Taking a look at the profitability mechanics of Piratez has been pretty enlightening. I wanted to put down my findings here and see if other smarter people might be able to point out something I might have missed.
Findings:
Hang on to all Silver and Purple chips.One Silver can net you under
$700k in just under 7 days.
Purple chips over $65k every 31 hours. These are quite significant.
The major key that I see is that the earnings compound through each level of production.
Due to multiplication,
one Silver chip fully processed,
yields 5000 Red Chips (1X5X10X100). At $200 per Red,
you have just turned one $5000 chip into $1,000,000 in under a week at minimum staffing.
If you have run out of silvers, Purples can still yield 1000 of the reds in under two days for a sale of $200k.
Profitability:To check profitability, we'll have to make some minimal assumptions. First and
foremost is the requirement of having a mint to do the work. Lets ignore the build cost of this facility (or any others) and just use the monthly maintenance costs ($40,000). The mint allows 10 runts to work inside it, so we will use this as a minimum staffing figure (10 runts X $5,000/mo =
$50,000). Lets call these the
"Overhead Costs" and they total
$90,000. There are two other costs as well, the job cost for production and the cost of materials. Job costs are: Silver>$1500, Purple> $2500, Blue>$4000. Multiplying these against the number of items to process (S:1, P:5, B:50) yields a
total job cost $214,000.
Materials cost can be considered the face value of the chips. In considering the production of just one silver chip, we are looking at an additional
material cost of only
$5000. I believe this is a fair way of looking at it, though arguments could be made to consider the face value of all the intermediate chips that are processed as additional opportunity costs (an additional $70k as it turns out). I'll go with the simpler version.
Our
total costs:Salary+Facility+Job Cost + Materials= Total Cost
$50,000 + $40,000 + $214,000 + $5,000 =
$309,000.00 Our
profit on one silver is Sale Price - Total cost.
$1,000,000 - $309,000.00 =
$691,000.00Not bad for a week's work, so hang onto those silvers!
Other interesting findings:Just over four lots of Silvers can be processed in a
month for a
profit of
$2,764,000.00.
This makes the hourly profit on these guys
$440/hour. Very tidy.
If you are out of silver, you can process four lots of purples for $1,552,500.00 at an hourly rate of $219/hour.
Of course, add in additional runts from workshops or factories and the speed can increase significantly.
The major
limiting factor in this operation is
the supply of chips, which must be gathered from tactical missions and acquiring the research breakthroughs and building the infrastructure necessary for these enterprises.
Edit: (4/12/2016) : Limiting factors have been lifted a bit with the new Robbery Mechanics yielding a good supply of chips as well as Pimping which also provides chips. Looks like our mints may be able to run longer than before with these new additions to the mod.
Assumptions:
