I've been playing it a lot lately, just bought my largest competitor. It's been great fun :)
Anyway, I realize it can be a hard game to get into (despite having pretty good tutorials and ingame help), so if there's any newbies out there, feel free to ask any questions while I have all the details of the game fresh in my memory.

I wish I could take you up on your offer, but I will pick it up once there is a weekend sale on both. I just do not think both are worth $16.00, so I will wait until it hits the $14.00 range.

There is no point in getting the sequel if you get Capitalism Plus, so that would just be a waste of money. But this is already being discussed in another thread.

Thanks for the offer. I've just brought No. 2 and if I find I've got problems I'll message you.

Ah, sorry, I prefer the original Cap Plus and it's been ages since I've played Capitalism 2. But ask away, if I can't help I'm sure there's someone else who can.

Fantastic game, just got started on it and it's really advanced for its time :D

Are the supported resolutions the same for Cap Plus and Cap 2? I'm not too crazy about the cityscape in Cap 2 and I have heard many people say Cap Plus was clearly superior. However, nobody really gives me the hard facts as to why Cap Plus is superior. Any thoughts? I'll probably buy Duke Nukem this weekend and I'm thinking I can get that and Cap + for the price of Cap 2 (nearly).
Bit

It's early game, I'm selling my widgets for a year now, I have no competitors except for the local ones. I have the local guys crushed, quality 30, theirs is 11, equal in brand, and 3 bucks cheaper. Yet the local sellers have 75% of the market share. Sometimes I have 33%, sometimes just a sliver, it just seems random. Why am I not crushing these guys?
DeanCo--

I don't really have enough information to give specific advice, but I have a few ideas.
This may be a stupid question, but are you sure you're producing enough goods to actually supply the market? If you're not sure, look at the blue and red lines in the sales unit in a store. If the red one is longer than the blue one, you're not able to meet the demand. Ideally, the blue and red lines should be about equal length.
Check the Manager option in the Help-menu in order to see exactly what info the different units (sales, purchasing, manufacturing, et.c.) display, and then use that info to your advantage. If a manufacturing unit in your factory is working at full capacity, but still not managing to meet the demand, you probably need to add another one if that's possible.
One mistake I often did early on was I believed that one factory would be enough to cover the demand of multiple cities. That may be true sometimes, but it's usually not the case. Often you'll need one factory per product per city. Also, the internal sale option is very useful. Otherwise AI players will start buying your products, and making it harder for your own stores to meet the demand. So they will get income that could have gone in your pockets.

That's a great answer, not stupid at all, and that's another one of those 'details' that is starting to sink in slowly but surely. I have been approaching that problem by pumping a lot of money into training. I figured, probably mistakenly, that once the production lines get to level 4 or 5 there are enough boxes flying off the shelves to satisfy 4 cities. Also because it is such a pain to re-link suppliers, assuming I set up another factory. Which brings me to my next question: isn't there an easy way to find out who is selling what, and to link the factories? I am following the manual which says, click around until you find someone selling or using the product, click the link button, then follow the lines on the minimap until finally you find the silicon mine or whatever. That's a lot of clicking to find that out, and it still doesn't tell me if he's selling silicon at the cheapest price. I'd need to check all my competitors to really know that. Isn't there a better way?
Thanks,
DeanCo--

What I usually do, at least as long as I have products that I know are going to be successful, is to basically build four factories for every one store. One factory for each product that goes into the store. Of course, I build these as close to the city as possible (usually just outside the suburban area), to minimize shipping costs.
This is probably inefficient in the long run, but it works well enough for most products (at least the typical supermarket stuff).
To be honest, I don't quite remember. My problem is that I almost never do this myself. Basically, I do _everything_ myself. I always do my best to own the entire production chain, from mining the chemical minerals to selling the shampoo. It pays off in the long run, and it helps me to ensure that my goods are of high quality and that my opponents don't get access to the raw materials.
But I suppose the best way to find info like this is to start the search with the raw materials. So if you need plastic, just find the oil well and see where it links to - one of those factories is bound to sell plastic. I know, it's not an ideal solution. Ideally you would make your own plastic with your own oil. :-)

