Profit!!!

It has been several months now, becoming familiar with this game, asking questions, posting on the forum, trying to get a handle on even the most basic ideas on HOW TO MAKE A PROFIT. Now, in all my countries and enterprises, most corps generally produce a profit, as in, on my financial statement I'm in the green.
I look at each individual corp and MOST have a profit, however my enterprise still ends up in debt, and my countries are all racking up massive debts due to country spending. I can't not have them buy items they need, therefor I conclude that my corps are not profitable ENOUGH.

So now, I have to ask all those who seem to have a clue, as I clearly cannot get it, what are your basic step by step routines you follow to tend to your corps so that they make decent revenue to turn enough profit so that I don't run up huge deficits and in turn become a massive debt that I end up taking loans out for that are impossible to pay off without buying more gold coins?

I realize I may sound frustrated, but this has been going on for a while, and I'm starting to think there is no real strategy or game here for that matter.

What I'm asking for, if anybody has the time or inclination to do so:

Step by step instructions on what you do. What must be done first for each corp after set up? What must I watch for? I'm not looking for one silver bullet solution, but there are several, I get that.

Basically I can't imagine how I could be spending hours upon hours trying to figure out some sort of method of success and come up with the same problem.


Whats the trick!!!??

Figue out how ASQ works and you'll see your profits rise. Infact I think thats the only method left to make good profit.

I know what your going through with the ceo's trust me. My toatal profit per month is 100B+ and im still going into debt. Im pissed off with it to say the least.

For countries there is one major pitfall, presuming your corps are keeping at least over 25B in cash in them. That is - once your country has a negative amount of cash any supplies ordered will not be bought. This causes the supplies in question to change to immediate orders next month as your country is now in defecit of them. Immediate orders are far more expensive, but by now the country will have taken out a loah so you have cash but that will be eaten double quick by the immediate orders. From there on its a downward spiral unless you can really push up your income or reduce your spending elsewhare. It might even be better to put money into the country to cancel debt if you have it, or check very frequently so you can send a small bit of cash just to keep it in positive cash.

Note, this is assuming your corps arent being fed cash regularly by the country because they are losing money. You must do something about corps that lose money regularly unless you can afford to ride the market out.

Also you should say your profit sharing and tax rate because these can make corps lose cash by paying out to much or on the other hand they could be haording money that your country could use monthly instead of making one big payment once every say ten years. (general tip would be have profit transfer and tax, if any, add up to 85% ish).

Again, seeing as I've talked to you a few times before, I'm sure you are doing the obvious things like upgrades to corps, not having high unemployment, good indexes and not going too mad on military yet.

I PM'ed you in reply earlier today.

1. Product Selection- Not all corps are created equal, first step is to pick a corp that you know are great corps. Air Transports are awesome but you can't move them. Other one's that are good are Production Plants but there MV will stay low due to the games inability to process its production schedule. And household products are good. Roads are also real good but only if you plan on using ASQ, which will also assist you with Production plants.

2. Never expect much profits till Q is all the way up, and decide for each company if it is worth sending it truly public. Personally I send all of mine truly public.

3. (Tricky step) Determine whether a corp's expenses are material driven or labor driven. Then discover whether efficiency is negatively or positively coorelated with the salary level. To influence revenues most efficiently on a material driven market you want to manipulate labor. If labor is a much lower cost then the cost of materials such as in HT corps or Medical material corps it will cost less to increase welfare point by point (so salary increases). The opposite is also true if all your mining and farming, and service industries material costs are much lower compared to high labor costs. You can optimize profits by lowering salaries more then you usually would and ensuring that you are running a high finished Q level. A great example using this will be explained in step 4.

4. (tedious step) Utilizing ASQ can be tedious but just about imperative in an enterprise. I think I may have explained this to you before, but I could be wrong. Essentially pay less for expensive items and subsidize the loss to Q with slight increases to other material. My rule of thumb is anything around 1500 or higher I try to contract myself, of course I've made some big moves and my contracts are all messed up, I may need a second Enterprise to manage this more easily. Contracting down is remarkably easy but contracting up is where you can clean up the easiest it also ensures that the supply corps too make money. I'll use that example now. From looking at roads we can look at it and see a ton of material needed nearly all the supplies are dirt cheap but stone is even lower, you can set ordering Q to 120, and contract High Quality Stone that you produce to, BOTH corps should gain good profits. The danger of roads is that there is so many employees and so much material. You can eliminate risk but lowering your ambition, set salaries lower than say an Ammo company, run efficiency high as salaries though low, will severely decrease the amount of labor (insane LLW's call for high efficiency ratings, nearly always) then max out the Q with the stone quality.

