Rival profits on businesses

[Knottypine]

Just for confirmation... Rivals always make more money on a business than the player?

It's what I've observed with any similar business I've run, and also ones I've taken over. There is no way to match the profit the rivals make from it. Is that correct?

Just something that's been bugging me is when one of my rivals (Thierry) lowered their prices on some products as an 'attack,' it's been days and days and the prices are still low. That is because one of the minor rivals (Pamela Dunston) had also lowered their prices. Several days ago, my major rival was not profitable 'enough' and closed the store they in fact lowered their prices in, yet the minor rival has left the lower prices.

Possibly two issues:

One, the minor rivals don't initiate attacks like major rivals, so if they lower their prices in line with a major rival attack (which is when I believe they also lowered their prices and I thought the major rival attack was still happening), they don't seem to put their prices back up. It's been a long time, probably weeks that I've been selling products at low low prices to match the minor rival price.

Two, the minor rival business still has a weekly income of $951K, while my similar business with slightly better prices on every product is $145K. Their income is over 6.5x mine. That is a MASSIVE discrepancy in profit. I'm open for longer hours and have max customers every hour. I know not everyone buys things, but I don't think it's possible to even realistically have enough customers and stock in fact to have nearly 1M in weekly profit in a grocery store.

Because their store is seemingly artificially better than mine by 6.5 times, the valuation of their store is almost $27M. That's what it'll cost me to get my prices back to the 'normal' market average because they seem to be happy with keeping their low price as they're still profiting nearly $1M per week.

Just wanting to know if those are the kinds of numbers that are intended? And if it's a possible bug that a minor rival is indefinitely keeping a lower price but still turning a huge profit?

[David Estes Creations]

Hello! The rival's stores might be a little more perfectly optimized and slightly more efficient, but it shouldn't be massive 7X differences, no.

Originally posted by Knottypine:

One, the minor rivals don't initiate attacks like major rivals, so if they lower their prices in line with a major rival attack (which is when I believe they also lowered their prices and I thought the major rival attack was still happening), they don't seem to put their prices back up. It's been a long time, probably weeks that I've been selling products at low low prices to match the minor rival price.

They don't initiate attacks, you're right. Their prices are reacting to yours and the special rivals. When the Special rival attacked, you all lowered your prices to match. But then you said you continued to sell product at "low low" prices, so they are actually continuing to match YOUR prices now.

Originally posted by Knottypine:

Because their store is seemingly artificially better than mine by 6.5 times, the valuation of their store is almost $27M.

Their valuation is based on their assets plus a projection of their next few years of sales, based on the previous few weeks of profits. So even if they lower their prices, it will take a few weeks for that to fully impact their valuation. But you can't compare that to your store because you don't see your store's valuation.

Originally posted by Knottypine:

the minor rival business still has a weekly income of $951K, while my similar business with slightly better prices on every product is $145K.

Just a confirmation- make sure you're looking at your weekly income, not your daily income. I've seen a few people get those confused.

[hi.mzdebo]

Originally posted by David Estes Creations:

Hello! The rival's stores might be a little more perfectly optimized and slightly more efficient, but it shouldn't be massive 7X differences, no.

Originally posted by Knottypine:

One, the minor rivals don't initiate attacks like major rivals, so if they lower their prices in line with a major rival attack (which is when I believe they also lowered their prices and I thought the major rival attack was still happening), they don't seem to put their prices back up. It's been a long time, probably weeks that I've been selling products at low low prices to match the minor rival price.

They don't initiate attacks, you're right. Their prices are reacting to yours and the special rivals. When the Special rival attacked, you all lowered your prices to match. But then you said you continued to sell product at "low low" prices, so they are actually continuing to match YOUR prices now.

So if he raises his prices does that mean the minor rivals will also raise their prices back to normal?

[Ghost]

I take over failing rival business's and turn it around into profit. So I imagine you have just had some bad RNG luck?

[David Estes Creations]

Originally posted by hi.mzdebo:

So if he raises his prices does that mean the minor rivals will also raise their prices back to normal?

Each night at midnight, they should adjust up toward the new prices, yes! It might take a few days for them to get up there, but they should!

[Knottypine]

Originally posted by David Estes Creations:

Just a confirmation- make sure you're looking at your weekly income, not your daily income. I've seen a few people get those confused.

