It should get rather less ridiculous when we start building dreadnaughts / super dreadnaughts / our own Citadel.
Shepard Quest Mk V, Base of Operations (ME/MCU)
- Thread starter Esbilon
- Start date
It should get rather less ridiculous when we start building dreadnaughts / super dreadnaughts / our own Citadel.
Not really, so long as your ability to sell stuff is limited only by your supply, you can increase your capabilities exponentially. The only thing I can do about exponential growth is to cut it off.
Cue Reapers!
So we have...
Edited.
Now what should we do with the other 8 billion...
Well, how else are suppose to afford
I mean a regular dreadnaught is a trillion credits and Auks said a Super-Dreadnaught costs several times that. So Lets say 5 trillion a piece as a minimum.
To be able to continuously, one every two years, produce them would require ~82 Factory IIIs dedicated solely to it.
Or alternatively limit demand. I calced the Alliance as only having a GDP of 637 trillion credits, which interestingly enough fits with the 600 trillion Auks gave in one of the old threads, and that limits the total income possible.
Admittedly 160 trillion credits per quarter is insane but I doubt we'd ever even come close to that since that would require effectively consuming the Alliance Economy.
If you want I could try and work out some demand limits for various things. I already did so for the Tiger after all.
Or introduce any of the below:
materials supply limits (which we'd have to get around using mining research / heroes. I'd say that supplying those factories should get harder and harder the more we have),
political limits (a certain treaty comes to mind),
political pressure to lower prices,
sustained espionage (enough to force us to spend a large portion of our profits on security / repairs),
legit competition to drive our prices down (asari tech ex machina anyone?),
war against a non-reaper significant enemy (Collector backed batarians? Collectors themselves? Mysteriously cured Genophage? Returning Rachni? New Aliens from the relay network?)
Actually I worked out, although don't believe I posted, a reasonable justification for the Batarians attacking within the next couple years.
We embarrassed them at Mindoir, massive group of pirates been defeated by a little girl and her mom, and will almost certain do so again if they attack Elysium, which they probably will since it will give them a chance to strike back at Revy.
Two massive failures against humanity and the Alliance's massive up-teching from our Legionaries, Arc Reactors (which the Batarians are likely a year or two away from even getting their hand on), Tigers, and (depending upon timing) Cabira will make them very angry and afraid.
This will cause the same sort of push to research the Leviathan of Dis that Shepard stopping the attack on Terra Nova did. Leading to an Indoctrinated Hegemony. Given that the Reapers aren't invading yet they'll likely try and take down the Alliance, possibly with subtle Reaper aid, and especially Paragon Industries.
So yeah, the Alliance-Hegemony war the Citadel was after? Will almost certainly be happening within before the decade is out.
At some point we'd probably qualify as a nation of our own. And we'd expand beyond Alliance soon.
New aliens from beyond opened relays could be interesting. Perhaps not in "there's an empire about to invade" way, but in general. If we eliminate static discharge issue and add perfect stealth, exploration will bloom, as it'll become easier to send scouts along the relay routes to open them from the other side.
Can't we trap the static discharge in a specially built capacitor or something? or build some transformer to add the static energy to the existing power grid, or even just blast the stuff away from the ship.
If it's just a pure static electricity problem, humanity of today could deal with it just fine. The only way to really make it make sense is to say there's something esoteric about it that prevents the existing floating ground techniques from working.
You have access to the Citadel market, and it's actually where you get your best bang for your buck, limiting you to the Alliance GDP is not meaningful, and as you said even that's fairly ridiculous.
I like the resources way, it's kinda like my own idea to increase the cost of buildings by a large factor, but more elegant.
There are good ideas here, let's take a look.
Possible, and this would introduce a soft kind of cut-off which is a nice mechanism. The easy way to do this, would be to say that the production cost in credits is a function of the total available production you have, this will mean that you get a de facto limit on how many factories it makes sense to have.
Possible, but I frankly have trouble seeing a reason the Alliance would want to limit you, and it would be an unprecedented move by the Council, and they don't like taking those. The Treaty you're referring to doesn't do much since it limits the number of dreadnaughts you can have, not the dreadnaughts you can have the ability to build.
This seems forced. And in any case, politicians can be bought.
I don't see that costing enough for this to be a meaningful limit. Already with your current security protocols, I have trouble justifying spies infiltrating you.
