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Give narrow-inventory stores a small sales bonus


Josh Millard
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Proposal:

For every empty/non-selling shelf in a store (that is, for every item a store COULD sell that it is NOT currently selling), apply a small multiplier to sales potential on all items that are selling.

Rationale and notes:

Right now there's an overwhelming incentive to stock as many items in a store as possible. You're literally throwing away revenue with each item in a store that you do not stock, since there's no relationship between breadth of store inventory and per-item sales.

Which is fine for folks who are interested in diversifying their inventory (whether through heavily diversified production or, more practically, through B2B or Import stocking) to maximize profit margins. But it creates the inflexible notion that there are literally only a fixed number of kinds of stores in the world and a single type of consumer.

For folks more interested in specialized inventory, this is a bummer; for folks who want to run a store but don't want to go through the hassle of restocking and repricing a whole line of items, likewise a bummer.

But if we were to see this change to how sales throughput was calculated, it'd create a compromise ground where someone managing a limited-inventory store would still see less revenue than a full-stock place but would get some return on their specialization.

It'd also allow for more ad hoc sense of biz roleplay in the absence of actual additional stock store types or customizable store types. The player gets some positive feedback on the decision to focus.

Two arguments about the mind of the Econosian consumer, for why this'd make sense as part of the economic model of the game:

1. People walk into specialty shops because they want a specialty. If we treat the roboconsumer as an entity with self-knowledge about its own wants and needs, we can assume that when it walks into a shop that sells only donuts, it does so because it wants donuts. So it's likely to buy more donuts at a go than someone walking into a Cafe that happens to sell donuts.

2. People who don't find what they came in for will settle for what they can find. The Econosian automatonsumer may walk into a Cafe hoping to buy a donut, but if there are no donuts for sale she'll look instead at the bread rolls and the buns. Lack of donuts doesn't make her any less hungry once she's through the door.

So. One possible rubric:

- specialty_bonus starts at 0
- for each non-selling item, specialty_bonus += 0.2
- specialty_factor = 1 + (specialty_bonus / (number of items selling))

Then multiply normal sales volume calculation for each item by specialty_factor, et voila. Your actual inventory doesn't sell at the same rate of revenue as you'd get for a full inventory, but you do see some compensation for specializing.
Josh Millard
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To step through that rubric, take a store that can stock 10 items.

If it is selling all ten, then:

- specialty_bonus = 0
- specialty_factor = 1 + (0 / 10) = 1

So you've got standard sales volume for all items.

If the store sells only nine of ten items:

- specialty_bonus = 0.2
- specialty_factor = 1 + (0.2 / 9) = 1.022

So each item actually selling sees a wee bump in sales volume.

If the store sells five of ten items:

- specialty_bonus = 1.0
- specialty_factor = 1 + (1.0 / 5) = 1.2

So selling only half the possible ten kinds of inventory lets a player recover essentially one unsold item worth of revenue.

If the store sells only a single item:

- specialty_bonus = 1.8
- specialty_factor = 1 + (1.8 / 1) = 2.8

Hyperspecialized shop can sell a lot more of that one thing that it sells, but is still drawing in only a quarter or so of the revenue of a non-specialized version of that same type of store.

Caveat:

Because stores currently have varying sizes of inventory from store type to store type, the size of calculated specialty_factor for different stores selling only one item will differ. A store selling only one of fifty possible items will have a factor of 1 + (9.8 / 1) = 10.8 for that sole item.

If that's a problem (that is, if the relative cost of a store doesn't already compensate for this somehow in proportion to a store's inventory), it might make more sense to have the maximum specialty_factor value be a fixed value and to calculate the per-item-not-stocked specialty_bonus as specific incremental value that differs by store type.

So if we said max specialty_factor should always be 3.0 (a hyperspecialized version of any shop type will do three times the sales on a single item vs. what that item would sell in a fully-stocked store), the specialty_bonus increment could be calculated as (specialty_factor / max_items - 1).

In a store that sells ten items, that's (3.0 / (10 - 1)) = (3 / 9) 0.333.

In a store that sells forty items, that's (3.0 / (40 - 1)) = (3 / 39) = 0.076.
Space Butler
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I like this idea, and maybe the specialty aspect can be increased by quality levels. After all, if it's your specialty, you should have good quality.
Josh Millard
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Well, quality already is a factor in the per-item sales volume calculation that the retail model uses, so I'm not sure specifically what additional Q-factor would come into it. Can you elaborate a little? Partly my hope is to introduce a system that is relatively straightforward.
Tom Denton
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My concerns are three-fold:
a) Calculating the specialty factor of a given store on each tick would increase server-load, which is already on the high side, as we know.
b) There isn't a way to differentiate between actually specializing in something and just being out of stock.

