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Chapter 1: Introduction
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Informatist is a simplified version of the real business world. This exciting virtual business competition game is based in Europe; and is representative of a market that is somewhere in between capitalism and informatism. Anybody can play Informatist and best of all it's absolutely free. This article is slightly lengthy but I suggest you read it through completely, so that you will know what's going on during your game play.
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Chapter 2: Basic Idea
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In this virtual business world you are a businessman or a businesswoman. You goal is to gather the most information (INFO) and to become the biggest Informatist. INFO will be explained below. The ranking of players is based on how much INFO you gather. To do so, you will need to create a business, buy the business real estate property, recruit employees, allocate Workforce usage, adjust the price of products, and even trade stock. There is only one purpose to Informatist – making money and stopping your competitors from making money. There are no computer-generated players in the system and all competitors are real players. Upgrading the image of districts and increasing the number of territories in each district is the main way to get INFO. The law of supply and demand is fundamental to the basics of the game. You can establish Enterprises and Joint Stock Companies (JSCs) and earn money from other companies operating in different business types from yours. Be warned though, that those who work in the same business field as you, will compete with you. So you need to set a proper salary scale for your employees to retain your workers and set appropriate and competitive product prices to keep your company profitable. Players may also pool their capital together and establish a Joint-Stock Company (known as 'Corporation' in the U.S.) A JSC can often incur faster growth than if the players were to create individual Enterprises. Your job is to look for perfect locations (get clues from the statistics and districts reports) to do business, employ and fire people when needed, allocate the appropriate Workforce on profitable products, set a profitable and competitive price to sell products, and check charts and diagrams from the statistics menu so you can act accurately and intelligently. As mentioned before, living in a high image district will give you more energy. Energy is very important when you want to build up new skills (learning is very important for the company operations) or hire employees. Do whatever you can to make money and use the money to raise the image or upgrade the territories so you can get INFO in return. The more INFO you gather, the higher your player ranking will become. Most important of all, have fun and enjoy Informatist!
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| Chapter 3: Registration |
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Starting from this version, players have to register before they can play this game in order to discourage cheating and to minimize confusion between a registered account and a guest account. A registered account can access all features of the game, including those related to the stock market immediately. Your browser must accept cookies and JavaScript. Remember, it is absolutely free.
I've tried to make registration as easy as possible. The only thing that people tend to misunderstand is that you can not register multiple players for the same person. One person can have no more than one player. So if you have already registered, skip this chapter and move on to Chapter 4: Real Estate. However, if you are new to Informatist, then please go ahead and register. At "Register here", enter your details and you will receive an email message with a confirmation code (this is just to discourage people from registering multiple accounts), then click the link in the email or simply enter the given code on the registration page. It's that simple. After registering you may login immediately. Simply enter your username and password which you registered and click Login. You will be asked to supply the registration code, which will have been sent to your email address.
After you have played for far too long and your eyes are tearing and red and your hands are shaking like they were ran over by a ten ton truck, consider logging out by clicking the "Logout" button at the top of the page. If you are using a personal computer and not a public one, you can just close the browser window. If you have no activity for about 20 minutes, the game will logout automatically and you will have to login again to play.
If you forget your password, type anything into the password field and you will be able to reset your password. However, if you forget your username, you're doomed! Send an email the Administrator, which is me, and tell me your problem. PLEASE DO NOT REGISTER ANOTHER ACCOUNT.
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Chapter 4: Real Estate
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When you confirm your registration, you're also informed of your residence location. On the menu, go to "Real Estate ->Map" and you will find a world map there. Zoom into Europe and you will see all the countries (districts) in Informatist. There are 35 districts (all of which do actually exist) and each one of them has its own unique business fields (see below). Districts have different image levels and territory sizes. Your residence can be moved to any district, but depending on its image, it will incur different rental rates and will bring you more or possibly less energy every hour.
Companies can buy or sell territory in any district provided it is available. If you don't have enough territory for your company, your employees (Workforce and/or Brainforce - see Job Pool) won't come to work. One territory equals one Workforce. Brainforce is like a separate business field and they need offices. If you want to hire Brainforce, you have to own territory suitable for Offices. This is the same for all business fields.
Your residence is so tiny that it doesn't occupy any territory. However, businesses do occupy territory. Sometimes there is a demand for a territory but there are none available. This is when Public Auctions come into play. If you feel that you own valuable territory, you may try to auction it in the Public Auctions for an above market-value price. Any company can then bid in your auction, and the winner is the company with the highest offer. There are certain limitations on the sale price of territories in a Public Auction The starting price of territory cannot exceed more than 50 times the regular selling price of the territory, when you sell it back to the district. The final price also cannot exceed more than 50 times the starting price of the auction. So the final price of each territory can never be higher than 50 x 50 or 2500 times the regular selling price.
