User blog comment:Scottin/New Ideas for Resources/@comment-5220945-20120903213722

Darn, Eppi beat me to it while I was typing it up, but my explanation will show exactly how out of whack things are:

I do agree whole-heartedly with you on this. My heart gradually sunk and I resisted as much as possible when I was "supposed" to get rid of my resource makers. To me, I think it's the market prices that are broken, but I always like to try to back my point up, in case there is another problem requiring a solution.

So, what would really need to be done is that the resource producer would have to produce enough resources per square to make it more worthwhile than purchasing at the market. Let's take the previous self-sustaining store, which is the florist. I call it self-sustaining because you have enough space to supply the store, if you wish. If you produce your own food you will make pure profit, so this has to be the best way, right? Well, the best recipe for return per hour is usually the quickest one, so let's check that one. 60 food every 10 minutes gets you 90 coins, for a total of 540 coins per hour. Seems nice so far. So how many farms do you need to supply this recipe...11! Yep, that's right.

So, let's back it off a little and go to the longest recipe. This is 250 food every 8 hours, giving you 440 coins. So, 440 / 8 = 55 coins per hour, which is a lot less, but it will only take 1 farm. If we work with that, then it would be a total space usage of the store and the one resource collector, so a total of 41 squares. Giving us a total return of 1.34 coins per square per hour. I use this so that we can compare buying solely from the market.

While we're at this, let's take the happy medium recipe, 110 food every 1.5 hours for 180 coins. This is 120 coins per hour and needs 3 farms. Well, 2.2 farms to be exact, but unfortunately, you can't buy 0.2 farms :P So, let's just go by sqeaking by with 2 farms, to save space, and that pushes out the time needed to 1 hour and 40 mins. So, a total of 120 coins per hour is now 109 coins per hour...so how does that affect our coins per hour per square. 1.65 coins per square per hour. Better, but still not great.

Now to compare that to buying from the market. Since you don't have to worry about resource collectors, you can use the best recipe, which we already determined is the first. So, 540 coins per hour, and 6 recipes of 60 food. Well, let's just do it per recipe since we aren't as dependent on time when not using collectors. On average, you will pay 91 coins per 100 food from the market. This makes the recipe “cost” about 55 coins per recipe. You still make 90 coins for each, so 90 coins reward – 55 coins for material cost * 6 recipes per hour = 210 coins per hour. With only the store, that's 210 / 16 squares for a final comparison number of 13.125 coins per square per hour.

This means exactly what you think it means, as soon as you can build a market, resource collectors become obsolete. The fix then is that the farms don't produce enough at all, and the super farm should replace the regular farm, or the market system needs some serious modification. Since farm production adjustments would require recipe adjustments, I would lean toward just fixing the market system. But, I would still like to buy a super farm, just because it sounds cool :D