Soft Drink DIM (6/98)  (unzip this into your Entrepreneur directory)

 

Afterall, what really is a soft drink?  It's just carbonated sugar water.  Your job is to become the world's leading producer of carbonated sugar water and destroy your competitors with this.

The Soft drink industry is the first DIM that takes advantage of a few minor Entrepreneur features.  Here they are so that you aren't wondering about them when you're playing:

Luck.
Thus far, you have had total control over all the traits in your product.  The soft drink industry takes advantage of the luck trait (buitl into Entrepreneur).  You can't control the luck trait and it is the same for all players at all times.  What this means is that even if you have the greatest product, someone can manage to get the world to care about some new and unknown trait that you have no control over and then it just comes down to distribution and marketing.  This was how we resolved the issue of "Why is 7up more popular than Sprite when they taste essentially the same?"

the other feature being used is...

Research Screen readyness.
When a product doesn't use space, the area can be used to display whether your engineering offices have been used or not.  A pretty minor feature but the net result is that when you start researching, the line turns green to display that all is well.
 
The Traits:

Taste
This is pretty straight forward.  How good does your product taste? At first, your cola will taste like 2 day old phlegm.  You will need to research your sweetner and to a less extend the "other" ingredients components to improve on this.

Luck
Already described above.

Healthiness
Basically, this just means how fattening it is.  We wanted to stay consistant with the longer bars equal good rule so we changed it to its inverted name.  The more you research on this, the fewer calories and such it will use.

Appeal
This was basicaly put into for marketing. Appeal represents your ability to make your product seem cool.  When you research this, you are coming up with new ways (contests, can design, etc.) to make people think that drinking your product makes them cooler.
 

Tip:
Marketing is the way to go on this DIM...