Why are products so worthless and materials so valuable?

[Syrchalis]

Dumping protection is an interesting idea.  Regardless of the pricing system, the player will always be able to identify some good that pulls in big profit with little effort.  Also, in the late game it's so lucrative to just dump stuff you don't use.

Dumping protection could be something as simple as the price for a good decreasing proportionally to the total value sold (or bought).  Like:

item_price = item_price * (1-(value_sold / 10000 * demand_elasticity_coef))

So if you sell $20,000 of plasteel, the plasteel price goes down by 20%.  Do this enough, and it becomes more lucrative to make weapons out of it.  Prices would recover (very) gradually over time.  This could be tune-able per item with a demand elasticity attribute.  For example, shirts or sculptures could have a high price but mostly fixed demand, so the prices would fall off quickly if oversaturated.  The player would be incentivized, or even required, to diversify their  resource extraction or make finished goods.

After all, what are these tribes even doing with the million rice you sold them?

Yeah I agree that a system like this, even if it's simple, would help make trading far more interesting. Maybe throw in a random factor too. As in... every day the price for every item (or category) has a chance to go up/down by a few %. This makes it worthwhile to stock up on something and wait for a high price.

Also it would really really help if different traders changed their prices based on their stock. So if you meet a bulk goods trader without steal or very little steal he will pay a lot for the first 1-2k steal you sell him.

But aside from that I still think the penalty on products is pretty ridiculous. If you're using a mod to make the quality less random (e.g. I use static quality with the +2/-2 option, which is the highest randomness the mod allows) - then the prices seem fine. But a level 20 crafter will on average just produce superior items and if you're unlucky you lose money if he makes too many normal/good items.

I mean the name of the quality levels kind of breaks the neck here. And yes "feeling" and "labels" are important in games. If I sell a duster with the quality "good" how in the hell does it sell for less than the materials it's made out of? It just feels wrong. If I sell a poor one on the other hand... - and there is just 2 quality levels between the two.

Part of the problem is also that price goes up SOOOOO much with quality. Legendary is worth 6x as much? That's just asking for a balance problem. Especially since legendary items are not even close to 6x as good as normal items. It also inflates the wealth of your colony and makes raids especially hard - because you are not 6x as strong, but 6x as wealthy.

These reasons combined are why I think this whole thing needs to be revised and improved.

I just want to add - I say all this because I want the game to improve. I can change the values of the defs myself and make the game great for me and me alone rather easily. But I care about the game being better for everyone. Sure not everything I like others enjoy, but I worked as game designer for a few years and there is some definite "better"s and "worse"s in design. And a dynamic trading system that requires the player to adjust repeatedly and not just go route A every game is certainly always better.

[Shurp]

There are lots of ways the Rimworld economic system could be improved... but without question the first step is to make produced goods more valuable than raw materials.  Judging by the number of naked raiders that keep showing up on my doorstep there is no surplus of pants on Rimworld and traders should happily pay a premium for even a normal pair.

A variable pricing model could be entertaining but only if it is used as a means to encourage the player to expand the number of villages on his trade route or such.  Let's get the foundation fixed before adding new floors.

[Syrchalis]

There are lots of ways the Rimworld economic system could be improved... but without question the first step is to make produced goods more valuable than raw materials.

I agree, mostly because it's a rather simple change. It only involves some number crunching. Along with that the selling price curve for quality should probably be a lot flatter.

As I said before, 6x for legendary is just asking for issues. Especially since legendary items aren't 6x as good in stats and their 600% value inflates colony wealth. TBH it's better to have superior weapons than legendary because the raids will be a lot weaker and you still have really decent guns.

To summarize: Product worth up or raw material worth down or a mix of both, then flatter quality value curve.

[Shurp]

I wonder if this is fixable through modding.  I know that item value is calculated off of the material base, but I don't know how it is calculated.  If the value of labor put into the item is increased then this would resolve increasing product worth.

I also don't know if the value of different quality settings is changeable.  Alternately, maybe the difficulty of achieving higher settings could be increased, so that your skill 20 tailor still rarely makes legendary pants.

[Syrchalis]

There is a mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1206250447

Literally named "economy bandaid" - it's not really balanced, because it merely buffs product prices. However, I had a non-steam mod that patched the quality multipliers to be balanced (I think legendary was just x2 or so). With that together it might be pretty okay already. What would need to be added ontop of those two would be a general reduction in sell value across the board (because we just buffed things so you just have more silver).

Code Select Expand

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Patch>
<Operation Class="PatchOperationReplace">
  <xpath>*/StatDef[defName = "MarketValue"]/parts/li[1]</xpath>
<value>
  <li Class="StatPart_Quality">
<factorAwful>0.4</factorAwful>
<factorShoddy>0.6</factorShoddy>
<factorPoor>0.8</factorPoor>
<factorNormal>1</factorNormal>
<factorGood>1.2</factorGood>
<factorSuperior>1.4</factorSuperior>
<factorExcellent>1.6</factorExcellent>
<factorMasterwork>1.8</factorMasterwork>
<factorLegendary>2</factorLegendary>
          </li>
</value>
</Operation>
</Patch>
Just throw that in an XML in a mod/patches folder and you're good. That's what I will try for my next map.

