Best Products

Survey, what are the best products to sell to turn a profit? For example, what would you consider the bread basket of your enterprise, or a product you know for sure will most likely make a profit? Ideas anybody?

AT, HTS, Services. As the central 3. electric components, electronic components, industrial eq, machine parts. as the secondary level. but thats kinda the skeleton of my ASQ

additionally, other corps that really crank out a profit, if you set them up right. home eq, clothes, HP, med eq, med mat, pharm, plus many others.

when it comes to selecting corps. of course we all look at whether the product is in the red, and what kind of education level you'll need to maintain... further thoughts... look at the supplies, if it uses allot of the consistently red supplies, then its supplies itself will contribute more to other peoples profits than your own. Books and Newspaper are an example. And opposite example, look at Cars on FB, one of the key supplies, car engines, are a third the cost, compared to other planets. meaning cars have a greater profit potential on FB than WG.

even more consideration. their are allot of corps that require a mid-range, or low amount of techies. by running high sals, you jack up salaries of high payed professions (like High tech Seniors,) lowering "profit," but you get it back via income tax, and probably "country resources used," by going with lower tech corps, you can save on education. and then buy lowering salaries, you compensate, by having your corps making higher profits, and corp tax/payouts. this secondary method, also has the effect of lowering your gov and military costs...

i guess to sum up about corps, nearly anything can work, really well, its all in how you set up your country.

as far as buying/selling from the open market. i'm being pretty successful with aluminum, copper, iron, machine parts, solid missile fuel, weapons parts, wood, cattle, gold, and silver. But i'm doing my thing via space trade.

the way i've got my space trade thing down, i make between 10-15GC per shuttle. If i build them myself, they cost me between 4-6 GC... and you can take a look at the prices from direct trading.

AT, HTS?

aww, sorry, Air Transport, and High Tech Services

air transport only supplies like 3 corps. But it is the key supply for Services, and HTS. most of my AT corps make a killing, while keeping my more important HTS and Services robust. AT is an excellent corp. With a couple of disadvantages... you can't move them.

If your interested in ASQ, well, the frame work for my ASQ, is the first 7 corps i mentioned above. plus coal.

The AT supplies, Services, and HTS. And those 2 are used in almost everything. they are fairly cheap, and usually used in quantities that strong arm the final quality.

the other parts of my ASQ, machine parts for I EQ, I EQ for Oil, and allot of other thing. between, both the E-comps, and I EQ, they cover like 75% of what services, and HTS don't. the remaining stuff goes to coal.

lastly, sand, and stone, and cement, for the handful of things that are left.

so if you follow, AT supplies services... which supplies clothes... or telephone, or nearly anything else.

the supply trains i have a hard time making work... are

1. wood, to paper, to B&N.
2. chemicals? i can do it, but i don't like sulfer and potassium for ASQ, theirs something off about it. not sure what
3. oil to plastic, or gasoline, or aircraft fuel. If you set your oil to 120 q, with upgrades,

you can contract the 180-210 base supply to those, and make money, but by sacrificing your oil profits... same in the wood/paper/b&n train. (see SC does have trains!! lol)

i can make them work, but i have to disable one part of the chain to loose money, to make money some where else. that kinda defeats the purpose.

ok, this is good stuff. Thank you

your welcome

an easy supply train to follow.

first, for these corps, set you supply q to 120, then contract the first to the second, and second to the third, of JUST what i mention.

assuming max q from the original supplier. and supplying the full amount needed

contract AT to services, services to coal, coal to sand, sand to cement, cement to construction...

B&N should be mentioned here. for AT, i contract Services, HTS, and the 180ish Q B&N, that i mentioned above. so in this supply train, i have AT going to Services, and HTS, which in turn are supplies of AT.

another thing to try, set all your supplies to 170 or what ever your want. then manually buy FMUs, and EP at 120 q. and then manually sell them to your corps. i call that reverse ASQ. i wouldn't recommend doing that at a large scale, i mean i don't really wanna manually supply products to my 14 countries... just giving you something else to xp with

on that point, things that use stone tend to use a lot of stone! So things like roads, and production plants in which you can buy stone at a base price of ~400ish you can buy all your materials @ 120 and supply your own stone. What's good with this is you can run a high profit supply corp instead of trying to deal with c3's for cheap supplies in FMU's and electricity.

Also I'd look into Household Products. They are such a high supply needed industry making it far more stable if it is in the red, and tend to pull great profits. They also cost a lot per unit meaning you can use them as supply corps also.

