear on what I need to do.

Well then, I have opened a furniture shop and am buying from market. It's quite a business, because it's landed me in an area I haven't looked at yet, and there seems to be weakening demand already. At least in this case, there are quality bonuses produced by other players for me to exploit.

In fact, I'm beginning to see weakening in demand in Toys as well, now. You know how a product looks like this below (pcs....S/S/A/W)?

Tricycle: 20......6/20/6/20

Well, at the beginning, I swear I seemed to be selling 20 tricycles every season. :] Anyway, that's what it seemed like. Now I am selling a lot less in the weaker months. How do you correct this? By making only 13 per wu for that shop (average of the months)? Or by beginning to reduce your prices already? And how big should the reduction increments be? Drop 5% every time you sell too little, or go down by 1 or 2%? Do you try different prices in different shops and see which performs? I'm afraid I can't spend all day online.

Anyhow, I'm going back to my cafes now. Tricycles, anyone? Lot's to spare!

Another thing I might add is that when I joined at the end of last round and was merely experimenting, putting up any old thing to examine costs and whatnot (and somethimes demolishing them), I had a farm to make a little money to keep all this going. I was too poor for fancy stuff like wine and fruit juice--mainly just meat, eggs and milk going straight to my grocery. I had just one building one might term a "factory" for bread. I occasionally bought the odd product from market more to see how it worked. That's all.

My scores in most categories were of course a joke...except Best Vendor. That shot up. Why? Because I did almost no "manufacturing" relative to my purchases, wheras meat, eggs and milk didn't count?

Who is Morgie? Morgie, where are you? =)

Zitat

Originally posted by Amanda Grayson
It is necessary to have a respectable position in the Best Vendor and the Best Manufacturer Score to get a good highscore rating.

To be among the first 100 people in each of those categories is better than to be the first in one of them and the last in the other.

Simply said you get manufacturer points if you produce things and sell them on the market. It looks as if you get manufacturer points if you sell your own products in your own shops, too, but not so many. You get vendor points if you buy things from the market and sell them in your shops.

I'm still a little mystified by vendor points. Do you only get points for buying finished products? It looks like it so far. Anyhow, I'm at position 2K-something way way down the Best Vendor list, Kahla was on the same page as me and Dktc managed to be on the last page with -1.511 points! He was beating firma0816 and Himmelreich who, at the time, could only manage the second-last page!! These are top companies, aren't they? Clearly they're in a race to the bottom! :]

So is this something you rectify at a later stage of the round, and why do points go negative meanwhile? What are they doing that causes them to fall way way "behind" the average noob? It is not clear, but I suspect it may involve importing raw materials as well as not importing and selling goods from others. Maybe?

Thanks, both. I must digest that and read the manual very carefully again. It's well written in some ways but has this knack for causing me confusion.

And sorry, dktc, I didn't figure your company name from your sig. So I'd guess...are you DDD in chat, then?

Some of the raw material prices have shocked me. So very different from the ending moments of last round when I joined. Iron ore especially. It's below cost! So I'm figuring I started all wrong and should have waited a day to start and then -bought- the stuff from the market. In fact, you barely need raw material processing either right now. Just factories and shops. Oh well. I'm learning.

I'm still busy trying to set up my first industry so it's much to early for me to be worrying about highscores or the like. Nonetheless, I'd like to ask Kahla how she got to be IT Market Leader at this stage of the game. Whatever it means, well done.

After that, maybe we can gravitate to discussing what those various categories mean for game strategy? In particular, aren't Best Vendor and Best Manufacturer mutually contradictory? Is the effect of that to force people who want a highscore rating to concentrate on being one or the other?

A huge thankyou to you both! =)

That is certainly one more topic I'm now much more comfortable with. Can't even think of much more to ask!

Well, I was still busy studying the various industries, particularly toys, when the new round began. However, no matter how much I tried to convince myself that toys are good, I kept getting led back to DIY. It has everthing needed for very fast starts for people who have (or who want to work on) high Ql in lumber and steel and, a bit further along, the pushcart is virtually a trainee Merc/BMW.

Nonetheless, being rather contrary...perhaps foolish ...I am setting up a toy industry after all. Dktc, if you think this is nonsense, please let me know since I have nothing to lose in one more quick reset at the start. It's all been experiments till now. Thanks!

Kahla, how do you find buying at the harbor...quantities, prices and such? How many cafes could you keep running and how many times a day would you have to log in for that? More stressful? Too much? Thanks!

I think I've found where the "winners" are from examining the SuDe, or at least some of them. They're all busy making luxury cars. Now why couldn't I guess that since this is a German game? :tongue: (just kidding...actually more of a compliment--they're very nice cars!)

So, Kahla, maybe you should have concentrated on selling high quality coffee in those steel cans. They'd go wild for qual 100 steel, I'm betting, because I'd guess they could always "dilute" it if 100 is to high. Can never have too much steel!

