[New Economic Module] Customization Points

Day 833, 10:40 • Published in • by Plato

Dear citizens,

You have in front of your eyes the 5th and last “technical” Insider dedicated to the new economic module. In a few days we'll provide a final article regarding the new economy module that will summarize all previous Insiders. After that we'll move on to the military Insiders. Oh, and what a different experience it will be! The economic module has been rewritten up to 70% and we can still recognize some products, ideas, and places. On the other hand the military module will be 100% new! Redesigned from the ground up! Please have a little more patience until we publish the Military Overview article, and you'll understand what we mean!

But today we are going to talk about Customization Points. In the rest of the article we'll use the abbreviation “CP”. In one of our previous articles we said that CPs will push the product qualities concept one step forward. This doesn't mean that CPs will completely replace the qualities. For example, you will still work in a company of a certain quality level, or rather customization level, and hence lose wellness according to that level. Instead of having five quality levels, companies will have five customization levels.  

Since company owners use the CP to customize their products, players will no longer search for just “Q3 food” but for food that will restore a certain minimum amount of health or happiness.

Here are some rules:
1. A new company starts at Customization Level 1 with 30, 40, or 50 CP to spend, depending on the kind of product produced.
2. In order to complete product customization company owners have to spend all CP.
3. Company owners have to upgrade or downgrade the customization level to be able to change the product customization.

The cost of creating and upgrading companies is the same regardless the industry but the avaiblabe CPs differ, because we also need to take into consideration the number of product components:

- for products like food consisting of 2 components, the company starts with 30 CPs and receives 30 CPs for each upgrade. On these products company owners can spend a maximum of 150 CPs.

- for products like houses made from 3 components, the company starts with 40 CPs and receives 40 CPs for each upgrade. On these products company owners can spend a maximum of 200 CPs.

- for products like tanks consisting of 4 components, the company starts with 50 CPs and receives 50 CPs for each upgrade. On these products company owners can spend a maximum of 250 CPs.

But how many Customization Points can you spend on a single component? The answer is 100. This means that you can never have a product that has all its attributes maxed out. On the other hand, some attributes require a minimum amount of CPs; like durability for example, you can't leave this at zero CP.

We said that the prices are still the ones that you are used to (20 GOLD to create company + 20 GOLD to upgrade to Q2 + 50 GOLD for Q3 and so on). But one thing does actually change: you'll not be able to create a new company with just 20 GOLD. You'll need another 20 GOLD at your disposal, which is automatically transferred into the account of your new company. This assures that your business has a good start, with enough money for raw materials, salaries and other expenses.

One more addition: the “dissolve company” button. This button instantly and completely "deletes" your company. Of course, it also refunds you, according to the currently existing rule (you'll get half of your invested GOLD back). This way we want to prevent high numbers of Q1 “ghost” companies, because a General Manager can decide to completely "delete" his company, not just downgrading it until Q1, as it is now.

Let's say you decide to upgrade your company, but you have lots of products in stock. What can you do? Right now you'd need to either upgrade (and lose all the existing stock) or put the products on sale and wait ... and wait ... and wait. Well, you will be able to put the current stock on sale and still upgrade your company. What you won't be able do is to remove the old products from the market place. Actually, you can do that, but your company would just lose them, just like as if you would have tried to upgrade the company while the products were in stock. So, when you'll want to upgrade, put on sale your old products (you can adjust their price anytime) and start doing business with the new ones!

OK, that's it for today,
Regards


Previous Insiders in the series:
- The New Economic Module – an overview

- The New Economic Module – Time Management

- The New Economic Module – Professions

- The New Economic Module – Products