Yes. My Daily income is just over $20K. Thanks for all the other info. I will adjust my prices and see how they react when I get home after work.

[Knottypine]

I've adjusted my prices back up to the level I had prior to them dropping. (Customers are still 100% satisfied with my new normal prices) Pamela's response was to increase her prices slightly, but still below mine. Maybe she'll put back up more over the next couple of days. However, this also made her Supermarket even more profitable than it was. Mine as well, but her $970K weekly vs my $190K weekly is still quite a gap, now around 5x as it stands on the current game day. I did press F2 to submit it (prior to my price change) for you to have a look at the numbers if it might help to see why rival supermarkets are much more profitable than the player supermarkets.

Also I noted in the report that, while I didn't really compare any other businesses, supermarkets seem to be the one that stands out the most to make the rivals the most profit vs the player.

Edit: a day later customers are quite dissatisfied with my prices.
Edit 2: Another day and prices slightly went back up and customers are satisfied again thankfully!

[PresBartlet]

I've found that rival's businesses are generally more profitable. Though it was their supermarket business also that was ridiculously higher profit than my own, so the bug may be limited to supermarkets.

I was looking at what business to do next as I was number 2 on the rivals board. Number 1 had a supermarket in mid town earning 1 million a week. Ib thought I'd tap into that as he had the only supermarket. I opened a same size store with similar, if not higher footfall, optimised and the most I could get was around £200k a week. Sure enough, the rivals profits reduced by 200k so that mechanic worked nicely. However, he is still making 800k a week from the one store and I've no idea how. We are matched in prices.

[Knottypine]

Originally posted by PresBartlet:

I've found that rival's businesses are generally more profitable. Though it was their supermarket business also that was ridiculously higher profit than my own, so the bug may be limited to supermarkets.

I was looking at what business to do next as I was number 2 on the rivals board. Number 1 had a supermarket in mid town earning 1 million a week. Ib thought I'd tap into that as he had the only supermarket. I opened a same size store with similar, if not higher footfall, optimised and the most I could get was around £200k a week. Sure enough, the rivals profits reduced by 200k so that mechanic worked nicely. However, he is still making 800k a week from the one store and I've no idea how. We are matched in prices.

Agree. The rivals certainly have an advantage what seems beyond optimization, I just wanted confirmation that is actually intended for rival businesses.

I was purposely ignoring Huang Guo and the fact they they had multiple supermarkets in Midtown, two of which were each making over 1M per week, simply because they were a major rival. I assumed it was intentional that they just made several times more money like that because they were major rivals. So I was focusing on a minor rival.

My prices are back up to normal and my supermarket in Murray Hill has a weekly income of over $200K. But Pamela's similar supermarket with higher prices again and open fewer hours, soared to over $1M per week now. Which doesn't particularly add up since my supermarket is open for longer hours with max customers. So I would need to sell 5x as much as I'm selling now just to match her income.

Overall, it's not terrible. I'm top dog making over $10.5M per week with all my businesses, I'll just buy them out at some point after I'm done with the last two major rivals. But may require me to invest several million above their valuation if they're as fierce as the major rivals.

[David Estes Creations]

Just a little update: we found a big factor in what was making the rivals' sales outrageously high and will be adjusting that for EA 0.6!

[hi.mzdebo]

Originally posted by David Estes Creations:

Just a little update: we found a big factor in what was making the rivals' sales outrageously high and will be adjusting that for EA 0.6!

Great! Looking forward to the update.

[Knottypine]

Originally posted by David Estes Creations:

Just a little update: we found a big factor in what was making the rivals' sales outrageously high and will be adjusting that for EA 0.6!

Nice, thanks for the update!

[jhughes]

In the past, when you take over a business, the state of employees and equipment does not match up with profits they make.

They are never meeting the employees hours demands or special demands. The employees are at very low happiness, etc.

The AI should have to meet all the same requirements as us to build a business. When you take over a business and pay millions of dollars for it, it should have the proper equipment in it. It should have a real refrigerator and not a drinks fridge or salad bar that employees can't even use (just one example).

If a rival is going to be making tons of money and have a business, it needs to meet the employees requirements OR it needs to suffer the same consequences we would suffer if we didn't have gold healthcare or a meeting table or a fridge, etc.