In the past, I've gotten annoyed by those types of goals because I've achieved them, and the game ended when I wanted to continue building, playing, and having fun with my company. So, I'm doing an open-ended goal right now, where I can continue to play
as long as I want, but at the same time, I can complete the goal whenever I want.

Example open-ended goal: Gain control of 4 companies.

The one thing that I've noticed is that the inhabitants of each city are culturally unique in that they have different product demands. For example, let's say you start selling Pork in one city, and notice revenue of over 10 million... it would be a
mistake to assume that revenue is proportional to population. You could have a very small city with a large pork demand resulting in 10 million in revenues and a very large city with almost no Pork revenue.

The moral of the story is that the size of a city's population does not matter. What matters is a city's demand for each product. And to accommodate this demand efficiently.

Let's look at the spectrum of demand, and how to get the best efficiency:

#Sales-Units : #Purchasing Units (#Products per store)
1:1 (x4) low demand
2:1 (x3) medium-low
3:1 (x2) medium-high
4:1 + 3:1 (x2) medium-hybrid
5:1 + 2:1 (x2) high-low-hybrid
6:3 (x1) high-demand-slow-production
6:2 (x1) high-demand-fast-production-with-advertising
7:2 (x1) high-demand-fast-production
8:1 (x1) high-demand-very-fast-production-rate

At the low end of the spectrum, you might have as little as one factory supplying the entire world (or one factory per region). At low demand, you'll have Department Stores (Retailers) offering 4 products: 4 purchasing units, 4 sales units, and maybe 1
advertising unit. This provides the best efficiency for low demand products.

For medium-low demand, your Retailers will only offer 3 products:
1 purchasing unit and two sales unit per product.

For medium-high demand, your Retailers will only offer 2 products: 1 purchasing unit and three sales units per product.

At the higher end of the spectrum, once your Retailers only offer 1 product, then you'll have to vary the rate of production to get the best efficiency. For example, you might have one factory per retailer; two factories per retailer; or even as many as
three factories per retailer.

Most of the time (for higher demands), it'll be 2 purchasing units supplying 6 or 7 sales units with maybe an advertising unit, and one or two factories.

And although one Department Store may not be able to supply the demand for an entire city, you can't just add more stores with the same products because, unfortunately, their sales will dramatically fall to the point where the sum of their sales will not
equal the single store.

If you've hit the ceiling of sales, then you'll have to train your Department Stores to increase the efficiency of the sales and purchasing units. Or, you can optionally hire a President for an absurd amount of money to immediately increase unit-levels (
after you assign control of the facility over to the President).

I think the best President in the game is Jason Branch. He provides +2 retailing, +5 manufacturing, and +1 farming.

Honorable mentions are Warren Rotledge and Taylor Lewis.

Taylor Lewis provides +5 retailing and +5 raw-material-extraction, but he doesn't product any manufacturing boost.

Warren Rotledge provides +1 retailing, +4 manufacturing, +5 raw-materials, and +1 farming.

The problem that I can't figure out is that there seems to be a maximum salary of $2,147,483,647... and if you hit the maximum salary and it's not high enough, they'll leave. Which I just checked is actually the maximum value of a 32-bit integer (problem
solved).

So, don't make the same mistake that I did and forever rely on the increased efficiency due to your President, but rather, take the small & precious time-frame that you have him to train your units higher and slowly delegate each facility back to
yourself (the CEO)... to the point where you no longer need a President to increase unit efficiency.

Anyways, I got off on a tangent about how to increase sales. Back to my original point about product demand: All of this begs the question, "How do you know the demand for a product in a given city ?"

Press '1' to goto the Product Summary page (filter All Sales, Consumer Goods, All Companies, All Cities). Then click on the product that you're interested in producing, and cycle thru each city to see what the local demand is. (Note that this trick does
not work on new technologies).

This trick is especially good for small cities where Urban real-estate is limited... so you can prioritize products with high demand... and so that you don't mistakenly try to build up heavy local infrastructure & marketing around a product that is never
going to sell.

Anyways, I'm currently doing $21 billion in revenue and $7 billion in profits, but I just noticed this little quirk in local demand :(

Thankfully, I've answered my own question about maximum salary. At first, I thought maybe it was a percentage of revenue or profit, but now, I clearly see it's limited by the capacity of a 32-bit integer. It's kinda funny that in 1995, some badass
programmer just did "int salary;" to make a spot to store the number, and the testers never alerted them: "Um, hey guys, after we run this simulation for about 10 game-years, we've noticed that $2.147 billion is not large enough to store the salary of a
president." So... I'm left wondering what the other limitation are ? Like maximum revenue ? long int ? Which is 9200 quadrillion... so... logically, if we program the AI to favor a salary that's just 1% of revenue, then that's 92 quadrillion... way too
big to fit in a 32-bit integer.

So, if anyone needs a badass tester, I'm your man!

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