So I would recommend making specialization something that actually requires commitment. The player selects some number of products as a particular store's specialties, thereby garnering the boost, and the store is then locked into those specializations either permanently or for a fixed period of time, like a week. This would take care of server load by making the calculations a one-time thing and also differentiate between empty shelves and actual specialization.

The final concern is that encouraging specialization would further diminish our player's incentive to actually cover entire sectors of industry. This could be a good or bad thing; given the size of the current player base, I would say it's a bad thing, as there are currently lots of neglected areas (ie, massive profit waiting to happen which we either can't or aren't able to meet). With a larger player base, specialization could make it easier for new players to find neglected areas or even individual products for specialization.

(And Space Butler, I know a good number of meat-space specialty shops where you can get some piss poor product...)
Tom Denton
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Hm, it occurs to me that one could also implement a specialization as a 'boost' to the quality multiplier. Right now, it's 2% per difference in quality level. It could be made (2+s)% where s is some specialty bonus. This would have the effect of making it a really bad idea to specialize with goods that are lower than world-average quality. Thus, people with low-quality goods are encouraged to be generalists, while people with high quality goods are encouraged to specialize, and thereby not dominate entire market sectors.
Josh Millard
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a) Calculating the specialty factor of a given store on each tick would increase server-load, which is already on the high side, as we know.

This would be a trivial calculation, however. Literally a couple of count variables, a divide, an add, a multiply. I agree that weighing down store update stuff is a concern since that's a major strain already, but this would not be a significant addition to that weight as far as I can reckon. My reckoning might be wrong there, though; Scott would know for sure.

b) There isn't a way to differentiate between actually specializing in something and just being out of stock.

True, and in the long run I think some sort of custom-store approach would be a better solution. Create some friction and some up-front costs for changing the scope of inventory, etc, yeah.

But that's also a lot more implementation work, whereas this could be done as an incremental modification to the current system. Forward progress now, more forward progress later when there's the time and the will to do something more ambitious.

And the per-item sales volume bonus for a simpler inventory does not come close to recapturing the lost revenue of unexpectedly running out of stock on an item, so I'm not too worried about people gaming the system here.

The final concern is that encouraging specialization would further diminish our player's incentive to actually cover entire sectors of industry.

I hear you, and I agree that it's a sort of could-go-both-ways thing. Part of my reason for not being worried about this is that I am looking forward to an increasing player base over time, so anything that favors that future state I am inclined toward.

But part of my reasoning is that store inventory is kind of a bear to manage. This addition would somewhat compensate for the decision to run with a smaller inventory while still leaving a broad inventory the strongest revenue-generation choice. So dedicated players with the patience to stock a full store get compensated very well for that, but players who don't have the patience for that much fiddling can still make a decent profit from a specialty store, and thus stay engaged, which is better than having them arse off to play something else because they're tired of restocking.
Mister Death
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> There isn't a way to differentiate between actualy specializing in something and just being out of stock.

We could make a way; say you have to check a box to remove the shelves from your store, and you have to uncheck it and pay a fee to put them back in again. (To keep people from fiddling with the knobs too much.)

> The final concern is that encouraging specialization would further diminish our player's incentive to actually cover entire sectors of industry.

The object of a game like this shouldn't be to force people to play a certain way, but rather to provide them with a plethora of profitable strategies. If I don't want to make beverages, fine; somebody else will when the supply goes down enough. There are companies in the world that make one product, and companies that make tens of thousands; so should it be in Econosia IYAM.
Tom Denton
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Yeah, it's not so much a question of forcing people to play a certain way so much as realizing that changing the environment changes the way people act within that environment. If you offer choices that aren't balanced in one way or another, then savvy players will gravitate towards the smart 'choice' while the unsavvy will be left behind. I like the idea of the specialized stores quite a lot; it offers a way to keep advancing without going into the full craziness of keeping a store stocked, has obvious real-world market analogies, and the generalist player with time on their hands can still do a bit better cash-wise by putting the time into maintaining a broader selection. On the whole, I think it's a great idea, and I was just thinking through some possible implications for player behaviour in the implementation suggested.


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