How does the production pricing work?

  • Hello fellow Patricians!


    I am a newcomer to this truly awesome game... where the heck have I been all these years ?!


    I started my trading career just doing the standard trades in the baltic sea, and then I began to persue my passion which is to produce my own goods. I started producing bricks and iron goods in my home town, and it was going very well. The prices I was paying for producing them was very competitive with what the town would charge for it's production.


    But then I started to expand to other towns and I began to build facilities there. For example, I build 3 sawmills in Torun to feed my hungry facilities at home with cheap timber.


    Except my dreams were crushed when the game was showing my production cost of timber was significantly higher than the prices I was buying them off the town for. How could this be possible? Is it because my sawmills are not employed 100% yet? I was really expecting them to produce timber with a reported cost of maybe 45-50 per load. However the game was showing them costing me 65 or more per load. What a rip off! I hope there is a logical explanation for this, for my real passion is to setup a nice supply chain across the baltic sea.

  • Yes you got the point exactly, the production lines will only reach the low and desired productionprice at 100% employment rate.


    Effective and uneffective production will have an effect on the price too, as you get more units to distribute your fix costs on with effective productions.

  • Ther production in P3 has 3 factors to be considered:


    1. Take care to produce a good only in towns with efficient production. Use unefficient production lokations only if you have no other possibility. (That can only happen if you play a own made map or have build up all towns to nearly the max. possible and need a special good to supply your population that now is only produceable in one of the unefficient production locations, because thet is no space available in the towns where that good can be produced efficient.


    2. As long as your production facilitys don't have 100% of the needed workers the production prices will be high. According to the rules of production that is a known fact.


    3. P3 will give you a efficientcy bonus if you have more than 3, more than 6 and more than 9 facilitys of the same kind in one town. After you have more than 9 facilitys of the same kind the efficientcy will not rise anymore, because that is the highes bonus available in the game.


    Hein

  • Just something to add to what bagaluth said.


    For the example of timber, you will NEVER be able to produce timber for 40-45. If you look at a completely populated sawmill, you will see that the weekly wage divided by the output of 14 timber per week yields a production cost of 60. You can knock that down somewhat by placing 9 or more sawmills, but you will NEVER get to 40. The reason you can buy timber for 40 is due to massive overproduction (or underconsumption) of timber at the beginning of a game.


    There are other things whose production price is VERY attractive even by the standards of the early game. Iron Goods is one such example. Eventually you will need to produce timber, but you will produce it for your own use. One of your own uses will be to satisfy the demands of citizens of other towns by selling for a very modest profit of 70. Without satisfying that demand, you will not get beggars to populate your more profitable industries. You will also need timber as feedstock for your Workshops producing Iron Goods.