EA 0.6 first impressions and factory tips/observations

General
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Alright, it’s been awhile since I have played, it was a pleasant surprise to see something to spend the end-game money on(or day 89 money for me) to see if we can eek out more profits. I did see some youtubers complaining about the factories not being worth it. (I also recommend not investing in it till you have at least 2mil and 2 stores per district minimum so you know what’s your “best sellers” are) I only have used it for expensive jewelry atm. Lets do some math. I will do it in weekly values to make people understand “when they are worth it” TLDR you need to be selling enough to use a full machine’s weekly output (for expensive jewelry that’s 336 per week; 48 per day x 7). Running 24/7 a jewelry machine can make 48 per day with 2 laser cutters, 1 polisher and 1 assembler (you can scale this without increasing the input/outputs past 3 for quite awhile using splitters) so those are all 1 time/fixed costs; so your first 48 in this case will be the most expensive to make when it comes to expensive gems. (this prob applies to everything really) All the below values should be static, each output/input you add will cost 6k a week to man 24/7 and your warehouse will require a logistics manager (purchasing agent is a 1 time deal) I will leave out the cost of a driver and any insurance since you can avoid it with using headhunters to recruit 100 skill labor w/o the healthcare requirement and use the warehouse as a distro in a pinch.

The cost breakdown is such…
Raw materials per week 292.50(uncut gem) each .39(metal bands) each
$98,441.04

Factory Labor per week (100%) 35 per hour
3x 24/7 shifts per day(2 input 1 output) x 7 days x 35 per hour
$17,460.00

1 logistics manager (100%) 88 per hour
$3,520.00

1 Purchasing agent (100%) 88 per hour
$3,520.00

Rent (112 per day)
$854.00

$120,275.04 (the total of above) Divided by 336 gems(expensive) per week

357.96 Cost per goods made (keep in mind they can sell for 1,399 each easily almost 3.9x profit)

The shipper/distributor charges over $640 each for expensive jewelry with my 100% Purchasing agent. (if you can get close to 360 each from a distro it might not be worth it, but IDK how low I can get uncut gems for either)

If you add up all the equipment needed it’s a 1 time investment of 1.2mil roughly
You are saving close to 94.5k per week on gems with the above numbers so it will pay for itself roughly in 84 days. I am not sure if they give you a 30% tax credit for machines but that would just lower the machines from 950k to 600k ish.

Keep in mind you can double production for a 1 time cost of ~950k for the equipment and belts to double production. The workers can keep up easily. So once i’m selling far over the 336 per week I can start scaling up. Below is a scalable setup that’s takes almost no space and I threw together in a few mins. I am sure there’s much more efficient setups.Main take away is try to minimize input/outputs as much as possible since they cost 6k each week! Here is it scaled up to 96 per day

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Keep in mind though I have only tested jewelry (since I love high profit margins) I will prob check electronics as well; I will update this when I do. The only other things from the update of note I have found is, I feel like clicking the car is kinda annoying when interacting with storage now, cashiers have been buggy, and I have had hand-carts bug out but fix on a restart.

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Hi guys,

Thanks for sharing your experiences! I like it! It is useful to me that when I will test the Game Ver 0.6.

Regards

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I got another roughly 120 days into the game, after some testing I did find out some interesting things. You get no tax incentives from machines, so they are a total cost that needs to be factored up front. For factories, the baseline cost of making goods is roughly 120$ an hour for your first set of machines, for every set of machines after w/o adding more input/outputs it becomes much cheaper till 5 sets of machines which starts to lower cost basis of goods by 5ish% or so, so ideally you want to make 3 sets of machines to maximize cost basis reduction on items. Raw goods seem to be fixed cost so you can only fish for cheaper prices of distributer for finished goods. For labor the base cost I outlined above makes any goods under $37 a piece almost always better to buy from the distributers. (until u can make 5-10X machines off one input) I think many of the food machines would benefit from a “hopper” system or something that would allow one worker to fill multiple inputs to make it more viable earlier game since many items require a lot of inputs and you need to make a TON of volume. I will go through an example, French fries below in the spreadsheet.

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As you can see once you make 2-3 end-product machines it becomes massively worth it for cost reduction over a long period of time. The up-front cost would be many million though to lose money on French fries vs distrubuter. For the fun of it lets pretend u sell all 1800 per day for $2.30, cost basis of 6 cents (just to illustrate how horrible this is currently) , $2.24 profit, to make machines it’s 1.2 mil for 10 fry machines (8 min per craft) and 550k for 8 food cutters (5 min per craft; 80 cut fries needed per min) let’s pretend 2 mill total for all belts and conveyers and output/input and machines. You would sell the fries for a 4068 profit per day (we will ignore tax) it would take roughly 492 days to recoup your initial investment. SO the machines either need to be cheaper (or the fryer output increased A LOT with current numbers 6 cents would be achievable at ~44000 fries with 10 machines) BTW if you spent that 2mil on fries at $1.64 you would have 1,219,512 fries; if you use 1800 a day that would last you 677 days (11 years and some change AND that whole time your making your money back with the fries and you don’t lose opportunity cost) I think giving a 30% tax incentive for depreciation of real estate and machinery would make this more attractive as well to allow you to re-coup your investment faster. Sorry if some of the math is off, I think it’s right though. To fix fries, lower cost of potatoes, make more per hour, and lower the cost of the machines with tax incentives (this should still be a long term investment).

