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Seen several debates on setting efficiency, some saying that its better to set it to zero and reap the profits, even though this adversely affects your GDP/C.

Just trying to get a general consensus from the community on what they feel is the best setting.

Do you invest more in an industry which you export heavily, or just use the same policy for all industries?

My answer is " none of the above".

It really depends on the region played.The AI regions ,the resources,the tech,etc... are all very important to me when i consider this question in the game.

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This post approved by Tkobo:Official Rabble Rouser of the United Yahoos
Chuckle TM

In the begin of the game i set always the sliders back to zero.
After a few months i make the adjustsments.
But i always try to keep them near to zero...

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NO MORE NOISY FISH [unless they are green & furiously]
I HAVE STILL A FISH IN MY EAR

I tend to try and invest heavily in raw materials. Electricity I find a good one since it decreases cost per unit. Electricity is used in finished goods so the cost per unit of each of those goes down accordingly. This can really help make exporting consumer goods very profitable.

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

I try to zero everything out to start.

My initial goals are, of course, to satisfy domestic demand [based on any number of indication parameters, such as DAR, and Immigration, and acceptable tax revenues,...]. If investment seems warranted, then I start investing in the base commodities first.

Remembering that Electricity costs depend on fuel costs, first I would try to get fuel costs down somewhat [using WM prices as a benchmark, but not necessarily a target], then try to affect electricity itself. This can be tricky if you are also exporting coal or oil, as your efficiency investment is a factor of total production - so if you bump up oil production, investment increases [and it is apparently non-linear, and also affected by inflation]. Rule of thumb, don't invest deeply in commodities that you expect to overproduce.

Getting power costs under control greatly affects the costs of finished goods, especially consumer goods, so stabilize this first. Do investment changes on one commodity at a time, and validate them over at least a week of game-time - look for 'percolation' effects.

Another odd rule of thumb - if you are running commodities in demand mode, and this is usually the case, try setting the demand target to 98% instead of 100%. You will generally end up producing a small surplus anyway, and in the long run it will seriously reduce the impact of investment outflows. Much micromanagement went into validating this recommendation, but I would urge you to validate it for yourself -don't take my word for it.

Another clue - changing your investment rate also impacts your effective markups, in an odd way. If you reduce investment, you need to also reduce markup, as it is a percentage of cost: reducing investment raises consumer costs. There is no real linear relationship here - that is, dropping investment a tick AND dropping markup two ticks at the same time might still result in a domestic price hike - so be very careful to monitor domestic prices when markup and investment are active and changing.

Once markups are stabilized, you might think that investment could help to increase margin on domestic sales - and it will, except that in very extreme or liquid inflation situations, it can create a lot of havoc. Get markup, demand and inflation under control, and use investment judiciously when all else fails.

It's all particularly difficult in the early years of a phase, as you are probably also upgrading or adjusting capacity. Running a bunch of low-efficiency facilities has real costs - so as you replace or upgrade these, you will have to also adjust investment. To simplify the upgrade process it is [IMO] easier to not have investment active if possible [as you can save some time by avoiding cost stabilization when new facilities come online].

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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously [but otherwise, they do not worry and are happy].

I usually go for a research-based economy, so all my goods eventually exceed WM prices after inflation takes off. So it's not worth it for me to fight the inevitable. Sometimes I do try to keep something cheap, like uranium, efficient.

BigStone,
That's an interesting ploy to set efficiency sliders to zero. The poll question was a bit vague about which sliders. Still I can see where that helps make a big difference between sales and costs which should bump up employment but unless you're setting prices really cheap your demand will go down. Not a bad idea to get your imports under control early.

I usually like to jack my sliders up early on and get my production efficiencies up to get my imports down or exports up. I also like to jack up education and infrastructure efficiencies as well as research early on to get them on the proerp upwards track. Then after I burn up my treasury it's time to hunker down and come back to reality.
Thanks,

Eric Larsen

I was away from the game for several months - is the price/unit contains the cost of efficiency?
I'm wondering if the one of the latest patches fixed that the price/unit was calculated without the efficiency costs...

pretty positive its still not put into the final price.

and i remember a long discussion from a couple months back and someone did the numbers and showed that efficiency sliders werent exactly that "great" just made everything excessively expensive, and it looked like you were making money but werent.

Yeah, that is why I asked if efficiencz cost is included or not in the proce calculations...

how the price per unit is calculated has not changed, but I don't have the formula handy. AFAIK, it is not. You see a separate value of what you're spending on efficiency, this affects your cost per unit.

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com