Beiträge von One-Stroke

Nice screen shot chips.

1. Produce anything - toys, textiles, furniture, cafe, etc.. Fill all 100 squares as soon as possible.
2. Climb the RL tree as fast as possible. On the way up, produce icebox, telephone, keyboard, fridge, motorcar, motorcycle, luxury motorcar, and city car. Jewelry may also be a path to victory, but nobody has proven it.
3. You won't win your first round, but once you've gotten high enough in the RL tree, and with at least a month left, you'll have all the money you need to do QL research.
4. Research only high RL items at first if you can afford to. Citicar, Luxury motorcar, motorcycle, motorcar. You get more results with fewer levels of research if you concentrate on the end product first. You can make a quality 25 motorcar with only 100 levels of QL if it's all in motorcar. It only takes 33 days to go from QL 0 to QL 100 so you can make QL 25 cars after your first year of research. If you research cars (to 100), engines (to 50), and car bodies (to 50), and steel (to 100) - a reasonable goal for a first round, then you can make QL 50 cars after your first round. Within a year and a half of this plan you should have 18 items up to QL 100: Citycar, Luxury motorcar, motorcycle, motorcar, engines, tires, car body, luxury car body, aluminum car body, aluminum, bauxite, leather, rubber, oil, steel, iron ore, maybe electric motors, and maybe copper wire for example. Then you'll be able to make high QL cars across the board.
5. After trying step 4 as much as you wish, try for high score. Keep a careful watch on ROI, never let it go too low for any 12 hour period. Keep a careful watch on company value: don't let it rise too high in the first 2 months. In the last month of the round, make just as much money as you possibly can.

There are many things left off this map, but I've kept it short and pared down to the bones of how to get there. A year and a half is a long time, and more than enough to figure out how to make vendor score, now the markets work, and what other products you should produce besides the ones I've suggested. But if you follow this map, you'll be in as good a position to win in a year and a half as I am right now. Which turns out to be a pretty good position.

I like overall high score the way it is now. I like vendor score the way it is now. The changes that have been made to vendor score I think have made the game better.

I started playing Industrial Tycoon a little more than three years ago. It took about 4 months to figure out what was going on and develop a plan to win the game. I knew it would take years, but when I had finished the plan, I thought that nobody would have a better chance of winning except if they had the ability to hang out with the game all the time. This was the first round I tried almost exclusively for high score and... my plan worked!

In other posts people have lamented about how new players have no chance to win. This is true sometimes, and not true others, and is the nature of the game. If the old players who have schemed for years, and done their math carefully, and aren't on vacation show up to play their A game, then no, new players don't stand much chance to win. On the other hand, if the old players are concentrating on best-eventmanager, or research, or are on vacation, or just distracted then the game becomes more wide open. Last round Red Viper won despite having much less research than the old guys.

This round Oakville played an awesome game and will get best manufacturer from it. But he really had no chance for overall high score. I for one was nudged into going for high score by the thought of Tycoon World coming to an end. I love to prepare, scheme and plan and probably would have continued doing so if not for the prospect of all the scheming and planning coming to nothing due to a possible early demise of the game.

The new guys do have things to shoot for though while they develop their plans for overall high score. There's event manager - everybody has roughly equal chances to get high score on this one regardless of quality researched. The same is true for best vendor and best manufacturer. In this way the game is well designed to give goals for new players to shoot for right away, and goals that are attainable only with planning, execution, and the passage of time.

So, TW is a game of planning, a game where it could take a year or two (or in my case 3 years) for a plan to come to fruition. Of course, that's just the way I like it.

Oakville,

I like this thread, but I confess that your last post and my last posts were too long and wide ranging. Maybe a condensation of thought would go a long way here. Pick a few of your best ideas and give them a quick pitch, or take your best idea and give it a longer pitch. I think we'll make more progress by trying to do less.

I took my own advice in "Game Theory" and I'll try to do it here too later when I have the time for it.

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.

Zitat von Fun-Factory

...
Eines Tages war das Geschrei so groß, das Thomas die Produzenten und Verkäufer Highscore verändert hat. Von da an wurde es noch einfacher mit der Autobranche Punkte zu machen....

