Newbie Questions

[blindspectator85]

Hi everyone,

I have now been playing for like 20 hours and a couple of questions arise:

How do I see the actual costs of my products? I have serious trouble setting up the correct prices. I can't find a way to figure out the costs per product. I know that there are costs listed in every selling module of a factory/shopping center etc. But they only show delivery costs. However, how do I know the costs including the costs of the facility that should sell it (like employee costs, etc.)?

How do I know if I produce too few/many products? I can't seem to find an overview of products made vs. products sold. I know that there a diagrams in the factories. But it is hard to see whether I am producing too much or not. I do set up warehouses to keep track using the occupancy of the warehouse units. But there must be another way to see how much I produce vs how much I sell.

[anjali]

the costs shown in your factory are plain raw material + transport cost. to figure out the real costs for a product you got to take the overhead+salaries of your firms financial report and devide it by sold units per month ...
i.e. your factory does produce a computer ... the production costs shown is lets say $280 this will just be the plain transport and raw material costs of anything you bought with that factory. now lets say your facotry has $300.000 wages and $100.000 overhead per month so you got a total of $400.000 factory expenses per month.
if your factory sells 1.000 computer a month you have
$280 raw + transport and $400.000 factory running cost devided by 1000 computers you are selling monthly thats $400 per computer
so you have a real cost of $680 for a computer ....if you only sell 100 computer a month then a computer costs you $4.280 to produce
this is just an example as everyone plays with different settings so no way to give exact numbers.
if you know the base wages in your game (100% base should be 2.000 per worker x real wage x consumer price index) and the overhead you can fetch in company few from last month and divide it by consumer price index and real wage of that city and you have the monthly base overhead for that type of firm. each unit also tells you how many workers it has.

you have in every unit in your factory utilization bars and even shown in % of load so you can easily figure out if you produce too much or if the demand is higher then your production output

as you can see in the picture of a shop below, by the eggs you got 99% maxed out in sales units max trained, they cant sell more but the demand (orange) is higher then the supply (yellow) but on the purchase units the supply is a lot higher then the demand so i have more then enough eggs from my farm then the shop units can sell. if the purchase unit would also have higher demand then supply then the bottleneck would be on the farm that provides the eggs to my shop. its kinda the same on factories etc. that way you can easily figure out if you produce sufficient. in this case, i would just open another shop to sell more eggs

[blindspectator85]

OK thank you. That helps.

How do I know how many items I sell. To stay with your example, how did you find out the factory sells 1000 computers per month?

EDIT: And how do you determine the overhead costs? What positions of the financial report do I have to consider when calculating the per item costs?