Game Concepts - Factories/Industries

Ok first lets get something straight:

• An industry is the field that the factory works in, i.e. steel industry, or mining industry.
• The factory is the actual building the work happens in.

Sorry had to clear that up because some people were getting confused.

What are the factories for?
The factories will be where most of your profit comes from. To start with each player will own one of a selection of factories. Once the factory is established, the objective will be to buy raw materials in order to make a product that will sell (except mining fossil fuels, which is covered in Game Concepts - Resources).

Once a large enough profit has been gained, the player can upgrade to a second factory, and repeat the process. However in order to buy your second factory, you will have to upgrade your accommodation from small house, to something bigger (this is covered in Game Concepts - Accommodation)

How much will they cost?
The price of each factory depends on two factors:

• The cost of the resources needed to "build" the factory (This process is explained below)
• The number of factories you currently own (the more factories you own, the more it costs to buy a new one).

Building a factory
When a player buys a factory, the server will determine how much of each resource is needed to construct the factory (e.g. 1000 units of steel etc). The building process is automated and requires no input from the player. However the resources used in the building process are taken from the market, meaning if everyone buys loads of factories and doesn't sell anything, eventually everything will run out. The cost of the factory is based mainly on the total cost of the resources needed.

Running a factory
Running a factory can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. You will have to make decisions based on how much of a product you sell and when, also when and how much resources you buy to produce your product.

Because the prices on the market are dynamic, an intelligent manager would wait until the price of the resource needed is low before buying, and similiarly wait until the price of the product is high before selling. There are other complex techniques involved, but we'll leave them to you to work out.

On top of the above choices, you will have control over a variety of factors that will affect the speed of production. So far we have developed one factor idea, that is workers. Put simply, not that it could get much harder, the more workers you have in a factory, the faster you will produce products. There is one down-side, the more workers you have, the more you must pay per month in wages. It's entirely up to you which way you balance this out, do you go for maximum production with small profits, or large profits with very slow production?