Pogo
101
Hrm… 6,000 units of product in the past 3 days, and I ran out of product half an hour ago.
Kinda wish Factories pumped out product that got stored immediately instead of waiting until the end of production to add it to your warehouse, but I suppose that’s part of the game that keeps you logging in somewhat regularly.
Pogo
103
Why? I can’t tell what makes it immediately obvious that it’s a bad buy, since the balance sheet has sales.
I thought you could tell why without even clicking the link!
(It strikes me as funny what some people name their companies. Anyway, if they are doing what the name says, handling their shares would be hazardous – you never know what you’ll catch… )
So is there no way to transfer resources/money between two companies? A friend and I are trying to work together on manufacturing some stuff but the only way to transfer seems to be putting it up on the B2B and hoping the right person buys it first.
dbd1963
107
Right now that’s the only way.
Is anyone making helicopters? I run a hat store that sells helicopters and I need helicopters.
Helicopters.
Pogo
109
OK I’m just… bad at this game. I’m in the market with a product that has a low demand met and I’m just barely making ends meet. I’m spending money to make more money but not really making more money. What the hell am I doing wrong? Is this game balanced around getting into quickly inflating stocks or what? One stock purchase a week ago has netted me more cash than several weeks of producing goods, which is what I thought the point of this game is. I could sell all of my stocks right now for like $14 million, but all the work I’ve done with my company is worth $6.5 million and it’s siphoning more cash from maintenance costs than it’s making (though I do research every day).
Is this some meta-commentary about how manufacturing is dead and the top 1% are just making money by buying stocks, or what?
What are you making and how are you selling it?
Manufacturing takes time for research and either building your own supply chain, or finding the right combination of the right quality of product on the B2B, which can be a pain.
Thus far the developer’s focus has been on stores, (though sadly not the store UI), so there’s a ton of money to be made by just running a store. To do this you either need to hawk the B2B, or do what I did, which is just buy bulk off of import. Import prices are considerably higher than wholesale, but you have the advantage of being able to buy very large quantities that are all the same Q.
That second part is important as it makes living with that store UI more bearable - goods of different Q all need to have their different prices set, so being able to buy all one quality and then restock with the exact same quality removes a lot of the store management pain.
This pretty simple method got me to the point where I could accidentally buy $32,000,000 worth of belts without flinching and that happened about five minutes before the clothing boom, which was fortuitous and fabulous.
Now I buy helicopters and aircraft and have an aircraft retail business, even though I probably couldn’t produce a single component of them, (unless you like your helicopters with fur seats). They only sell about one or two a day, but each time it’s somewhere between $7m and $15m of straight profit, while my apparel store runs along at about $1.5m a tick.
I IPO’d yesterday, so now it’s time for massive construction with all the free monies.
Similar problem here. I run two gas stations plus oil well & refinery. I am plugging along, if I do nothing I make ~$5k per day profit. That goes poof real quick if I research anything. My biggets mistake is I paid off a bit of my debt so now I am down to $360k in cash. Just enough to claw out a profit while paying off remaining debt interest and cocts but my room for maneuver is now very limited.
I don’t claim to be an expert, but what I have found works is to make sure you stock most of the items that sell in your store. You don’t have to stock all of them, though I think there’s a bonus coming later on if you do.
Then, it helps to grow your stores to as big as you can get them. I now make $100k a click, but it took me several days of growing to get there. Expand your stores, keep them stocked, and oh yeah, make sure that you are producing some of the things that make the most money in your stores if you can.
Edit – for me, it’s wood and paper goods, which is what I mostly produce, and also Bonsai trees.
Don’t forget to use marketing - even with a fairly small store you can significantly increase its selling power by spending some money on advertising it.
Unless the equations have changed, with a small store you can pretty cheaply effectively double the m² of your store this way.
thanks both. Tough to fill a gas station (pain as well). Will try that and some more marketing though.
This is true. I spend money on advertising every day.
Don’t limit yourself to just 1 project line, is the best advice I can give. If you’re running a gas station and selling gas, also keep an eye on the B2B for other products that sell at the station. Donuts, espresso, etc… if the average price is $15, anything priced under $13 is worth buying for resale. Even if you’re only making $2 per sale on the resell, that can add up quickly across a couple dozen products.
Your maintenance costs on a store are fixed based on size, so there is nothing but upside to eeking out a profit by buying B2B items and reselling.
Also, don’t be afraid to use the B2B to sell masses of product as well. I have 16 hours of downtime per day (sleep + work) where I can’t log into the game. Right before bed I tend to set everything I have to poduce whatever they can in a 17-hour period. So I may have my farm produce 2mil strawberries, my plantation produce 500k wheat, my bakery produce 30k apple pies, beverage produce 50k strawberry smoothies, etc… I then keep track of what my stores are selling per hour and list most of the rest on the B2B. I figure I’m selling 4k strawberries per hour at the farmers market and like to keep a 2-day supply just in case, so I round that up to 200k in stock and sell the rest on the B2B at whatever the going rate is.
Even though my profit from the B2B per unit is much lower, it’s profit that would take a week to realize as opposed to minutes from the B2B. Those 1.8 mil strawberries will bring in $2mil+ in profit when they happen to sell.
Make sure to diversify your B2B sales as well. Demand ebbs and flows. If you have a farm, don’t be scared to produce 100k Q0 blueberries and throw them up there for a cheap price. Profit is profit
Holy smokes, the fact that my store is full seems to be creating some kind of buying frenzy in the robocitizens. I have my biggest store in construction so I have half the store space I did yesterday, but simply filling my store with the items I wasn’t carrying, even though I set their price high so they wouldn’t sell out too fast, seems to have really boosted sales. I’m making twice what I was yesterday with half the space! When my biggest store gets done with construction, will I really be making 4x what I was yesterday?
So, yes, fill yer stores, apparently.
JFrazer
118
He’s working on adding queues for research and factories. That’s going to be such a great addition. But at the same time, it means I’ll be “playing” the game less. Set up a day’s worth of queues, maybe log in once a day to check the B2B and stock market, set up another day’s worth of queues.
Hoping there’s going to be a queueing limit (maybe 3 deep)
dbd1963
119
The factories already have them now, and the limit is in hours. I can’t remember what it is, though.
Pogo
120
Yeah I’m done, I can’t bring my revenues above my maintenance and salary costs. I could dump 20 million I own in stocks back into my company, but I didn’t want to play this game just to do some insider trading metagame to see a number shoot up into the billions.
