Explain Wharf mechanics to me

[UkrainianDoomer]

OK, I've invested close to 200 mil credits into building a S/M Wharf with all the blueprints from ANT in The Void. As of right now it made me 60 mil back. Of those 200 mil about 110 were just S/M Production Module. So I have a few questions:

Now that S/M module has been the largest investment - it will work for every race from the same blueprint, right?

Since ANT and ARG technology are almost similar (save for a few guns and ships here and there) - why isn't ARG buying ships from it? Yes it's rather deep in the ANT territory so do I need to build the same in the ARG space? What about neutral sectors? What about sectors controlled by me?

How exactly would you guess which race/faction will be buying ships from you?

Is building ships and selling them to other races will include that additional 50% tax? The Void wharf is selling ships at 150% price quite well

[Min]

Yes building ships is the most profitable enterprise in this game. Buy blueprints from each faction race but in my experience I never have a time where my warf/shipyard is not building something. Even at 150% NPCs will still order ships. If you have the blueprints of other races they will order from you. My complex is in grand exchange and every race apart from terrans order ships from me.

[Gregorovitch]

The factions only order very specific specifications of ships, always their own, always with exact requirements. The reason ARG won't buy ANT ships is they are not the same models. For example ANT do the Nova sentinel whereas the ARG do the Nova Vanguard. When either of them order a Nova from you they may not call it either of those, the might call it a patrol ship or something, but whatever they call it it will be based on either the sentinel or vanguard versions and they won't accept the wrong one, you must have all the exact BPs they want.

Yeah, bummer. Yeah, expensive. Very expensive. Wait till you hit this issue with destroyers and carriers BPs, you won't see much change out of three or four billion for them all

In my last game I started buying all the factions BPs for S ships first since after the first set I got I thought that S ships were very reliable sales even if the cheapest. Then I moved onto getting all the M BP, one faction at a time.

Dunno how other folk do it but one thing for sure is you can't steel these ship BPs so everyone just got to buckle down and pay through the nose for them over time. It does of course accelerate as you get more and more BPs since you get more and more orders to pay for them.

[UkrainianDoomer]

Interesting - so does that mean one wharf is enough for the rest of the game (as long as enough resources are coming) and building more is more or less pointless (e.g. the investment won't really make a difference)?

What about building and selling ships yourself? Will it sell them when you click "sell ship" at some race's wharf at 100% resources used price or 150%?

[Min]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

The factions only order very specific specifications of ships, always their own, always with exact requirements. The reason ARG won't buy ANT ships is they are not the same models. For example ANT do the Nova sentinel whereas the ARG do the Nova Vanguard. When either of them order a Nova from you they may not call it either of those, the might call it a patrol ship or something, but whatever they call it it will be based on either the sentinel or vanguard versions and they won't accept the wrong one, you must have all the exact BPs they want.

Yeah, bummer. Yeah, expensive. Very expensive. Wait till you hit this issue with destroyers and carriers BPs, you won't see much change out of three or four billion for them all

In my last game I started buying all the factions BPs for S ships first since after the first set I got I thought that S ships were very reliable sales even if the cheapest. Then I moved onto getting all the M BP, one faction at a time.

Dunno how other folk do it but one thing for sure is you can't steel these ship BPs so everyone just got to buckle down and pay through the nose for them over time. It does of course accelerate as you get more and more BPs since you get more and more orders to pay for them.

At the start the BPs I purchased was of ships that I myself would use. Fighters that I use in my fleet, an M transporter Miners etc and a large Transporter and miners. I am saving up for Asgard BP before I start buying up everything

[Min]

Originally posted by Junta:

Interesting - so does that mean one wharf is enough for the rest of the game (as long as enough resources are coming) and building more is more or less pointless (e.g. the investment won't really make a difference)?

What about building and selling ships yourself? Will it sell them when you click "sell ship" at some race's wharf at 100% resources used price or 150%?

Yep I have one warf/shipyard all on my PHQ and the rest of my investment goes into having enough production to never run out of resources. I dont think you need to buy up every BP because the AI will order ships no matter what. Get the BPs that you like at first, for example you dont really need every XL builder BP from every race if you have limited funds

[The Big Brzezinski]

Try placing your wharf on a peaceful border area as well. I've got Teladi and Argon ship orders constantly flowing into my wharf in Black Hole Sun V. I was hoping for Paranid too, but I guess it's a little too far away.

[[Vilu]]

Originally posted by Min:

Yes building ships is the most profitable enterprise in this game. Buy blueprints from each faction race but in my experience I never have a time where my warf/shipyard is not building something. Even at 150% NPCs will still order ships. If you have the blueprints of other races they will order from you. My complex is in grand exchange and every race apart from terrans order ships from me.

Was in 3.30. Been greatly reduced in 4.0
ARG is buying 4-6mil behemoths at 150% price. Minimum equipment behemoth costs me 5.5mil to buy, that is with fully stocked ARG Shipyard at +30 reputation so max discounts.

Now the best bang for your resources is building ships with high cost equipment (mk3 engines, shields, beam turrets, meson streams, mk3 thursters etc) and then 'selling' them at shipyard/wharf that is at low supply, by de-equipping them there.

To give you some idea, highest costing Syn terrans have bought from me has been 26mil.
In comparison I can build one with mk3 shields/thrusters/beam turrets/main-guns and de-equip all that for 40+ million in a shipyard that's low on supply. Then sell the empty hull for another 14million or so.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Junta:

Interesting - so does that mean one wharf is enough for the rest of the game (as long as enough resources are coming) and building more is more or less pointless (e.g. the investment won't really make a difference)?

