So a little backstory: The first product I chose to make when I started Kapilands was Wine. Something about the Vineyards of Knolls or the Knolls of Vineyards or something witty like that. However, after a few days of this I realized that my ROI just wasn't matching up to what others were achieving - not even close.
I investigated a little, and found that there was general advice: Leather Jackets, or Gas, or Wardrobes. And sure enough, those were better profits. But were they they best? Was anything else decent? How could we know for sure? I wanted to find out.
So I set about gathering data. Now the production side is easy. You can just look up the costs, rates, and inputs. So the first thing I did was make a linked spreadsheet with all the recipes interlinked, and a column for the current market price. Then I could just fill in that column and it would autocalculate the cost of any product based on the market value of the components (plus manufacturing cost of course).
This was a decent start. It let me know what was selling above or below price on the market. Car parts were of course one of the worst, since steel is so valuable and cars are apparently not. Also my perennial favorite poster child for losing money, Cattle, of course showed up. So did a few other things (like Wine as I'd already known), and I had an idea of what to avoid.
This was useful and I know for a fact that other spreadsheet-friendly folks have done just about the same thing.
However, market prices are of course set by players, and I wasn't trying to figure out what players thought were the best or worst products already. I wanted to know what they SYSTEM treated as the best and worst products. (And besides, some of those were so thinly traded with just a few listed in the market at high prices that I had no idea what was realistic.
Achieving this goal meant I needed to get the other side of the economy: what the store results are. So I went about building all the different stores and selling some of everything. But the problem is what price to use. It's always important to maximize my profit (as described here)). I needed to know what the optimized price was because it wouldn't be fair to compare a right-priced product against an overpriced one and an underpriced one. But I couldn't just use market prices which I'd already said weren't reliable.
A better way to get the midpoint was to figure out where the price should be if all producing buildings were generating the same ROI. Obviously that isn't true, but what it does is push the balance to the end of the chain: the store. This meant that whatever rate I picked wouldn't matter as long as it was somewhere in the middle of the store results. For example:
- Suppose I pick 20%. I calculate optimal store ROI for gas at 8% and Cars at 2%. Well that is not reasonable because clearly the factory is getting overpaid. And since cars go through more steps, I'm building in that 20% profit many more times but not counting it.
However, suppose I use 10% instead. Gas in the store is 15% ROI at optimum, and Cars are 4%. Now the 10% is much more fair because it underestimates the gas factory and overrates the car factory.
So what I needed to do was figure out a shortcut for every product. A way that, without going into the game and trying over and over, I could predict what a retail time would be at a given price. So I gathered a spread of data in all products and attempted to reverse-engineer the formula.
And this is the meat, the essence of product pricing. People have asked me for this over the years and I never gave it out, but now I will share the formula for calculating selling time based on price.
Now first, a few caveats. There are some variables that I couldn't vary and so I just baked them in together. Average price and average quality being foremost on this list. This was close to the game start so quality was still close to zero in all products. And average price - while it does matter, the difference has never shown to be large enough to significantly shift profitability. Also I'm sure this is a greatly simplified version of what the game actually does. However, months later I still found that my spreadsheet estimates for time remained reasonably close. And you'll recall that the profitability curve is pretty flat at the top, so being a little off is forgiveable when you consider how far off people's raw guesses generally are.
So anyway, here's the formula:
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(Price ^ 3.5 - A) / B = Time in minutes to sell 1 in a 100m store.
And again, this is a bit simplified. In part it's using a line to estimate a flat curve. So you won't get A and B to be exactly the same even with varying points of your own data over and over. But they're close enough to count.
Now one cool thing about this is that if you are familiar with Excel's SOLVER tool, you can just ask Excel to find the optimal price for you! (If you're not familiar with it, you should go learn, though it's outside the scope of this guide.)
But anyway, back to my story. What I had then were the costs all linked together, and the ability to calculate optimal pricing for any product. All I needed were two more data points, the prices of two products. Care to guess which two?
Those two products, spelled backwards to avoid spoilers, are r-e-t-a-w and r-e-w-o-p. Because naturally they don't use inputs, but everything else builds from them.
So given that, I had complete information. From this I was able to compile the "Knolls List" that I've talked about elsewhere: the 10 products I felt were the most profitable in the system, regardless of what the players do. Gas and Leather Jackets both top the list. If you run a gas business buying power but producing everything else yourself, you effectively make 7.1% ROI on every building. Leather jackets, 7.7%. I personally liked Pullovers and Leather Gloves at 4.2% each.
Everything else in the game is lower than that. Now you can do better by focusing on just the best part of a chain and letting someone else do the unprofitable part. But in the wide view, that's why those are the best businesses.
Now you're probably thinking "OK, so just give us the workbook." To be honest I was going to, but believe me when I tell you that it's an unreadable mess. I was figuring a lot of this out as I went along, so there are dead ends and calculations that don't mean much. The good values are hidden amidst odd or archaic columns. I wrote it and I can barely figure out where to look. If you're really interested in this, you can take the raw info and make something much cleaner.
However, to save time I did publish one sheet, here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key= ... 01tf-_vrdQ
which includes all the linked self-calculating costs. If the formulas look odd at first, it's because I named the cells for easy reference. One quirk of that sheet as currently written is that I made the Market Premium the manual entry and the Market Price an autocalc, instead of the other way around. You'll also notice the next two columns are Raw Input and Raw Total Cost. Basically the same thing as Input Cost and Total Price, except I excluded the Market Premium at all steps.
So when I tell you that's the neatest sheet, you should believe that the rest is just unreadable.
