I'm stuck and was wondering if any designers out there could give me some alternate ideas. I am creating a selling game, where players sell their wares. Obviously, the goal is to sell the most products and make the most money. However, I have added a mechanic I call "time units". It could be min, hours, days, I wanted to make it generic. Anyway, in order to put products up for sale, they may or may not require time units to assemble a product, and may cost money as well. I am keeping track of the time units used for each player thru out the game. At the end of the game, I don't really know how to use these "time units", plus the money earned, to determine a winner. I wanted to do a $/time unit, but you would need a calculator to see who won. Should I just throw out the time unit concept and go with whoever made the most money?
Selling Game needs end game help
Why don't you just force the players to buy time units with money, as when you pay a salary. If you hire three times as much personnel, you can produce three times as much goods in a given time, so time units might turn into man-hours. By making the players buy man-hours with money, you don't need to keep track of it anymore, just count the money.
Seo
Off hand, when I think of a garage sale and my experience with them, one doesnt really think of time as a major factor... it is definitely there... but I'm not sure its an appearant or identifying part of a garage sale in most peoples minds.
So... If it were me, time IS money as they say, and I would combine them and reflect this by having a more time consuming action (hanging signs around town) simply cost more (took off work early, gas, materials, etc....).
I agree with Brahmulus, you could just pay to get time for promoting the sale, or simply to stay there selling for a longer period of time.
My earlier concept of man-hours can still aply to some extent (say you pay your kids a % of what they sell if they help you, so you can sell faster), but within a limit.
Or you can keep the amount of time fixed (let's say all players invest x hours in promotion, x hours in the sale itself) and compare how much money each player has collected at the end of the sale. Remaining items can be substracted from the earned money, so you have a cost for not selling, but also force players not to sell too cheap. I think you might balance things that way, and get rid of the time problem.
Seo
A simple-to-calculate option would be simply penalize the players who invested the most time with an "opportunity cost" type of financial penalty.
One could, for example, keep money earned as public information (money in front of the player or what have you), but time spent as semi-hiddent information, with players receiving chits for the time spent that they keep face-down in front of them, in various denominatiions (1, 2, 3, 5, etc.). At game end the time chits are revealed, and the player who spent the most time receives a penalty of $x. Could even be that the playere with the second-most time receives a smaller penalty.
A mechanism like this is used in Martin Wallace's game Struggle of Empires, and it works really well, with everyone trying to spend as little "time" (in that game it's Unrest points) as possible, while knowing that they need to spend some at least in order to earn the most "money" (in that game, victory points). Quite effective, and it could add some nice tension in your game.
In addition, in SoE there's a way to reduce the "time" spent, at the cost of doing something else on your turn. Also works well.
Your game is plenty different enough that the mechanism won't make the games seem similar at all, but it could work really well with your game (it's just a small part of SoE, one of a dozen mechanisms in the game).
It makes more sense if you use the "time units" not as a victory condition, but as a resource to produce more goods. At the end of the game, the winner is the one how sold more units and/or has more money, no need to mess it with time units.