[M&M] Market Saturation

Hi!

It’s my first post here and first of all I have to say I totally love this game! I’m addicted! Thanks so much to the devs for all the hard work you do! I look forward to becoming a part of the Big Pharma community!

I have a question regarding how M&M market saturation for a drug works. I read in a previous post in the forum that it’s not possible to fully saturate a product’s market without having a very high Sale Rating and/or severely discounting the product. Given that, I’m looking for some insight into how to use the provided information to determine how many lines of a particular product can be expected to be consumable.

In several scenarios, I’ve had cures that show markets of upwards of 7.0/day but trying to produce more than 2/day floods the stock even at a 30% discount, despite the product is showing a Cure/Sale Rating of C. Yet other cures with a market display of, for example 2.4/day can handle 2/day of a C or B Cure/Sale Rating, even at a small price hike.

Is there a discernable method to this, or is it supposed to be essentially luck and, “hope one of your 2 starting ingredients has a cure that sells”?

Or perhaps more generally, given the somewhat conflicting situation I’ve just described, What information are we supposed to be gleaning from a cure’s “X/day” number on the Cures page, and Is the other information somewhere that can be aggregated to provide an indication how many lines of a cure will sell?

Thanks again!

Hi RevoniK, and welcome to Big Pharma! :slight_smile:

Daily sales is calculated as follows:

Sales rating * Premium/Discount factor * Total demand / Number of competing products

Where:

  • A sales rating of C is roughly equal to 50% and a sales rating of A is roughly equal to 100%
  • The premium discount factor is not linear, charging a 10% premium will result in a greater than 10% drop in sales.
  • Discount factors are roughly linear unless the discounting perk is picked.
  • The division by number of competing products only holds if all the product have exactly the same overall rating (sales rating * premium/discount factor). I’ve presented it as above for simplicity but the actual maths is quite complicated. Having a better/cheaper product will give you significant amount of sales above your opponents.
  • Note that this is just a rough formula for demonstration purposes. Actual sales are calculated daily with a slight random factor so while on average this will give you the daily sales, you might see it swing 5% either way temporarily.

So for a simple example of a single product monopoly, premium of 0%, sales rating of C and total demand of 3/day. You should be able to attain a max of roughly (formula above => 0.5 * 1 * 3 / 1 => 1.5) 1.5/day.

Now as for your conflicting examples, the only thing you haven’t mentioned is whether there were any competitors. In your first example, you definitely should have been able to achieve sales of around 3.5/day at a sales rating of C if there were no competitor products. Is that the case?

For your second example, it does seem a little high, but then again, the ratings are not step changes. There is such a thing as a high B and a low B+ that have almost identical sales. The bands are presented for simplicity, but the internal sales rating has a higher resolution.

Do some more tests with this additional knowledge and let me know if you continue to see weird behaviour. The key graph is the one when you hover over the Daily Sales column on the company tab. If you see any weird behaviour, send me a screenshot of that and I’ll take a look and see if there is anything fishy going on. :slight_smile:

Tim