What about building and selling ships yourself? Will it sell them when you click "sell ship" at some race's wharf at 100% resources used price or 150%?

I built two wharf modules last game, but I'm not certain the extra capacity was actually used tbh. However it's not expensive to just build one wharf module once you got the BP for it
(relatively), so I guess why not, it looks cool.

Or if you mean do you need several shipyards to serve different parts of the map, AFAIK the factions don't give a damn where your shipyards are physically, they order wherever it is.

I didn't build ships myself and sell them last game ('cos that felt a bit cheesy for my taste) but I have a suspicion Egosoft have actually blocked that now, i.e. you can sell a ship you find or cap, or one you bought for cash from a faction, but I don't think the game will let you sell a ship you order yourself in your own shipyard anymore. I may be wrong.

[Lapo]

Originally posted by Vilu:

Was in 3.30. Been greatly reduced in 4.0
ARG is buying 4-6mil behemoths at 150% price. Minimum equipment behemoth costs me 5.5mil to buy, that is with fully stocked ARG Shipyard at +30 reputation so max discounts.

Ships that NPC factions order at the player's yard now get their sale price multiplied by 0.3. Also there is currently a bug with Terran equipment that when combined with this change makes you sell those ships at a loss, always. I suggest forbidding TER and PIO from buying ships until the bug is solved.

[UkrainianDoomer]

Originally posted by Lapo:

Originally posted by Vilu:

Was in 3.30. Been greatly reduced in 4.0
ARG is buying 4-6mil behemoths at 150% price. Minimum equipment behemoth costs me 5.5mil to buy, that is with fully stocked ARG Shipyard at +30 reputation so max discounts.

Ships that NPC factions order at the player's yard now get their sale price multiplied by 0.3. Also there is currently a bug with Terran equipment that when combined with this change makes you sell those ships at a loss, always. I suggest forbidding TER and PIO from buying ships until the bug is solved.

So that basically means that you can make barely any profit even at 150% because of that arbitrary multiplier that nerfs the player for whatever reason?

[Lapo]

Yes. While the sale price was reduced to 30% the production cost remains the same (*1) so the actual profit from ship production is reduced to around 10% of what it was before the nerf. If you needed 1 day to recover the wharf + blueprint investment in 3.30 now you need 10.

(*1) (or more, but that's another subject regarding the efficiency loss of stations without workers)

[Dracon]

Originally posted by Junta:

Originally posted by Lapo:

Ships that NPC factions order at the player's yard now get their sale price multiplied by 0.3. Also there is currently a bug with Terran equipment that when combined with this change makes you sell those ships at a loss, always. I suggest forbidding TER and PIO from buying ships until the bug is solved.

So that basically means that you can make barely any profit even at 150% because of that arbitrary multiplier that nerfs the player for whatever reason?

I actually calculated the costs of a Katana with only the bare minimum and a captain together once, and came to around 300k-600k. Click-Selling said ship gives me ~1.6M.

So yeah, you definitely make more money when click-selling to a warf or shipyard.

In contrast, selling a Gladius, when the AI dorectly buys it from me , gives me around 1M;
Note that I have no idea what it was equipped with, so I can't tell you if I actually made a loss, but since I'm calculating Computronic Substrate with 8k/piece the cost of an empty hull is really still below 100k
Again, it's possible that said Gladius was equipped with 4 Meson cannons and only MK3 stuff, then it would have probably been a loss, but the game doesn't really tell you that ;)

[Min]

Originally posted by Dracon:

Originally posted by Junta:

So that basically means that you can make barely any profit even at 150% because of that arbitrary multiplier that nerfs the player for whatever reason?

I actually calculated the costs of a Katana with only the bare minimum and a captain together once, and came to around 300k-600k. Click-Selling said ship gives me ~1.6M.

So yeah, you definitely make more money when click-selling to a warf or shipyard.

In contrast, selling a Gladius, when the AI dorectly buys it from me , gives me around 1M;
Note that I have no idea what it was equipped with, so I can't tell you if I actually made a loss, but since I'm calculating Computronic Substrate with 8k/piece the cost of an empty hull is really still below 100k
Again, it's possible that said Gladius was equipped with 4 Meson cannons and only MK3 stuff, then it would have probably been a loss, but the game doesn't really tell you that ;)

I never looked into calculating it fully detailed. All I know is my stations account increases in money. I actually have only one of each BP right now so for all S class ships I have only the mk4 split engine. Does that mean all NPC ships are outfitted with that engine even if non split order ships from me? If I have eclipse BP but no argon engine will it just use the split one? Is that why my engine parts is always low? I have more engine part production than hull parts but its still low in comparison

[Daddy Shark]

Mynock said that if a faction is low on part types like hull parts, they'll buy whatever ship you have and then recycle it and make their own ship from the parts.

[UkrainianDoomer]

Originally posted by Lapo:

Yes. While the sale price was reduced to 30% the production cost remains the same (*1) so the actual profit from ship production is reduced to around 10% of what it was before the nerf. If you needed 1 day to recover the wharf + blueprint investment in 3.30 now you need 10.

(*1) (or more, but that's another subject regarding the efficiency loss of stations without workers)

is there actually a mod that ups the income ratio at least somehow? Because I get Egosoft wanting players to stick with the game for longer, but it's a SP game and I find myself just using SETA more and more just to get more cash from my factories faster for the next very expensive purchase - which kinda defeats the purpose of having fun.