Topic on User talk:Hordes

Hi and thank you for your work on Money making guide. While I knew most corollaries from my own calculations, I still did learn few facts. Having said that, with 'assistance required', perhaps some things to consider especially in apparel section:

• It is possibly worth noting, that with market value being equal to material cost + (work amount * constant), there is no 'bad' or 'good' apparel (or in fact any item in game that doesn't have special modifiers to price) to craft. You are always moving on a linear function of work invested per material spent. While the tribalwear and corset are at extremes, anything in between is also optimal and if you were an AI you would always modify what you currently craft in order to move all your textiles / ensure your crafters are busy. I have seen a lot of players be very confused by this, so this is a tangent that might be worth discussing.

• While in opening you discuss that different factions buy different items, it is worth noting that Empire faction bases will not buy tribalwear. If memory serves me well, the top hat is the item with most profit / hour of work, that is bought by any faction. It might be worthwhile to add it to the comparison.

• Between production specialists and full time crafters, an analysis of income for higher quality level of crafted gear would also be interesting. Note expected quality multiplier per skill level was already calculated and is provided on Quality#How_quality_is_determined. This would be an interesting analysis, especially since quality levels is what allows crafter gear to outperform corn production.

Again thank you for your guides. The ideology one was particularly interesting to me.

Looking forward to reading more from you.

I was about to make an edit regarding this to the page (in retrospect maybe this would have been better posted on the page's talk page? Nbd tho), but given its a point of discussion I'll open it up to the floor rather than make unilateral changes.

Re "there is no 'bad' or 'good' apparel" that is kinda true it also makes some key assumptions. Instead I'd put the axiom as: There is a spectrum between the extremes of max value/work and max value/material. The optimal for a given colony is as close as you can get to the max value/material without leaving material unused, and only if you intend to sell the material instead of holding it in reserve for your crafters to catch up on. If you're willing to put material in reserve, the corsets (dusters in core) remain the optimum.

Explanation which I think you both already know but jic: Work per material varies significantly and it makes significant differences as to what is the optimum object to craft. If you are limited by material, then a corset makes you more money for that stock of material. The value of the work itself doesn't change, but you can't put work into nothing so stretching out the amount of material you "spend" to get that work is optimal. Meanwhile if you're work limited then quality factors matter. You can could still make corsets and sell the extra material but while you are still are getting the same value out of the work either way, all that material you're selling without making it into something isn't getting the value multiplier from quality. So again, there is an optimal selection

Presenting it as a binary choice is flawed as you say, but there are still optimal choices and the spectrum isn't all equally valid or equally likely to be the optimal choice.

Re: Assistance encouraged, tbh the main reason I put it there is because the original page had it and I didn't want to mess with the template. I would be comfortable with the page as-is, except I don't know what "Material Production" means. You could also include human resources and the other time-limited stuff, too.

Re: Apparel, I don't really care either way. Put whatever edits you want because I'm impartial to the topic. I put "no bad or good apparel" in the sense that "you can't go terribly wrong with apparel production", unlike, say, flake vs psychite tea.