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| Chapter 5: Business Fields
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Before you start your own business, it's a good idea to check what's happening in the market. Under Statistics look for Marketshare and Income & Expenses to see which business field you may want to go into.
There are 16 different business fields from which to choose. You may try your hand at any of them. Marketshare shows what percentage of the market each business field occupies. The more employees in each field, the larger their part is and vice versa. It may be a good idea to start a company in the business field which is least occupied, so you will have less competition. Now this is very important: business fields are tightly connected. This means that, for example, if there are many agriculture employees, companies in the food industry will earn more money.
Use your logic and utilize all the information available in Statistics to choose the best business field.
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| Chapter 6: Job Pool
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There are 6 different types of employees: Assistants, Laborers, Salesmen, Managers, Engineers and Scientists. They are finite and there is a limited number in the game. Every working company entering into the business field , raises that limit in the field it operates. For example, for every working pharmaceutical company there are 60 available Assistants, 45 Laborers, 30 Sales, 15 Managers, 4 Engineers and 2 Scientists. If there are 23 pharmaceutical companies, then there will be 1380 Assistants, 1035 Laborers and so on. But this is not a one time addition of the workers, as the system will load those workers in the market gradually. The longer your company will survive, the more workers will be loaded into your business field. However, you have to do certain things correctly first. It's not like in a socialism country, so that you get want you want instantly. You have to fight and compete, before achieve your goals. Every company states how many and which type of employees it would like to employ and what their salaries will be. The system then checks how many employees are available, what the average salary is, and then add or remove employees for every company. The Job Pool updates every 20 minutes so employees will come to or leave your company once every 20 minutes. If your salaries are set high, the maximum employee limits are high and the office is in a low image area, you will have the capacity to have as many employees as your business field allows. However, if your salaries are average, and the maximum employee limits are not so high, there won't be as many people working for you. One main thing you should keep in mind and take very seriously: Never ever enter a business field has a negative unemployed rate, as this means workers are leaving this business field now and you have no chance to hire workers even if your salary is higher than whatever number is stated.
So as you can see, there are 16 business fields x 6 types of employees which makes for 96 different combinations. These figures and more are available at Statistics -> Job Pool in real-time.
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| Chapter 7: Qualifications, Skills and Information
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You will probably understand by now that employees differ in their maximum employee limits, salaries, and qualifications. There are six types of different occupations (Assistants, Laborers, Salesmen, Managers, Engineers, Scientists). The system is separated into two divisions of employees. The first three types (Assistants, Laborers, Sales) are the Workforce. They help your company earn money by manufacturing or selling products. Assistants and Laborers are in charge of manufacturing and Sales are in charge of selling products. Your production Workforce will be equal to two times the number of Laborers plus just one times the number of assistant. Sales Workforce is equal to three times the number of Sales you have.
To make things more complicated, there's another division called Brainforce. Brainforce can make your Workforce stronger by up to two times. If you have 0 Brainforce, it will have no impact on your Laborers whatsoever. There is more than one type of Brainforce as there is more than one type of Workforce, but Brainforce only has two types, namely manufacturing Brainforce and sales Brainforce. Engineers and Scientists are in charge of production, and Managers are in charge of sales. Production Brainforce is equal to five times the number of Engineers you have employed and six times the number of Scientists you have. Sales Brainforce is equal to four times the number of Managers you have. That's much more than Workforce, but the total number of Brainforce employees available in the game is much smaller, so salaries should generally be higher.
Now let me explain the formula of this calculation, the total production Workforce that you worked out before will multiply with a coefficient, the lowest this coefficient can be is one, and the highest is two. The formula for this coefficient is one plus the total production Brainforce (TPB) divided by the total production Workforce (TPW). (1 + TPB/TPW). If the calculation above results in a number that is greater then two, the system will set it to two. You will have a minimum of one and a maximum of two. You can see that for every 6 Assistants, you have to employ 1 Scientist in order to have the best multiplying ratio of 2. Even if you employ hundreds of Scientists and have several Laborers, your Workforce effect will stay no greater than two, (2 x Workforce).
In the same way, sales force also has a coefficient. The formula for this coefficient is one plus the total sales Brainforce (TSB) divided by the total sales Workforce (TSW). (1 + TSB/TSW). As previously, if the calculation above results in a number that is greater then two, the system will set it to two. You will have a minimum of one and a maximum of two. For example if you have two Sales, hiring one more manager can boost up 33% of your sales. By using the formulae above, you can work out an optimal number of Brainforce to double up your Workforce.
