With the recent reset/upgrade, we increased the costs of unlocking an R&D Station and MFG Station in a Manufacturing Business to g200,000 per station. This one-time setup cost is reduced based on the country the Manufacturing Business is located in, with the least expensive countries costing g120,000 per station.
On Monday March 13, 2017 we are going to double this cost to g400,000 per station with the minimum being g240,000 per station.
We are doing this because we think it makes for better gameplay to make it harder to add all the stations. At the current costs, some players were able afford to add all the stations within 2 days (RT), which is far too fast. The easier it is to add the stations, the easier it is for all players to offer cars with maximum quality and features. We think it is better to have a wider distribution. The variable market demand does motivate players to manufacture and sell less expensive cars (ie, minimum quality and features) in certain countries, but if everyone can easily add and remove stations, it makes the game less interesting and less realistic.
RETAIL Businesses are currently set at g50,000 per Signage and Salesperson. We are still evaluating whether this number is good as is or not.
Poor manufacturers get whacked again! The game rules already favour retailers over manufacturers and so far this round the price to set up stations is a huge impost early on and the bxp rewards for mini game have been cut by heaps.
The result will be a severe shortage of cars for sale as soon as there’s money in the game for retailers to build stock.
On this one thought, I think you may be hitting the wrong end of the calculation. Once players have a spare few million, they will pay the price whatever it is, if the market values high quality and featured cars so your restriction is only early game. If you leave / eliminate the station cost but make the increase on the variable cost, then you have a game long differentiation. Then you just need to make sure the market will accept a similar level of price for quality…
Don’t worry Firesyscorp, we are not against manufacturers 
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The cost of a station does not stop a manufacturer from making cars. In fact, manufactures will likely create more cars because the cars with fewer stations cost less to make. One might argue there will be an excess of low-priced cars, not a shortage of cars.
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With expensive stations, there may be a shortage of high end cars and that’s what we want to happen, as that would reflect the real world. We don’t want an extreme shortage, we just want to make sure that there is significant difference between the quantity of low end cars and high end cars.
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Yes, the average consumer does value a high end car more than a low end car, but it does not mean they can afford to buy a high end car. Our virtual consumers are intelligently programmed into consumer groups where some have less price sensitivity than others. The result is that a retailer cannot just pay anything for a car … they have to pay the right price that fits what the consumers in their country will afford to pay.
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Having high cost stations also serves as a “level up” style feature for the game, which we think is more interesting gameplay than just having a variable cost, like increasing the per unit cost.
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Like you, we do want to have proper profit balance between Manufacturers and Retailers. We run a lot of numbers behind the scenes to try to predict how we should design things to make that happen. Bugs often throw everything off, just like what happened during the earlier BETA. Once the big bugs are cleared out, which we have mostly done so far, then we can start seeing the real game data and what players are achieving. Then we can adjust our design further. So, if we do see that Retailers are far more profitable then Manufacturers, then we will make changes to fix that too.
