Workers as a more profitable long term investment

[Demitrious Ducas]

Has there been any more consideration about making workers more valuable?

It was discussed in the problems area for awhile and then the thread vanished...

The points were:

1 Stash is worth more than workers since, it can be transfered directly into cash on hand, it has liquidity. Workers can never be cashed out or become liquid.

2 Stash produces more credits from interest/ growth, than workers do production/ growth.

3 Workers have the same initial value cost as stash, 1:1 per credit.

4 Workers, require an additional support mechanic (segments) to retain the benifits of their growth, stash has no extra requirements.

5 As stash and workers are both at risk from a base raid, although in addition only worker are at a secondary risk from loss of segments to a boarding action. Thier value as credit producing units is at a higher risk than stash.

For these and other reasons, workers should provide more credit income over time, as a long term investment than cash/ stash. Otherwise we will continue to see players, who get a large initial power lead and place everything into stash relying on pure intrest to hold their positions until the end of the round, without even the need to play... I think this takes ALOT away from the enjoyable depth this game offers for the active players, that choose to stay active and work multiple methods of power development.

[ars68]

you are correct and incorrect, DD, yes, stash can seem more profitable at times, however it is not, UNTIL you are as high as you are now, when you can't really get enough segments to keep up with the workers.

the reason being is this:
 
lets say you have 1 mil in workers making 3k with 3% growth, and 10 mil in stash that brings 10%
by the end of the day, the 10 mil will be more then 11 Mil, from interest.
the workers will become more then 10.3Mil workers from growth.  however, then they will produce an extra  4.32Mil by the end of that same day, from production alone.  so as you can see, by the end of the day, even with stash being the same, the end result would be:
stash:     1000k growth
workers:  4323k growth

in fact, at 10% (which by the way, is almost impossible unless using bonuses) it would take roughly 43 million in stash, just to equal roughly the amount generated by just that 10 Mil workers.

but as I said, once you DO reach that effective max number of workers, yes, it would become better to just switch over to credits stash.

what I want to know is, though, what is REALLY the point of having missions for workers when workers and credits are pretty much the same (1 credit = 1 worker)

[Lammalord]

to make you have to waste turns on workers missions and to waste command bonos to raise it? good point ars

[charmuska]

ars, you multiplied the produced credits by 1440 instead of 144.  That makes it about 432k/day.  It comes out to about 5% of their total number per day (using real numbers) that workers produce.  You figured things up wrong, but it is still more profitable (let's see a non-gold get 5% growth on anything until they're well into the billions, let alone more than 5%).

[Demitrious Ducas]

So, your really just talking economies of scale, rather than looking at their true long term value...

If workers are only slightly better than stash until you get a couple of billion of them, that accounts for only a minor part of many players round. I know it hardly took me more than a couple of weeks to have much more than that # workers.

I want workers to have VALUE over the entire course of the round. I want the top players to be concerned that they need more segments to produce meaningful worker credit production. I want players to be rewarded by using command points to increase worker growth or production. There are too many players out there that are one dimensional, and only build stash, and for only using part of the tools and parts of the game they are rewarded in the end, because stash IS better than workers...

[ars68]

ok, to be honest, I have no clue WHAT I put up, as I changed the starting amount of credits like 4 or 5 times, and Iw ent back through to edit it, fine, but once I hit submit, my computer couldn't find the forum!  so ya, I know I'm wrong on a bunch of workers.  and as far as the amount of credits produced... hehe, I thought it looked bigger then what it should be...  thanks for the info.  actually... I thought I DID times it by 1440, but then I ended up multiplying it by... something... I forget now

anyway, ya, but more then likely, it will come to be that workers will have worth in planets, working on the planet, so it may just be matter of time anyway.  by the way, as suggestion to the other thing, maybe you should have missions for workers get 2x the normal reward:
credits: reward
workers: reward X2

that way just getting the credits and buying workers will yield half the result of getting workers through the mission.

[Lammalord]

raise the amount that you get from workers... i mean now i have 3 trillion workers and only get 1.5 bil... thats a total of about 200bil a day yet if i had 3 tril cash it would be like a 340-400bil gain with my bonos... but in the end workers should be raised a bit, dont change the stash just balance out the workers, that or make workers take up less biofarm then they do now that that i know that i can do one misison get 100bil workers and not go negtive... so my concusion would be to eaither raise the amout of money gained from workers or lower the amount of biofarm space needed... like 10k segements = 1 tril workers, beacsue now im barly growing with 350k segs on bio farms only...

[Seither]

It Is balanced you guys, or balanced enough, and if you change anything about it, people are just gonna do the same thing they do with stash, only now with workers. Most players would be no where without their workers, as they serve as the foundation for your stash in the beginning of the round. Then later on they become less important as you are able to exert more from stash, whch is how it should be.

[Demitrious Ducas]

They aren't even close to balanced...

I'd say none of the top players cares or relies on their workers after the first or second month of the round. Stash is so much more valuable because of it's liquidity, and because of this commanders focus cp on increasing interest or ways of gaining cash, few if any would waste cp or resources on workers in any form (Contraception Ban , Slave Trader Mercenary, Steroids Factory, Psychic Apetite Inductor, Explorer Mercenary, Advanced Locator, Advanced Debries Collector), more than cheap base levels.

It doesn't pay to spead your cp/ resources into diversified fields, rather than focusing on only a few core places to extreme levels which is rewarded by higher success. Diversification of investments should be a core principle to success in any economic model, to safeguard assests from colapse of a market (or attack) and to provide greater rewards...

Which is exactly why commanders exploit that fact and rely on stash and cash to win, it is easy and better. The reward for choosing the harder method is minimal when compared.

[ars68]

again, here is my answer to both points:

anyway, ya, but more then likely, it will come to be that workers will have worth in planets, working on the planet, so it may just be matter of time anyway.  by the way, as suggestion to the other thing, maybe you should have missions for workers get 2x the normal reward:

when planets go in, if E decided to put in everything as it is now, it will be something like this: (this is total speculation, and may be no where near what it turns out to be)

in the begginning, you have workers, as they do more, and can't 'afford' planets.

later in the round, you will have a choice to build secret base workers where they are 'safe' or devote them to a planet where then they can stay there, creating buildings, (I am guessing more) credits, and grow faster.  however, on the planet they will be much much more vulnerable, especially to stellar converters, so it may still be sticking with secret base.

late in the round, secret base workers do little, compared to stash, so all workers are transferred to heavily defended planets where they have a chance to grow even more, and start building stuff to.  while all credits will be reserved in stash where they create more credits.

[Seither]

Ducas, you're think real life too much. in the game, it is balanced, and even if workers were more valuable, do you reall think the top players would use them? no they wouldn't. workers are for the lower through upper middle players, then it is rely on stash, which is 10x more risk as you lose more of it during a raid. Hence my saying it's balanced.