Offices and services

Offices make no goods: they sell their staff's work to the city. They are built downtown; the Advertising agency, the Painter shop and the Clinic are among them, and Buildings lists them all.

An office collects points the way a factory does (see Production and efficiency): its base points plus its staff's points every update, rolled with its efficiency. Each office has its own profession, which brings production points there: a Graphic artist in the Advertising agency, a Painter in the Painter shop, a Doctor in the Clinic. An office takes 2 staff.

The road bonus can count for offices too, and the office's card on the Offices page shows it when it does. The speciality bonus never does. Offices can't be upgraded.

Depending on the round, offices either sell services at the city's daily prices or take jobs. The Offices page shows which, with the prices or the jobs in your city, and the Map page shows the same figures for every city.

Selling services

Here you can build offices once your company value is high enough. Each office offers one of two services at a time, chosen on its card:

A set number of service points makes one billable hour. Once a day, at the time the Offices page shows, each office bills its whole hours at that day's price for the service it offers at that moment. Points short of an hour are kept for the next day, and switching service re-prices the whole day.

Prices are set for each city at midnight. They are higher where most of the city's buildings are factories and shops, and lower the more of them are offices. A service billed more than the average the day before gets cheaper, and one billed less gets dearer.

VIP members can switch all their similar offices at once; otherwise you switch each office on its card.

Taking jobs

Here things happening in the city create jobs:

• every shop in the city wants an advertising job each day, for an Advertising agency;
• every newly finished building wants painting, for a Painter shop, except each company's first few factories and Painter shops themselves;
• every member of staff in the city who calls in sick is a job for a Clinic. Nobody goes absent in their first 72 hours, so Clinics can only be built a few days into the round.

Each job has a top price per hour that nobody sees. You set each office's asking price, within the range its card allows. Every update, the jobs that have waited longest go to the cheapest office of the right kind in the city that has room for another job and asks no more than the job's top price. A job keeps the price it was taken at. Jobs no office takes wait on the Job board.

An office works through its jobs oldest first, a set number of points to each job hour, and is paid price × hours when a job is done. Points it makes with no job to work on are lost, so set a price low enough to win work.

Of each payment, 10% goes to your dividend stockpile and the rest to your savings, and it adds to your company value. Each office's card shows what it earned this week, its last payment and its total for the round.