The sheer scope of Revy's genius has been stressed many times, even if the Asari suddenly had access to all Prothean tech, it wouldn't drive your prices far enough down for it to matter, I think.
Possible, but this would involve a major part of the plot being taken up by this war (which is not necessarily a bad thing), and again does little to actually limit you. Even if you spend the vast majority of your production on ships you give to the Alliance at cost, you can still expand your production capabilities at a breakneck speed.
I like the resources way, it's kinda like my own idea to increase the cost of buildings by a large factor, but more elegant.
I dunno. You pissed off some Batarians, sure, and humilitated some more, sure, but only a small fraction of the Batarian population were involved in that raid. Adding the thing on Elysium wouldn't put them in a better mood either. But frankly, getting your ass kicked twice seems like a stupid reason to start a war.
Um guys, about this line from chapter "The letter"
Have we started it yet, I can't find anything in finances about getting the money or spending to build it.
Have we started it yet, I can't find anything in finances about getting the money or spending to build it.
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
Speaking of research plans, should we maybe lower the probability of completing any given project from 95ish percentage by at least one 10d10 dice pool (the smallest unit possible, if I understood correctly)? We would lower the chance of completing our projects in their starting quarter, but as we don't have any near-future deadlines, this isn't very problematic. As for the reason why to do this, given that overflow gets halved, by giving up the higher probability of immediate completion, we would be gaining more research points (and more completed projects) in the long term.
@UberJJK: As the one who makes nearly all of our plans, what do you think about this?
@UberJJK: As the one who makes nearly all of our plans, what do you think about this?
We also need to start making the Colliders IAR and I'd like to look at setting up the subsidiaries for Gaming, the PMC and others as business reaction.
We also want to include a IAR on Elysium or which ever other world we build on.
We're going to take a large hit to our income when the covering costs of the Genetic Treatments fully roll out. Though that is somewhat balanced against potential tax right off the scale we're looking at and the training and facilities needed to roll out on that scale are huge.
The three other areas we can be challenged is politically, resource gathering and publicity.
Politically there will be politicians and lobby groups with interests in the companies and groups we're walking over and taking contracts from that might try passing laws that disadvantage us in some ways or otherwise put pressure on buyers to shop elsewhere. And that's not counting a sudden change in patent law opening up Arc Reactors to Citadel production (Especially before perfect FRM/BB).
Resources wise we don't exist in a vacuum and probably need a fair number of rare minerals and metals. A shortage forces us into the exploration mining arena with it's own costs and expenditures or increases production costs.
Publicity, here it's harder considering our start and public works but it doesn't block slander and liable campaigns that could do lasting damage to our reputation if not handled well.
That's just a few of the ploys or changes in conditions, if a war with the Batarians starts someone might try and hold us accountable for provoking it if it furthers their own ends. And that's not even counting people like the shadow broker or the more powerful Matriarchs who might take more direct or deniable actions against us.
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Van Ropen
Angry, angry about elves.
Doesn't really matter that much - over all six quarters, we are talking about a total loss of maybe 250 points. Not completing a project is still very problematic, because we can't assign dice into subsequent projects until previous ones have been completed.
It would be particularly bad to do this in the beginning, where Advanced Mass Effect Theory is the precursor to fucking everything, we want QECs ASAP, and we need ANI and Optical Computing immediately for the tech point bonuses they provide. I guess we could do it in the later quarters if at all.
Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We could just decide "fuck it, we're gonna conquer the Terminus." That would create limits on us immediately...
Then here's a short write out of how I'd imagine a system like that working. I haven't bothered with any balancing for it, so consider any numbers to just be for the example.
Say a world has a given total supply of resources per quarter. Lets put Mindoir (as a remote colony) at 300. Lets say a factory 3 consumes 30 units.
The rest of the colony also uses those resources, though you can of course pay a premium to have extra resources shipped in.
So the total cost of resources for the quarter is dependent on the percentage of the base supply you're using. Different types of worlds should also have different curves - using 10% of the total available resources on a colony world with no other major manufacturing centers is reasonable. Using 10% of Earth's total resources would be crazy. So while Earth would be cheaper to have a couple of factories on, trying to use large amounts of resources there would get extremely expensive very quickly.
