| FredMark (White Giant) | Saturday, February 21, 2009 - 03:15 am 
For fully upgraded corps:
From purely corporation profitability standpoint, the lower your salary level the better.
The only one exception to it if you build corporations that produce:
-Gasoline
-Aircraft Fuel
-Electric Power
-Oil
-Factory Maintenance Units
-Jewelry
-bunch of strat stuff that don't reach high market price-premium
and use supply exploit.
Even then, you need to account on market price premium of at least 34% to 67% (34 for gasoline, 67% for jewelry) in order for higher salary levels producing better corp profit indefinitely.
If you don't use supply exploit, you will get corporation profit decrease as salary level increases in all meaningful cases (price premium 85% included).
BUT:
If you build corporations in your own country as your own CEO, the higher salary levels the better for all products from about 30% price premium and above (unless your country is a war slave). I use 30% as crude approximation as you need to balance your rising government worker expenses that "eat up" your tax benefit.
The reason for that is you get an additional income to your COUNTRY from taxes on salary and goods used. So combined income to both country and enterprise will be higher, although on paper your enterprise may be loosing money at extreme salary levels (900-2500 and above, depends on product and price premium). Your country gains will top that.
War slaves are exception to this rule because as salary level rises so is your military costs and it becomes overly counterproductive to maintain higher salary levels. For that matter, I think it is best to maintain as low salary levels as possible for war slaves far below 100, between 20 to 70 (depends on size of empire to keep corp damage from revolt in check) in order to keep your soldiers cheap. You also may consider to maintain bare minimum infrastructure and health care just to come by.
As a side benefit, you can place money loosing corps, such as all strategic forces, aircraft carriers, fleet command in to those countries and see they actually turn modest profit (or at least don't loose that much).
As a drawback, it may decrease your total game level.
Basis for above:
I did extrapolation analysis on salary impact on production and found that, after about 400 it extrapolates to 4% per 100 salary. I found it to be around 3.9% from salary and 0.46% from corresponding welfare. It is debatable number, but not anecdotal.
30% I found base on analysis of profitability about 36% on base levels to be break-even for 6 products in different categories. That does constitute severe approximation.
Basis to consider why you should not trust my data:
I do not have war slaves ( I am de-facto restricted to a single country). There may be some hidden components that I do not take into account advocating extreme low level of salary for war slaves, as far as lack of experience.
I reach a conclusion from analogy and pontification on my part.
Please let me know if I can help you with any further explanation or simply want to debate findings (I found latter to be most fun). |
