Finding suppliers is a bit overwhelming. With amount of countries possible it becomes a hassle to find a particular product.
Could we maybe have an option to search the world for products instead of having to check each country individually?

Yes. I’ll add options to search for All Countries, European Countries, ... It will be much easier.
I plan to implement this over the next week (I’m currently rewriting the business units interface to simplify things…).

You can now search all countries in one click.
Use the “All Countries” option in the countries drop down list.

Would it be possible to search for suppliers via region as well i.e per state in the USA?

I find that the problem with suppliers is dealing with large numbers of suppliers.  When I’m selling beds, and I find that there are 27 suppliers (for example).  I want to be able to order them by price (I can do this) and add all of them below a certain price.  Further, when I’d rather sell some other product, the process of removing 22 suppliers from my list is tedious.  I wish the add supplier list could do a bulk multiple-select add, and the drop supplier could be done from the existing supplier list, either multiple-select or click-to-drop (as happens with the actions).  This would really help me.

I agree. That would simplify it a lot

An alternate/additional suggestion to the one I made above would be to filter the supplier list of the suppliers that are already set up.  There are lots of Sarrasin Farms selling frozen beef, most of which I have as suppliers…I really only want to add ones that aren’t there—not peruse the whole list.  This might be enough to help out some.  I can only imagine this becoming more of an issue as my empire grows, and more people join the game.

Thanks!

Another thought on suppliers…

From a programming perspective I can understand why the programmer of the game doesn’t want all stores to be supplied by all farms, for example.  As the game grows, this matrix will grow exponentially.  While I understand this, from a player’s perspective it’s difficult.  Even though I had a thriving business selling a certain item, two days later, all my supplies had dried up, and in order to get enough product, I have had to go through the list of suppliers and add all available ones—the list of my existing suppliers long enough that it was easier to just add all listed suppliers.  I expect this will not last past another several days before the existing suppliers are dried up by other demands, and to keep my stores selling at max, I’ll have to repeat this process.

One way to solve this issue would be to have a supplier’s volume be calculated and shown.  When I add a supplier, I would decrement their available volume, and that would also be shown.  This way one could find suppliers who had available volume.  I would be happy to have my store rely on a few suppliers, and the need to add all suppliers of a given product would be circumvented.  It does make for more calculation, but not exponentially more as the game progresses.

Thanks again, Anthony, for a fun, addictive game!

Could the ‘find supplier’ screen not also exclude suppliers (your own co excluded) that are not selling externally?  The you would only have to choose from companies that are actually offering supplies…

Now the find suppliers window automatically filters out:
- suppliers with No Sales strategy
- suppliers with Internal Sales strategy (if company is different than buying unit’s company)