Maintained by The Center
This guide helps beginners who just started playing Sim Companies grasp some key concepts of the game and its economy simulation. It's not necessary to read this guide to be able to play; many players may enjoy learning from their own mistakes, but it's useful for those who want a head start.
This guide focuses on explaining the key dynamics for which we'll use a company's starting period as an example. But this will not be a step-by-step guide. A step-by-step guide would be difficult to make, as the market conditions change with time and what made sense a month or week ago may not apply now.
FIRST STEPS
We want to maximize the company's cash available for the company using the resources and buildings available. Since we start with a plantation and grocery store, we need to stay in the grocery business.
Check out what you can sell in the grocery store and which of the products have the highest demand. You don't need to pay too much attention to the average price - that's just information about what others are selling at. The demand is important because it determines how fast you sell and, essentially, what will be your per-unit profit. Let's assume that apples are high in demand right now.
Companies at lower levels cannot put in long, over-night orders. Our first goal should be to level up, so we can put in long orders before signing off for the night. You gain experience points while buildings are working, so let's put orders - both production and sales - in and keep them busy.
Put in a production order for a bunch of apples; while they are in production, head to the market and try to buy some apples - doing so will keep your grocery store occupied while the apples are being produced.
When in a production building you can enter "am", "pm", "hr", and "m".
For example:
"3pm" your production will end at 3 pm
”10am” your production will end at 10 am
”5hr” your production will end in 5 hours
”30m” your production will end in 30 minutes
Warning: Some products require a fraction of another product. This can increase your unit cost (i.e. Construction units need 0.125 Bulldozer. Meaning 8 construction units can be made from 1 bulldozer. If, you made 1 construction unit the price of 1 full bulldozer would be used). Always check your ratios before producing any product with these above methods.
EXCHANGE
The Exchange (or Market) can be found on your map near your Headquarters (building with your company name). Clicking on the exchange building will send you to the exchange. The default product is Power.
If you are using PC: the list of all the products is on the left.
If you are using Mobile: the list of all the products is on the top.
When selling items on the exchange note that the cheaper prices (per unit) are at the top. The products at the top of the exchange are sold first. Changing the minimum quality (gold stars) will force the cheapest of that quality to the top of the exchange.
If you decide to sell anything on the exchange make sure you are matching the prices near the top. Placing items way over the price of the top of the market will guarantee your products will not sell any time soon.
Forcing you to have to cancel the exchange order which can cost you fees.
Normally Power is around $0.24
Do not sell power at $0.30 or higher
Visit Frequently Asked Questions for a walk through on how to sell items on the exchange.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Achievements are by far the easiest way to earn cash at the beginning. You should familiarize yourself with them by clicking here. You will get to some of the achievements eventually, and there's not much you can do to speed it up. But, some can be faked easily.
For example, The Buyer Achievement. You can just purchase something that has a high turnover on the market, like water. Buy 5,000 units, and then post them back on the market at the lowest price. You can max out both Buyer and Supplier achievements this way while losing just 3% on market fees for the transactions. It's very profitable. Think outside the box.
While we are at it, dump your power on the market as well. You won't need it anytime soon; the money will help you more. Keep the water and transportation units - you will need them.
Helpful information added via the Sim Companies Forum:
Updated Achievement Guide
My Version of Achievement Hunting
PERSONAL ASSISTANT (PA)
Wondering about the Personal Assistant?
Early in the game your PA will present a series of business related problems. How you respond to them is completely up to you. There may be benefits or consequences to your choice.
Remember that saying "yes" is often a good idea!
Make sure you answer every quest. Sometimes players don’t get quests and the reason is they have not answered the last quest they received from the PA.
The newer quests that were added to the game have requirements that need to be met:
Time Played
How much cash that your company could potentially lose ($50,000).
Executive requirements (level 15)
GUIDES
There are many useful guides in the Library. Scrolling past the newspapers will reveal many guides. It is highly suggested to read these guides. You will gain an understanding of the mechanics of the game. The Forum is also a great source of information.
After reading this guide check out some of the other guides listed in the library:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) - Is a list of questions and and answers, that are very common for new players to ask.
Interface Tips - How to use many of the features of the game. Navigation Bar, Chat, Production Values, Warehouse, Exchange, Headquarters (HQ), Buildings, Notes, and Charts.
Research Guide - Covers what research and quality are with means to obtain both.
Construction Guide - Covers the construction update and what is needed for constructing new buildings and how scrapping works.
Bonds Guide - Covers what bonds are and how you can gain capital needed for growing your company.
Executives Guide - Goes over what executives are and how they benefit your company.
Time Table - This is a list of times when functions of the game are calculated. Check the list for your local times.
Links to the Forum:
Using the Encyclopedia (production)
Personal Assistant Quests
EXPANDING
At this point, you should have nice cash reserves resulting from the achievements, production, and sales. It's time to invest in more buildings. Let's stick with the grocery market for now, as it's cheaper to build these buildings. You should decide if you want to focus on production, retail, or both.
