Sales depend on location

A company can provide and sell one or more services.

There are three kinds of services in the game: hotels, restaurants and cinemas. For simplicity, all services work the same way.

Selling a service means choosing a location, constructing the building and hiring people. The construction of a building is instantaneous for game play reasons. There are startup and operational costs.

The number of workers in a service and the amount of work determine the capacity of the service. The capacity of a service is essentially the number of customers that the business unit can sell to. How many customers a service actually gets depends on the location of the service.

The more activity there is within four distance blocks of the service, all other things being constant, the greater the number of customers. This means it pays to locate hotels, restaurants and cinemas near areas with a lot of shops, factories, crop farms, livestock farms, mines, oil rigs, logging camps, and research centers. A business unit must have at least one worker in it to count. This is represented on the map by an underline.

But at the same time, the more competitors there are within four distance blocks, the less the number of customers.

It is possible to shut down a service at any time and recover 95% of its fixed cost.