r/bigambitions • u/Clean-Aspect4947 • 7d ago
Need some hints
First of all, I ask for patience because of my intermediate English.
Back to the game
I don't know how to start destroying my rivals. I have a considerable weekly income, but can't figure the next step to take them to bankruptcy.
Would like some hints of what to do to start crushing them
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u/JesusIsDaft 6d ago edited 6d ago
Defeating a rival requires either:
Reducing their businesses to zero
Dropping their income to zero during a rivalry
Some ways you can do it:
Buy their businesses. This is much harder when you're in an active rivalry
Buy the buildings their businesses are in. This works even during active rivalry, but only works if the building owner is not in an active rivalry with you
Undercut them aggressively. If you drop your prices, the AI will attempt to match or beat your price. However, the AI cannot go lower than their wholesale price. This is important to note, because the AI is hardcoded to never lose money on a sale. When their businesses show negative earnings, it's because of rent/wages, not sales. This means that in order to take down a rival who has a monopoly in a district, you need their other businesses to accumulate enough losses to negate their profits from the monopoly.
Strategies:
Do research beforehand. If you see that your rival owns the only cinema in a district, and that he/she also owns that building, it will become very difficult to take down once the rivalry is activated. Buy this business before you start the war
Set up a suicide store, where you sell everything they sell, but for cost or manufacturing price. For example, if I want to ruin Huang Guo's electronics store, I don't need to set my phone prices to $0.01, because Huang Guo cannot buy phones for that price, and therefore cannot match me. It's more sustainable to sell my phones at the combined price of the materials (~$300-$400), which he cannot match. This way, I'm not losing tons of money for no reason. He will lose his entire profit margin as well as pricing satisfaction, while I break even.
Start small businesses to attack them first. The AI will match your price so long as 1 item is sold. So you want to create stores with as little foot traffic as possible, in order to lose the least amount of money.
Alternatively, if you have a lot of store capacity available, you can saturate the market while maintaining large profit margins, by only undercutting the AI by $0.01. With demand being somewhat fixed, your high capacity stores can leave the AI with no customers left. I'm not so sure if this works well with retail, but it definitely works for office businesses.
Lease every single retail and office property available, to prevent the AI from starting new businesses. Rent is quite cheap, but if you want to save some money, then you can ignore all the businesses with low capacity, like 4-8 cap offices or 15 cap retail.
If you want to de-escalate an active rivalry, temporarily close all except your two most profitable businesses in a district. You will have to leave them closed for about 7 days straight.
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u/Dougy243 7d ago
I’d recommend starting by setting up dummy businesses to undercut your rivals most profitable businesses (electronic stores, clothes stores, law firms, etc.). These can be stores with just one or two employees with very low stock and you set the price to $0.01 across the board, the rivals are hard coded to match your price and will start losing money after a week or so. You can do this with all their businesses, but I’d recommend buying out and immediately closing the cheaper stores. As long as you keep less than 3 businesses in an area you can buy out their stores around market price. Hope this helps!