Choosing both retail and production is the most difficult option, as you need to manage 2 streams and carefully balance your resources. The easiest approach is to do retail. You can always get the cheapest stuff with the highest demand from the market and sell it in your stores.
It is recommended getting another grocery store, and if the cash allows, also upgrade your existing store to level 2. But here, you really need to read the current situation. If there's more influx of grocery products on the market, go for retail; if not, go for production.
RETAIL TRAP
Most players do the mistake of trying to maximize the per-unit profit when selling in the retail. Yes, you are reading it right. You don't want to maximize your per-unit profit. The higher the selling price, the longer it takes to sell. Let me ask you this: would you rather earn $20 every day, or $5 every hour? Suddenly, $5 is more than $20. You have invested hard-earned cash into your stores, so make sure they return you more money back quickly, rather than squeezing every last cent from the apples for hours. And by the way, the supply of apples is virtually unlimited on the market.
TRANSPORT
Transport is a resource that is needed to place your products on the exchange or delivery contracts to other players.
The exchange is full transport. Contracts are half transport.
The encyclopedia will indicate how many units of transport are needed under the image of the product.
Apples require one (1) transport per unit.
Placing 100 apples on the exchange requires 100 transport units.
Contracts however are half transport.
100 apples in a contract requires 50 transport units.
Power, Water, Construction Units, Research, and Transport do not need any transport to place on the exchange or to send contracts.
When sending any item to the exchange or through contracts the warehouse will indicate how many transport units will be used.
The game will not allow you to place items on the exchange or send a contract if you do NOT have enough Transport units in your warehouse.
It is highly suggested to always check the transport needed on any product you are dealing with. Transport can remove any profits in an instant. Especially on items like Golden Bars which require 1000 transport per unit.
Note: Transport is not included in the unit cost of a product. It is a separate calculation on top of the unit cost. Transport can vary in price and can change the profits of your products.
Forum: Calculating Transport
KEEP AT IT
Whatever basic mechanism you decided to go with, keep at it - just optimize the flows. You need heavy cash to be able to experiment and explore other industries. If you are a manufacturer, you can try to find somebody who will take your goods using contracts, so you save on the market fees. It's also good to have stability. Find a good water supplier.
Similarly, if you are a retailer, find a stable supplier with prices better than the market's.
Most players try to get a water reservoir as soon as possible. While cheaper water sounds appealing and your per-unit profit would go up, you likely have just one or two plantations whereas the reservoir supports a lot more than that. Therefore, you will end up investing a lot of cash into something working at about 15% capacity. You will end up trying to find somebody who will buy your extra water which adds inefficiency.
On the other hand, if the water is scarce, you definitely want to build one, and you may get more profit selling water than from growing apples. Your cash is the most important resource; you want to apply it where it can bring return.
WHAT’S NEXT?
By this time, you should be at level 12-15 and have stable cash flowing in and you can decide on how you want to shape your company further. You should ideally have $50,000 to $100,000 extra cash for experimenting.
Don't be afraid to build any building you like. Buildings at level 1 and level 2 can be demolished and refunds retrieved at the construction price, so there's no cash loss. At the same time, don't be afraid to take your buildings down, if they are not fruitful. You can experiment and exploit anything you consider as a gap in the market at that time.
You should have a feel for the game and the market at this point, and you can decide which industry you want to enter, whether it is farming, electronics or energy. You can read a brief discussion about the pipeline to find out more about the various resources.
Whatever industry you decide to go for, here are few pointers on how to do it. You most likely do not have the cash to go full throttle and build complex manufacturing pipelines and retail at the beginning. Therefore, you need to start at one of the ends first. Fortunately, the game is geared up for this being easy.
Larger companies have a higher labor cost than when you are starting as a small company. This means they sell with lower per-unit profit and also manufacture with a higher per-unit cost. You can sell their petrol, diesel more efficiently and, thus, make a profit while they make some money as well. If energy (petrol and diesel) is what you are after, you can find a contract supplier, most likely a larger company and build your energy retail infrastructure first. You can follow that up with building out production.
Similarly, you may see that power is expensive on the market and decide to start with production. Your per-unit power production price will be around $0.17 or $0.18, while the largest companies will be producing at $0.23 per unit. This may not seem like a big difference, but it's huge. You need 25 units for one barrel of oil, so the difference on a barrel is more than $2.50. Also, a power plant produces thousands of units quickly, each unit adding up to your profit.
Smart larger companies and they are all smart otherwise they would not be at those high ranks, are constantly looking for suppliers and retailers to offset their expensive parts of the pipeline and increase profit. A larger company will have specialized buildings in which labor cost is not a big factor and heavy investments in research. At some point, rising further makes less sense but investment in research and quality keeps the company size in check while increasing the profit.
You want to get there as well, and you will!
RAISING MONEY
If you are impatient about the time it takes in becoming big, you can choose to raise money for your company (like any real start-up does). You can do this by issuing bonds. Bonds are available from level 10 and you can read more about them in the Bonds Guide. The short story is, that you borrow money to make money.
MINING
There are three (3) buildings in the game that have random efficiency: the oil rigs, mines, and quarries. These end up having random resource abundance when they are built, and the abundance can vary greatly.