As you work with the system, the processes will become much clearer than reading them. So keep on plugging through. There is another factor to consider in your hiring and running of your business. As in the real world, it is Qualification. Once you understand the doubling effect of hiring Brainforces, then you will also need know you can increase production and sales by hiring higher levels of labor. You will have the opportunity to learn new skills. The skills available for every business field are different. There are 16 skills in each of the 16 fields, for a grand total of 256 skills. If you enhance your skills, better employees become available for hire in that business field and your company will make more money.
The levels are classified as follows:
Level 0 can hire Assistants,
Level 2 can hire Laborers,
Level 5 can hire Sales,
Level 8 can hire Managers,
Level 12 can hire Engineers,
and Level 16 can hire Scientists.
Skills can be learned in the Learning Center The better the skill, the more energy, money and time is needed to learn it. You may not want to wait, so you can accelerate the learning process by using the "Haste" option. Hastened learning will require additional energy. For example, if learning a skill requires 20 Euros and you decide to use "Haste" a single time, you will spend an additional 20 Euros and it will shorten the learning time by one day. If you use "Haste" another time by paying another 20 Euros you can shorten the time by another one day, and so on. But energy is not the only limiting factor. Without INFO (information) you are not allowed to learn many skills. Only ten skills (any level) can be learned without INFO. Any subsequent skills learned require you to have a certain amount of INFO. To reiterate, you can earn INFO by increasing territories or raising image index. It will cost you a lot of money for the either or both of them, but it shows that you not only care about money but that you also care about the community in this territory. This makes you an entrepreneur with social responsibilities. That's the reason why you gain INFO from doing this.
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| Chapter 8: Product
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To make the game more realistic, we have introduced the "Product" concept into this version. Each business field contains five products. You must now take care of one more factor during your company's daily operations, and that is to maximize your revenue. Decide on what kind of product is currently profitable and allocate your Workforce to produce it. A Product Information report and a Production-Sales report are located at the Statistics menu to help you in your decision making. You can obtain detailed product information of each business field from the Product Information report.
The first section provides the current average price on the market vs. the base price i.e. the base price of a 46 inch plasma TV may be 1,500 Euros but the current average is at 2,000 Euros. That means some potential buyers may put their purchase on hold until the price drops to a reasonable price range (Your sales volume will decrease if you set your sell price higher than the base price) and vice versa.
The second section is a market status indicator where you can find the current market type of each product, for example: Seller's Market, Buyer's Market or Balanced. Obviously you may have more interest in the seller's market, since that means there are a lot of buyers who want to buy the product but are unable to (Try to enter choose the sellers' market and prevent the buyers' market). The logic behind this section is related to "Business Fields" (see chapter 5). Now the situation becomes more complicated, right? Here is an example, even when the price of bottled water goes to 50 Euros, you may still see it as the seller's market type if an earthquake happens and causes huge problems in the business field of "Transportation."
The third pie chart displays the Workforce allocation of all 5 products. It will help you keep tabs on all your competitors and the current market. For example; you found a seller's market for Plasma TV, but a lot of your competitors are already selling that product. You may choose to stay away from that retail field since it's not worth it. The Production Sales Report provides you with detailed statistics of the daily production and sales in the company. If you find that your sales are smaller than production, then you might want to increase your sales force or do something to boost the sales force ratio. On the other hand, if you are running out of stock and the demand is high, then you will go to increase production to maximize your revenue.
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| Chapter 9: Enterprises
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One easy way to earn money is to establish an Enterprise. When you click the link “Establish an Enterprise” some options become available. The title is explanatory and business fields have already been discussed. Now, we come to authorized capital and it sounds complicated, but it's really very logical. Authorized capital shows how much money is invested into the company. In the case of an Enterprise, you can choose any amount of cash to invest and that money is taken from your personal account and put into the Enterprise's account. In Informatist there's no tax for authorized capital. You do have an added option to “Veil Taxes.” You can take a chance and not pay everything, because sometimes you don't need to and taxes are evil! (wink) You may choose a percentage between 0 and 100, although be warned, if you are caught veiling taxes you must pay a hefty fine. (See Chapter 10)
Now that your Enterprise is ready to go, you should see its title in Your Companies list on the top menu. You can click it and rule it.
Don't let your Enterprise balance fall lower than -30,000 Euros. If it does, your company will become bankrupt and all debts will be paid from your personal account.
