What build method for profit

[shietinghd]

There are 3 build method for player. Which of the 3 (Universal, closed loop, terran) has the most profit margin. ( I do know about miner for terren because of high silicon use)

[Dunkler Messias]

Probably terran. But in the end it depends on your stations. If you have already built several stations to produce universal wares like hull parts, shield components, weapon components, ... then it makes sense to build ships using universal wares.

If you're still in the early game and just care about easy profits, Terrans is best choice since their economy is simplified. You just need mineral miners and gas miners, stations for three different terran wares, excluding energy cells. That's it. No need to further process any wares. Three stations alone are enough to build your own little empire. Hell, you could even build all of the three different production modules on one station. Simple!

[aY227]

Profit margin? There are no taxes or operating cost here.
If you mean "what will give me best income per hour per 1M investment" than I would say terrans.

Fast and simple and you can provoke an anti TER war. (plus amazing salvaging in Getsu)
Commonwealth is great but later with tier 3 products.
Closed loop is for ships and ARG equipment - but by closed loop peoples often mean salvaging generally - so yeah also great early for Hull Parts and Claytronics.

This being said you still can make good early money on stuff like food or medicines, or even energy cells :)

[joeball123]

Originally posted by aY227:

Profit margin? There are no ... operating cost here.

Opportunity costs are still costs, and the resources that a station consumes could instead have been sold to generate revenue. The only production station that doesn't have an operating cost is a solar power plant that doesn't have any workforce.

Also, you don't have to set your stations up such that they'll never purchase any of their inputs from the AI's miners, freighters, and stations.

[Azunai]

Best profit is simple. Terrans. No contest.

Computronic substrate factories are cheap to set up and generate fantastic profits.

Also very easy to extend later on. You just slap on a few modules for the other two terran resources and the builder modules and you already have a fully functional shipyard that can print money even faster than the substrate factory it started out as.

[aY227]

Originally posted by joeball123:

Originally posted by aY227:

Profit margin? There are no ... operating cost here.

Opportunity costs are still costs, and the resources that a station consumes could instead have been sold to generate revenue. The only production station that doesn't have an operating cost is a solar power plant that doesn't have any workforce.

Also, you don't have to set your stations up such that they'll never purchase any of their inputs from the AI's miners, freighters, and stations.

Well, I disagree - resources are also free and opportunity costs is imaginary term in a game where efficiency doesn't matter and you can't start losing money. You also can't just sell whatever you want wherever you want.
Applying this logic solar plants would also have cost of wasted investment, than we could go deeper because why to even produce anything let's go capture stuff for free etc. etc.

Simplifying - when you set up production chain it will run for free, all that matters in this question and I see no point in over-complicating it.

Terrans and YOLO

[Ketraar]

Originally posted by aY227:

Originally posted by joeball123:

Opportunity costs are still costs, and the resources that a station consumes could instead have been sold to generate revenue. The only production station that doesn't have an operating cost is a solar power plant that doesn't have any workforce.

Also, you don't have to set your stations up such that they'll never purchase any of their inputs from the AI's miners, freighters, and stations.

Well, I disagree - resources are also free and opportunity costs is imaginary term in a game where efficiency doesn't matter and you can't start losing money. You also can't just sell whatever you want wherever you want.

This is a very old dabate I recall having since X2 even before complexes were a thing. See, opportunity cost is something you need to factor in if you are truly looking to maximise profits.

For example if you build everything yourself and would be able to supply the economy then you would shrink the overall economy and as such reduce your profits. Including the NPC in your production loops stimulates the economy, increasing it and thus creating more opportunity for yourself, leading to more profits. So for example let's take Silicon Wafers production per hour.

Silicon, 4800
Energy, 1800
Silicon Wafers, 2140

This means if I sell the silicon directly at min price I get 532.800 and 18.000 for the energy, total 550.800 credits. If I sell 2140 Silicon Wafers at min price I get 385.200, making a net loss of 147.600 credits. If I do the same but all Average pricing then I start to see a profit of 15.860 for my own production, but I had to invest a huge amount of money so ROI is going to be low. It's at the max price ranges that station production gets a sensible profit with 176.660 credits, but again with the same investment and already requires a market to sell the wafers at max price constantly, which is not likely.

So yes, self sustainability is convenient, but not as clear cut in terms of maximising profits as any respectable Teladi would want.

MFG

Ketraar

[aY227]

This is still "what would give me more profit per hour", not "what's my profit margin"
Mixing terms, and tbh it's also my fault here.
Ok, in this understanding "opportunity cost" exists, but is nothing more than an another term for simple, good old "maximizing profits" as you said... actually exactly as you said. So a circle to my first post here - "what will give me best income per hour per 1M investment"

Again - you can't lose money here, you can't go negative while doing nothing. Player is never truly penalized and efficient planning isn't really rewarding - in the long term just scaling up will average out as best. If suddenly we are adding trading opportunities with made up scenarios where we somehow always can sell at minimal price, than hey - let's go board some L builders and try to count that. ¯\(ツ)/¯ Pointless.

Question was about PRODUCTION method in general, not what potentially we can do with silicon.

Not sure why this is going into area where simple thing is getting over-explained, artificially convoluted and unnecessary complicated. On the other hand this feels like a running theme here.