Talk:Manufacturing Profitability
Dumas, re: your point about Alien Alloys being plentiful - That section about LCs versus FBLs addresses a common early misperception. In actuality, both LCs and FBLs make the same amount of profit each ($18k), but you can make ~33% more LCs per month with a given number of engineers. In other words, LCs are 33% more profitable than FBLs, period.
Unless you want to make your FBLs one at a time, so that they don't need AAs. Then, they're just barely (2%) more profitable than LCs. (If you play with the spreadsheet, this is clear.)
So it doesn't really have anything to do with AAs. LCs are a far better deal than FBLs, unless you want to hassle with making FBLs one at a time. Either way, you never needed a single AA. (And if you've got a big surplus of AAs, then just sell'em! smile)
Let me know if I'm missing something - MikeTheRed 18:41, 9 November 2006 (PST)
I see. So that's what the AA thing means. It's not explained very clearly. I'll fix that.--Dumas 04:58, 10 November 2006 (PST)
Hmm, we go straight from Workshop to Manufacturing Profitability - there really should be a Manufacturing topic around that sits between them I think, to cover all the basics and key points. Might start it myself in next few days if no-one else does.
--Sfnhltb 18:36, 1 March 2007 (PST)
Oh and of course, another note is that the values for maintenance on Living Quarters and Workshops being fed into the equations are wrong, but you cant tell what they are going to cost unless you know what row of the base they are built on. Could make the numbers a little fuzzy (not likely to make a big difference, as the average cost is just over 17, so that would probably make these two items a little cheaper than the 22.5 currently assigned to them.
--Sfnhltb 18:40, 1 March 2007 (PST)
Huh, good point. I only just learned about that maintenance glitch today. For the time being, I'll stick in a note that those numbers are probably slightly high. For that matter, the maintenance glitch page could probably use a few notes about how much the other costs of 1) facilities in general are (e.g. for likely base configs - average cost per building as per UFOpaedia vs. actual average cost as per bug), and 2) other costs of the game in general. IOW I suspect that maintenance costs are a small part of a serious X-COM operation, relative to country funding, loot, and manufacturing profit. Which, if true, would lead to a wrap-up statement re: the maintenance bug of something like, "as can be seen, maint. costs are only a few percent of likely revenue and expenses; all in all, this base placement bug doesn't impact much, and can easily be totally ignored, if you like".
- MikeTheRed 19:15, 1 March 2007 (PST)