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| Chapter 10: Taxes
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The information on your company status is updated every 20 minutes. Since income has been exhaustively examined, we'll now focus on expenses. Expenses include salaries, territory maintenance costs, and taxes. You choose salaries yourself, so add them all up and multiply by 0.67. This money is used up every hour and it won't come back. I've decided to include this tax in Informatist. Tax looks like this: (salaries x 0.33). Remember that "Veil taxes" option? Now this is where it comes into play. If you choose this option, you will be veiling citizen income tax. If you've chosen 30%, then you will only pay 70% of that tax. However, in the case of 30%, there's 30% possibility that you will get busted. (If you've chosen, say 38%, there's a 38% possibility of getting busted.) If you do get busted, you will have to pay a fine and the fine is 10 times the percentage you veiled. So if you have chosen to veil 30% of the income tax you have a 30% chance of being caught and paying a fine of 300 % of the taxes would originally have had to pay. Happy veiling!
Oh, there's another tax called corporation tax. If you are the proud owner of an Enterprise and it happens to gain a profit of more than 10,000 Euros, it will get taxed. This tax is 15% (profit times 0.15). For Joint Stock Companies, this tax is paid when profit reaches 25,000 Euros.
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| Chapter 11: Banking
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With this version, we have decided to allow players to save money and borrow money from the central bank. The saving money part is pretty straight forward. You put your money into the bank and earn interest on that. You can save your money and your company's money as well. The borrow portion of the game is a little bit more complicated. Personal loan is similar to credit cards: it's unsecured and the system will automatically determine an amount based on your earnings and spending. A business loan requires you to pledge your land as collateral first. Once that is done, only then can you borrow money from the bank for your business. If you can't pay off the loan on the due date, the system will automatically sell your land out to cover the loan. Whatever loan type (personal or business) requires you to pay off the current loan first before you can apply for a new one.
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| Chapter 12: Business Opportunity
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It's time to have more interaction among the players. Instead of competing, now you need to cooperate. Companies can earn extra money by doing projects. There are several factors included in each project. They are Consignor, Consignee, Prize, Cost, Duration, Deadline, Business Field, and Energy. If you go to - Your Companies->My Business Opportunity, you can find a list of all your companies, owned or managed, and all the related projects and their current status, which relate to your companies.
If you have no projects assigned as consignor, you can create a new one and the system will provide you with the project summary including the factors listed above. You may choose to accept or not to accept. If you accept the project, you need to find and pay a consignee to work on the project with you, before the project expires. The company will get the revenue after the project is finished. The "None Available" status might change to a clickable "Find" link under the "As consignee" column if there are any open projects suitable for your business field. You can then accept the project if the deal sounds reasonable to you. Couldn't find the right business partner? Posting in the forum might help.
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| Chapter 13: Joint Stock Companies (Corporations)
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So the basic idea of a Joint Stock Company is rather simple. A group of people bring their money together and start a business. Just like real life, if they gain profits, it can be distributed among them in the form of dividends or higher stock price, or it can be used to expand the company's operation. If a Joint Stock Company becomes bankrupt, everybody loses their investment.
Now since you're reading this, I will assume that you want to be part of a Joint Stock Company. First, find some friends who have some money to contribute. Then go and click “Establish Joint Stock Company. Enter your friends' usernames in the fields. Please note that a JSC can have 16 different business types, compared to those ten, which are suitable for Enterprises. You should be familiar with authorized capital by now, after reading about it earlier. It's only slightly different for a JSC. I have made a decision to allow JSCs a higher authorized capital of 35,000 Euros and above, without any upper limit. Choose your capital amount and establish the JSC. Now you can click the “Make Investments link, and there sits your JSC. Every player in Informatist can invest in your company, but the players which you have listed will have the first right of refusal. This means that they are founders of this JSC and that the company won't start business operations until the founders invest up to or more than the authorized capital. Sometimes not all of the invited players will take up the offer to invest. If the founders of the JSC are unable to raise the full amount of the authorized capital, non-invited players can start investing in the company after 24 hours from inception. If the JSC cannot raise its authorized capital after seven days of inception, it automatically becomes bankrupt.
After the founders invest the required amount of money, it is joined with investments from non-invited players to make up the grand total for authorized capital. The player who has the highest learning skill of the business field automatically becomes head of the company and manages it. If there are no investors with learning, the company becomes bankrupt. If the JSC moves beyond this stage, shares are distributed to every investor and everyone has to give their portion of the energy which is needed to establish the JSC, proportional to their investments. All the percentages will of course total 100% of the energy requirement. Now the shareholders can elect a new head. Simply visit JSC head election and vote. The "weight" of your vote is proportional to your share of the company. So if somebody has more than 50% of the company stock, he or she has the right to decide who manages the company.