" They also cost a lot per unit meaning you can use them as supply corps also. " Drew

curious if you are thinking backwards. if you intend to supply high Q to your corps, to raise the final Q, while lowering the bulk of your supplies. then you want cheap supplies.

for instance, coal is a cheap supply, something like potassium... you'd set your supply quality to 120, and either contract from a coal corp, or manually supply it. that way, the more expensive chemicals, EP, and FMUs, are automatically bought at the lower quality, while the cheaper high q coal balances out the finally Q output, but the extra cost of the cheap coal, does not entirely negate the savings from the low q other goods. while still selling at max output Q, or as near as you can get

car engines are another one, CE. 6000 base price in the red. at 120 q, thats about 7200 per. at 170Q (for the example,) thats 10200 per, or a difference of 3000, times the 45K monthly use. is 135M per game month savings. or 0.135B.

The 45k CE a cars corp uses... has a much less dramatic effect on the final Q than 107500 units of Electric Components. at 15% the cost... even buying max Q of e-comps, wont soak up the entire savings of the cheap CEs, and have a far greater (possitive,) effect on the final out put Quality.

when you consider the rest of the supplies... you can end up saving more in costs, meaning higher profits... but even with JUST the 0.1B savings of CE, for most players, thats near a 20% increase in profit... and once you get the process down, its better than that!

Average Supply Quality, ASQ. In all the various ways of doing it... well, the concept is to buy the high priced goods at low Q, and low priced goods at a Q level that gets you as near max Q as you can get.

for some of those corps, like you said, with sand or stone, where they use ALLOT, they are already very cheap, so max Q doesn't completely negate the savings from other supplies. but you can try manually supplying those corps with a mid range Q, start at 200...

so for example, have a couple fully upgraded cement corps. set the supplies for both to 120, manually supply one with 200Q sand, to the other contract directing from a high q sand corp... either way will work, one will work better than the other, but do you really wanna manually supply your corps? with 14 countries, and 3 enterprise, i don't. so i take a little bit of a hit with the over supplied contract, but still make more than others using conventional supply methods.

the problem i have a hard time around, well, look at vacation. it takes allot of AT, while still being cheap, it is more mid-range than sand, and will actually increase cost. i've set up some base Q (upgrades only, no asq, and 120 supply,) but that ends up disabling 1 AT corps for 2 vacation corps. considering that i can get my AT corps well over 1.2B income per gm, its not really worth it.

thats what i was talking about with the difficult supply trains above, its hard to disable a wood corp, to make 3ish paper work, and hard to disable a paper to make like what 4? B&N work. when their are corps that use a similar work force, with similar profits, with out requiring me to ruin another corp. i mean, i'll make more over all setting up my AT right, forgoing vacation, and going with something like Clothes, or H EQ.

The best products in my opinion are shoes. Thus, this brings me back to the age-old sim question....why are there no shoe corporations?!!! Shoes are important! Without good foot health, where would we all stand?!!!! :P

All for shoe corporations to be added to this game, vote here! Dun pay attention to what Josias says. He knows nothing!!!! You all listen to Lorelei and you will go far! Vote for SHOES!!!

shoes are part of clothes

but those that want to look, my main country on WG, is scary beyond all reason, and my CEO on LU is Orbital Supply Platform. if you scroll to the bottom of some of my corps, and look at my supply Qs, you'll see what i'm talking about.

Josias, you should write a 'how to' for the SC wiki-pages. Your info is more detailed and easier to understand than Wilds old one even.

To Josias,

Shoes are NOT part of clothes! If they were, there would be no shoe stores in addition to clothing stores. This is a gross error in the game. Dun make me mad, Josias. Cuz this is POing me!!!! *Says under my breath...it figures the "Evil One" would oppose this.

Oh and please call the help section, Simcountry for Dummies. I'll be the first to sign up! :P Oh you will need an editor. Be nice, and I might offer my expertise on the matter. I dunno what was so easy to understand there, Crafty. I have no clue what he is talking about. :P ha ha ha J/K

the icon representing clothes, are guess what, shoes.

crafty, when i started figuring out ASQ, i completely threw out the "formula." I do hesitate to say that, as Wild is a friend of mine. But i found the formula confusing, although the concept still remains, you want your supplies to average out, by buying the cheap stuff at high Q, and the expensive stuff at low.

its takes some experimentation, for it to click. additionally, W3C is not only seems to be raising the needed supplies, and lowering production. but also adjusting the way they average out. making ASQ much more fluid, than a formula can account for.

not to mention, i'm with lorelei, i'm surprised any one understood what i posted. but coming from you, thats great compliment. i'd have to write it, and then send it to some one else to make it resemble english. i'm so terrible at grammer, that its pointless for me to do more than run a spell check.

i've been considering just setting up my own independent forum that i could manage, and put down allot of my secrets... probably wont tho

You just make me want to slap you, Josias. ha ha ha ha ha I guess I'll just be satisfied wif that.

