You make valid points, but I still think that the balance difference will at least cause a serious stone blocks shortage for the foreseeable future unless someone chooses to consciously take a serious opportunity loss for the benefit of the economy as a whole. Particularly considering...
Mit wrote: ↑Thu Nov 08, 2018 8:57 pm
Also: The min buy-in-price for a 2.5d item should be 4d, not 3d - Think I got the rounding wrong on that in a couple of places and may have to adjust things. I'll check into that and the export price ranges will get an equivalent bump if it needs changing.
(Edit: For now, to keep things simple, i've lowered quarry production cost to 4d per two - so buy-in prices don't need to be adjusted).
My rant above on the superiority of the wood industry was based on the assumption quarries would at least be buffed to viably sell at 2d per stone. As this is apparently not happening (producing at 2d means selling at 3d) the prospects for stonemasons are even bleaker: If quarries are selling at 3d, stonemasons must buy at 4d (assuming natural economic transport and not self-stocking which AFAIK you want to discourage), resulting in a production price of 8d per stone block. At an export price of 11d (current) you could sell at 10d for a profit of
2d per 10 minutes (
2s88d/day, 7.3 days to break even).
If we assume the price rises 1d every single year, this would be the prospects for profit assuming constant supply of material:
Nov 9th: 3d/10m - 4s32d/day - 4.8 days
Nov 12th: 4d/10m - 5s76d/day - 3.6 days
Nov 14th: 5d/10m - 7s20d/day - 2.9 days
Nov 17th: 6d/10m - 8s64d/day - 2.4 days
Nov 19th: 7d/10m - 10s8d/day - 2.1 days
Nov 22nd: 8d/10m - 11s52d/day - 1.8 days
Nov 24th: 9d/10m - 12s96d/day - 1.6 days
Nov 27th: 10d/10m - 14s40d/day - 1.5 days
Nov 29th: 11d/10m - 15s84d/day - 1.3 days
Dec 2nd: 12d/10m - 17s28d/day - 1.2 days
It would take well over three weeks to get the stonemasons to an equivalent break-even point to how sawmills are now. Obviously sawmills will decrease in value over time (and I've already noticed the oversaturation of sawmills has caused efficiency to drop below maximum), but
these estimates are based on an ideal situation for stonemasons. In practice, stone supply will be hard to come by (dropping production efficiency and thus daily profit): government stone supply will dry up as less people mine the rock, and quarries are currently terrible so nobody will want to invest in them (and especially their skill) unless they get a better profit margin; if they will only get going by selling at 4d the above numbers are going to look much worse even. And unlike with the Lumberjack skill, you cannot self-supply unless you dedicate a second skill slot. Which brings me to...
Mit wrote: ↑Thu Nov 08, 2018 8:57 pm
I do agree though that the skill prices are a little wrong and both Quarrier and StoneMason should be less than Lumberjack, which I'll change.
The prices of the skills are not the problem. The two problems (in the context of this situation) are
- You are limited to only three skills at a time, and you must have the skill for every building you own; and
- With each skill you learn, skill learn times increase significantly
The problem with the former should be obvious. I've already ditched Stonemason to learn a different skill (went for Farmer but got 'Upgrade Required' instead; see my other thread) due to lack of economic viability; each skill you possess comes at the opportunity cost of not being able to have a different skill instead. And for Quarrier it's even worse; who is going to keep a skill that nets them an (unstable) maximum of 2s88d/day per building after making further investments? If I ever made the mistake of learning that myself, I'd ditch it immediately after seeing how terrible quarries are.
The latter discourages switching and experimenting. Temporarily having Quarrier because you still have unused skill slots is actively punished; you should go only for the skills you really want, because every 'mistake' you make in skill selection will have lasting repercussions until your character dies. It's like drinking from the well; at times it's necessary, but people avoid it like the plague and for good reason. Permanent debuffs are extremely discouraging, and while this works great to discourage people from becoming jacks-of-all-trades, it also discourages people from taking the 'bad' skills which has obvious effects on the economy.
(FYI: I've been offering my two stonemasons for sale at a low price for almost 24 hours now, and since about 8 hours ago they've been at the lowest possible price, but there are simply no takers; nobody seems interested even way below construction price. I will likely demolish them soon as they do nothing for me without having the Stonemason skill.)
(While we're at it, by the way,
the government imports are selling Stone rather than Stone Blocks in the 'construction materials' section. I assume this is unintentional?)
Mit wrote: ↑Thu Nov 08, 2018 8:57 pm
Separately, most of this is focused almost entirely on the export market - and although that's the focus initially, that should (assuming people continue playing :]) change over time as demand for items for construction and internal production increases. Stone (via concrete) and Stone Blocks are required for all second and third level building construction (factories, warehouses and all the larger farms, mines etc) so demand for those will increase as the world gets wealthier.
I think you're overestimating natural player demand here. Construction is an inherently limited resource sink; only so many buildings need to be built and unless building decay gets turned up to 11 (I would highly recommend against that) there won't be all that many stone blocks used for construction - not even remotely close to the volumes of wood being exported. Furthermore, I've noticed that on Grey
exports were always the main source of economic value. Even for the advanced stages of production (steel etc), pricing at every point was in some way derived from the value of exports made using the products; influence of exports dwarfed influence of natural player demand on Grey, and we even had a larger (and richer!) playerbase there. The science production chain ended up fizzling not because of labor shortages - top players were getting employed the the science buildings to keep them running and grab the high wages - or lack of funds (ATC was filthy rich), but because players didn't really see any point in continuing the production chain with seemingly no relevant reward being offered at the end of it (unlike other production chains where the end result was an exportable item). In all my time on Grey, I'd never been burned as hard economically as by investing in science buildings; there was simply zero profit to be made in there because there was no real demand. Some external factor needs to keep demand going and the internal factors are insufficient (with stone blocks only being used for construction; unlike stuff like fuel or food/drinks which are being consumed in great amounts in all forms of gameplay).
It's not really any of my personal business anymore as I've now ditched the stone industry and don't plan on returning to it, but I can see this causing problems for the broader economy further down the line. Be careful that the economy doesn't get stuck because nobody is incentivized to get into the stone industry.