Capitalism Plus Strategy

[Phil H. Sheraton]

For those of you who play "Capitalism Plus" by Interactive Magic, here is my
winning strategy that accomplishes my goals every time even on the hardest
difficulty settings. (I usually set myself the goals of $100M revenue and
$1B net worth within 30 years.)

First when my company starts out with 1,000,000 shares outstanding (50%
public) and $10M cash, I immediately buy back all the public shares and get
100% ownership. Then I take out the max $10M loan so I have $15M working
capital. (Since my strategy causes my share price to grow the fastest of
all, buying it all back is the best investment. It also prevents hostile
takeovers.)

Then I build one leather goods store, one medium farm and one large factory.
In the farm I raise two units of cattle and process both into leather. I
make the factory produce leather wallets. The farm also grows three units of
cotton, and when those are harvested, I make the factory produce textiles
and combine it with leather to make leather bags and leather briefcases. (If
there's enough money left, I try to build three leather goods stores right
at the start in three different cities.) I also raise the price of my cotton
so competitors are dissuaded from buying it all before my factory can use
it.

After I've got leather goods stores in all cities and strong profitable cash
flow, then my credit limit should let me borrow another $10-20M by year 2. I
do that, and build an oil well and a chemical mineral mine on the cheapest
deposits I can find. Then I build another large factory, and convert oil to
plastic, which I combine with chemicals to make cough syrup, cold tablets
and headache pills. I then sell those with a drugstore in every city.

After another two profitable years, I should be able to borrow another $50M
or so, which I do and build a gold mine and silver mine. Then I build a
small factory near each city and set them making gold rings and silver
necklaces, which I sell in jewelry stores.

By now my cash flow should be well over $1M per month, and I should have the
$3M to build a headquarters, where I set my character's salary to max, and
set my dividend to 1 percent. I also consider building a couple of R&D
centres.

By year 7 or 8 I should have cash and/or available credit around $100-200M.
I build a medium farm and set it to grow rubber. When the rubber is ready, I
build an iron mine, coal mine, silica mine, and all the industry needed to
produce cars and motorcycles, which I sell with an auto dealership in every
city.

When my auto industry is rolling, I borrow some more and build a computer
industry, and I sell desktops, notebooks, palms, and printers with a
computer store in each city. I also look at costs wherever I'm producing
goods in one location and shipping to other cities, and if the shipping cost
per finished good is too high, I consider localizing my industry.

Here I run out of investment ideas and get lazy micromanaging my sprawling
empire, so at this stage I just pay down debt and let my net worth increase
by over $100M per year. My stock price has grown to $2000-$5000 by now, so
if I wanted, I could wipe out the debt with a small share issue, but I
usually don't. I also build some mansions for my billionaire character.
Usually I've accomplished all my goals by year 15.

[euro...@gmail.com]

In the past, I've gotten annoyed by those types of goals because I've achieved them, and the game ended when I wanted to continue building, playing, and having fun with my company. So, I'm doing an open-ended goal right now, where I can continue to play as long as I want, but at the same time, I can complete the goal whenever I want.

Example open-ended goal: Gain control of 4 companies.

The one thing that I've noticed is that the inhabitants of each city are culturally unique in that they have different product demands. For example, let's say you start selling Pork in one city, and notice revenue of over 10 million... it would be a mistake to assume that revenue is proportional to population. You could have a very small city with a large pork demand resulting in 10 million in revenues and a very large city with almost no Pork revenue.

The moral of the story is that the size of a city's population does not matter. What matters is a city's demand for each product. And to accommodate this demand efficiently.

Let's look at the spectrum of demand, and how to get the best efficiency:

#Sales-Units : #Purchasing Units (#Products per store)
1:1 (x4) low demand
2:1 (x3) medium-low
3:1 (x2) medium-high
4:1 + 3:1 (x2) medium-hybrid
5:1 + 2:1 (x2) high-low-hybrid
6:3 (x1) high-demand-slow-production
6:2 (x1) high-demand-fast-production-with-advertising
7:2 (x1) high-demand-fast-production
8:1 (x1) high-demand-very-fast-production-rate

At the low end of the spectrum, you might have as little as one factory supplying the entire world (or one factory per region). At low demand, you'll have Department Stores (Retailers) offering 4 products: 4 purchasing units, 4 sales units, and maybe 1 advertising unit. This provides the best efficiency for low demand products.

For medium-low demand, your Retailers will only offer 3 products:
1 purchasing unit and two sales unit per product.

For medium-high demand, your Retailers will only offer 2 products: 1 purchasing unit and three sales units per product.

At the higher end of the spectrum, once your Retailers only offer 1 product, then you'll have to vary the rate of production to get the best efficiency. For example, you might have one factory per retailer; two factories per retailer; or even as many as three factories per retailer.

Most of the time (for higher demands), it'll be 2 purchasing units supplying 6 or 7 sales units with maybe an advertising unit, and one or two factories.

And although one Department Store may not be able to supply the demand for an entire city, you can't just add more stores with the same products because, unfortunately, their sales will dramatically fall to the point where the sum of their sales will not equal the single store.

If you've hit the ceiling of sales, then you'll have to train your Department Stores to increase the efficiency of the sales and purchasing units. Or, you can optionally hire a President for an absurd amount of money to immediately increase unit-levels (after you assign control of the facility over to the President).

I think the best President in the game is Jason Branch. He provides +2 retailing, +5 manufacturing, and +1 farming.

Honorable mentions are Warren Rotledge and Taylor Lewis.

Taylor Lewis provides +5 retailing and +5 raw-material-extraction, but he doesn't product any manufacturing boost.

Warren Rotledge provides +1 retailing, +4 manufacturing, +5 raw-materials, and +1 farming.

The problem that I can't figure out is that there seems to be a maximum salary of $2,147,483,647... and if you hit the maximum salary and it's not high enough, they'll leave. Which I just checked is actually the maximum value of a 32-bit integer (problem solved).

So, don't make the same mistake that I did and forever rely on the increased efficiency due to your President, but rather, take the small & precious time-frame that you have him to train your units higher and slowly delegate each facility back to yourself (the CEO)... to the point where you no longer need a President to increase unit efficiency.

Anyways, I got off on a tangent about how to increase sales. Back to my original point about product demand: All of this begs the question, "How do you know the demand for a product in a given city ?"

Press '1' to goto the Product Summary page (filter All Sales, Consumer Goods, All Companies, All Cities). Then click on the product that you're interested in producing, and cycle thru each city to see what the local demand is. (Note that this trick does not work on new technologies).

This trick is especially good for small cities where Urban real-estate is limited... so you can prioritize products with high demand... and so that you don't mistakenly try to build up heavy local infrastructure & marketing around a product that is never going to sell.

Anyways, I'm currently doing $21 billion in revenue and $7 billion in profits, but I just noticed this little quirk in local demand :(

Thankfully, I've answered my own question about maximum salary. At first, I thought maybe it was a percentage of revenue or profit, but now, I clearly see it's limited by the capacity of a 32-bit integer. It's kinda funny that in 1995, some badass programmer just did "int salary;" to make a spot to store the number, and the testers never alerted them: "Um, hey guys, after we run this simulation for about 10 game-years, we've noticed that $2.147 billion is not large enough to store the salary of a president." So... I'm left wondering what the other limitation are ? Like maximum revenue ? long int ? Which is 9200 quadrillion... so... logically, if we program the AI to favor a salary that's just 1% of revenue, then that's 92 quadrillion... way too big to fit in a 32-bit integer.

So, if anyone needs a badass tester, I'm your man!