I believe the game rules are unfairly weighted in favour of manufacturing, both at startup and ongoing if you login frequently.
At startup after some small investment a manufacturer can be making cars of high quality instantly and within an hour have product to sell. Once a few cars are produced you can put them on the open market with no price restriction apart from what players are prepared to pay. When bought and shipped, you have your g return instantly to fund more production - no matter how long it takes to arrive at its destination. I also believe the rewards in bxp are much higher for a manufacturer.
A retailer places an order at startup and then waits a minimum of 5 days for product to arrive, but that 5 days may become 15 if it bought from far away. The sell price is restricted by the purchase cost and the g will start trickling in at the rate of daily sales. Funding for the next purchase order is much harder although that’s irrelevant pretty soon when the g are splashing about.
Profits generally are much too easy to make especially as players work out how to maximise against the game restrictions and the barriers to expansion seem only to be a players time to manage them (I know that last bit has been mentioned in previous posts)
Thanks. You are right that the SHIPPING TIME for retail is an issue with new players, so we will be modifying the game so that the FIRST shipment has no shipping time.
While there are no price restrictions on the OPEN MARKET, there is a FEE designed to encourage DIRECT SALES instead. We will probably be increasing that fee later. And, as more players join and play, this will add downward price pressure.
The price restrictions on RETAIL need some work and that is on our list to do.
You are right that PROFITS are easy right now. There are some bugs causing that and we will fix them for sure … although it’s better that it is easy to make money right now rather than too difficult as that gives players money to do a lot of things in the game, which helps our beta.
The BXP should be balanced but we will take another look at it now that we have real data from real players Posted.
That’s not totally true.
the retailer will do more revenue and potentialy more profits too. All depends choices he make (distance of shipping, price of sales)
The manufacturer has 2 big advantage currently:
he can sell very much more car than a retailer
he has a lot of cash as he doesn’t need to spend money (cars always cost g7500)
Beeing able to see, filter and sort shipping time in market would be a must have
After playing a while and with the benefit of very easy markets, the above starting comments apply to the startup phase only. Once established, retail is more profitable than manufacturing, simply because as long as you have a series of orders coming in, the sales side is automatic. In manufacturing you have to log in each time to start the next production run.
(Do I smell a feature available with paid play in the future?)
Posted.