5. Of course you may need to set up these supply companies yourself. If you want low quality expensive supplies. Good countries would still be preferred but you can't run good salaries. C3's are better but they are dangerous, a salary at 100 in a C3 will make any Q at 100 corp successful as long as their product sells, which it will because you contract it of course. But you cannot guarantee that salary level as once a player jumps in the salaries rise to 200, SC did this only to make me angry. E should stay at 100 also, and salaries should be at the bare minimum unless you want a bump to send it to 100% production. This is not true with High Quality Supply, you want the standard 120+ W low tax full production. But in reality supply corps are easier because they are meant to draw bigger profits for other corps and their actual profits tend to be irrelevant, and so tax rate doesn't really matter and you can be much less cautious when dealing with these.

Anywho if you build a road corp in a 120+ welfare country, with salaries around 250 (to somewhat appease the president), contract 195 Q stone from yourself. That corp will make 1.2B depending on the market of course. The Stone corp will have enough output for i think its like 3 or 4 of them and will make ~200-300M.

But the thing you can't ignore is the profit number you get has some that stays with the corp. So sometimes when it feels like you are losing in reality you are gaining assets. And not being able to buy things at the right time is devastating for your profitability and so if you need debt take it, interest rates ARE a joke. As you know just don't fall into a pattern of losing money and maxxing debt, not because of interest that is still minor but because of access you always need access to money.

ASQ?

Crafty- currently my profit trans rate is set at 80, tax rate 0, so I'm assuming that's close to what your describing. Regarding the factors you have explained to me before, I have already upgraded almost all corps to the max, and my employment rate hovers between 95 to 96%, which is not bad. I did do some experimenting with military recently, but I don't think I went overboard.

Drew- Steps 1 and 2 seem to make sense, except I can't get most of my corps up to market value of 600B to make the public offer, which is frustrating. As soon as it ever hits 600, the P/E ratio than skyrockets, go figure...

I am really sorry, but I'm totally lost as to the rest of the steps except for keeping the welfare above 120 and salary levels.

How could I pay for less expensive items? for the country or the corps? What am I subsidizing actually? That stuff is all way over my head....


I really don't want to throw in the towel on this, I spent allot of time working on this game,to just quit, but damn.... this seems to come way easier for others..

ASQ = Average supply quality.

Do a search for wildeyes leaving guide and you'll learn how.

I cant put a link up for some reason.

If making a shoe took 1 cattle (1000$)and 1 fmu (3000000$) and you bought them both at 120 you will pay 1200+3.6M=3.6012. Your ASQ (Average Supply Quality) will be 120. Now in this example half of your Q is determined by FMU and half by cattle. This also means that per dollar cattle effects Quality moreso. 50% of Q /1000> 50% of Q /3M. So if we wanted an ASQ of lets say 170 (so it sells for more. we can set both to 170, and pay 1700+5.1M=5.1017M$ in supplies. While if you instead create a cattle contract at 220 Q, or set your ordering Supply Quality to 220 and contract your FMU's at 120 you will also get 170. But... 2200+3.2M(is much less expensive)then 5.1M+1700

But if you buying ANY supply level right now that is far more important to change.

so basically get your more expensive supplies at lower Q, and get cheaper supplies at higher Q to get a nice mix for average quality product?

Exactly. Use a common market for easier setup.

I feel your pain, Khome.

I have two countries with almost identical indexes and settings.

In one the corporations are all running profits, in the other a lot of them run deficits.

I can't see any other way than making sure indexes are completely identical.

I allready lowered SQ, but my best contry was doing fine evene with the higher settings, so that can't be the reason.

And I'm completely annoyed by electric power corporations. They have stayed in deep red market situation since I joined, but prices the last few years have declined and now they all make deficits.

I guess I'll eventually have to close them all down. As apparantly others also did. It's gonna be a strange world where noone bothers producing power...?

Tip. Look at the corps of other players using ASQ and you'll see which products there using to supply. The quality lets you know. Will save you time and a bit of head scratching untill you get a better understanding.

sbroccoli:

I've got several electric power companies - I maintain them all at minimum quality, (but high efficiency), and then contract the entire output (or at least most of it) to my own corps and country.

I've got several other corps that I do the same thing - I regard them as public utilities - effectively I'm subsidizing them if necessary to maximize profit elsewhere.

Yes, Alex I do that too.

But yours also produce a deficit then?

Does anyone have an electric corporation that runs a surplus???

All of mine make profit. Not as much as they used to mind you. EP used to be 1 of the best corps.

Yes and that's why I built 3.

It's OK IMO for corporations to become unprofitable with time if the market situation changes to oversupply.

But it hasn't in this case, which is the problem.

My elec seem to be doing ok. Put your corp figures here, upgrades, sals, welfare, tax paid, upgrades etc. or state corp name, country world.