Wealth management

Wealth management is the practice of managing the wealth present in a colony to reduce the difficulty of the raids that it encounters.

Effect of wealth

Main article: Raid points

Colony wealth is one of the key determining factors in determining the raid points available to the storyteller, both directly contributing raid points itself, and scaling the points added by each colonist.

"Storyteller Wealth" = (Colony Wealth (items) + Colony Wealth (people and animals) + ( (Colony Wealth (buildings)) * 0.5 )

"Storyteller Wealth" is linearly interpolated on a graph to create "Wealth Points".

Graph	Points	Storyteller Wealth
	0	0
	0	14,000
	2,400	400,000
	3,600	700,000
	4,200	1,000,000

Items on the ground that you can see are counted towards wealth. This includes any amount of corpses and their clothing, items dropped by sieges, and items held by pawns, but not chunks or items hidden inside an ancient danger. Items in a caravan stop counting as soon as they leave your colony.

Empirical testing

Due to rounding and other modifiers to raid size, including the type of raid, these numbers may not be entirely accurate.

A colony starts with 3 colonists and about $105000 wealth. They suddenly gain 1666 beer, worth just under 20000. For a scyther-only mechanoid raid:

Strive to Survive (100% threat): 3 scythers increases to 4 scythers.
Losing is Fun (220% threat): 9 scythers increases to 10-11 scythers.
500% threat scale: 21 scythers increases to 23 scythers.

A scyther is worth 150 combat points. A generic tribal is worth 60 points, while a fairly well-armed pirate is worth 90 points. A centipede is worth 400 combat points, or 2.66 scythers.

The 1-2 scyther difference might seem small, but keep in mind that this is after reaching $100000 wealth. For example, the same 20000 could increase 5 scythers to 7, which is quite a large increase. The more extreme the difficulty, the more wealth matters.

Analysis

While wealth is clearly a primary driver in the raid point scaling, the effect is often exaggerated and certain causes of wealth blamed unnecessarily. Put simply, it takes a significant amount of wealth to noticeably affect raid sizes and often it is colonist count and the normal scaling causing the actual problem.

That does not mean that wealth management is without merit - it just means that the gains must be considered objectively. E.g. Is a strategy requiring significant micromanagement worth it when it reduces raid size by one scyther?

Strategies

Wealth management strategies can be broken down into two general classes:

Wealth control, or wealth minimization, where the intent is to control the total wealth accrued by purposefully reducing both the total wealth of the colony and the rate of accrual.
Wealth investment, where wealth gain is not retarded in any way but instead steps are taken to ensure that sufficient wealth is reinvested into advancing the colony to keep up with advancing raid points.

For example, a colony without wealth management might mass-produce flake, sell it, and leave silver for later use. A wealth controlling colony might avoid growing psychoid all together, or limit its production. A wealth investing colony would create flake as needed, but use it to buy items like components and doomsday rocket launchers to better deal with the increased raid points.

WHEN CONSIDERING COST SAVINGS RELATE IT TO NUMBER OF SCYTHERS SAVED

Wealth control strategies

Destroy any useless items. Burn corpses and smelt any unecessary weapons that raiders drop.
Gift valuable items to other factions. All your excess leather, flake, gold, and other items can be donated for a goodwill boost. Eventually, you can call factions as an ally, turning this into an investment.
If you can't be bothered to gift them, destroy excess items. You do not need 3000 units of rice to feed 5 colonists, even in the worst volcanic winter. Food, leathers, and even silver can generally be obtained later.
Have rooms perform multiple functions. For example, combining the Dining and Recreation rooms has 0 penalty, giving both Impressive moodlets for the cost of 1.
- Turning bedrooms into barracks does lower mood. However, combining the barracks with their dining, recreation, and even work rooms allows you to make them all Impressive. This can usually makes up for the mood loss.
Accept a lower amount of "progress". You don't need an opulent carpet if your colonists are happy on their own.

Wealth investment strategies

Buy doomsdays, neurotrainers, psylink neurformers, bricks, better weapons, Trade = investment but also = control - trade price improvement means your net wealth is always decreasing when you sell something for silver (unless you're selling buildings potentially) and always decreasing when you buy something with silver. So buying a doomsday for 200 silver mark up makes both reduces your total wealth by 200 but also improves your ability to defend the remaining wealth.

When bonded, persona weapons have no value, both for trade and for the purposes of raid points.

Guides

Progression: Quickstart Guides • Basics • Intermediate Midgame Guide • Advanced Endgame Guide • Ending the game
Scenarios: Lost Tribe Guide • Rich Explorer Guide • Naked Brutality Guide • The Mechanitor Guide
Survival: Extreme Heat Guide • Extreme Cold Guide • Extreme Desert Guide • Ice Sheet Guide • Sea Ice Guide • Events Guide
Combat: Defense tactics • Offense tactics • Weapon Guide
Construction: Colony Building Guide • Defense structures
Production: Food production • Money making guide
Other: Skill Training • Permadeath save conversion guide •
Ideology Min-Maxing