| auditor | Friday, July 5, 2024 - 09:18 am 
Dipping my toes into playing with Targon, I had my enterprise open up a pair of corps making the batteries and turned them public to get a higher capped output quality. Unfortunately because the market price never changes due their restricted market access, the corps are actually money losers without and way to keep them afloat once theyâre public and canât receive manual cash transfers. At minimum quality supply input, 150 salary level (and falling), capped quality and effectivity, and 0% profit transfer the corps still lose money in every full unit production cycle. Please consider increasing the base price of Defensive Targon Batteries such that the corps donât drive closer to bankruptcy unavoidably during standard bare bones operation. |
| James Folsom | Friday, July 5, 2024 - 05:33 pm
Post a link to one. I can do thorough all way analysis. |
| auditor | Friday, July 5, 2024 - 10:04 pm
I appreciate the offer but I'd rather have Andy take a look at the information and provide his input than have a chart showing how within certain specific min-max configurations that I am already well on the way working on, they could not lose money in their production cycle. They could operate profitably if the standard price fluctuations that apply to all other non-restricted items applied, but they cannot change from their base price so as base prices of multiple other products in game have undergone significant changes over time I honestly can't say whether or not Targon Batteries have but I'm willing to believe that they haven't because they're so seldom built. So I'm asking for Andy to take a glance at the supply and production costs and potentially either reduce some of the supplies required or boost the base price of the batteries such that they don't require such an unreasonable amount of babysitting compared to all other corps especially considering the extra work that already has to go into them from the production and transportation and manual supply of the Targon itself. |
| James Folsom | Saturday, July 13, 2024 - 10:19 pm
I've been working with auditor to model the profit from these corps, and our collaboration resulted in a complicated modification of the spread sheet that I use for optimizing profit from corporations.
It's especially difficult to think about the profitably of a corp that only makes one unit of product every 8-10 game months. Because, These corps always produce negative for a few game years and then have a big profit year. This all goes in a cycle. Most months show a steady loss. Also, In the case of Public corps, one has to reason out the country resources used as well. It's difficult to say what profit these make. So it's understandable that the game master may not realize how bad the profits are.
So I decided finally that to think about profit of these is to frame it as "Profit per unit produced".
Other complications include the rounding errors since the game seems limited to 2 decimals for production figures. 1.2 divided by 12 is 0.1. This number goes up slightly with increasing salaries and country welfare indexes. Due to rounding errors a wide variety of conditions can result in the same production number. Much wider than for "regular corps". I've used the Round function in Excel to limit some numbers to only 2 decimals in order to simulate this.
I collected the corp data and after discussion with Auditor. One thing to note is we concluded based on the observed periodicity of the "Heart beats" in monthly profit charts that the Annual production of these is 1.2 batteries a year. So if If Andy would be so kind to clarify this number it would be helpful. I put all the data into my spread sheet and modified the all the necessary calculations to express how much money is made by producing one. These produce 1 every 7-10 months, so you can get monthly profit by dividing the profit by the number of months to get that profit.
If I've managed to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts, these things are not profitable. They might make 1B / month if you set the salaries to 30 and supplies quality to 120. (Caveat, I've only seen public and Ceo controlled corps and no state controlled ones. So the N is limited).
I hope all of us can go through some discussion and figure out if my math is right and whether it is wise to improve profitability by simply raising the the base price.
The sheet is attached below for everyone's inspection. Explanatory notes are included there.
Please engage everyone, because players will not engage in trade of these things unless there is a lot a money to be made. It is costly to go get the targon and requires a lot of real life work. These should be the most profitable corps in the game. I think if they produced 10B a month, there would be a real possibility they could be worth while to players to build. Then the rest of us could buy the products.
The sheet once verified could be used to calculate the needed changes.
For those who don't trust files or don't have excel. I know this will import into google sheets. For those from above who also hate google, you probably have open office. Auditor says it works there too. |
| James Folsom | Saturday, July 13, 2024 - 10:20 pm
File here: |
| James Folsom | Saturday, July 13, 2024 - 10:21 pm
Apparently the attachment won't work. Hold tight. |
| James Folsom | Saturday, July 13, 2024 - 10:26 pm
I'll put on google sheets. but it'll be a hot sec. |
| James Folsom | Saturday, July 13, 2024 - 11:35 pm
Okay Maybe this will work,
I think I have it configured so that anyone can edit the parts that should be edited.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LFdKWTYGgU2EvtaMpHadXT3dae9VnQf_JIXnQw590VU/edit?usp=sharing
Probably should just make your own copy. |
| Andy | Sunday, July 21, 2024 - 02:57 pm
These corporations are indeed very difficult.
We have some more such corporations.
Most of them end up producing profits but need a lot of cash to bridge over the long periods of no sales.
the problem with Targon batteries is even more complex because the market price is stuck.
I will follow the suggestion to make them more profitable.
it will be done by increasing their output.
It will be part of the next upgrade. |
