[Economy] the -44% offer - UPDATED

Day 1,540, 04:49 • Published in USA Belgium • by shadowukcs
NOTE: to the readers who where hoping to see an article by the admins with new changes in, I'm sorry to disappoint you. There is no admin information in here, nor is anything about present or future updates in this article. This is an article where I analyse the -44% company upgrade offer.




Dear Readers


The following article is about economy



gotta love dat economy



I am one of those people who's PM box get flooded with "can you advise me what to build/upgrade next?..."-PM's from various players in this game at the beginning of each company upgrade offer. Now I'm not claiming I'm an expert on economy, but I do know how to make a nice profit. I guess that's the reason people sometimes come to me for advise.

In the past, my advice more or less always came down to: "upgrade your companies with every upgrade promo to as high as possible", but in the past, we had 50% upgrade offers.






Recently, this has changed. This morning I was a bit shocked to see that we no longer get a 50% upgrade offer, but a 44% upgrade offer. This shuffles the cards completely. "Is it still always the best thing to upgrade your companies?" I asked myself.

So I started working on the math in a googledoc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnA1tRLkQCzFdEJvZm5KZWtMQmx6VHJwNW1HbmJfZ0E&hl=en_US#gid=1

The sheet I created there can be copied (check instruction in the sheet called "intro") and everyone is free to use it as they please.



A few notes

There are however some notes I wish to make in regards to the calculations in this sheet:
First of all, it works from the principle that you are only going to work as WAM (WAM=Work As Manager; ea have no employees in your companies). Seeing as the only ones who can afford to hire employees are people with Q6 companies, I think this applies to the large majority of players.

If you do however have plenty of gold (and with plenty I mean +400 gold) that you wish to spend, ignore this article and this googledoc and wait until the admin releases another Q6 purchase-offer, buy that and hire employees.

Secondly, this article also works from the principle that you don't mind spending 50 to 100 hp per day extra on work. Personally I find 100 hp per day a very small amount seeing as you can spend 2400 hp every day if you're very active, but I understand there are some people who find the few 1000 damage a day they can do extra more important.






The analysis

right, let's analyse these calcs, shall we? First of all, people bitching about the admins making it a 44% offer in stead of a 50% offer only have themselves to blame. I know it's easy to blame the admin and call it "admin greed" but the real reason behind the change is the fact that once again, we had players abusing the system. Some players had 10 Q1 factories but only 85 gold. So every day of the offer, they would upgrade their Q1 company to Q4, work in it, downgrade it again, upgrade their next Q1 company, work in it, downgrade it again, ... so they ended up with 10 day production of Q4's in stead of Q1's. It's thanks to those people we now have -44% promo offers in stead of -50% offers. Because lets face it, those 1 or 3 extra gold you have to pay now when upgrading low Q companies will not make huge differences for the profit of the admins.

This new promo change however does have a huge impact on the readability of companies.

My sheet proves that it has become much more profitable to have just a large number of Q1 companies, in stead of 2 Q3 companies or higher. The profit generated from those 10 Q1 companies is nearly double than those of the 2 Q3's. One can ask himself the question, "is it even worth upgrading at all?"

That question is difficult to answer. The answer is: yes, it is worth it, BUT ONLY if you plan on upgrading to Q6 and ONLY if you plan on hiring workers. And even then, I would still advise to upgrade 1 company as high as possible in order to reach Q6 and keep the rest of your companies on Q1 level the profit correlation to your investment is just much higher with Q1 than it is with higher Q levels.

IF you plan on working as WAM, you are best off just buying a large amount of Q1 companies and sell your products at bot price for a maximum profit.


conclusion: if you're in it purely for the profit you are best off using your gold to either buy Q4 RM companies or buying Q1 weapons/food companies as they offer you the most value for your money



To the admins I can only plea that by the next offer, they can restore the upgrade promo back to 50%, giving players actually an economic purpose again to upgrade their companies. Maybe add some functions that allow you to only downgrade a company once every 24 hours to stop abuses of the system.



In the mean time, keep calm and buy some Q1's or save your money
UPDATE

on the eUSA forum I came across --->his thread where Pearlswine showed me an alternative method of looking at your investment. My calculations start from the thought that you'll continue the work in your companies indefinitely. If that is your goal, my advice still stands: RM and Q1's. (in some countries RM is better due to the very high gold price)

Pearlswine however (a far superior economic mind than myself), showed me a different method of looking at this promo offer. He explained that you can also look at this as an investment. You upgrade one of your companies now, make a profit out of it and later downgrade it again. Whereas the only difference being that you have to earn the 6% you lose, trough sales.

if you can earn back those 6% loss by the next company promo offer, you've made a profit out of this investment.

The goal is then to continue upgrading like that until you reach Q6.

He posted the following Gdoc on the eUSA forum where you can see the days of ROI as WAM per company you upgrade: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AiKV8-zrsigjdEJ2TWtQNTllRldRY0VTTDdtU0FWeXc&single=true&gid=21&output=html




sincerely

shadowukcs
the major journalist pretending to be an economic genius (rite pubs? rite? ;p )




SMALL EDIT: I'd just like to point to everyone that my starting point is to maximize profit. If you are a new player who doesn't have a Town centre on Q5 or a player who feels that over the course of several months/years he might to be able to buy a Q6 company, it might not be such a bad idea to upgrade your companies after all. The profit gained from having a Q5 town centre cannot be measured in relative numbers, but it nevertheless is something that's very profitable and should be achieved first and foremost.