Architect Archive

I wouldn't necessarily agree that undercutting is defined as cheaper than what you could sell the resources for. Undercutting, to me, means selling it for less than what it cost me to make.

It costs you money to harvest your resources. Credits and energy (and the credits for the energy harvs) to pump into those things so you get a workable resource to craft things. Granted, if you're smart about it - you find decent veins so that your expenses are minimal (a target of .1 to .3 credits per resource unit to harvest).

For example, I have a fusion generator on an 80% radioactive vein that is also a high enough PE to give me 2 for 1 (for every 1 unit of radio, I get 2 energy). This is very good. It means my cost to harvest this stuff is only .09 credits per radioactive unit. If you consider that it's worth 2 energy, that can theoretically drop it to only .045 credits per unit. Huge margin. Even if I sell the stuff at 1 credit for 1 unit, it's a slaugher of 10:1 to 20:1 profit (essentially, the 80% becomes around 13k of radio a day - it takes me 1400 to keep going daily, and selling that at a pure 1:1 is still a 10x profit).

Anyhow, with that in mind, we add into the fact that we use that energy to fuel our harvesters. Mine? A few heavies on a 65% ore vein. Now, that's 2160 credits and 1800 energy daily (per harv) to keep going. Energy, we have in spades and well below the 1:1 mark, so we can effectively remove that from the equation - but we're keeping it in to keep the numbers solid. This turns out to bring in 6500 or so units of ore daily per harvester. The "break even" sale price of just selling this ore, would end up being 0.3:1. Meaning, I could sell 3 units of ore for 1 credit, and break even. I'd be earning my costs to keep this all going - even steven. The more richer the veins you find, the lower your cost-per-unit to harvest go down. It definitely pays to find rich veins.

Anything more than that is pure profit. If I were to sell that ore at a full 3:1 price, I'd be making about 10x profit on the ore (since it only costs me 1/3 of a credit per unit to harvest).

Now that we know what it costs to pull all this crap up outta the ground - that can directly apply to how much it costs for us to whip this stuff up into deeds. Let's take a hypothetical example that I have a deed that takes 10,000 units of ore (and that's all) to make. Well, it'd cost me (considering the formula above, that it takes 1 credit to mine 3 units) only 3.333k to break even with this 10k-ore using deed. Anything more than that - is profit.

I know it seems wonky, but yes - those 10k unit using deeds can be sold at less than a 1:1 price, and still make profit. If you spread yourself out (as an architect) wisely in your resource mining, you'll do well. Typically this means 60% of your mining is ore, 20% is steel, 10% is copper/gas, and 10% is alum/chem. (Rotating the chemical and alum, and the copper/gas to gather up stocks of them - a day or so on chemical, then let it run for the rest of the time on alum - same thing for copper/gas). We don't use alot of chemical or gas, so it doesn't make sense to have it dedicated. Gather up a bunch, turn it into our generator turbines we need (gas situation).

Anyhow, with that all said - another thing comes into play. If you're all heavy harvesters - it gets expensive to keep this stuff going on a daily basis. You need to sell enough to keep your harvesters running, if you're turning the resources into deeds. Add up all the harvs and the cost for maintenance, and make sure you're selling enough to keep that going - and still make a profit.

Example - it takes me about 25-30k of money, and 20k of energy daily to keep my harvesters going. I need to make sure that I sell the equivelent of that to keep it all in the profit. It doesn't mean sell something worth 30k daily - it means - if I sell a coupla large houses each week, or some large harvesters - I'm making a profit. If I only sell two small houses the whole week - I'm losing money.

It also pays to gather up resources for a few days and turn that all into factory-crate items (turbine engines, ore mining units, fluidic pumps, harvesting/manf mechs, etc) - so you have a stockpile of those goods when it comes time to get an order to whip something up. Believe me, this definitely pays off. You may not be servicing customers for three-four days, but when someone walks in your door and wants four large harvesters ASAP, and will pay well (has happened to me more than once), you're ready and raring to go. But that is a whole other issue.

Well, all that said? Even though selling less than 1:1 is still turning a profit? I won't sell for less than 3:1 to anyone except repeat customers. There's profit - then there's a profit margin. If I'm earning +15 credits a week - yeah, that's profit - but not enough to keep me interested. The customer does pay for the time and energy it takes me to make sure my harvs are working, and whip the deeds up into something useful.