Im laufe dieser Runde wurde ein kleine Änderung in die Verkäufer Highscore eingebaut, die schon einiges bewirkt hat. Nicht mehr die Masse an produzierten und verkauften Produkte einer Branche bewirkt das man in der Verkäufer Highscore vorne mitspielt, sondern die Vielfalt an verkauften Produkten der verschiedenen Branchen hilft um Punkte zu Gewinnen.

...

Which Google translates to:

Zitat

One day the screams so great that Thomas, the producer and seller's[high score] has changed. From then on it was still easier to do with the auto industry points.

During this round, small change in the seller's score has been installed, which has already caused some. No more mass produced and sold products of an industry in which one causes the seller's Highscore plays along the front, but the variety of products sold of the various industries, for points to win.

So, yes there appears to be a change in the way vendor score is made - and it appears that selling stuff that others don't sell will give you a larger vendor score than previously possible. It would be cool to have an explanation of how this works here.

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.

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

The recent discussions in the forum about changes to Tycoon World made me think back to when I first came upon Industrial Tycoon. I looked at the SuDe first thing to find some product that nobody else was making. I picked coffee. My thought was that if nobody was making it, it should be profitable. There was no way I was going to make wooden furniture or ice cream. Those products were so over produced that a functioning market simulation would lead to huge price crashes and company failures.

Boy was i wrong. In this game the products that are the most over produced are the ones you need to produce to win.

With the help of Google translate I was able to read the German thread. I understand that there are some who very much dislike this proposed change. I understand their position. People become familiar with a situation, invest time and emotion into it and don't want wholesale change. After analyzing the numbers briefly, I suspect that the winning industry would change from cars to jewelery. Somethings would change very little. Wooden table - already the best initial product would be slightly better, while ice cream (also a good beginning product) would be far worse. Tricycle (Jik's starting product) would be much better than before.

In the proposed price scheme a product that can be produced in great number with a small number of buildings and with high production costs would give the most profit, most vendor score, and most manufacturing score. In this case the product would be Jewelery by a wide wide margin.

So, it would be a big shake up. The dominance of the auto industry would be replaced by the dominance of the jewelery industry.

I wouldn't mind it, but I know may others would. The fact that people would dislike the change so strongly would probably lead some to quit and reduce the sized of the pool of players. I think this reduction of numbers of players is the one good reason to not make this change.

******************
With that said, the game does have a problem with only one or two paths to victory, a problem with a few people vying for victory each round, and a problem with a market that is calm and predictable. Fixing some of these problems would improve the game, but how should it be done?

Right now only Autos and maybe Jewelry can lead to victory. When a game with such a broad variety of products and a deliciously complicated structure of production and scoring is reduced to one or two paths, the complication is being wasted. But how do we open a new path to victory? To win you need sales volume to get vendor score, you need to produce a lot of items with high normal price for manufacturing score, and you need to make a lot of money for ROI.

In a real market, items will gain higher prices when they are under produced. As production rises, the price at which an item can be sold drops. In this game that occurs to an extent, but only in products that are overproduced in great numbers (ice box, fridge, motor car, etc..). When 42" LCD TVs first came on the market in the US they cost $15,000, but now you can buy one for $1,000. If we mimicked this sort of price curve we could make all products a potential game winner. Let the normal price be 10x as high as the current normal price when production is only 10% of the market demand. Let it drop to 2x when 50% of the market demand is satisfied.

Current year Normal Price = (Wiki listed Normal Price)*100%/(SuDe % market satisfaction) - then place an upper limit of 10x Normal price and a lower limit of 1/10 normal price.

Use the current year normal price in the calculations for vendor score, and manufacturing score and all of the sudden any product can win the game for you if nobody else is making it. Under this formula a motor car would have a normal price of about 14,000 right now (SuDe is almost 1,000%) while Diesel fuel would have a normal price of 70,000. This only makes sense because in Tycoon World all these people have cars, but nobody can run them because there isn't enough fuel.

This would create a dynamic ever changing market. It would more closely resemble a real market, which I expect would be more enjoyable to more people.