Dktc, how much shuffling of values happens when a new round begins? I would suppose they do a bit of balancing here and there, but not too much? I'm talking about things like production costs and the "normal" price in the SuDe.

Ugh, definitely no more groceries for me. I still haven't built enough farms and farms and...

Hmm. So if you have researched some levels of quality for product X which can only be manufactured at RL n (n>0), then that quality as such is kept for you, but you must in effect wait to "rediscover" it when your product research again reaches RL n?

More simply put, that company which has quality 60 books must wait till it can again produce books, and then it will find the quality of 60 there "waiting" to be used when it restarts producing the books?

Thanks for your patience!

If the above is the case, it might explain why there are almost no high quality items further on. They would be reached too late in the round for the quality to matter, yes?

Ooo this is interesting. It means that when we all restart, even the current top players will be grubbing around at RL 0 until they get their act together. Hence, just possibly, the value for them of a few very high-quality materials at RL 0.

Thank you. And yes, I'd meant to say "research level" there. Sorry.

Right, I'll soon be making a new thread so it relates better to what I need to know...

But one more quick question. I regenned my map until I had 40 resources and a fairly even mix between them. Looking at the issues of specialization, should I go more for one type, eg wood, or stick with flexibility? In other words, any hints from what you and the other experienced players do?

As I understand it, in a new round you keep your map and your patents only, that's it? (It says you keep quality so that must imply research levels also?)

I'm sort of thinking maybe I need more wood for some mix of DIY, furniture and books next time. On the other hand that would leave me less flexible...

Thanks Kahla, and thanks very much dktc! These were truly fascinating replies and I think I now begin to get an idea what it must be like for the players at the top end. Land usage becomes all-important for them. So while the margins on grapes and wine seem good to me here at the bottom end, I face a future of building vinyard after vinyard after vinyard...

Suddenly the profitability looks less good when land use is taken into account. So top players will buy these low-level products at very high prices purely to maintain shop values so that they can sell those extra units of top-end products in the same shops. Right, I understand now, I hope! =)

One quick question. It seems that shop value must be based on the spread of products you can sell at your research level [edit: it had read "quality level", an error -- see post below], and not on the overall spread of what might be sold at all research levels [edit]. I mention this because I have not been playing seriously yet....mainly just putting up plants to examine profitability and the like....and yet my shopping value in the grocery store reached 140 without my trying all that hard. I thought I read the maximum is 150...?

Anyhow, dktc, the rest of your posts I've downloaded and will study more carefully. You have made the strategies involved sound a lot more interesting than I'd been expecting.

Any tendency for top players to form "quality cooperatives" for the purpose of spreading research on inputs? Or do they operate solo and rely on the market?

Zitat

Originally posted by Kahla
I think John is probably talking about the sort that gleans and records information from the game...

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. You don't need active scripting Many programs can read browser pages or - less elegantly - read them when saved. But even a basic calculator would be nice.

Zitat

Originally posted by Kahla
It would be very useful for things such as recognizing patterns in price changes in the market.

Yes! And apart from seasonal markets, simply dealing with pricing relative to supply and demand as a round progresses.

My issues probably stem from the fact that I've arrived so late in the round. Almost everything at the bottom end is oversupplied, and furthermore the "average selling price" is somehow out of whack....also mainly at the bottom end. Mostly it's rather too low and sometimes simply strange. This is altogether odd since one might expect it to remain too high as supply continues to rise throughout the round (caused by people "falling asleep" with old settings still in place).

On the other hand, it is possible to price eggs too high, lol! And maybe just one egg sells now and again. So down comes the price and a few more sell. Ideal would be the sweet spot where you sell all the eggs you feasibly can at the best possible price, yes? So then the game program itself must be running an algorithm to determine that. It would be nice if we had a calculator to reproduce that process rather better than trial and error.

Two questions then

1) Is it generally agreed that "average selling price" is too low in the "newbie zone" of level 1-4 products?

2) Why are market prices almost universally so high? There seems hardly any concept of wholesaling at all. Is there much scope for buying products from the market for resale with a margin for yourself? In other words, retailing what you had bought wholesale. And if not, what's the purpose of the market?

Thanks!

Hello, my first post. Thanks for the FAQ and walkthrough. I've been through them and am plodding my way very slowly through some of the German posts too. Often with games like this, players who can program sometimes write unofficial utilities for the game and I wondered if any had been written so far. It would seem that a price calculator would be an ideal candidate After all, the demand curve meeting the supply curve is the central big Idea in microeconomics, isn't it? lol

Otherwise, if you could point me to any German threads you think might interest me, that would be a help. Trying to monitor all of them is ...very...slow... for me, unfortunately. I'm interested mainly in pricing policies and why I keep noticing these strange "irregularities".