How are product costs calculated?

[solaristics]

I'm on the firm layout screen for a farm and I click on the Sales unit and it shows the cost, price, quality and overall rating. How is the cost calculated? For wheat it is showing $0.09 but there is no breakdown of this number that I can see. My other farm adjacent to it shows $0.08 cost for wheat.

[anjali]

the farms calculate the costs on the overhead of the farm only so if you got about 1 million of crop max collected per year in a crop unit by a monthly farm overhead of $8.000 it ll be 8.000 x 12 / 1.000.000 - $0.096 per crop. to get the real price for your stuff you d got to take some sort of spreadsheet and a little larger formula like ... = ( [base overhead of farm]+ [number of workers in all units except inventory] x [traning factor i.e. 50% by max training] x [base wage] ) /[number of crop units you are using in your farm i.e. 6] x [units used for this crop] x [farmextension]) x [Realwage of city] x [Consumer price index of city])/[monthly sold units]
its actually same with factories, the costs there are solely calculated on input materials without wages nor overhead.

the cro formula depends on how many crop units you usually use in a farm, i use 6 in most cases and 3 sales units (3 crops) and add extenders to the farm if needed. only in some cases i use 8 crop + 1 sale then the above formula will show tiny higher costs per unit because the forula assumes 1 sales units for 2 crop units, so in case of 8 crop + 1 sale it would add wages for 4 sales units instead of the 1 used (about $6.000 base wage difference like $0.01 higher price shown then you actually have, not a problem i think)

for livestock farms its similar, usually you have 1 livestock raising. 1 processing and 1 sales units if you do 3 different livestocks in a farm then you take all wages and divide the total costs of the farm by 3 to get the real costs for the product divided by the sold units

this will give you your real cost of each unit you sell
but requires you to make a spreadsheet and enter data on a regular basis, real wage/price index/sold units i add once a year, upgraded units from time to time usually end of month. its quite some work but once units fully trained its fire and forget and you only need to update the sales and the main data like real wage and price index for each city once a year to get a quite accurate cost of all your products and you can indentify bottlenecks before they happen.

[solaristics]

Thanks very much for the detailed response.

It looks like the game doesn't make it easy to work out the actual unit cost for anything produced! I find this a bit surprising for a game that touts itself as the most realistic business simulator. I used to solve these kinds of business management problems IRL, and knowing your true unit costs by product/service is the most basic and fundamental of business management information.

Going through your response, it seems that the game does not actually tell you the number of units a crop/mining/manufacturing functional unit produces per month (and for crops it would need to be per year because of their seasonality). Because that's the real number you want (and the most basic question you'd ask the production manager of that functional unit), not the units sold per month. But I don't see the monthly units sold number either: there is only a monthly sales value for the firm or a 36 month volume number, so I guess you are calculating (approximating) the monthly number from here.

I'm impressed that you go to the effort of keeping a spreadsheet to calculate unit costs! If I keep playing, I'll probably do the same myself, but I really think the number of units produced per month (or day or whatever time period) by functional units should be given by the game. I'm struggling to take the game seriously as a business simulator without that so I'm not sure I'm going to keep playing.

[anjali]

you can add graphs to see either the monthly revenue/profit or units sold on top of the product picture, to turn that on you got to look at the far right side of your product picture list inside any firm theres a graph symbol ... click it. marked red on picture below

for numbers, i made up a little spreadsheet where all numbers for my mod are listed so i have all costs/ demand etc on it, helps planning, like in real life you got to do your homework too, would be too easy if the game does all claculations for ya, also i do many times calculate stuff on the go in my head, keeps ya fit in ya brain hehe and i use spreadsheet in kinda every game i did ever play, even mmo's like eve online i had a few dozen spreadsheets linked to each other to calculate every crap, not sure if you know that game but running several hundred POS's with moon goo and production of everything you need you got to plan ahead as some productions took 6 month real life time or more for a single ship, and the game size is enormeous you wont find what ya looking for without a spreadsheet. you loose your head without spreadsheets but there you could get a lot data directly drawn from the game via API

and for the actual costs ... well the plain cost of production is correct from the game it just ignores the wages and overhead as this can only be taken into account when ya got the sales numbers, letting the game calculate that everyday for a few thousand firms would slow it down greatly.

and the amount of produced crop / livestock or manufacured units depends on your mod / script so its usually never the same for everyone, but you can take that numbers down quite easy, when you start your game, save it as start_01 or whatever then plant a few small or medium farms whatever your smallest, 9 crops in each farm with a single units and last farm you can use for livestock, take 1 day production x 365 and you got your anual livestock prod ... livestock done ... fast forward to harvest, once all harvested without sale sunit you have your crop amount per year in your game by lvl 1 units +20% for every other unit thats 260% total on lvl 9. if you always play with that mod you can just write it down in a spreadsheet and never need to do it again, large farm is double then medium farm

[solaristics]

you can add graphs to see either the monthly revenue/profit or units sold on top of the product picture, to turn that on you got to look at the far right side of your product picture list inside any firm theres a graph symbol ... click it. marked red on picture below

Thanks, I've been using that but it only gives a very general overview of units produced and nothing I can use in an actual calculation (unless I'm missing something).

when you start your game, save it as start_01 or whatever then plant a few small or medium farms whatever your smallest, 9 crops in each farm with a single units and last farm you can use for livestock, take 1 day production x 365 and you got your anual livestock prod ... livestock done ... fast forward to harvest, once all harvested without sale sunit you have your crop amount per year in your game by lvl 1 units +20% for every other unit thats 260% total on lvl 9. if you always play with that mod you can just write it down in a spreadsheet and never need to do it again, large farm is double then medium farm

I'd have to do that for every product though as I want to know the unit output for every manufacturing, mining, and farming functional unit. It would also be harder to use this method for products that have inputs. But thanks for all the suggestions!

[anjali]

if you got access to the mod files you can of course calculate all the stuff a lot easier
base units x space of building (farm, factory, mine etc) / basic price of the product = your monthly output
just by mines oil wells and timber camps you also got to multiply it with the speed factor from natural_resources.dbf

i got over time sick with taking the numbers in-game every time i changed something in the mod, so i did play with all kind of numbers from all the different .dbf files for quite a while in the past and i came up with this basic units written below. they seem to be correct as they match my production ingame.

base units
factories 3.000
Farm crops 1.000
Farm Livestock 750
timber / Mine/oil ell 750

[mdemircan2]

...

I'm impressed that you go to the effort of keeping a spreadsheet to calculate unit costs! If I keep playing, I'll probably do the same myself, but I really think the number of units produced per month (or day or whatever time period) by functional units should be given by the game. I'm struggling to take the game seriously as a business simulator without that so I'm not sure I'm going to keep playing.

A criticism that should be taken seriously