The per-unit production price of minerals can vary between $6 and $10 depending on the abundance. With these buildings, you want to repeatedly to re-construct and demolish them until you get a good abundance.
Anything over 75% should generate profit for you, but one with over 90% abundance will generate greater profit.
Mining is a good example of labor-intensive activity where you can, with little effort, produce resources a lot more cheaply than larger companies and, therefore, be able to sell these resources easily to other players.
The Prospector achievement goals:
10 scraps for $10,000
50 scraps for $50,000
100 scraps for $100,000
200 scraps for $200,000
Helpful articles from our local newspaper The Sim Companies Times:
The Art Of Prospecting
Links to the Forum:
RESEARCH
Wondering what those nice, golden, stars next to some resources on the market are? It represents a higher quality version of the resources, which you can achieve by investing in research. End products with higher quality sell better through retail, allowing companies to sell such products faster and for higher prices, thus making a larger profit.
While the research is available for your company early on, you should not invest heavily in it until you have around $1,500,000 company value. Returns are greater when you invest your cash into buildings at the beginning.
There are some exceptions though. Since research units are pure labor, you can create them at much cheaper per-unit cost than companies that need to use them. I am talking 30% cheaper. You guess it right: this is a good resource for selling to larger players.
An exception is when your business partner consumes your water but pushes you for higher quality. He may need at least quality 1 (Q1) to produce his quality 2 (Q2) apples. In such a case, you would want to produce quality 1 (Q1) water to keep him as a customer. You should expect to need about 90-100 research units to achieve a quality level 1 (Q1).
Learn more about research in the research guide.
SIM BOOSTS
What are Sim Boosts? Sim Boosts are blue stars that can be earned from daily login and producing/selling. Or can be purchased with real currency. They are used to unlock/speed up/switch items in the game. Cash earned in game cannot buy Sim Boosts. Here is a list of all the uses for Sim Boosts.
You can use Sim Boosts to: (suggested order)
Unlock three (3) building slots (50, 100, 500)
Move production speed bonus to sales speed bonus and vice-versa (account settings)
Unlock Executive slots (50, 100, 200, 400)
Other Sim Boost uses: (no particular order)
Unlock display case slots, where you can showcase your certificates, inventory, and achievements
Advertise your company in the Sim Companies Times
"Rush" building construction and upgrades, this means you do not have to wait for construction and upgrade to finish
"Rush" executives training and hiring
Exchange Sim Boosts for in-game money - limited to $10,000 a day
Upkeep recreational buildings: park, lake, castle (40 a week)
Unlock three (3) building slots (Sim Boost cost: 50, 100, 500)
ECONOMY PHASES
You may see a lot of activity in chat on Friday’s about what the Economy phase the game is currently. This is because the game has three (3) phases; Boom, Normal, and Recession. Friday is the day that the game rolls a random number and based on that roll the economy has a chance to change. (15:00 UTC - Economy phase shift (only Friday). See Time Table for your local time.) If there is a change you will receive a message from your Personal Assistant. Not change equals no message.
When you first start these phases will not have much of an affect on your company.
So what happens in each of these phases?
Recession: production quantities are higher; while retailers selling quantity is lower.
Boom: production quantities are lower; while retailers selling quantity is higher.
Normal: is a balance between Boom and Recession.
But what does that mean for your company? It means when the changes occur they are immediate. Any building not producing/selling will be affected when it changes. Any building producing/selling already will not be affected; and when they are done producing/selling they will reflect the new economy on the next production/selling cycle. It may be advantageous to take this knowledge into consideration to save your company money.
As you get more established you may want to line up your production/selling with the economy phase switch in mind.
For instance; in a Recession before the dice roll on Friday. If are a producer, you will want to run production as long as possible to keep the production costs lower. If you are a Retailer you want to end your selling just before the change. If it changes to a normal you will be able to take advantage of higher prices and make more money.
The opposite is true for a Boom. Producers would want to end production just before a economy change. And retailers would want to run 48 hour selling cycles to take advantage of the Boom prices.
With a Normal economy this is more of a gamble. You’ll have to decide when the time comes what to do in a normal economy.
Helpful articles from our local newspaper The Sim Companies Times:
The Numbers behind Economy Phases (1)
The Numbers behind Economy Phases (2)
CREATING A FEW BOGUS ACCOUNTS TO GET AHEAD
Thinking outside the box, right? New companies get substantial start-up boost, to make the game fun to play at the beginning and, sadly, some players try to abuse this to gain an unfair advantage against honest players.
This is why having more than one account is strictly prohibited.
Also, small companies are more restricted regarding what prices they can sell resources at, or send contracts.
There are monitoring mechanisms in place. It's very easy to check if the contracts or market orders a company is receiving are substantially low-priced than the average price in the game for the concerned goods. Same, if a company sells to other players at much higher prices than the average.
If you try this approach you will get caught.
Library Guides
Frequently asked questions, Interface tips, Research guide, Construction guide, Bonds guide, Executives guide, Government orders guide, Aerospace, Forum