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


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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...

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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?

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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.

 

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