Broken Manufacturing Economy

[Rekit]

I have sat down tonight and worked through the manufacturing process to see how it works. After a while I realised I was losing money and fast. So I did an Excel breakdown sheet with all recipes and Items. I wanted to know what items were profitable to manufacture, what ones were a waste of time, and why I was losing money.

I discovered that the pricing vs. manufacturing requirements are not balanced at all. This is an easy fix though. It will just mean adjusting buy and sell prices to balance the market.

Primarily, All the level 5 minerals need adjusting at the least;

Awesomite L5 is valued at 1,000,000c, Awesomite L4 is valued at 1000c. 1x L5, makes 4x L4 with a manufacturing ratio of 10:1. This means a loss of 90,000c per every L5 broken to L4 for market.

Changing mineral sell values to say L1=90, L2=800, L3=7000, L4,60000, L5=500000 would mean a 11,13,14,17% profit per break down respectively. This means, the higher the level of resource you have, the more money you will make breaking the resource down. Also means that the higher you buy the resource at for manufacturing, the cheaper the whole manufacturing process would be.

As it stands Level 5 mineral are good for nothing but selling to the shop for MASSIVE overpriced values. To manufacture anything with this, would be at the loss of potential profit.

EXAMPLE

To manufacture SD proton reactor, you require 1x Insanium L1 valued at 10c.

If you were to buy 10,000 Insanium L1 (10,000 x 10c = 100,000c) and sell them (10,000 x100c = 1,000,000c) you would make 900,000c profit 90%GP

If you were to buy 10,000 Insanium L3 (100 x 1,000c = 100,000c) and sell them (10,000 x100c = 1,000,000c) you would make 900,000c profit 90%GP

If you were to buy 1x Insanium L5 (1 x 1,000,000c = 1,00,000c) and break it down to 10,000x Insanium L1 and sell them (10,000 x100c = 1,000,000c) you would make 0c profit. 0%GP

Now, you the prices were adjusted (to above figures);

If you were to buy 10,000 Insanium L1 (10,000 x 90c = 900,000c) and sell them (10,000 x100c = 1,000,000c) you would make 100,000c profit 10%GP

If you were to buy 10,000 Insanium L3 (100 x 7,000c = 700,000c) and sell them (10,000 x100c = 1,000,000c) you would make 300,000c profit 30%GP

If you were to buy 1x Insanium L5 (1 x 500,000c = 500,000c) and break it down to 10,000x Insanium L1 and sell them (10,000 x100c = 1,000,000c) you would make 500,000c profit 50%GP



Also to manufacture any of the following runs at a loss. (First ones on the list are the worst effected)

YHOLE NUCLEUS, All Colored Regular Hulls (except purple), BLUE PAINT, SD HCT xm3.4 Power, SD Docking Enhancer Unit, SD Docking Unit, PlexLander, SD PROTON REACTOR, SD1000 CAPACITOR, SD1000 DELTA INTERFACE, SD1000 FLUX COIL, SD1000 MEMORY MODULE, SD1000 MICROPROCESSOR, SD2000 CAPACITOR, SD2000 DELTA INTERFACE, SD2000 FLUX COIL, SD2000 MEMORY MODULE SD2000 MICROPROCESSOR, SD3000 CAPACITOR, SD3000 DELTA INTERFACE, SD3000 FLUX COIL, SD3000 MEMORY MODULE, PROTEIN 40000A, PROTEIN 1000B

Also there are some items that you make a ridiculous amount of money on for effort input. The buy/sell prices need to be reduced. (Further in the list, the more profit % you make)

PROTEIN 2000B, PlexDoor, 0C Cloaker, AstroTechnician, PlexBeacon, Weapons Computer, PROTEIN 30000A, 10x RadarJammer, d1000 Missile CPU, Salvage Computer, PROTEIN 10000A, PlexStorage, SD KB Missile CPU, SD-BB Missile Computer, SCHEMADYNE 1000, Plextanium Glass, PROTEIN 20000A, SCHEMADYNE 2000, SCHEMADYNE 3000, SCHEMADYNE 20000, SCHEMADYNE 30000, PlexRecycler



If the Dev's would like a loook or copy of the interactive Spreadsheed, just ask

 

[Axebane]

Yeah, the value of mineral ores are 10x higher than the previous level, EXCEPT for L5 ores, which are 100x higher than L4. If you simply change L5 to 100,000 instead of 1,000,000, you would fix the problem of losing money when using the mineral seperator. You would also make it a little bit harder to get rich quick. (although I personally redid the values for all the ores completely, and also tweaked a ton of other blocks to make the economy more balanced)

Also, I don\'t know if you knew this but, if you want to make a recipe more/less profitable, you don\'t actually have to change the sell values of blocks. Instead, you can open BlockConfig.xml in a text editor (you can\'t do this in the built-in Modding tool unfortunately) and scroll down to the Factory section. There you will find all the recipes and the amounts for input/output. If you wanted, for example, to make thrusters more profitable to produce, you can change the output from 1 to 2. This way you get 2 thrusters each time the recipe is used, doubling the profit you can make from your ingredients. You can even add your own recipes to the file as long as you use the existing format!

I had to do this kind of thing after I had changed a lot of the values for most of the blocks in the game to try and make the economy more balanced. After I did that, I realized I needed to re-evaluate the recipes to make sure they made sense with the new sell values. So I wrote down the price for all the ship components I had edited, and then went through all the recipes in the game to make sure that they were profitable to produce, but not TOO profitable. I found some of the strangeness regarding some of the ingredients, like the various protein items. Some of them were stupidly profitable, so I increased the required ingredients (input) to make sure the recipe was more reasonable.

 

[Rekit]

Yes, i was aware of this. I have put together a changelog for the server I play on. but the other 90% of servers i am sure are running on default resource and recipe values. Also it is a pain when the game updates and changes are made in the new cliet, eg, new blocks added.

I think that the balance should be primarily done on the development side, not the server/client side. It would save alot of people, administrators time. It would also mean that their game is better recieved.

Thanks Axebane

 

[Axebane]

True, the vanilla recipes should be evaluated by the devs so that they make sense with the default buy/sell prices. Manufacturing should always turn a profit due to the time and effort it takes to do it. If a player spends an hour setting things up and deciding what recipes they want to use, they should be rewarded. Otherwise they could have just spent that hour harvesting blocks and made tons of credits.

I am hopeful that we might see these kind of changes fairly soon, because there seems to be a lot of players who are wanting to see a game economy/manufacturing system that is more balanced.