Why unprofitable businesses remain such even when I provide truckloads of input?

[muzietto]

There is something I don't get.

There's this lumber mill with "poor" profitability. I buy it and start shipping loads and loads of logs. It produces lumber and I take the lumber to the city.

The train makes some lukewarm profit.

But year after year the profitability of the mill remains apparently poor, and I get a pittance profit from it. It will never repay its cost, let alone turn a profit.

Why is it not profitable to buy the "poor" industries that I later make work?

Am I missing something? Any word of advice is welcome...

 

[MikeC]

I've had mixed experiences with what you describe (I usually play on 100+% difficulty).  I think it may have to do with where the lumber is shipped, meaning if you sell it at stations with a 5+ demand, your lumber company will make more money.  That said, other industries, especially food, seem to do well no matter how low the demand for (in this example) food goes in target cities.  Maybe not always to "gushing cash" status forever, but certainly lucrative-to-very-lucrative levels.

[jeffryfisher]

Please define "loads and loads". Is that over 12 full log cars per year, every year?

Also, what's the demand factor for logs at the delivery station? If it's greater than 1, then you have work to do. Only if it is zero do you have cause to complain.

[muzietto]

@jeffryfisher - yes, more than twelve. Full output of three logging camps.

I've found this page, which implies that businesses like coal, cattle or bakeries will NEVER turn a profit: https://railroad-tycoon.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Industries_in_Railroad_Tycoon_II

Is this the reality?

[jeffryfisher]

I've never heard of that factor before. I wonder where the author got that column name. I also wonder if it could really be something else.

Searching through my notes, I think I've found the data table from the EXE file. In v1.56, it's a fixed-length table starting at hex 0x1457E8 that I called the building price table. These "profitability" values appear in a column (12th - 15th bytes) that I was never able to connect with anything in the game.

Some experimentation might be in order.

[kamyFC]

On 5/10/2020 at 7:17 PM, muzietto said:

There is something I don't get.

There's this lumber mill with "poor" profitability. I buy it and start shipping loads and loads of logs. It produces lumber and I take the lumber to the city.

The train makes some lukewarm profit.

But year after year the profitability of the mill remains apparently poor, and I get a pittance profit from it. It will never repay its cost, let alone turn a profit.

Why is it not profitable to buy the "poor" industries that I later make work?

Am I missing something? Any word of advice is welcome...

 

You could ship lumber to multiple cities, that way the demand value does not go down. I guess the profitability of the mill depends on how much the town is paying for the mill's goods?

[MaglevForever]

My observation here:

Volume matters more than delivery price. All production must be hauled away fairly quickly.

 

The most profitable industries I ever owned have been getting ALL the output from two or more resources. And I was delivering all resources to a nearby city at a low, 1 or 0, demand.

 

PS. I'm not familiar with the "relative profitability" factor mentioned on the fandom page. Some of the figures don't correlate with my observations. Especially, Coal, Cattle, and Bakeries are at least above average for profits in an actual game.

 

[Bossatchal2]

Things understood: 

Fully delivering from a farm or cattle or other simple producer facility will result in business profits around 10% of the business purchase price. 

Delivering more loads from a meat packing plant in the previous year (the year you see when hovering profitability) will increase the profits of that year. Delivering about 2 cars worth per year seemed to result in business profits around 10% of the business purchase price, more would be higher. This aligns with Maglev's comment.

(on the hardest difficulty) Demand does not matter. I supplied a town bakery (w/ extra supply trains) before supplying grain from my farm (demand was 2). I also did a save and stopped the extra supply trains and then delivered from my farm (demand was 5). Farm profit was 25k each time. I delivered 6 cars that had been stockpiled in both runs.

 

unclear:

I was unable to replicate the lumber mill described. I had 50k (25% of business purchase price) average return sending to 0 demand towns using 2 lumber camps as a source even with some congestion. Most likely the OP was not sending enough per year due to high congestion.

I don't understand relative profitability. With the relative profitability of 100 for grain farm I expected profits to be considerably better than cattle but it was not. Both were around 10% of business purchase price.

 

untested:

Economic cycles affect on businesses.

Edited September 23 by Bossatchal2
minor change