A couple questions from a CEO and President (Little Upsilon)

1. I notice some corps have upgrades up to 250. But I havent seen any particular qualifiers or dis-qualifiers for being able to do so. Can someone shed some light on this? I know state can only top 200 and enterprise can go to 225. How does one get to 250?

2. Some of my jewelry corporations have ordered upgrades AGES ago, but still have no gotten them or installed many at all (they are 3 game years old yet still at 110). Is there any reason for this? it seem to only be affecting my jewelry corporations, and even then, only some of them. They also had trouble getting supplies immediate ordered, causing shortages, when i could easily immediate order the same supplies for another corp. Please help.

3. Do strategic weapons have to always be sold on a contractual basis?

4. How can you tell if a company is actually selling stock in any significant amount?

5. Is there a way to immediate order upgrades?

6. At what point do diminishing returns on raws quality start hitting harder (greater than 2 to 1)?

7. Why is it that some corps just hit a cap on company value based on what they produce? My oil companies have been stuck at 190-250 despite producting 6-13 billion in profits a year.

and finally:

8. This is to a successful CEO. What do you set your prices above market at? How much above? Ive seen as low as 20% under and 40% over (though when i tried this i didnt sell jack).

1. Those are Public Corps which has 5 (or may be 4) or more owners and the highest held percentage by any owner is less than 24 (maybe 22) percent. Details can be found in the documentation.

2. Patience. Just make sure all your corps are set to auto upgrade both efficiency and quality.

3. Nukes, but only sell them to yourself - please.

4. Click SHARE MARKET -> You stock portfolio.

5. Not that I know of -> I do not believe you can. Only in the cash market using gold coins can u quickly upgrade your corps.

6. I have to claim n00bness -> I do not understand what u mean by RAWS QUALITY.

7. Patience, they will grow based on the global demand.

8. I personally set mine to 12 over reduced by 3 in tight times (like now) and then 15 over reduced by 3 when the demand is high.

2. To clarify, im not being impatient...its not just the upgrades. All things the jewelry companies buy take an eternity to come in, causing them to have shortages constantly. I was just wondering if this was a bug.

6. I mean quality of raw materials. 300 quality materials cost 3x as much, but not give you a 200 point boost to quality (obviously or else wed have spiraling quality values). I was jsut asking what was an efficient range of quality targets for raw materials.

Thank you for your time and information it was helpful, especially #1. I have some 250 level corps that i recently ended up with majority share. They seemed to have retained their cap...at least for now.

6. I do understand what you are asking now. I set my required Quality to 100. You will receive first available materials at the lowest price. Your profits will go up. It's just like in the real world, you buy crap materials making lower quality products, but your virtual marketing campaign will bring you in maximum profit for it.

Corps which have floated their shares on the market become 'truly public' when no one entity owns more than 25% of their shares (N.B. this doesn't include investment funds in countries, which can never control a corpopration). These corps can then be upgraded to 250. So in theory you could own 1% of the shares, IFs own the other 99%, and you would control a truly public which can upgrade to 250. If a greater than 25% ownership of shares occurs then the upgrades will deteriorate with time down to the appropriate level.

I can think of no reason why any one particular corp type is singled out for particular supply priority. Check that it is not a specific product that they are having trouble getting. There may be a world shortage of this. Also check that your buying strategy is in line with your other corps for your jewelry. A good solution for this problem is to have reserves in your country/enterprise that you can direct trade to your own corps should the need arise. You might also consider the use of a common market for getting some supplies. I cant think of a way to 'immediate' upgrades except to say that you can super boost a corp to maximum (200) with a 10GC booster. Someone else may know a way.

Checking and analysing your financial pages will show you what a corp is selling, its profit etc. Just take the time to understand what all the numbers mean, (get your calculator out).

Q6 is for you to experiment with. Each product is different and it depends on demand. Very high quality roads will be harder to sell as most everyone orders Q100 roads (I hope!) but this doesn't seem to work as you would expect in real life. I am personally sure the market is "manipulated", (and probably a good thing too).

Corps Market Value can grow beyond a trillion dollars, in deed they will self float themselves at extremely high levels. The value is down to many factors: demand, productivity, salaries, welfare, transport index and so on.

Strategic weapons - forget them. Yes, they can only be traded by contract.

Lastly, for Q8, I'm not sure if I qualify as successful as a CEO, but there are many fold strategies for selling your product. You could be aggressive and ask 60 over produced Q and reduce the price 20 each month its not sold (good for products often in short supply) or you could go for a more sober approach and settle for a more reliable 20 - 25 over produced, being more confident of selling most of your product every month. Again, its for you to tinker with, this is what makes the difference between winners and losers .

CCs 'Dummies guide to Simcountry' is available to purchase. The East End, Kebir Blue. Price 2.5GC, pub. soybean printing press.

Red, the same thing happened to me with my corp in which it wouldn't upgrade. I found that manually deleting the order and redoing it fixed it for me.

Q8. I have too much time on my hands, I have messed with pricing a great deal. I wish that prices could be set by product, but. alas and alack, it is not so. I use +23$ -7% as the base for most corps. I then tweak from there.

I use +40% -7% for defensive ammo and FMU's, +30% -7% for oil and electricity (market manipulations are common in these 3 products). Potassium, Luxury goods, cars, and a few others are set at +30% -7%. Everything else is base.

In the olds days when LU was the "real" war world, my CEO only had defensive and offensive ammo corps that sold at +80% -20%, and it was obscenely profitable.

I try to buy my supplies from C3's using -9% +8%. My CEO holds a lot of FMU's since these are sometimes hard to come by for some reason.