Sell soap to Eli, or let farmers use it (lifestyle need)?

[TowerWizard]

Which is best (from an economic standpoint)? Should you do both, or just sell to Eli? Does it depend on how many farmer's houses you have, or is it always better to sell to Eli?

[Chaosium]

I'd say Eli 100% of the time, even if you can afford to do both it might just be more interesting to redirect everything to sell at Eli's. It gives a meager +1.875 coin/minute per farmer residence, which is pretty poor. At least with Eli you'll get a very nice influx of cash pretty quickly, definitely faster than with the farmers

Generally speaking you won't be rich by supplying farmer needs, it's not their purpose. It does provide workforce, but then again you can just build more farmer houses and their basic needs are ultra easy, so yeah... I wouldn't bother

[TowerWizard]

Has someone calculated it? It also gives more farmers, which should save money and space? Or how is income calculated? Per house or per actual farmer?

[Tuxedo]

Originally posted by TowerWizard:

Has someone calculated it?

https://steamcommunity.com/app/916440/discussions/0/592887423803926952/#c592887534192754320

[TowerWizard]

That video does not say anything about Lifestyle needs, which is what I am asking about. I know soap to Eli is profitable, what I want to know is (as stated in my opening post): should I ONLY ship to Eli, or should I ALSO provide soap as a lifestyle need.

That video also ignores production and maintainance costs for ships, as well as all infrastructure such as piers and such that is needed to deliver the goods.

I want this compared to simply allowing farmers to use soap (no maintainance from ships and piers), including an analysis of the impact of providing additional lifestyle needs. Does it get more profitable to provide lifestyle needs the more different lifestyle needs you provide? Stuff like that.

Also, how is income calculated? That is also a question left unanswered.

[Chaosium]

Income is per residence

The soap chain is 210 coins per minute and gives +1.875 coin per farmer residence per minute (on high income settings), so 210/1,875 = it takes 112 farmer residences to break even

[its ben]

disclaimer: I'm trying to math this out and I might be very wrong

According to https://anno1800.fandom.com/wiki/Needs, you would need 286 residences to consume 1 soap/minute, and the consumption will be the same regardless of how full those residences are. But if the residences are more full then they make more money from the need. So it shouldn't matter how many residences you have in terms of profitability, but instead, how full they are.

Multiply by 1.6875 for normal difficulty and that's 1.6875*286=482.625/minute in income if lifestyling 1 soap per minute, but that assumes your residences are full. If they're only 1/2 full then it's only 241/minute.

Buy price at the prison is 381 per 1 soap.

So the cutoff point for lifestyle soap making as much $ as prison soap is when the residences are about 381/482=79% full (in normal difficulty), or about 12.6 out of 16 farmers.

But it gets more complicated, because if you use lifestyle soap to raise the residence pop from 10 to 11 then you start making 10% more of other non-soap goods, and it doesn't increase your consumption of those goods. So in fact it should be cost effective to hand out lifestyle soap at a lower point than 12.6 per residence since you'll also be getting a 10% boost to schnapps/fish/clothes/pub/flour revenue.

If you assume all goods bring in the same revenue per residence per minute (and actually soap brings in less than average), then if you have 5 other needs fulfilled besides soap it'd bring in 50% more revenue and lifestyle soap would be worth it on normal difficulty for pop densities of ~8.4.

My analysis says that it's worth it in most cases, and it's more worth it the more other goods you can supply.

[TowerWizard]

Thank you, Its ben. That was what I asked for, and also the conclusion I was hoping for.