Should you make that? Tycoon pack edition

Day 5,460, 04:55 • Published in Canada Canada • by Wilhem Klink

Part three

In this article, we're looking at one of the few ways to generate work tickets. We know an employer can:
- hire at market wage from the Job Market. We've also seen that hiring at market wages is not profitable

- have some sort of work-swap where you & another producer work for each other at reduced wages. The question is does the profits cover what you could get by working for market wages? Example: I work for 1,500cc and I employ a co-conspirator at 1,500. I can produce a Q1 house worth 17,100 on the market for 15,000 CAD and it costs me 5,000 CAD in lost (forgone) wages. Is that really a bargain?

- a co-op where the workers get low cash wages but get a slice of the items produced. Example: Co-op worker gets 5CAD + 4 Q5 Air weapons. Assuming the market price of a Q5 Air is 1,125, am I not just paying them the equivalent of 4,505 CAD? I am.

- Lastly, the focus of this article, buying the Tycoon Pack from Plato. I'm going to focus of buying with tokens (99 of them) since introducing real currency doesn't have any real payback. If I shell out €9.90 I'm not ever expecting to get that money back.

In this article, the price of a game token is set as 10,200 based on the prices noted on eRepublik Tools. So the question we will try to answer is:

can a producer make at least 1,090,000 in profits from the Tycoon Pack in order to cover the game token cost of that?


What one gets for 99 game tokens.

- 20 gold
- 150 work tickets
- 20% production bonus for 7 days

Lets look at Work as Manager production first

Food
A table with a high bonus region (200% bonus)



We're looking at cramming all 150 works in while the +20% Tycoon bonus is active, attempting to maximize production. So instead of 200 food per work, we're making 240 food per work or 36,000 over the 150 Tycoon works. As one can see from the table, the low Food Raw Material cost helps keep the profit high, but food just doesn't sell at a high enough prices to make the needed 1,090,000 to enable us to buy another 99 game tokens.

A chart showing what a token would need to cost to be able to afford a Tycoon Pack

Everything craters pretty fast. Getting tokens for less than $1,000 seems unlikely.

Skipping the low-bonus food since if high bonus can't do it, low certainly can't.


Weapons then, maybe?



Ouch. Even with free labor, Q1 & Q2 can't escape the cost of the raw materials. Even with free raw materials there's just not enough sales to make it (3,600 Q7s at 91cc each only gets 327,600).

Lets try Air weapons


Bear in mind, we're still working with the odd Q4 pricing, but even that can't salvage a breakeven on the Tycoon Pack. As quality goes up so does the cost and even though the Q5s sell for over 2 million, it can't net enough after the raw cost to cover the Pack.

But wait! You may say to yourself, I can also produce the necessary Air raw materials with my 150 work tickets. And you'd be right.


This table shows how many works you'll need in the Neodymium mine you'll need to cover the ARM. Q1 for example, needs 37 works to cover the ARM. Some production hits the ARM on the nose (Q2 & Q3), but the others have to buy a small amount.
But in the end it doesn't matter. The reduction in the amount of air weapons you're able to produce can't make up for the need to not buy ARM.



Housing maybe?

Since Housing works a bit differently than the three industries we've already seen (each house takes the same HRM, just the labor changes) we're moving from a base of 40% of a Q1 per day to 48% of a Q1 in a high bonus region.



Still not there. By game mechanics, the amount of housing raw stays steady across the quality levels, as the houses produced drops in half and the raw materials for each level doubles (except for Q5, where's its a third).

How about just making raw materials? We can obviously ignore Food since the .01 market price won't get us anything. And lets also ignore weapons as the 17.40cc market price isn't helping. So the two most expensive raws, housing & air


Both housing & Air raws produce the same, it's only the market price that varies. Neither return enough to buy a Tycoon Pack, however.

RECAP
It's clear that our initial goal - to earn enough cc from a Tycoon Pack to buy another Tycoon Pack - isn't realistic. Sure, if you want to pump up your fake in-game currency with real life currency, the Tycoon Pack is a much better way to do that than straight buying & selling gold. And if that's the goal, then it would appear that either Q5 weapons, Q1 Houses or house raw material would be the industry to be in.





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