I've been playing this game for quite a while now and have enjoyed many adventures in the game over that time.

However oftentimes when I played in "Freestyle" I noticed, that I wasn't really able to make use of the maximum efficiency of my company without having to constantly rework massive parts of it - which can be quite tedious after some time.

That's why I decided to dig a bit deeper into the files of Good Company and I present to you today my guide on how to improve the demand-mechanic of Good Company in freestyle in order to have a more fluent and less tedious progression that still doesn't feel like cheating!

As many of you probably know, each time a product reaches a certain milestone in how many units you have sold in a phase, you can opt to "Progress Phase" which will slightly increase the max demand of an item per cycle but also introduce higher demands in terms of features for an item.

By default, this progression is incredibly slow and often time means that the second you get your production up and running properly, you either overproduce materials, components and parts massively (especially mid- to late-game when you have machines and conveyor belts at your disposal) or you simply get a massive penalty for keeping the same product. You could of course just rework your product again, but in my experience after a certain point, there is simply not enough space in the chassis of lots of items to balance the needed criteria with the current research progress in-game. This then means, that you directly lose out on money/demand if you opt to progress the phase regardless and potentially have to rework massive parts of your company every time you make a decent progress. That sucks.

In this guide I will show you how to change a few files (including a pre-defined file-set that you can download for free and simply paste into the folder of the game) to mitigate this issue and keep demand of items higher and make the game a lot less stressful.

Before we change any files, please make sure you close your game as this COULD potentially corrupt saves if the game is still running.



Step 1:

Head to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Good Company\mods\base\markets\freeplay"

The drive (C:) might differ if you have multiple storage-medias installed in your computer. On most systems however, C: will be the default for your steam instance. You can find this also by right-clicking on the game in your library, selecting




Step 2:

Within this folder you will find various LUA files. These contain scripts that directly affect various variables and mechanics in-game. If you feel confident, you may open these yourself and manually alter the following lines (line 141 - 145) to their new values.

market.min_base_demand = 10 -> market.min_base_demand = 20
market.max_base_demand = 25 -> market.max_base_demand = 50
market.demand_per_level = 0.5 -> market.demand_per_level = 1.5
market.demand_per_phase = 0.5 -> market.demand_per_phase = 0.5
market.demand_variance = 0.3 > market.demand_variance = 0.3

Before:


After:

RECCOMENDED

Instead of altering the files yourself and potentially messing up formatting, you can simply download a set of custom files I made for you guys from here:


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mIwyB6ebRePRCXw6XmOyygfIeZwQwGM6/view?usp=sharing

• If you decide to use these files, simply download them, unzipp them on your desktop and copy-paste them into the folder (make sure to replace all the old LUA files in there and that the game is NOT running during this process either)

Step 3:

Save files / paste files into folder & start game

Ingame, the new changes will apply as soon as we start a new freeplay game OR once we progress to a next phase in an already ongoing save file. PLEASE DO NOT report that it doesn't work immediately if you are using this with a preexisting save-file, this is not a bug but just the way the game reads the files and runs the checks. Just wait until you can progress a products phase and you will see a massive jump in demand occur.


Before:



After:



The demand has now been improved a lot and gives you more wiggle room to really push your production to their limits without having excessive amounts of over-produced parts that you can't use because supply out-performs demand.

Step 4: (optional):

If you want to return the demand to the default behaviour, simply delete the files in that folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Good Company\mods\base\markets\freeplay), right-click on Good Company in your library, head to
"properties" at the bottom of the list, click on "installed files" and press "verify integrity of game files". This will check for missing/corrupted files and download them again in their default-setting from steam.




Alternatively, you can of course always just backup your files somewhere on your computer to paste them back in again. :)

I hope this guide has helped at least some of you.
Feel free to suggest other things that I should make a guide on for Good Company,

Cheers
- Zero