, Britain
Take the same trade, a 1,200 square foot unit, and the same year. In one of our towns the rent on that unit is a little over £9,000 and you will struggle to find a qualified person for the counter. In another it is above £31,000, there are four competitors within a mile, and you can fill a vacancy in a fortnight.
Those are the same business. They are not the same problem, and a simulation that flattens them into one national average is not simulating Britain.
The fifty were chosen to cover economies, not to rank by size
The obvious way to pick fifty places is to take the fifty largest. We did not do that, because the fifty largest are mostly variations on one thing and it leaves out most of what is interesting about trading in this country.
What we picked for instead was the different kinds of local economy a business can sit in, and then chose real places that are good examples of each. There is a capital that behaves unlike anywhere else. There are the big regional cities with their own labour markets and their own professional sectors. There are post-industrial towns where the rent is low, the premises are available and the demand is thin. There are seaside towns with a summer that pays for a winter. There are market towns serving a large rural catchment. There are new towns built around a road layout. There are university cities where a third of the demand vanishes in June and comes back in September. There are commuter towns with high incomes and nobody at home on a Tuesday. There are places tied to a single industry, which is a different risk profile entirely.
We also wanted the four nations properly represented rather than represented by their capitals, because the rules actually differ and the differences are not cosmetic.
What differs between them inside the model
Each town carries its own values for the things that decide whether a business works there, and those values move over the decades rather than sitting still from 1930 to 2040.
Commercial rents and residential property values differ by a factor of several between the cheapest and the dearest, and the ratio between them changes over time. Wage expectations differ, which is the cost side of the same coin: cheap premises and cheap labour usually travel together, and so does thin demand. Labour availability is separate from wages, because there are places where you cannot recruit a chef at any price. Population and its composition matter, since the age profile of a town decides what sells in it. Local unemployment feeds both wages and demand. And each town has an industrial character that determines who your business customers are and what happens to them when that sector has a bad decade.
Those last two are the ones that make history bite. A town whose economy was built on one industry in 1971 does not look the same in 1991, and a firm trading there through the intervening twenty years experiences that as customers getting poorer and then premises getting cheap.
Competition is local too. Opening a third hairdresser on a parade that supports two is a different act from opening the first one in a town that has none, and the model knows which it is.
Four nations means four sets of rules, not one with regional flavour
This is the part people are most surprised by, and it is a large share of why we built the game around real places rather than invented ones.
Property transaction tax has been three different taxes since 2015. Stamp Duty Land Tax applies in England and Northern Ireland, Land and Buildings Transaction Tax has applied in Scotland since April 2015, and Land Transaction Tax has applied in Wales since April 2018. They have different thresholds and different rates, so the same purchase costs different amounts depending on which of our towns it is in.
Income tax diverges too. If your founder lives in Scotland, Scottish rates and bands apply to their non-savings income, and they have differed from the rest of the UK since 2017.
Business rates are administered separately in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the small business reliefs are not the same scheme with different numbers, they are different schemes. Licensing law differs, notably in Scotland. Planning differs. Landlord and tenant law for residential property in Scotland and in Wales has diverged substantially from England.
A business simulation set in a generic Britain would have to pick one of those and pretend. We would rather model four.
The places we put in on purpose
A few of the fifty are there for reasons that have nothing to do with size.
We wanted at least one town that is genuinely difficult to trade in: low incomes, cheap premises and a high street with gaps in it. Not as a punishment mode, but because a great many British businesses operate in exactly those conditions and their story is not usually told in a game about building things.
We wanted somewhere seasonal enough that the calendar is the main antagonist, where you take most of a year's money in fourteen weeks and spend the other thirty-eight not losing it.
We wanted somewhere tied to one employer, so that a career started in 1975 can experience what happens to every small business in a town when the thing everybody works at closes.
And we wanted a couple of places that grew, so that a player who picks them in 1971 gets the other experience: rising rents that gradually price out the business that arrived first.
Where this shows up in the game
You choose a town before you choose almost anything else, and it is the decision with the longest consequences. The town sets your rent, your wage bill, your customer base, your competitors and which of the four rulebooks you are playing under, for the entire career. Ninety-one of them, across every decade from 1930, means the same trade started in two different places is genuinely two different games, which is what we were after.