OTOH, spreading out production to get cheapest resources is a security nightmare, and shipping around all the parts would be a big expense.
So the system as I imagine it:
Each world has a total production it can support at no cost. (i.e. 100,000 production)
It also has an exponentially scaling quarterly expense for additional production.
Set a number you want us to produce with no extra cost (current system). for this example I'll use 100k production, or 3 factory III's and a couple misc factories
Then set a number for the break even number of production (for a planet to produce the product, but at no profit). I'll say 300k for this example.
Then you just need to choose a scaling function to go between 100k and 300k. Linear wouldn't make much sense, so I'll go with exponential.
Cost at MaxProduction needs to equal Profit for MaxProduction, so f(300k) = 300k*255k.
Cost at MinProduction need to be 0, so f(100k) = 0.
diff = x - MinProduction (if negative, just set to 0)
MaxDiff = MaxProduction - MinProduction
f(x) = diff*diff / (MaxDiff*MaxDiff) * MaxCost
So for the entire equation,
CostForQuarter = ((TotalProduction - FreeProduction)^2)/((MaxProduction-MinProduction)^2) * MaxProduction * ProfitPerUnit
To make it easy, when you write up the planet's specs, just use the below to come up with a cost coefficient:
(MaxProduction*ProfitPerUnit)/((MaxProduction-MinProduction)^2)
In the example, that's
(300k*255k)/(200k*200k) = 1.9125
After that you just need to care about the amount we're over the free production. Square that and multiply it by the coefficient for how much we pay.
Here's a couple example planets:
| planet: | A | B | C | |||
| Free: | 30,000 | 100,000 | ||||
| Max: | 300,000 | 150,000 | 300,000 | |||
| Coefficient: | 0.85 | 2.65625 | 1.9125 | |||
| ProfitPerUnit | 255,000 | 255,000 | 255000 | |||
| Production | A Cost | A Profit | B Cost | B Profit | C Cost | C Profit |
| 10,000 | 85,000,000 | 2,465,000,000 | 2,550,000,000 | 2,550,000,000 | ||
| 30,000 | 765,000,000 | 6,885,000,000 | 7,650,000,000 | 7,650,000,000 | ||
| 60,000 | 3,060,000,000 | 12,240,000,000 | 2,390,625,000 | 12,909,375,000 | 15,300,000,000 | |
| 90,000 | 6,885,000,000 | 16,065,000,000 | 9,562,500,000 | 13,387,500,000 | 22,950,000,000 | |
| 120,000 | 12,240,000,000 | 18,360,000,000 | 21,515,625,000 | 9,084,375,000 | 765,000,000 | 29,835,000,000 |
| 150,000 | 19,125,000,000 | 19,125,000,000 | 38,250,000,000 | 4,781,250,000 | 33,468,750,000 | |
| 180,000 | 27,540,000,000 | 18,360,000,000 | 59,765,625,000 | -13,865,625,000 | 12,240,000,000 | 33,660,000,000 |
| 210,000 | 37,485,000,000 | 16,065,000,000 | 86,062,500,000 | -32,512,500,000 | 23,141,250,000 | 30,408,750,000 |
| 240,000 | 48,960,000,000 | 12,240,000,000 | 117,140,625,000 | -55,940,625,000 | 37,485,000,000 | 23,715,000,000 |
| 270,000 | 61,965,000,000 | 6,885,000,000 | 153,000,000,000 | -84,150,000,000 | 55,271,250,000 | 13,578,750,000 |
| 300,000 | 76,500,000,000 | 193,640,625,000 | -117,140,625,000 | 76,500,000,000 | ||
| 330,000 | 92,565,000,000 | -8,415,000,000 | 239,062,500,000 | -154,912,500,000 | 101,171,250,000 | -17,021,250,000 |
| 360,000 | 110,160,000,000 | -18,360,000,000 | 289,265,625,000 | -197,465,625,000 | 129,285,000,000 | -37,485,000,000 |
| 390,000 | 129,285,000,000 | -29,835,000,000 | 344,250,000,000 | -244,800,000,000 | 160,841,250,000 | -61,391,250,000 |
| 420,000 | 149,940,000,000 | -42,840,000,000 | 404,015,625,000 | -296,915,625,000 | 195,840,000,000 | -88,740,000,000 |
If you combine this with a cap on how many planets we can build up at once, you can keep us on a more linear growth curve. We'll be making mad bank in profits tho, and will probably need to figure out what to do with all the money we would have sitting around (like, say, building up our own fleet / PMC...)