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Good job! Amazing!

I test 0.6 yesterday, and I think factory is interesting for me.
Before I calculate the profit, I need to know every machine that how to work!
Maybe like knight club at 0.5，its profit isn’t worth to invest.
I would like to test more things about the version 0.6.

Good luck!

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Alright, I did a little more testing, right now, just math-wise here are the findings, just from a gross profit stand-point, without any consideration of cost basis from factory efficiency. Jewelry, electronics, clothing, whisky and wine. (whisky and wine are worth making since for some reason they are made at a rate of 60 per hour; you need to be able to sell close to 10k per week though) outside that; it really isn’t worth it making anything else. The issue is food item machines cost as much if not more than items that sell for 10x the price and are made at the same rate or even lower. For example, pizza is made at a rate of 1 every 5 minutes and sells for 22 base price. A smart phone is made 1 for every 10 mins but is worth $999… the cost basis is roughly $8 if you buy a pizza from the purchasing agent. So at most you can save 8 dollars on each pizza sold if you steal the materials to make them. You make 2016 (12x24x7 pizzas) a week with one machine vs 1008 phones per 1 machine. (6x24x7)(we are ignoring the total chain of machines/inputs since it doesn’t matter it just contributes to more cost basis) 2016 X $8 is a total of 16k worth of savings possible for pizza… meanwhile a zanaman phone can be purchased around $368 from the purchasing agents, with a potential savings of WAY MORE than 8$ per unit…$368 of savings potentially… To balance this food needs way more volume since they sell in much bigger bulk anyways so the weekly gross profit achievable is at least comparable vs phones and the like. They need to mimic whisky and wine which are pumped out 60 per hour, this allows them even selling at 21 and 26 dollars to profit as much as cheap jewelry and clothing and some electronics if your able to sell all 10000 units. The factory mechanic needs to make sense to work; we are here to make money afterall, not lose it. If you are dead set on making food though, burgers and pizza are the best of the best. Clocking in at a potential 42000 and 44352 gross profit per week per machine…To put things in prospective 1 Zanaman phone machine has a projected profit of 1.06million per week. (at base profit target) If you sell all 1008 phones vs 2016 pizzas and 3360 burgers. Below is the sheet I made, again at the end of the day the factory allows you the chance to make the end-goods for cheaper than the purchase agent, thats the only benefit besides “being something to do”. Meaning the purchase agent price is the most important thing when considering if you want to make an item otherwise, just bulk order (a year’s worth) and ignore factories or making it yourself since “quality” isn’t a thing.

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The ability to make items that cannot be shipped in and or sell items as a wholesaler to your rivals would make this mechanic more interesting as well as possibly an alternative to the forced narrative of being a retailer. Another thing I find weird is this…Currently the best way to optimize a factory is to run shifts on inputs rotating employees in 30 min intervals or so depending on how many belts u have between each input and crafter speed; since throughput is so low on some chains. (sometimes as low as 4 items every hour) Outputs run by very low % factory workers 24/7 helps as well just for simplicity as well. I feel like really 1 factory worker should be able to run multiple inputs without scheduling Shenanigans or maybe allow near full automation but require an onsite mechanic/factory tech to keep the machines running as a progression path for inputs/outputs. I like the addition, I am curious what’s the idea of “balance” and what’s the “target” cost basis savings for a factory vs the purchasing agents. Some things I wish factories had are over under belts(allow belts to cross vertically and horizontally over eachother) , built in buffers, the ability to mark pallet/shelves to allow only 1 type of item to be stored on them. Only other comments I have since I last played, nightclubs, offices, flower shops, coffee shops, and book stores all seem to not be worth making, though maybe I am not optimizing their hours correctly, they seem to lag a lot behind the other store types.

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I would go on test EA 0.6 if I have enough time, but it looks like not.

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I re-studied your test results and charts, great work!
I only tested the cell phone line and the cigar line.
Obviously, we came to much the same conclusion.

  1. Human costs will greatly reduce profits (although the real world is the same)
  2. The fluctuating import price index will greatly reduce the attractiveness of factories
    3.54 retail goods with higher unit prices seem to be more suitable for factories
  3. The factory cost recovery cycle is too long, although in reality it is common to recover investment costs in 5 years, but I can hardly imagine that most players will play for more than 2 years (game time).
  4. It is a very, very good idea to reduce labor costs by scheduling and the length of conveyor belts, and I admire your proposal very much. Although I had been scheduling every lawyer, programmer, and graphic designer to work an hour at a standard desk to meet their need for office equipment, hahaha.
    That’s all, thank you!
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I have to say that after many live broadcasts and repeated thinking about the problem of the factory production line, the problem became clearer and clearer.
Your analysis and suggestions are very accurate and helpful to my thinking.
Because we came to almost the same conclusion, and almost similar solutions.

Thank you!