Q1 to Q3 Weapons Manufacturing is a Loss.
screamingslave
Recently I became aware of the fact that low level weapons manufacturing is a loosing effort. A great economic news paper The 1600 Index runs an ongoing analysis of the eUSA economy. One of the things this great paper covers is the profit/loss of running factories without employee's, which he shows to be a loss at low quality with current prices in the eUSA.
Not surprisingly things are no different here in eCanada. Q1 through Q3 are not profitable even to make with ones own labours. If you make your own WRM its better to sell it on the market and buy what you want than make these weapons and sell them.
I'll show you quickly with Q1 as an example. Our bonus is 40 so we make 14 weapons and use 140 WRM.
Right this instant the lowest market price for Q1's is $2, WRM is 0.19 and FRM is 0.08, you'll see why that's relevant in a second.
Cost to make a weapon of Quality 1 is WRM needed + 10 Health or 0.08 x 5 as each q1 food takes 1 FRM and gives 2 health, and i'm pretending everybody makes their own food before selling weapons because 40 cents cost is better than 1 dollar to run your company right?
So: 140 x 0.19 + 0.08 x 5 = 27/14 = 1.93 Cost EA. but we still have to add 15% vat tax of 0.29 to get our break even point 2.22 CAD.
Selling for less than this is not helping you. Why? because you could have just sold the WRM for more money, remember there is no tax on WRM.
Here is how I figured that. Selling the guns at $2.00 minus 0.26 for taxes leaves you with 1.74 as your revenue per weapon. For your 14 gun run its 24.36 - 0.4 (for food) to get 23.96 as your final Income from the operation.
But just making and selling WRM will give you 140 x 0.19 = 26.60. It still cost 5 Q1 food to make that so that's a cost of 0.4 for a final profit of 26.20 CAD, much more than your 23.96 right!
Q2 and Q3 are not only worse off they also have significantly more offers below their break even points of $4.40 and $6.59.
It might be a small difference but these days every penny counts, particularly for newbies.
Comments
Groovy
excellent screaming slave. Does anyone really make Q3 weapons at all anymore?
^ I do... don't have enough gold to upgrade to Q4+ atm >_
I make Q2 ):
sadly Q3 is on the ladder to Q7
but honestly trolling aside, people will make whatever there is demand for, and as we saw right after rockets came out not many people were making Q3, however all that profit was quite the carrot so now everybody is making Q3 and there is no profit again lol
I'm glad someone's doing the math. Even considering the extra XP you'll get, it's not worth it. 😛
What happened to Platobot, though? Is he still buying at that level for a profit?
NIce work slave..... it's good to see someone still have their math skillz around here.
Screaming Slave for MoF!!!
i´m not sure, for raw definitly not.
i'm to lazy to screen shot the market pages and compare them every few hours, but i do sell at every Q range and it does seem like things move at a glacial pace these days.
I think plato's efforts are minimal at best, but i've done no research on it yet.
Plato bot is at $1.8 right now.
@Leo Balzac I have a Q2 since I'm a newb... :/
Hmm. So are you saying that not making Q1-3 weapons and buying them instead is better?
he's saying selling the raw materials is better
because i like rockets i buy the weapons rather than make them and pocket the savings (particularly on Q2 which is WAAAAAAY under valued)
but most players will want to sell the WRM rather than wasting their effort (and food) making that into a bunch of guns.
and if you buy your food, the math is even worse, and even Q4 weapons are a waste! and thats important to take note of!
Larsonman, the price the game defaults to is not necessarily where the bot is buying. I think that misconception is wreaking havoc on the markets.
Players need to stop being lazy and check the market price rather than just blindly selling at the default price. I believe this will be the topic of my next article.
good piece of analysis. but those are moving targets: with WRM 0.16, FRM 0.04 and Q1 weapons up at $2.07, it makes sense again to produce (same with Q2 and I assume Q3 as the most significant change here is the ~15% drop in WRM cost).
thats exactly the point, people need to be doing the math every day to know when to sell weapons and when to sell WRM.
its also important to keep your eye on the QUANTITY for sale. 70 units for sale at 0.16 does not mean WRM is at 0.16 when the much larger and more significant amounts are up for 0.17 and much more even than that at 0.18.
Often thats just somebody dumping their tiny bit of stuff to try and get some quick currency.
Dont race to the bottom, With patience one can make the full price on their sale.
"Dont race to the bottom, With patience one can make the full price on their sale."
it's funny you should say that, 'cause I used to love building up a big chunk of a certain weapon (used to be Q3's before upgrades), I would try and dump at least 2k product for a low price. The market would hit rock bottom for a few hours until all the small volume offers (which you pointed out) were bought up and the price rose back to what the larger volumes were priced at.
Heh. I knew it. I just dissolved all my weapons stuff last week and now there are actual numbers to support that decision. Yay me.
Thanks! V+S 🙂