Military Bases Maintenance Corps

Hey Andy, can you take a look at these corps? When they were introduced, you promised they would be "very profitable" given their high demands of highly trained professionals. It seems now the only way to break even is when the price is at its highest mark (743K per unit). When it's around base price the corp makes heavy losses. It shouldn't be this way, should it?

I would have to agree.

Well the profit is there if the price is in the highest points its very damaging if its not.

A while back i complained because i IPO 10 corporations of base maintenance in the hopes the higher Q would give me more profits but when it came time to buy the goods almost ALL of my profits where eaten away.

The GM should look into these corps and see about a small tweak on re-balancing there buying. These corps have the potential to make a huge amount of money ---BUT--- they consume a HUGE amount of very expensive items.

Base maintenance use .02 or .03 units of base per month giving them a few year life span before needing more bases. Maybe to keep profitability up these corps can use only .01 points but use selenium also?

Personally i think it was a bad move to take nuclear subs/strat bombers away from the corps, They really did help trading and help the FB economy. Maybe increasing producing and price a bit and adding selenium would again help them to become profitable and give selenium a new use?

Andy if you'd be so kind to answer this query...

I checked and they are very profitable.
Only vessel maintenance, although profitable, it is not at top condition.

These corporations are profitable even when the price is at a lower level but when very low, they will make losses like every other tpye.

They also suffer a bit because of the quality that is not relevant at this momnet and you should limit the quality of raw materials for these corporations.
It does not make sense to produce at Q300 as they will not sell at that price.
the quality issue will be taken care of.

Show me an example please. I will check.

This is an example Andy:

https://sim01.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgi2nova?SN_ADDRESS=wwwCountry&SN_METHOD=ccorp&miCorpNumber=1244511

This Military Base Maintenance corp is in the red (marginally) even though the current market price is a bit higher than the base price

And this is an example from FB, with the Market Price at the top and the corp barely making a profit:

https://sim02.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgi2nova?SN_ADDRESS=wwwCountry&SN_METHOD=ccorp&miCorpNumber=6121101

Finally, an example from LU, where the price is near the bottom right now (but not at the bottom yet), and the corp is losing 18B a year!!!

https://sim05.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgi2nova?SN_ADDRESS=wwwCountry&SN_METHOD=ccorp&miCorpNumber=2202708

Need I say more to prove MBMU corps are handicapped right now? I rest my case...

I looked at all of them.
on KB and LU, the price of the product is very low due to oversupply. I don't know if it continues, the price is increasing in one of them.

however

The reason for the losses if a very high price paid for raw materials.
check the income and cost of these corporations and you will see the cost of raw materials far too high.

The reason is that you purchase the raw materials at quality up to 300+ while your products are probably sold at a much lower quality.

in these corporations, you can reduce the raw materials quality to 120 and reduce the cost by more than 50%. Experienced players do not pay for high quality for these products.

even for the best corporations around, we have advised many times on the quality of raw materials. it used to be best at 160 and we promised to make it even more profitale at higher quality. now it is at 190-200.

there is never a reason to purchase at 300+.

Hi GM, I posted a problem in the problems forum regarding inherited debt from raiding. Please take a look. Thank you

Andy,
I may not be a vet but I am not new either... The only thing I buy at 330 is Services and HTS which amount for 0.3% of the total supply cost. Is this that threw me overboard lol? All others are at 180-190 and the corp is producing a 270q product, not 307. So even if I reduce supplies ar 120 my quality will go at 220 and still I will lose the same money (I have tried it believe me)

no. you will not.
the cost will go down by 1B.

You can discuss this for ever.
you try to say that these corporations are not profitable in their base setup.

they are.
very profitable indeed.

we always explained, that a a very low market price, they will have losses. Even heavy losses but in this case, your corporations are not optimized at all.

