Sim Companies is a realistic economy simulator, similar in a way to the game “Economies of Scale,” wherein players build supply chains to produce materials and sell them, on both the public and private market. The game is realistically simple but also complex, effectively making it a great daily time waster and incremental game.
Starting wrong can set you back a really long time, so we’ve got the major tips and tricks that’ll get you started A S A P on the path to being the next top 500 player. Starting off, the tutorial is mostly wrong about what you should be doing – let’s get into it.
The game is available on Steam, Mobile and via the website @ Business Simulation Game – Sim Companies.
Production vs. Selling in Sim Companies
The first major choice you should make is if you’re going to produce or if you’re going to sell. If you produce, you’re going to have to decide the complexity of what you’ll produce and what industry. If you’re going to sell, you’ll have a much easier time with how you manage the game but you’re going to be limited to how much you earn based on how much you can sell.
Either choice is fine, the market is self-correcting in the sense that if too many players produce then the prices drop in a market and it becomes much more lucrative to sell.
The reason you have to make a choice is that you have only so much land and dedicating it all to one endeavor or the other allows you to stack all bonuses either on the production or the sales side.
At the very start, having the buildings the game suggests is fine and as long as you don’t build above level 2 it’s free to scrap and start all over again. You’re also limited to where you can be until you can afford more expensive buildings.
Don’t get hung up on retail price – you have to pay wages to sell. You may make $2 per unit on the market, but selling it may only make you $3 per unit and you have to wait, even if the cost to produce was $15 and the retail price was $40.
Return on Investment
Upgrading buildings in Sim Companies isn’t specifically always a great investment. It can take a long time to recoup some of the upgrades and administrative overhead starts to occur as you build more buildings at higher levels.
Be careful with executives, until you have about 30% overhead you don’t get a net positive on the COO. CMO is useful for figuring out what to produce or the strong sales bonus.
Achievements = Early Game Boon
Focus on earning achivements early on, they can make you an absolute load of cash quickly to get you set up for success. Prospector is an early easy one, but check out the achievements they’re huge boons.
Sim Companies doesn’t have a lot of variety in achievements and they’ll come pretty naturally. Focusing though on a few of them early game to get the cash rewards can help you build your empire a bit quicker.
Sim Companies is a Slow Game
One thing to understand is that Sim Companies is designed to be a slow game. There’s not way to really speed things up. You can buy up to $10,000 a day but if you look at the leaderboards that’s almost joke money to the millions that some players have. Someone who is around 2,500 on the leaderboards will still only have a net worth of 80-120 million and years of playing. Patience is a huge virtue here.
Live Market
The market is constantly shifting and there’s no evergreen thing you can produce and sell to get the top tier money. Whatever you produce you can sell for a profit and whatever you buy off the market you can sell for a profit, generally speaking, so you’ll always be turning a profit as long as you’re playing.
What you focus on and do is up to you, so don’t sweat that part of it.
Fool Proof Path to Seed Cash
A lot of guides are going to talk about manipulating the personal assistant quests to get you to where you need to be in the game. I disagree. I’d just build all power plants at the start. Fill the map with power plants, then get them all to level two. Let that run for a while and when you’re ready to branch into something else you can scrap level two buildings for 100% return and then build your empire with enough cash (and building materials) to get your industry started.
Power doesn’t need anything but wages and the power plant is an inexpensive building. Power sells instantly on the market. Yes you can try research, but you’ll need a lot of money to build each research building vs. power plants which are inexpensive and their output can get you early game cash fast.
