Alpha 15 Economics Study

[Spdskatr]

[EDIT 2016-11-18: The first of the studies is complete! It can be found in this thread here.

The link is broken there is a rogue quotation mark and http in the link. Tbe proper link can be found here.
Pls fix (even though it's the same post it might cause ppl some stress)

[brcruchairman]

What would be great to see is the relative profitability of manufacturing smokeleaf joints, survival rifles, and alpaca wool parkas, assuming some baseline labor cost (pawns consume meals, so some multiple of the food cost might work).

What I would especially like to know is if it is *ever* profitable to make something with resources purchased from traders, or if profitability always requires using map resources (farming, mining, raiders)

That's actually exactly what I'm working on now! Anything produced from local materials will have a higher profit margin than what my next study will state by virtue of having some or all input costs go to zero, excepting labor. Since my study will be assuming entirely depleted local resources (including crops; dunno how that'd work, but it's useful from an analytic standpoint) and as such will give profit margins for a worst-case scenario. We'll see what they actually are; it may be that, like firearms, there doesn't exist a good option. :p We'll find out, I think.

[EDIT 2016-11-18: The first of the studies is complete! It can be found in this thread here.

The link is broken there is a rogue quotation mark and http in the link. Tbe proper link can be found here.
Pls fix (even though it's the same post it might cause ppl some stress)

Ah, good catch! Thank you! Link on the front page should be fixed. I appreciate the help!

[EDIT 2016-11-24-0225: Hm, I've done an analysis for textile items, and most of what I find is that I need to gather some more raw data regarding commodity values, specifically for the various wools, hyperweave, and synthtread. Guess that's the nest step; once I get that data, the page should come together nicely, but at the moment there's so much material cost data missing only 10% or so of the analyses come through with a non-error result. Something for me to do tomorrow, I guess. ]

[Bozobub]

I haven't run the numbers, but sculptures built from bought materials — mainly wood and stone — certainly can be quite profitable!  I haven't bothered much with other ingredients, such as steel or precious materials, so I can't verify for those, but this is DEFINITELY true for more mundane materials (assuming even basic skill on your artists' part).  My colony does this quite often, in fact.

[brcruchairman]

I haven't run the numbers, but sculptures built from bought materials — mainly wood and stone — certainly can be quite profitable!  I haven't bothered much with other ingredients, such as steel or precious materials, so I can't verify for those, but this is DEFINITELY true for more mundane materials (assuming even basic skill on your artists' part).  My colony does this quite often, in fact.

My preliminary results definitely support this conclusion! Aside from being plentiful on most maps, wood and stone present a very cheap input for a proportionally expensive output. However, things like gold, silver, jade and uranium, being small items, seem to be the exception; the increase in volume of input required (e.g., 2400 gold instead of only 120 stone) seems to make exotics a losing proposition for most things. Still, art is a reliable, if labor-intensive option.

As such, one of the metrics I'm looking at in this Profitability Study is work-per-silver. For instance, supposing one could make Gizmos which sell for 10 silver apiece and take 10 work to make, but could also (with the same inputs) make Doodads which also sell for 10 silver but take 12 work apiece, Gizmos are clearly superior. I'm hoping that, because of the hard and normalized figures I'll be using, I'll be able to compare entirely unlike things such as dusters and sculptures, swords and drugs, in order to find the most efficient possibilities. (Well, that and permit players to pick their own favorite; if I want to make an agricultural colony I might be more interested in textiles than firearms; once I get some publishable results, the hope is people can just look and see their best option given their preferences.)

Interesting, I thought you might enjoy the analytics mod https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=27521 I made for those who likes analytics, planning and prediction. Currently it's limited, however, I am planning to expand the feature sets for more analysis. My ultimate goal is to have a full-blown analytic capabilities. I think, as others have suggested, you can look into in-game data to do your analysis, so if you are interesting, I am open for collaboration on this.

That actually sounds really interesting! My apologies for the lack of initial response, I seem to have missed your post. But, once I've got my results published from vanilla-only, I'd really like to collaborate with you to see how the empirical results compare to the theoretical ones. If nothing else, it'd be a good exercise in finding where I went wrong with my calculations. :p

As for your mod itself, that looks really useful in-game. I usually stick religiously to vanilla-only, but I might bend my rules for this one. This will be especially useful in finding practical values such as colonist work-per-tile for crops, or animal resource consumption per unit of output. (E.g., how much hay is used in producing a unit of wool for an Alpaca?) I'm definitely going to have to give your mod a look once I've finished gathering my vanilla data.

[mugenzebra]

That actually sounds really interesting! My apologies for the lack of initial response, I seem to have missed your post. But, once I've got my results published from vanilla-only, I'd really like to collaborate with you to see how the empirical results compare to the theoretical ones. If nothing else, it'd be a good exercise in finding where I went wrong with my calculations. :p

As for your mod itself, that looks really useful in-game. I usually stick religiously to vanilla-only, but I might bend my rules for this one. This will be especially useful in finding practical values such as colonist work-per-tile for crops, or animal resource consumption per unit of output. (E.g., how much hay is used in producing a unit of wool for an Alpaca?) I'm definitely going to have to give your mod a look once I've finished gathering my vanilla data.

I accidentally stumbled upon this post again while randomly strolling through this forum.
So basically this forum doesn't send notification from post replies, so I'll suggest if it's possible you can pm me or respond to my mod posts, as I've done tremendous amount of code just in the past 3 weeks since your reply. Now users can create graphs dynamically, show a table of stats, do basic text displaying, and taking notes.