Of course this might be all too much for the players of Tycoon World. After all the game has a long history of steady prices, and predictability. Maybe we could introduce a method where prices change more slowly. You could make it so any product that suffers over production to the extent of the SuDe reaching 500% or more at any time in the round have its normal price reduced by 5% in the next round. At the same time make any product that never gets the SuDe to raise above 20% has it's normal price raise by 5% or 10% in the next round. The game would maintain its slow and steady demeanor, and still have an element of change to it. After 10 rounds of insanely high motor car sales, the normal price would drop to 60% of what it is now, and it would no longer be such a great product. At the same time, after being completely ignored for the whole game, maybe frozen foods would become a reasonable thing to produce.

******************
Those are two options to mix things up a little. I'm sure others have more ideas. Maybe an open call for changes to the game mechanics is in order. I suspect the players would like a little change to the current order of things, and this sort of design and debate will probably be good for the game. It will involve the players, bring some activity to the forums, and bring some variety to the game. If we do it right, the game will be more interesting, and bring in more new players.

-Dave
One-Stroke

PS. I'll list a few ideas for spicing up the game.

1. Introduce a rock-paper-scissors method of winning the game. Maybe Jewelery makes the most money, but has poor vendor and manufacturing score. Autos make the most manufacturing score but have low ROI and low vendor score. And Textiles have the best vendor score, but poor ROI and manufacturing score. This way one industry can't monopolize the high score in every category.

2. Make event manager more important. Right now if you work really hard at it you can get about 1,000 points with event manager while it took Red Viper over 79,000 points to win. Event manager isn't a path to victory now, but if you gave more points for it, it could be. I'd try increasing the points you get with event manager by a factor of 10. Then it would matter.

3. Make market leader important. If people got victory points for selling what nobody else made, then that would be an easy way to get challengers from someplace other than autos. Last round the difference between 1st place and 25th was about 7,000 points. Spread over 90 days of the round comes to about 75-80 points per day. The last few rounds Preetz ended with a market leader score of about 5-6.5%. Right now Fun-Factory is in the lead with 6.5%. If we added 10x market leader score each day to the high-score earned by each player, that wold make market leader status important. Stora Enso has a market leader score of about 2% right now. The extra 45 points of high score for Fun-Factory would give him a meaningful advantage. A player might go all out and search for non-produced items to get a market leader score of 10% or 20% so they could get an extra 100 - 200 points per day. Maybe this would be another path to victory?

4. Give out sized bonuses for delivering high quality products that nobody else does. If a player is the only one to produce high quality of some product, then they have a normal price 2x or 5x the listed normal price. Maybe give a 2x bonus for selling products 10 QL points higher than anybody else, and give a 5x bonus for selling products 50 Ql points higher than anybody else. Players could start their own Starbucks by making QL 100 coffee. As it stands now, nobody will make high Q coffee because the game won't reward it. Make this change and they'll get the ROI, vendor score, and manufacturing score to make it worthwhile.

5. Introduce advertising. Build an office building on one of your squares to produce ads. The money you spend on ads can increase the numbers of products you can sell in your store. Let's say you can increase sales by at most 100% if you spend 500,000 per Wu on a store type. The actual sales increase would be reduced by competing ads. If two players spend 500,000 each on that store then they'd each get 50% more sales. How about this formula:

Sale increase % = (Money spent on ads)^(0.5)/[(50^0.5)*sum(M1^0.5,M2^0.5....Mn^0.5)]
where Mi = money spent on ads by player i.

If I spent 500K on autos, and so did Fun-Factory, Red Viper, Stora Enso, USA, and Oakville we'd each get an increase of 16.7%. But if a player was the only one to spend on Electronics and spent 500,000, they'd get a bonus of 100%. This would be a way to benefit out of favor industries and a way to increase complexity. Likewise since the effect of advertising is proportional to the square root of the spending, it pays to spend a small amount even at low RL where stores can't generate much revenue. It also ads another level of complexity which I believe is good for the game.

PPS. How's that for an opinion Fun-Factory?

Dang, I just formulated my plan for the new prices. It would have been awesome and different.

