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Post by amyclas on Mar 24, 2020 5:09:30 GMT
This is an idea that can use the existing research framework.
Apply research on buildings to incrementally increase production rate by 1% per level on individual items.
The research levels are lost when a building is scrapped. But carried over when a building is upgraded. The research has to be applied for every individual building.
I believe this will offset admin costs to compensate for larger economies of scale over letting everything remain at level 2 (which is what I do now). It will also allow static high level buildings some advantage over the build and scrap strategy.
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Post by AG Forumer Inc. on Mar 24, 2020 6:02:08 GMT
Using research to add a speed bonus to a specific building is an interesting idea, and you're right about offsetting admin costs. I would also say that this idea can be applied to retail as well. To illustrate how useful your idea is, I'm going to do an example using my own numbers:
My admin is currently just under 63% before executives, and I have a 12% production bonus (9 base + 3 from the lake), so any production run would cost 163% * 88% = 143.4% of the base wages. If I were to use this research idea on my buildings, the costs would become: q1) 163% * 87% = 141.8% q2) 163% * 86% = 140.2% q3) 163% * 85% = 138.5% q4) 163% * 84% = 136.9% To get the same numbers without additional production speed, I would need to reduce my admin by 1.9%, which would require 3 management points in the COO slot. SkyCo's spreadsheet says my 21 management COO reduces my daily production costs by $136k, so each quality level on all buildings would be worth about $19.4k. Keeping in mind that I'm in the top 50, let's do another example that would be realistic at lower level.
For the 2nd example, let's assume a player with 23% admin and a 3% production bonus. This would result in a production cost of 123% * 97% = 119.3%. Each quality of building would reduce the wages by 1.23% of the base, which would require 5-6 management points to achieve with execs. A pure power producer with those numbers would save $5k per quality level on all buildings, or $500 per building. By contrast, I would save just under $1.4k per building.
If this idea were to be used with the same quality rules as for items, q1 would take weeks to pay itself off (how many depends on the size of the company and the research type), q2 would take 4 times as long as q1, and q3 would take 10 times as long as q2, so high quality buildings would only be worth it if either they stayed for a very long time or if buildings counted toward PV (which would be lost when scrapping).
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Post by amyclas on Mar 24, 2020 13:51:39 GMT
My current underwear chain has the following ratios in terms of factory hours for a production run of 20,000 units:
Fashion Factory 203.5953429 Plantation 199.022229 Water Resevoir 27.05311633 Power Plant 3.428206347 Retail Hours 752.7286413
$62824.68 in labour inputs $0 in purchases $215818.18 in revenue, at the time of planning.
If I had 10 * 2 building levels to work with it comes up to 21.6 hours of Production + construction time, and 37.6 hours of retail + construction time.
Less construction time my profit per building hour is $152993.5/1185.2 building hours = $129.08 profit per building level per hour. It drops to about $87 profit per building level per hour when construction time is factored in, but that is easily remedied with larger production runs.
Less construction time the raw profit from the utilization of 10 slots with level 2 buildings is $152993/59.2 real hours = $2584 per hour
Thus building anything to level 3 and above and locking in a static production chain is only justified if $2584 per hour is exceeded.
With the above throughput ratios I could for example build 10 building levels of fashion factory, 10 building levels of plantation, and level 1 or outsource the water, level 1 or outsource the power. This will give me a pipeline that will churn out 20,000 underwear in the same time as the build and scrap flex build. But for the retail money to come in at the same rate, I need at least 38 building levels of retail. Let's say capital investment is not a factor, and I do build it, I would have a whopping 58 levels of buildings from fashion factories, plantations and retail alone. I estimate that throwing a max COO at the problem could drop admin down to the 25 to 30% range.
The margin for profit for this underwear setup completely disappears at around 54% admin overheads. But at 25% It drops by about 1/3 to half across the whole chain, while maintaining the same unit production and unit sales rates.
You could however, specialize in parts of a value chain, but my spreadsheets for food and fashion and construction at least, guarantees you will never exceed build and scrap production in profit per hour no matter what line you do... (except gold bar making, with low admin and contract selling)
Notes: Outsourcing cotton trades about 10k in labour for 40k in purchases. and ups the net average profit per building level per hour to about 135 from 129, but exposes you to risk variance in exchange prices, especially for cotton of quality.
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Post by amyclas on Mar 24, 2020 14:21:09 GMT
TLDR: I believe no setup in existence will beat build-and-scrap flex production because of the administrative cost mechanic. This applies even for aerospace, as long as i can stockpile inventories before rolling the dice on the sales offices, I believe I will always make more from build-and-scrap. I will of course enter aerospace once I have the means to afford said aerospace inventory stockpiles.
We need more mechanics that can mitigate administrative cost to make economies of scale somewhat feasible. I believe that investing in buildings provides a balance of investing capital to reduce costs while retaining the inverse economies of scales from administrative costs, to make actually building things permanently competitive relative to build and scrap.
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Post by AG Forumer Inc. on Mar 24, 2020 20:25:57 GMT
I think you'll find that higher level industries such as aerospace will remain profitable even at high admin. To illustrate, let's take my setup, which has 63% base admin and goes down to 50% with my COO. All my buildings go toward the production of q4 economy cars, which I then sell on contract for an average profit/unit of $400. My numbers vary since I have to outsource some stuff, but let's say my average daily production capacity is 1800. This means my daily profit is about $720k per day. A player with building no higher than level 2 would need to make over $1k profit/hr/lvl, which is difficult even in high level industries. In fact, there's an article in the newspaper about build-and-scrap flex production by Secrets of the Void here. SOTV refers to the strategy as Void Flex and says it's not a way to the top. Instead, he says it's a way to change industries quickly and without loss of value and ensure you'll always make some profit. All that being said, your research idea would make the low level industries more feasible as admin affects them more than it does high level industries. It would also help out setups with high level buildings.
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Post by amyclas on Mar 25, 2020 3:56:55 GMT
Ah i see. I haven't number crunched higher industries as thoroughly as I'm still at the stage where developing the early stuff utilizes my slots and capital the most optimally. I guess I'll find out how high admin affects cars and planes when I get there. But I might need to go through electronics as a stepping stone, who knows.
I think retail overheads scale much more harshly with admin costs than with production.
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Post by amyclas on Mar 25, 2020 9:45:40 GMT
Ah i think i see now. Admin affects cars and aerospace less as labour becomes a smaller proportion of the costs.
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