This is also assuming a profit of 255k per unit. If we produce more profitable stuff, we might be able to afford 1 or 2 more factories per planet.
*edit* I can also easily alter the exponent to control the amount of money being made by the profitable areas of the curve. i.e. changing the exponent on A to 1.2 means that 120k production would give us a 5B profit instead of 19B.
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meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
Good points. Maybe later then, like you said, when we have more research dice and the effect is greater.
On the other matters in addition of the "Black Fucking Gun" (aka "Blackstorm" in ME2), I have been thinking that we should also create/ripoff from the canon "Cain" (aka "the Mini-nuke"). And as they both would very likely benefit from the Arc Reactor, considering that they use power cells instead off thermal clips in-game (along with the other heavy weapons), which I mentioned already at some point when Auks was still running this quest. And if we make mechs that can be piloted and start strapping heavy weapons on them...
What's that, Batarians? You thought that a cave-made power armor with an Arc Reactor was too OP? Then how about a 15 meter mech-suit which shoots slugs with enough kinetic energy behind them that they are like baby-nuclear explosions? Oh, and "miniature" black holes. And is equipped with all the other basic Paragon Industries weaponry/armor/power source/stuff. And now it has transformed to an atmospheric jet / space-fighter. Yes, I'm a munchkin. How did you know?
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- Location
- Dual citizen of SV&SB
Perhaps you could implement a factory upkeep modifier? In accordance with the material limits, if we're buying massive amounts the price of the materials go up due to our demand for them.
say, at every x factories, the amount it costs to keep a factory running goes up by y. So long as you warned us before this happened, this would prove an excellent limiter. (Especially if we can research ways to lower it.)
Edit: Kasumi'd hard.
say, at every x factories, the amount it costs to keep a factory running goes up by y. So long as you warned us before this happened, this would prove an excellent limiter. (Especially if we can research ways to lower it.)
Edit: Kasumi'd hard.
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The largest company in America by Revenue in 2012 was Exxon Mobile at 454,926 million. During the same year the US GDP was 15,533,800 million. So Mobile was 3% of the US GDP.
Lets say Paragon Industries can achieve 5% thanks to it's pure awesomeness. For the Alliance that's 31 trillion credits a year.
We know the Alliance is a small but still notworthy and rapidly growing section of the overall Citadel economy. Lets say it's about equal to the Spain compared to the rest of Europe, or about 8%. That would put the Citadel Economy at roughly 8,000 trillion credits. 5% of which is ~400 trillion credits per year and 100 trillion per quarter.
Now that's lot of credits however it's important to note that is total revenue not profit and most certainly not Net Profit After Tax. Paragon Industries operates at a 150% profit margin so that would be a net revenue of 60 trillion. Now our expenses are practically zero compared to our revenue so we can skip them and go to taxes. Which at 20% brings our profit down even further to 48 trillion.
48 trillion a quarter, 192 trillion a year, is crazy big, more then the Alliance military gets per year, but not quite nation sized yet. More like what you'd expect from a Megacorp that owns a couple planets, which I would fully expect Paragon Industries to be at this point.
I'm not really sure materials make sense as a limiter personally. The Mars-Jupiter asteroid belt is estimated to contain between 2.8×1021 and 3.2×1021 kilograms.
About 10% of all the asteroids are Type-M (metal) asteroids and they are probably an even higher percentage by mass. But lets just say that a bit under 10% of the lower figure are useful. 2.5x1020 kilograms is 250 zettagrams or 250,000 terratons.
That's enough to build 35 million Citadels or 10,000 trillion Tigers. And that's just one asteroid belt and it's likely there are countless more available with even higher masses (systems that didn't form planets for instance).
Mining could theoretically be a problem but worst comes to worst it really shouldn't be that hard to simply land an asteroid and process it. Given that Olympic Dam was processing 9 million tons of ore per year back in 2005 it shouldn't be that hard to get hundreds of millions to billions of tons of ore processing going on.
I have trouble describing the size of the smile this puts on my face.