Woah, dude, you just blew my mind. Four factories for 1 store! I'll put farms near cities like that to insure fresh produce and low shipping, but factories! Man, I'm like, 2 factories for 4 products in 2 cities. Doesn't your plan waste...er, boxes? Assuming a simple supply chain, making 1 product might take 4 or 5 boxes, so a factory can probably make 2 products with a little planning. Unless you're saying you have 2 assembly lines for each product supplying 1 store, in which case my mind just got blown again. Guess I'll have to rethink my strategy for the 22nd time...
At any rate, thanks for the replies, I appreciate it.
DeanCo--

I'll use a very simple product for an example - the humble bed. It's one of the best early moneymakers in the game, in my experience.
To make a bed, you need one thing - timber. So I put a purchasing unit buying timber in the middle box of the top row. Then I put a manufacturing unit directly under that, and a sales unit directly under that.
Sometimes I'll hook up an inventory unit next to the sales unit. They're inexpensive and can be useful to make sure that production continues when sales are slow, and there's supply when the production can't keep up with the sales.
Now, this looks like an incredibly inefficient factory, using only three (or four) out of nine possible boxes. But pretty soon, provided your timber is of high quality, the beds will get very popular, and the factory won't be able to keep up. So I add another manufacturing unit next to the present one, with links to the existing purchasing and sales units (and the inventory unit if it's there).
And as the demand grows, I'll add a third manufacturing. So the factory ends up with one purchasing unit in the top row, that links to three manufacturing units in the middle row, that links to one sales unit in the bottom row. One sales unit should be enough - with other products it might not be, but for beds it works well.
And this factory will most likely still have problems covering the demand in one city, at least until the results of the training kicks in. Other players might claim it's an inefficient way of doing things, but it works extremely well for me.
It typically looks like this in the end:
# P #
M M M
# S I
Edit: Keep in mind that not all products behave the same - with some products you may easily have one factory for several cities. Also, if you want the bed strategy to work well, you need high quality timber. So buy yourself a good lumber mill and make sure it's set on internal sale so that the AI players can't take advantage of your raw materials.
Edit 2: And yes, this is for one product in one store. :-)

Zeewolf: Once again, thanks very much for spelling it out for me. Part of my problem is that it's such a pain in the ass to re-link production when you modify your factories, I was just too lazy to do all that clicking. Also, I figured a factory using only 4 boxes would be a drain on my "budget", I assumed that as long as I was paying upkeep and maintenance for a factory (early game, not much money rolling in), I may as well get the most out of it and cram as many boxes as I can into it.
BTW, I went back to my game and built more factories making the same products, and sure enough, I am now competing in socks and sweaters, so you were right.
Man, I really wanna buy Cap 2 now, but apparently you're not a fan of it. I downloaded the Cap 2 demo and was unable to get anywhere with it, but then again there is no tutorial in the demo. If there wasn't that deep tutorial in Cap +, the game wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes on my hard drive. As it is, I'm reaching X-COM levels of addiction. Any particular reason why Cap 2 is less good?
DeanCo--

The problem is that, well, I played Cap 2 for some days when it first came out (I bought it the first week it was on sale), and quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't as good as the first game (though it had some nice extra features). I remember having good reasons for this, but... well, it's been many years, and I don't actually remember those reasons now! :-)
I know that sounds a bit silly. But believe me, I was ready to love Cap 2 when it came out, and I didn't.
Of course, $ 10 isn't actually such a lot of money, and if you like Cap Plus, I'm sure you'll like the second as well. My advice is to continue a bit with the demo and see what you think of it first, though. Especially after you have some experience with the original game.