One thing you got right Andy is that we could discuss this forever and I wouldn't be able to convince you that today is Saturday if you won't admit it. There is an ancient Greek saying by the comedian Aristophanes about it. It translates roughly as: "You won't persuade me even if you convince me". So, as I end this thread (and my case) I give you this nice link:

https://sim02.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgiw?productsuppliers&miProduct=300&miSortOrder=1&miAmount=248570864935

In FB, today 14.12.2013, at top market price (741K per unit):
a. The biggest corp has a market value of ... 500B only.
b. Half the MBMU corps are LOSING, yes, LOSING money even at top price
c. The rest are just making a measly profit of 100M to 300M per month which will turn to BILLIONS of losses very soon, when the market turns SLIGHTLY downwards.

So maybe it's not my own incompetence in running my corps, heh? Maybe it's not "market price" or "optimising"?

Whatever... I just spend some GCs to turn them into HighTech Services or FMUs, right? That's the answer for everything it seems...

Of course there are many that make losses.
this was clear from the start.

they are badly managed.

I looked at the ones you reffered to and they paid far too much for their raw materials.
It is very easy to destroy corporations.

I see many of these corporations with the highest market value around. they are extremely profitable when managed correctly.

There is a saying about a dancer who does not perform and blames the shape of the floor.

I hear this from andy quite often. We are to manage quality of all our materials on a individual corporation by corporation basis and yet you tell us that a good area is around 190-200. But you keep pointing out that half the corps make materials where quality does not mater.

On top of that the only way to get a set quality for any given resource to any specific corporation it by using a direct contract from a corp set up to produce at the quality you want.

To do this a player would first need a huge number of corporations at which point they would need to set up a contract for each resource for every corp manually as there is no point selling your 200ish quality services to your maintenance corp you would sell the 120 quality services from another service corp to that corp. And sell the 200Q services to your weapons corps. Assuming the player had this vast supply of corps to use contracting all of this with the number of corps needed would take at least 200 REAL HOURS.

Andy if you are going to default to "Your corp is not optimized" every time someone points out how thin the margins are on a corporation because they did not set up Thousands of individual supply contracts, fine.

Just give us a reasonable way to do this. Unless i am missing some huge secret it is so not practical to do this with the current game interface. Or please elaborate with your game master wisdom how a player would go about "optimizing" like you say we should in detail as i can be a bit slow on the uptake at times. This might sound sarcastic and i do not mean it to be such. I really want to know.

Perhaps if a nation could set up buying requirements for the nations corporations like the nation can with the materials the nation consumes. And even better if nations and ceo's could divide their corporations into different divisions and set the buy requirements for each division like the nation's consumables. And if possible i would like to have my corps start buying supplies at 4-6 months before they run out rather than 3.

If nothing else. Please Andy, spell out how you would optimize both a weapons corp and a maintenance corp in the same nation with out using common markets. I need an example with out using common markets because most players do not have endless corporations producing every quality you would like.

there are several examples of corps that do not need quality other than maintenance which will soon mater...and i suspect mess up all contracts involving maintenance.

How do you ensure that any given corp gets products at one quality and another corp at another quality? Unless you manually buy each supply every time a corp needs it you can not even set up supply quality for a given corp different from any other given corp. Much less any specific supply for a corp.

We do not think that you should micromanage the quality.
if you want to, you can place manual orders in some corporations and leave the others to the automatic procedure.

However, we do not see a reason to do this.

decide on the quality level you want your raw materials to be and set it everywhere.

For now, it does make sense to have it at a lower level in some corporations where quality does not matter but we have tested mix of corporations and the average is good enough. Not optimized.

with quality becoming more important for more products, the average will be even better.

We see some players who do not upgrade the quality of the corporations to 200 or 225. This is another way to keep the output product at a lower quality if quality does not matter.
turning off quality upgrading is a one time action and cuts the cost for the corporation.

the utput quality depends both on the raw materials and the quality of the corporation.

The quality problem in all the maintenance corporations will be solved in the coming weeks.