So instead, let me give you a list of "fair market prices". I actually found it to be much more useful in the long run than running any of the formulas. Just look up the product you're interested in and check the fair price for what you need. If it's above that, feel free to make it. Otherwise, be a buyer. That will be the second Appendix.
Overall I hope this is useful to Kapilands players. You certainly don't need to know it. And in fact you might prefer not to have everything figured out like this. In a sense it takes the challenge out. But I hope that those who enjoy numbers and calculations will find that this enables them to supercharge their Kapilands experience.
Knolls
Appendix 1: Values for the Retail Time Formula
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Product A B
Apple juice -67.0645 3369.3806
Apples 8.4032 508.2736
Bananas 9.4434 554.7873
Beds -396102347.8025 409657286.2152
Beef 78.0272 35708.8254
Beer -54.3616 2390.3695
Biscuits -468.4975 1179.9419
Breads -34.6468 2479.2404
Bottled cocoa -75.6927 3251.8352
Candy bars -357.8846 2870.1794
Candy -849.2278 348.7084
Cars 3206980965463980.0000 28303968153501.0000
Chairs 64025952.4386 38205613.2006
Chickens 208.6261 17072.8620
Cocoa powder -285.1145 740.9402
Coffee powder -1513.6719 1186.3407
Computers 1315296734.7565 1317207347.9135
Cabriolets 2038328779499870.0000 30262153571131.3000
Detergents 2181.0402 138528.2195
Diamond rings 264721450617.4350 20280875119.9549
Eggs 9.1362 129.9728
Flour -619.3405 534.5184
Gas 1053.0685 45596.5893
Golden necklaces 91302001980.2578 14677407552.1474
Golden watches 217906056723.8700 13741733745.1362
Grapes 44.9585 478.1563
Jeans -2656550.3934 16490836.4457
Kapi Cola 126.9975 1713.0266
Lamb -657.7612 3751.4229
Leather gloves -1047719.1138 13599820.2388
Leather jackets 202551469.0486 202874061.1979
Lemons 11.1429 565.5334
Lotions -32476.8127 195607.9847
Milk 17.4222 177.7777
Mincemeat 368.6051 47614.9159
Monitors 61964083.2556 244055161.6784
Motorbikes 25382034479809.7000 1069871523799.0400
Orange juice 291.0626 1720.1645
Oranges 12.6909 468.4448
Pears 23.0863 461.5706
Perfumes 29842.7092 1546024.0877
Pork -2801.6675 51145.2776
Potatoes 11.5609 687.8485
Printers 46710209.6329 21625611.1818
Pullovers 5584427.8342 6525470.9111
Sausages -266.6568 1716.3984
Shampoo -1984.1886 107786.6848
Shoes -4245490.8489 957263.5293
Silver necklaces 14733921716.8759 347102079.3356
Strawberries 9.9850 565.7183
Stuffed animals -2967945.0391 169356.7431
Sugar -3531.9060 1303.3729
Tables -3977916.1591 53545138.6208
Televisions 267148542.2262 1097702497.5530
Toothpastes 1719.5297 106911.3884
Toys -7668662.0145 431924.4644
Tires 15252714.5208 2737521.2587
Wardrobes 572726227.6901 3513726066.5850
Wine 4886.2278 110581.2582
Wooden toys -1685238.6986 345121.4469
Wool -0.4908 26.1834
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Product Fair Price
Advertisements $396.00
Apple juice $12.59
Apples $1.02
Bananas $1.02
Beds $688.95
Beef $14.57
Beer $15.43
Biscuits $2.15
Breads $4.70
CPU $180.37
Bottled cocoa $6.06
Cocoa $1.48
Candy bars $11.37
Candy $15.00
Car bodies $16,926.45
Cars $64,636.62
Cattle $70.38
Chairs $361.45
Chemicals $3.18
Chickens $7.33
Coal $1.42
Cocoa powder $12.80
Coffee beans $3.00
Coffee powder $16.91
Computers $774.22
Cabriolets $59,750.47
Corn $1.06
Cotton $2.04
Detergents $12.48
Diamond rings $3,501.07
Diamonds $102.00
E-Components $69.82
Eggs $0.78
Engines $6,107.53
Flour $14.20
Gas $4.86
Glass $15.58
Golden necklaces $2,936.16
Golden watches $3,910.75
Gold $79.56
Grapes $1.86
Iron ore $1.63
Jeans $169.66
Kapi Cola $9.69
Lamb $13.29
Lambs $59.78
Leather gloves $81.86
Leather jackets $235.86
Leather $94.43
Lemons $1.02
Lotions $10.24
Milk $0.33
Mincemeat $14.14
Minerals $1.60
Monitors $290.18
Motorbikes $14,368.74
Oil $18.00
Orange juice $12.59
Oranges $1.02
Pears $1.02
Perfumes $36.46
Pigs $70.38
Plastic $27.21
Pork $10.97
Potatoes $0.70
Power $0.06
Printers $260.68
Pullovers $62.81
Quartz $1.62
Rubber $7.39
Sausages $11.62
Seeds $0.10
Shampoo $13.06
Shoes $139.61
Silicon $5.90
Silver necklaces $2,109.60
Silver $68.04
Steel $46.72
Stones $2.60
Strawberries $1.02
Stuffed animals $159.65
Sugar cane $4.48
Sugar $17.76
Tables $196.81
Televisions $455.09
Textiles $36.13
Toothpastes $5.45
Toys $190.02
Wardrobes $794.27
Water $0.07
Tires $339.72
Wine $58.30
Wood $18.72
Wooden toys $178.62
Wool $1.48
Every time you see a post by knolls you know to grab a cup of coffee and settle in for a great lesson. 
