Retailers should have more focus on marketing their stores, manufacturers on marketing their products and getting brand recognition up which should drive more sales.
Manufacturing should have different levels you progress toward and research to be done, eg. Basic Tooling > Intermediate Tooling > Advanced Tooling.
Basic Robotics > Robotics Interface > Basic Machine Learning > Basic Automation Etc etc etc and make it a lot longer of a process to get to the end game with a huge tech tree. The benefit would be in early game you start out with a few employees and as you expand you have more and more employees which cost more on a daily basis with wages and such, once you get to a certain point you can begin removing people and adding robotics, in the beginning the robots only boost productivity until you get to automation and you can begin removing workers completely but at a huge initial investment cost but lowering your daily expenditure on wages and staff costs.
Meanwhile they should also occasionally give you a multiple choice decision such as âYour workers feel like they are overworked, do you A) Give them more time off. or B) Ignore themâ Giving them time off kills a small amount of productivity but increases happiness, ignoring them they go to the media and your brand image takes a hit.
Make it to where in the beginning itâs really tough, mid-game isnât as difficult and you can relax more and check the business less often (This is where you would then be able to start a new business ideally and focus on it full time) and late game where itâs pretty much hands off other than getting contracts for goods and such, where you sell a huge amount and are rewarded accordingly but you also face those decisions, and brand should take a long time to build which should affect sales way more than the current formula of âafter x amount of sales per day in the country all sales stopâ type of thing they have going.
In the real world that doesnât happen unless itâs a massively over saturated market.
With your company image being weighted heavily people will make their decisions more carefully and feel like they really have something to lose. At the same time you could expand the legal system and when you get sued you lose branding, but if you win you regain it, if you lose you lose even more of your image. etc etc,
I feel like the game is too concrete, buy x upgrade and you are guaranteed to produce y amount of goods or sell z amount of goods.
I was thinking about other ideas as well and came up with this idea that it would be amazing if the devs also made a focus of the game on you as a person as well. So you can set your wages and then use those
wages to buy stock in other companies and can be offered positions in other companies, both on their âBoardâ as an advisor or in positions such as CEO/COO/Logistics Director etc.
Basically when you make an account instead of making a holding company you make your person, then your person gets a loan from the bank (this happens automatically) and you start your first business. Then as you go along you can get positions on companies boards and such and collaborate more with other players. This would also open up the possibility of multiplayer companies where you assign another person as an executive, name their position and assign them rights and what they can or cant do (Make purchase orders, set prices, marketing, etc) which would tie into the other ideas I had above.
Or if the new player decided they could choose to use that loan on investing in stocks and bonds or just join an active company to learn the ropes and eventually start their own company if they so choose.
This could introduce a lot of interesting play. Perhaps it takes you as a player a period of time to move around the world. You buy a car from a player owned dealership and can move faster, but you cant manage your business without being near it or having another player executive do your bidding while you travel to possible suppliers/retailers or hire them to travel for you.
Iâm not sure how skills could work but if implemented you could make the playerâs character skills continue between rounds so that experienced players would have a set of skills that rewarded them for long-term play, which would encourage players to stay longer.
Just depends on how realistic you want to make this. A good end game money drain could be Philanthropy that boosts businessâ public image and/or gives trophies.
Banking could also benefit from this type of gameplay, when a new rounds starts at present time a bunch of companies apply for loans and then wait a decent amount of time to hear anything back and/or receive money. This takes precious time from devs and staff. I propose the first bank âWorld Bankâ have a board of 3 or 5 (an odd number) of players who were the most active last round. When a loan application is sent in the board votes on whether to approve or disapprove of the loan or disapprove of the loan but make a counter offer to the person asking for the loan. They could also vote to automate quick-loans where the person wanting a loan goes into the bank menu, picks a predefined loan and signs on the dotted line. The money is instantly transferred and the deal is done, but as these could be risky you could add a feature to request x amount of shares in the company. Eg. If you dont pay the bank becomes a partial-owner of the company and can then either sell the shares to return some of the lost money or they could go to a law firm and attempt a hostile take-over and either sell the company to a player or liquidate the business for a system generated amount the company is âworthâ based on upgrades and public image.
Law firms, in my opinion should operate more like a business. As in: you market to your clients and make sales which translate into income. You hire lawyers and they do their work providing income. This is all non-player, the people purchasing your services are the same non-players that are buying phones and cars right now, eg the system. (This could also be done with Banks as well)
However the law firm can also represent companies and business in court as well which is more of what they do currently. This is the part where players work with other players to sue or litigate issues. If you added more of the player perspective; as in youre a person not the company, you could also hire new players as lawyers or what not until they learn the game and would add more depth.
New Manufacturer in an old round. Ive thought about this a while as a retailer and have come to the conclusion that it would be amazing if we could set prices for specific phones. Eg. If I have 1,000 fully upgrades phones 100/100 I can set their price independently of phones I am receiving from a new player with 200 phones at 0/0 quality/features. This way once my higher quality phones are done selling it will automatically begin selling my lower ql phones and it helps me as a retailer help new players in manufacturing roles who I would otherwise not do business with because its a pain to have to watch your inventory, ok now im out of high ql phones, switch price down to low ql phones and then hope that the next shipment of high ql phones doesnt come in because then you are selling for a loss. Hopefully this makes sense, it would help level the playing field so much. Even if you could set prices for all product from a specific vendor or even a specific order. Eg. When you make the deal you set a price when you accept it, that price will then be used by default for that specific order/contract of phones unless you go in and manually change it.
Politics and the Supreme Court/World Court:
I believe it would also add a level of depth if players could run for political office as a âPresidentâ or âPrime Ministerâ of a country. They would be able to adjust taxes (Manufacturing and Retailing Taxes would be separate and add population taxes) and such but would have to balance between making taxes low and running the country out of money - which in turn would make the population poor and lead to very low sales levels for retailers or more expensive workers for manufacturing.
What this enables is countries to move population taxes lower to entice people to move to their country which boosts sales, then the country could increase taxes on manufacturing or retailing. If they increased taxes on retailing but lowered taxes on manufacturing you would have cheap labor and a manufacturing base (Think of current day China), whereas if you did the same but had low retail taxes and high manufacturing taxes you would be close to modern day US. You would have to balance it all out though and couldnât lower all three or your country would go bankrupt and the population would leave quickly.
As part of this you could also make the âWorld Courtâ a player-ran entity. It would be ran almost like the âWorld Bankâ with a 3-5 person âCourtâ and they would take cases and vote on whether to Approve, Abstain or Disapprove and then what the fines/fees would be for the case and how it is handled going forward. I know this is getting into more depth than just a business game but businessâ in the real world have to deal with these sorts of challenges and the way the devs are marketing makes me think they want some depth to each round. If we added all of the stuff with banks and courts it could make each round really interesting in itâs own right and nothing would be the same with different people running the banks and the countries and the courts. It could be very neat and challenging and something no other game has thought of or implemented.
Just a few ideas. Take care 
Edit 1: Added a paragraph detailing automation a bit better.
Edit 2: Added a section on Banking and Law Firms, my big recurring theme is âdepthâ if you havent noticed.
Edit 3: A way to handle new manufacturers.
Edit 4: Added Politics and Supreme/World Court idea