From time to time you should get some dividends, or if you're head of the JSC then you should pay dividends from time to time. There is a 15% tax for dividends paid, so if the head decides to distribute 10,000 Euros dividends to everybody, shareholders get only 10,000 x 0.85 which equals 8,500 Euros and the rest is the tax burden paid on the dividend.
All in all, you can see that Joint Stock Companies are way better than Enterprises. You may collect capital very fast and gain steps ahead of your rivals faster than they can notice.
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| Chapter 14: Stock Market
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Along with Joint Stock Companies comes the stock market. I personally think that the stock market is the most interesting feature in Informatist. However it's the hardest feature to learn as well.
The main feature of the stock market is definitely the company shares. As you may already know, a share is a certificate, which proves that you own a certain part of a JSC. Well, actually there are no papers in Informatist, you are presented with a digital stock certificate. So anyway, the basic nominal of a share in Informatist is 5 Euros. It is just the default price of 1 share which should be determined by founders of the JSC, but in this game they don't have such an opportunity because a JSC is already complicated enough for ordinary people. As obvious as it seems, at the very beginning, [total shares] = [authorized capital]/[nominal (5 Euros)]. For example, the company will have 4,000 (20,000/5) shares if the authorized capital is 20,000 (4,000x5). So the higher the authorized capital is, the more shares that are issued. After establishing a JSC some investors, for reasons of their own, may want to sell their shares. You can do so by clicking “JSC in the detail page, check it out, scroll down and make a bid. All the bids and sell offers are listed on the Trade Stock page. Find an offer that suits you, and accept it. Offers which stay there, unaccepted, for longer than 1 week are automatically deleted. All your successful deals are recorded, and you can view those in your Trade History page. The average price of one share traded every hour is called Stock Price. As a general rule, it goes up when the JSC is profitable, and goes down, when it's not successful. Low stock price is good if you want to buy and bad if you'd like to sell.
Now let's say you have some reasons to adjust the base price of the stock (i.e. you think it's either too high or too low). This can be accomplished in your company's page, under the section Authorized Capital. If the company has a large amount of retained earnings, you can use them to raise authorized capital, which will in turn, raise the base price of the shares. This also works the other way around. If the retained earnings are negative, (a loss,) you can lower the authorized capital to achieve the opposite results.
You may want to get some additional cash just like Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in the real business world. One way to do so is to raise authorized capital with the help of the stock market. The JSC will issue new shares (at the current base price), and people may buy them, thus bringing additional cash into the business. The negative effect is that the percentage of company shares you control will get smaller. It's also possible to get the opposite results by using some of the company's funds to buy stock to reduce the number of total shares, and thus, make your shares a larger proportion of the company.
You may discover various strategies and methods of earning money in the stock market. Informatist gives you all the tools, including those beautiful graphs and charts, so go ahead and try your luck and wisdom in the market! Each step you take makes the entire picture easier to understand and more fun to play.
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| Chapter 15: Bankruptcy
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There's a high possibility that you will become bankrupt. In real life a lot of companies do go bankrupt. Statistics shows that almost 95% of the startup companies go bankrupt within their first 3 years. Informatist is no exception. We've maintained a high bankruptcy rate to mimic real life.
It was already mentioned that Enterprises become bankrupt, when their account balance falls lower than –30,000 Euros, while Joint Stock Companies' bankruptcy point is -50 000 Euros. Bankrupt companies are automatically removed from the market, and the entry is placed in the Statistics under the Bankrupted Companies list. Nobody is responsible for a bankrupted JSC, but the last head is placed in the Bankrupted Companies list for other players to see. However, bankrupt Enterprises hurt its owner in more ways, The owner has to pay 80 energy points as well as the debt being debited from the owner's account.
If a player's personal money is less than -15 000 Euros, then that player becomes bankrupt. When that happens, everything that the player has ever owned, Enterprises that he has set up, stocks, skills and everything else will be lost. Players can restart the game manually through the Account Settings page. By the way, that's the page where you change your password and email address.
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Chapter 16: Summary
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Almost all of the major concepts of Informatist have been introduced here, but there are still some tricks and tips waiting for you to find out, since I think you will have more fun if you ferret those out by yourself. We have an integrated forum in this version so you can post your questions there. I'm sure the moderator and other players will provide you with helpful information. You can also post your suggestions or any bugs you find on the same forum. I will update Informatist and release patches on a monthly basis. If any institution or school wants to have a customized and separate Informatist game environment for educational purposes, please email us at info@informatist.net and we will be happy to provide that for you.
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