Artisan Archive

I know this has been debated before, but I'll ask again since I can not find it.

Which is better to run a medium (10 BER) or Heavy (13 BER) Harvester?

The medium have a lower cost per unit and the heavy produces more resources per day.

Mediums will give you the lowest cost/resource extracted. But I don't think that is the appropriate way to look at it. On a reasonable spot, a BER13 heavy will get you 3000 more resources a day than a BER10 medium, which is worth more than the extra maintenance. Since the footprints are essentially the same, heavies seem to be the way to go.

The only real downside is they take much longer than mediums to give you a return on your investment. Suppose that the 3000 extra resources is worth a 10,000 credit profit (after considering the higher maintenance). In that case, a heavy will return the investment in around 10 to 14days or so. Not bad, but nothing like the transition from BER4 personals to BER10 mediums.

I currently run a resouce business which has about 40 harvs all of them are med's mostly 10's Why cause i can buy med10's for betwen 20 and 30k where asa single heavy will be at least 100k to 150k. Heavys' are NOT worth the price.If there where ber 30 or 40 maybe but not at 13. Stick to mediums.

i run both atm, i have more mediums then heavies though but only to cut back on cost a bit. The heavies with the BER 13 do pull up more resources per day, the mediums BER 10 are cheaper, these are the only differences i know of between the mediums and heavies.

I recently bought 3 heavy mineral harvs. Before that I was running 12 BER 7 Med. harvs. I have to say that if you have the money go for the heavies. They pull a great deal more, and don't take up the lots. The downside is, they eat power and money like crazy. Buy a fusion (or two) if you are going to have any number of these. The power demands are what I am having problems meeting.

By all means though, if money is no problem buy heavies.

LOL

I have 35+ fusion generators.

I have access to plent of lots. So the per lot issue was not as important.

The way to look at this is a little thing you learn in Buisness 101, and I think someone touched on it. It's called Return On Invenstment or ROI. Let's take a look a simple small buisness model:

Random Newbie wants to start a resource buisness, and has for the sake of the argument enough funds to do either heavy or medium harvesters.

Let's make some assuptions about this small buisness:

1) Both models have a 14 BER Fuision Ion Generator at it's disposal, this harvester always lands on a 50% Radioactive Resource that has a PE rating of500 and must be moved every 5 days due to a resource shift.

2) The resource our potential harverter pool is going harvest is always at 50% and must be changed every 5 days.

3) The initalcost for our Medium harvesters (BER 10) will be 35K and the cost of our heavys(BER 13)will be 110K.

4) The harvested resource always sells at 2 credits per unit.

First, because of the amount of power pulled by our FIG only pulls 10080 units of energy a day, we can place 7 Medium but only 4 heavy factories on our resource, so the heavys start at a destict disadvantage.

After Random sells the resources gathered from the mediums, he notes that he's up 182,800 credits(26,114.19 per harvester) but on the heavy's he'd 139,600 credits in the hole. So by running the mediums he's already recoved his intial investment and is making profit. This is after expensing ALL the harvesters...

Now after the second run, the heavy's have returned the intial investement and Random is up 180,800, but because the mediums are new running at pure profit, he'd be up 610,600...Notice that because there are only 4 heavys vs. 7 mediums (because of the power issue) the mediums are able to pull in an extra 107400 credits per run.

Now if he's willing to use all of his lots (the mediums only take up 8, plenty of room for a house or tents for vendors) for 4 more heavys and an additonal fusion ion generator (at a cost of say 135K), but it still doesn't start to overtake the profit avaialable of the mediums until the end of the4th run...

I realize this is a rather simplistic look, but there are pro's and cons to running both ways, but in my mind because I can run 50 medium harvesters on my 7 Fusion Ion's without too much trouble. According to my calculations, heavies don't become as cost effective until they were running a BER of 15...

A couple of quick observations about the harvesters:

1. All things being equal, you have to place a heavy harvester on 43% or larger concentration to turn a higher profit than usinga medium harvester. Any concentration less than that and you are loosing money per unit by using a heavy overa medium. This takes into account that you only care about total profit, not quantity.

2. If you want quantity and could careless about selling the items, then heavies are the only way to go. Their higher BER obviously yields more resources on the same concentration than a medium harvester. This can be an important factor, as people are restricted to 10 lots, unless they have aid from a friend.

3. We all know the heavies cost more than the mediums, so how long before the heavy exceeds the medium in profit margin on a cpu basis. First of all lets assume they are on at least as 70% source. Secondly I am using the current prices from my server which results in the heavy costing 60K more than the medium. At 70% you make roughly3500 credits more profit on the heavy than the medium (assuming power used is 2 cpu and resources out of the harvester are sold at 3 cpu). This means it will take roughly17 days for the heavy to become equal with the medium harvester on a per unit bases. After that the heavy makes more profit.