Something that would be a great dynamic on your “rise to the top”, is how you interact with the competition. Right now you can try to make your place more appealing (cleanliness, customer service, variety), but it would be interesting to have the negative option for your competition as well.
For instance: You could advertise to draw people to your store. You could also do a smear campaign to drive them away from your top competitor.
You could sabotage your competitor’s supply line, and you could hire security to guard your own.
But while doing these things might draw the customers to you, it could make businesses wary of doing deals with you, etc.
I know this idea involves a lot of undeveloped concepts, so it may not work with current plans, but I figured I’d throw the idea out!
The problem
I think that the biggets problem Big Ambitions is going to face, is how to keep the player engaged in the game over a long period of time. I see quite a few people figuring out how to “min-max” the game and finding themselves bored and without any goals.
Solution
I believe the key to this problem is to create a robust system where the player competes with other businesses and through the competition you create “a story” of overcoming difficult circumstances/ odds.
What is needed for this to work
You need an easy way to see who you compete with in the district your business is located and how well they score on the given competitive parameters. They need to be simulated (play by the same rules as the player), so that your actions affect them and vice-versa. And with well implemented random events (not too serious, nor too frequent) this could create a relatively fluid system of competition.
Parameters that you can compete in. The four parameters already present in the game (that affects customer satisfaction) would work well, but they need to be made more complex and you would need to be able to compare your stats with your competitors.
Some ways of adding complexity: Sales handling time, sales campaigns (“two for one” - hitting your revenue, but increasing sale and satisfaction), location (where it is located and how it looks and functions indoors), complimentary things for the customer (coffee, cookies, candy) etc.
The employees will be the most important puzzle piece to make this system interesting in the long run. One way of doing so will be to create a system where you have to keep them happy, which in turn helps the way they treat customers and can give you an edge over your competitors: Emplyee personality, vacations, training (courses and eductiona), salary, coffee machine, lunch room, hygiene etc.
These are just my initial thoughts, so please add to them in the comments if you find this to be an interesting idea.
One of the functions in Startup Company that kept me coming back was the list of other competitors and their size/value how it stacked up to mine.
Can we add that to Big Ambitions for total valuations? I see that many of the Real Estate is listed as 'owned by" with several fictitious in-game entities already plugged in. Would be awesome to see them in a leaderboard type option to help strive for creating the “Largest Empire” in the game!
Like uncle Fred i think it would be cool to compete with AI bots and see who win and have an option to do it with in a timelimit to have some competition.
The more wealth tax you pay the higher your city reputation becomes, unlocking skills that would improve customer satisfaction, tiredness and such. Could be intresting to also implement a leaderboard to that, so you would compete against bots or just have random names with their induvidual wealth rankings.
