Whenever you release a new product you will need to pay an upfront marketing fee and than a reoccurring fee based on the amount of people your logistics coverage area has. Therefore you will find yourself in fiscal trouble quite quickly if you over extend your market area (having more demand than you can supply) since you will be paying advertisement fees for all those customers who aren't buying your product.

The good thing about the new market system is you can back out and reenter markets. To make the most of your early game (when lots of markets are still not supplied/empty) if you see a sudden sharp drop in your DPP than an AI has entered one of your key markets or is out performing you with their product.

You'll want to find what market(s) and exit out of them after having taken note of the population since you'll want to enter into new markets equal to or less than the one(s) you exited. Do note that if you've built any fans up in a market you are exiting from you may loose them (but early game those numbers are minuscule anyway).

This is the meat and potatoes, after all the markets become congested you'll no longer be able to flee into fresh areas to gather sales, you'll need to cater to market data instead. Remember for the next section of the guide that this data has but also does not have anything to do with your actual product advertising, mainly for your product development (you'll see later).

So we first want to check our current market preferences. We can see that Capacity makes up roughly 40% of our market preference here (The legend does not correspond to the percentages so you need to kinda guesstimate the order.).








Next we check this against our top markets. Our top market is Eastern Russia followed by the Pacific (The legend on this screen will be ordered for you from largest to decreasing size).







Finally we want to check market focus for the top market countries from above. Here is Eastern Russia's. What we are interested in is the percentage breakdown data on the far left side (ignore the bug that is making it add up over 100%).
Here is the same data for the Pacific

Adding all this data up together we can tell that the most profitable machine (to beat out the AI) in these markets should be geared towards casual and focus for the main selling point should be storage capacity. By doing those two things market dominance should be easier obtained (Note that pricing plays a minor role as well, if the AI has a slightly inferior product but has significantly undercut your pricing you will loose the market).

When you develop your product to the market data you collected you than go to marketing screen (For which I hereby refer to as the advertisement screen). So when I told you that the above market data has mostly nothing to do with your actual marketing it does and it doesn't, here is why. Their are two ways to use the market data on the advertisement tab.

We will use those little target group icons. Since half our market consists of Russia and the Pacific and half of those countries markets consist of casuals, we can than deduce that at the very minimum 25% of all our sales will be to casuals, not a very high number (you'll see why below).

If we continued to check all the countries listed under our top sales and we saw that Madagascar and Alaska also had 50ish % of casuals we would know than that at the very minimal around 40% of all sales would be towards casuals, which is a much reasonable assumption to use for our advertisement target group. So with that in mind we would tick the target group of Casuals.

Instead of advertising towards a specific group we will instead advertise towards specific hardware features. Using this way is more recommended if you don't have a very large minimum sales % from the above method for a certain target group. Assuming that when we checked Madagascar and Alaska they had very low casual numbers we would instead want to advertise to our main Market Preference(s), storage capacity, and not our Main market Countries of Russia and the Pacific.

We can see that Storage capacity makes up roughly 40% of our market which in this case would be greater than the 25% casual minimum. So what we would want to do is check which target group likes our main market preference(s) the most and that is whom we will target advertise to, in this case we would choose to focus on the gamers.

If you have a high guaranteed minimum % for a target group use method 1, if not use method 2. You might have noticed the market has no data for fans, that is because by selecting the Fans Target Group your product will not be advertised for max profits but instead your product will generate your fan base at a higher rate than normal. I definitely recommend using the Fans Target Group with method 2 if you have a high prestige markets.

Be aware also that you can't change any of the parameters once the products leaves prototyping and enters into testing. You can however still access the advertising screen for a product being tested/released so that you can see the cost breakdown.

Therefore entering or exiting markets will make your advertisement selection not match up with your market data anymore for those already released products (so you can't just keep copy & pasting the same advertising data if you changed your markets).

This area will list the slider information for the advertisement screen. Do note this takes FOREVER to gather. It took releasing a product waiting for the notification that new marketing data was collected (when many times their wasn't any NEW data, idk if this is a bug or not) than releasing new product and waiting again rinse and repeat, it took 34 products to just fill out the information for a single target group (times that by the 5 groups, and than by the 4 hardware types [which I don't have done yet] and that is around 650 [±50] products needing to be released to get all the data)...

TBD

TBD

TBD

Always strive to maintain only a small tech advantage over the AI. You don't want to just throw every latest and greatest tech on your machine as it may not work towards your market data and could be loosing you money.

If for example you focused down the CPU branch and got several generations of CPU ahead of what the AI has out than by using those it'll increase your production costs resulting in you getting less profits. You should instead use the same CPU the AI is using but with your tech advantage you'll have access to better multiplier options which you should use to get slightly ahead of the best one on the market. Thus your production cost remained low and you still have the better product.

Speaking of multipliers, scaling techs not only allow you use multipliers but they also decrease production costs and apply to multiple components of your machine, always use the best tech of these.

Ram as well will be cheaper production for performance wise, the newer the tech is. So you should always use the newest RAM available, just make sure to only go slightly ahead on the performance slider of what the AI has out (if you have good multiplier tech increasing that while leaving the base clock to the far left is usually cheaper).

For storage it is a bit tricky as the newer the tech is the more expensive it'll be for you. You'll need to check what Capacity is out on the market and use newer tech if the current tech is near the storage slider final 3rd as it'll be cheaper to use the newer tech with the slider back to far left than to continue to increase the slider further right on the current tech (same goes with CPUs and GPUs).

Displays are usually never worth it for you to upgrade in unless the AI already has. The reason being the production costs increase significantly with each newer tech of these.

Check out the Hardware section of this guide to learn how to min/max your part selections for your market data (like prestige, quality, ease of use etc.).

P.S. If you ever find the game isn't challenging enough you can Try out a Scenario or Challenge!