You did see the part about it causing them to accelerate their research on the Levaithan of Dis, which canonically was done in response to the failure at Terra Nova and lead to the entire leadership becoming Indoctrinated, right?
Because Batarians aren't very bright to begin with and I imagine Indoctrinated ones are even worse off. Especially since the Reapers have good reason to want the Alliance embroiled in war and people trying to kill Revy.
Ha! I knew I forgot something. I remember noting to put it in but obviously forgot. Added:
They were willing to pay 600m (50% markup) but given how much money we're making it's no real loss.
Taking away a single dice significantly reduces the probability of success. For instance for the current plan:
[] Advanced Mass Effect Theory
60d10+120 (98.85%) -> 50d10+120 (41.26%)
[] Advanced Neural Implant
60d10+115 (97.97%) ->50d10+105 (16.90%)
[] CASIE Implant
60d10+120 (99.97%) -> 50d10+120 (41.26%)
Now as Van Ropen said the overflow is on average small:
Average(60d10+120) = 450
Average(60d10+115) = 445
Average(60d10+120) = 450
So on average we'd be looking for a total overflow of 50+45+50 = 145 giving us a waste of 73 compared to the average total of 1510. ~5% wastage for the certainty that barring incredibly bad luck most/all of our projects will finish this turn isn't that bad a trade off.
Taking a later example:
Average(90d10+295 + 50) = 840
Average(60d10+150) = 480
Average(90d10+360) = 855
Average(50d10+190) = 465
Average(50d10+200) = 475
Average(50d10+160) = 435
Total Overflow = 350
Total Waste = 175
Total Research = 3,550
Waste Percentage = 5%
Even with lots of dice the overflow wastage really isn't a problem.
Collider is already covered, the PMC will depend upon what results the previous turn's:
returns.
And for the gaming how about:
[] Set up a branch of PI to work on the gaming applications of your tech and market your new game. Your sure there are plenty of kids like Kasumi (and yourself) who would get a kick out it.
I assume you mean ISAR (Industrial Scale Arc Reactor) in which case there is already one listed.
Depends on the cost. We'll also be getting a large increase in our profit from the Tigers as well.
True, very true. Don't forget about Anti-Monopoly laws. Then again as Esbilon said we can just buy the right politicians. But that needs a political adviser, good thing a rather talented one happened to run into us
See above.
All very true.
Me said:
Just noticed this on the vote tally. Corrected the plan to account for the increased security teams. That's another 280m and 1200 production.
Sense of scale is important here. A Tiger is 25,000kg and consumes 30 production.
With 9 Factory IIIs on Mindoir we could produce 9,000 per quarter and 36,000 per year for a yearly total mass of 900,000,000kg.
900,000 tons is a very small number. To put that into perspective the Ukraine produces 65.8 million tons of Iron Ore per year.Even Germany produces 400,000 tons of Iron Ore.
A single kilometer long M-Class asteroid could contain more then two billion tons of iron ore, enough to run those factories for over two thousand years.
Good thoughts there. One mistake though is that it's a Humanity-wide collider project, not just Durham's. They're the biggest group in their field, but they do not have that kind of funding.
I see your point about the Leviathan-induced Indoctrination. That obviously changes things.
I intended "resources" to be more abstract than simple iron. We could be talking about more rare elements, labor requirements, pollution regulations, infrastructure costs, etc. When you're just one factory on the side of the highway, and you are purchasing of element Y at market prices, it's a lot less expensive than when you need to build out roads & rail to your factory complex and hire prospectors and mining companies to find more of Element Y, since you've already bought all of it that was available.
I doubt we're going to be limited by the common elements anytime soon, but finding enough palladium to power the arc reactors, enough gold/platinum/rare earth elements / whatever to make our exotic super alloys and electronics, and whatever else we're building is not going to be easy.
Also, yes I acknowledge that asteroid mining would add tons of useful resources to the pool. There was a whole discussion earlier about (as far as we can tell) ME universe not doing any asteroid mining, and what sort of techs we could add to the tree to open that up. I even wrote an omake on the topic. Research on that tree would increase the amount of production we could reasonably fit into one system.
You do know that most of the gold found on earth are from meteorites and asteroids right? Any that was on earth when it formed sunk to the core. Same with platinum and probably palladium considering that they tend to be found together because they also come from meteorite and asteroid strikes.
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