As example (this assumes you have the quality patch I posted above and the mod I posted above):
80 Devilstrand = 960$ Marketvalue (80x12$)
A normal devilstrand duster is worth: 1082,5$
A legendary devilstrand duster is worth twice as much: 2165$

So at normal quality you already make around a 12,5% gain, which is meh, but it's something for your work. At legendary quality it's a whopping 125% gain, which is really good.

That is not taking into account: Sell/Buy price modifiers, negotiator bonuses and difficulty modifiers. At extreme difficulty the legendary duster is worth only ~1600$ - or 2000$ depending on social skill. (You need 38,3% bonus to reach 100% market value, because 1*0,5*0,8*1,8 = 0,72 and 0,72*1,383 = ~1)

You can of course tweak either mod to change things to your liking. E.g. change the bandaid mod that I posted to give bigger/smaller bonuses on apparel or change the XML code I posted to give bigger/smaller bonuses for varying qualities. Or just add a stat modifier to your scenario in which you adjust the trade price improvement. E.g. if the 30% at 20 social is too low for you, try 150%, so you get 45%. Be careful though, you are getting a big bonus from the item sell price multiplier - if your negotiators skill is too high you actually get less selling the apparel, because the sell price can never exceed the buy price. So at 60% bonus you get 1700$, but at 40% you get 2100$ - because if you were buying the devilstrand duster it would only cost 1700$ with the 60% negotiator.

[Shurp]

Well, that solves the quality overkill problem.  But what about the base value problem?

The 80 units of devilstrand are $960.  The duster is $1,082.5.  The difference is $122.5.  For 26,000 ticks of work that implies a value of $0.0047/tick.  Can this be increased?  I think that's what I really want to see -- the labor going into making the duster worth more than the material.

--- [edit] ---

I just realized an alternate solution -- edit all the material in the game to reduce its value, making labor comparatively greater.  Quite a bit of work, but hypothetically doable.  But increasing labor value if it can be edited directly would be far better.

[Syrchalis]

Well, that solves the quality overkill problem.  But what about the base value problem?

The 80 units of devilstrand are $960.  The duster is $1,082.5.  The difference is $122.5.  For 26,000 ticks of work that implies a value of $0.0047/tick.  Can this be increased?  I think that's what I really want to see -- the labor going into making the duster worth more than the material.

--- [edit] ---

I just realized an alternate solution -- edit all the material in the game to reduce its value, making labor comparatively greater.  Quite a bit of work, but hypothetically doable.  But increasing labor value if it can be edited directly would be far better.

I think for a normal quality duster that's fine. If your crafters are not that good yet it's fine if you mostly sell materials and just a few finished things, once they get better you can steadily decrease the products you sell (since you lose money doing so) and make more and more stuff out of them instead.

[Dargaron]

First off, I wholeheartedly approve of any change that makes production of finished goods more valuable than their component parts: otherwise you literally make skilled labor have negative value, while virtually all "non-skilled" labor (growing, mining, etc) has a positive value.

What if raider weapons had a debuff that made them significantly less durable than player-made weapons: e.g. a "jury-rigged" modifier which decreases the weapon's durability by a massive amount, with a commensurate decrease in resale value, a la "deadman's apparel."

No idea why some of the finished products are less expensive than the inputs: for example the base value of medicine is less than the components that go into it, despite requiring a specialized bench, research AND two separate skill requirements.

[cultist]

I think it actually makes sense.

Your colony is not an efficient economic machine. Big corporations don't make money by just buying the raw materials they need and then turning them into other things that create profit. That's only the end of the process. Money is made by buying in bulk, making trade deals, good customer service, marketing, keeping your workers happy (or at least content) etc.
I think it would be fair to assume that your rag-tag colony could never compete with some intergalactic corporation when it comes to efficiency and turning a profit.

Something I think could make trading/production more interesting is a rework of the trade missions. There's too much RnG and the rewards often aren't worth the trip.

[Shurp]

No, it does not make sense that finished goods sell for less than the materials that make them.  If you're going to argue that interstellar corporations make your sale of deerskin trousers unprofitable, you also have to argue that selling deerskin hides is also unprofitable.  But that doesn't happen on Rimworld. 

The corporate advantages you describe are methods for controlling costs, and if you had to pay your colonists a wage to work for you you'd certainly go out of business immediately, sure.  Likewise if you had to buy the deerskin you're making pants from.  But when deer are wandering around for free and your colonists are happy to work for pemmican then you have an advantage no corporation can dream of -- free inputs.

The amazing thing is that Denny's Inc. hasn't landed on your colony and turned it into a beef plant sending frozen carcasses to distant worlds...

[josefrees]

Am I missing something or is wealth generation being easy pretty much meaningless in a game that scales raids based on wealth and allows the player complete control over the difficulty? Creating wealth is not as important as keeping raiders from taking everything.

IMO, the game would benefit greatly with a more realistic economy. Supply and demand, stockpiles, consumption etc. Probably very tough on the calculations though. The balancing as it is is a bit ham fisted

I will never agree with tainted tag how the merchant or any random person who didn't see you rip it off the corpse gonna know?