Josias, I was teasing about understanding your post. It was more a funny about me not understanding half the stuff y'all write about the game. lol I do however, excel in grammar, although I do make mistakes. I attribute it to old age, but you are a youngun....you can't use that excuse for 20 more years. lol The ONLY errors I ever see you make are the spelling of allot (alot is the correct spelling) and usuage of there/their/they're. Other than that, you are A-OKAY in my book, well other than you are friends with my bitter sim enemy, but I try to overlook that! :P

This is all way too advanced for me....

Shhhhhhhhh dun say that, Khome y Peng...... do as I do. This is what you say:

I have mastered this game. I have done amazing feats. My knowledge of this game is insurpassable. I have killed many and have taken over empires without even having fired one shot. Countries have been named after me........ Capitals have been erected in my honor! :P You hang in there!

@ Josias Can I join your forum? I wanna know your deepest, darkest secrets. So I can use them to take over your countries. :-)

Alright I'll clarify for Josias with the hope that Khome can understand in the process.

If you have an FMU corp and every corp needs FMU yes you will try to make 120 Q FMU's and supply them around. At the samw time you set your order strategies to the value you want your average supplies set to. To hit smaller extra savings EP and household products <- which is what I meant by a good supply unit as the base is somewhere near 5500 or something.

Most used supplies outside of those tend to be in the 800-1100 range, meaning these will be the primary supplies that dictate your supply quality at least mostly.

With that said it doesn't really make any sense to supply down, that is unless you can find a supply that is very significant to the average quality and is ALSO a severe discount to the products in that 800-1100 range. Stone is great example because when it is used it is really used. Roads are one of the most profitable corps there are because you can set your order strategies to 120 in this case and supply stone at Average quality desired and lower all costs of materials other then that in which is supplied personally by you.

So I'm not thinking backwards I just didn't clarify or explain as I know Khome is a smart guy so i figured he could put the pieces together himself.

And another note Lorelei's army is so big they have taken over the space center and ready to transport Billions of highly trained assassin soldiers to any country on any world with just a snap of her fingers. And they all have shiney boots with her monopoly on the cobbler industry. Cobblery I like that word it sounds like a cartoon word that reminds of shoes and cakes at that same time, like stepping through someone's head like it was a cake. Mmmmm brains.

the FMUs and EP certainly are the biggest chunk, but saving on HP by buying them at 120... it works better to set your supply q to 120, then manually sell, or contract, the supplies that are below 1000 price, with a couple of exception.

the 6000 base price, of HP, Car engines, and several other, is like 6 times the cost of MANY other products you can manipulate. HP isn't necessary, and their high cost can be cut, but buying them low. i mean you can buy what live 25K per GM of HP at 10000 per unit, or you can have the same effect at a fraction of the cost, with 50k services. I mean, if you go up and read my example of car engine, and realize they have the same basic price of HP...

seriously, if the cost is over 1000, unless theirs no other way, you'r best to leave it at 120.

its not the average price, its average quality

i guess another way to say it

if a corp uses 25K each of HP and HTS, the HP which is usually around 6000, and HTS which is in the 850-910 range, 900 for this example. The 25k of each product has the same final effect. with HTS being less than 1/6 the cost. so it has the same effect, at a much lower price tag. HP is terrible for using to increase the final qulaity. when their are many better choices. Not to mention, that HTS is usually used at 2-4 times the volume.

lol Drew. Well my shoe army is coming for Josias iff'n I dun gain entry into his top secret forum. I dun like being excluded. Dun worry I won't attack you, Josias. *crosses fingers behind back and smiles all angelic like* :-)

OMG I found a pic on the internet that soooooo embodies me. I will see if I can post it as my Avatar. ha ha ha ha

Andrew!!! I need picture posting capabilities here!!! Someone tell Andy, I have needs.

Thank you, oh and sorry that I went off topic here. :P

drew, just to make sure something is clear. i like you, you think for yourself. ironically, one of Sim Countries problems are "great," players that only do what they where taught, and when games changes that come around, and change things... these "great," players don't have enough understanding of the game to adjust, and then complain about changes that are good long term changes. you clearly don't fit in that category.

Josias, I need your help. How do I set up my new country? What do I put in for my settings and such?

I guess I am guilty of that Josias. My thinking out of the box was always in the war department, to get that edge. Econ was never something I looked into much. And believe me, I was very successful (assets wise) from this.

Nowadays, it's like learning a new game almost. I still understand the rough ideas but the fine tweaking and little things that distinguish the reasonable from the great are out there for me to learn I suppose. Just there is not much left, seems to me, that you can fiddle with. Look at Drews high salary strategy, it should have worked fine by my memory, but now...no good. IFs...not worth much, pension funds...who knows, IPOing...a lottery of who is going to get your shares, trade strategies...nullified, and the beat goes on...

I've dropped about 2 quad $$$ and several thousand GC since everything went west. Suppose it's time to try a bit of serious econ!