Wow, that's a big change. I can't say that I like it or that I dislike it, but it certainly will change the game. Luxury motor cars will sell for less than half of what they do now while quartz watch will sell for over double its current price. Overall prices will be a little lower. Ice cream will sell for less, but wooden table will sell for more. There will definitely be winners and losers with this change. Will the old maxim of "make cars to win" still hold?

I'll say one thing - this suggestion will lead me to look at the numbers again.

The way things were players would look to key products: ice box, keyboard, fridge, motor car, etc. Each time you'd get to one of these products the game would change, and your company would become much more profitable and your score making ability would go up to a new level. This change could eliminate or change those key points in the RL tree and change the game. Will it be for the better or for the worse?

(One Stroke thinks for a bit.....)

I like the change. The mechanics of the game have become too well known. Top players have picked their products and done their research and are now manipulating smaller and smaller details of the game mechanics to gain an advantage and win. This change will shake up the old guard, and perhaps give the new guys a better shot at the win. Perhaps.

Nice job on showing how much stuff is sold in each type of store. I never would have guessed that Textiles and DIY were so popular. I don't think this page shows any information that will affect the way I play, but it's neat to see it.

Congratulations on the win Red Viper.

Thanks for bringing us Tycoon World Thomas.

Red Viper, I saw what's been happening the last few days, and I see how you will win, and I will get second place. I had thought you had low ROI for a long time despite having a low company value because you didn't have the research or capability to make a lot of money. Now I see that you were making less money for a long time so you would have a lower company value and the ability to make large gains in ROI for the last few weeks of the game. Well played.

It's funny how quickly predictions can turn out all wrong, and plans can be proven to be inferior.

Next round I will forgo research and make a run at high score from the start. It never seemed imperative before to stop QL research in favor of increased chances to win the game. Now that there are few rounds left, it changes things. I would consider stopping my QL research this round except for three things. 1st, tearing down a level 7 research facility would hurt my company value and ROI so greatly that I'd loose more points than I could gain from the following days of lower building maintenance costs. 2nd, I still can't make QL 100 LPKW. 3rd, I'd still get second place even if I didn't have the first two problems.

Thanks Berkei.

Maybe there is less importance to QL than I had thought...

Zitat von barmcake

I predict Germany will win the World Cup.

I predict Spain will win.

Back on topic.

Today I passed Stora Enso in high score. I wasn't sure it was going to happen this round. I was steadily gaining on him but the rate of gain was steadily decreasing. Lucky for me, it looks like he couldn't get to his computer for a while, and was unable to keep selling the stratospheric level of goods he was selling. Now that I've passed him, I think it is very unlikely that he'll be able to regain the lead. My style of play means that each day I get a very good score even if I can't come to the computer each day. This style leaves me vulnerable to players who can log in two times a day every day for two months, but I doubt there are many players who can keep up that sort of schedule. I certainly couldn't.

I predict now that I will win this round. Red Viper is still in good position to win it, but has not been able to gain much ground on average over the last few weeks. Yes, he's within 100 points of the lead, but it's hard to consistently gain a lot of points. Red Viper gained 23 points on me yesterday, but I gained 28 points on him today. So although it's not hard to make 10 or 20 points in a day over the leader, it's really hard to get consistent gains of even 8 or 10 points per day.

\o/

Scoring is different now than it was in the past. I agree that in the past a player could win with a good vendor score and good manufacturing score and a mediocre ROI. Now ROI is king and vendor/manufacturing score take a back seat. Sure you need to do well in V/M but I get roughly 5th place each round, and I do nothing special for V/M. ROI on the other hand is the one where the most variability is introduced for each player, and the one where the front runners can not score in the top 5, ever.

So, what's the point of QL? It's good in making ROI.

I know the research hampers ROI. It's 3 squares that aren't productive and it costs a few million per WU to maintain the buildings. All said, my current research probably reduces my ROI by about 15%. I don't really expect to win this round, I expect to come in second to Red Viper while Stora Enso comes in third.

I'm excited because after a long time of losing to Stora Enso, I'll best him. Now I'm frustrated that I'm being bested by Red Viper.

Yes it's too early to count the chickens, but it's not too early to make predictions.