Military Unit Quality - Money vs Time

Simcountry is a game that, despite some of its problems, has plenty of appeal for both a casual player and the budding in depth strategist. There are still new things that I personally discover quite often in how a little change here or a purchase there can yield significant results for your country. In an effort to assist with player outreach so newer players don't feel so on their own, I'm going to periodically share some of my findings and walk you through some of the more in-depth things that you may not have thought of that can help you in providing more options to efficiently control your country in a way that best suits you.

As always, newer players are encouraged to join the game's discord server to interact with other players across all of the worlds. It's a great source particularly if you are encountering potential problems with your country as we've all been there. The invite link is https://discord.gg/M3WUKG4ypR

Today I'd like to cover Military Unit Quality, and specifically the cost and benefit of money vs time.

When getting into the war game, you will almost immediately recognize the importance of quality in your military units. In essence, quality is a multiplier for a unit's attack strength and defensive durability. A unit with 240Q will be expected to hit twice as hard and take half the damage that a unit with 120Q would (though results won't be so perfect due to the mini-round nature of battles). Higher quality yields better results so the conventional wisdom is obviously to buy at the highest quality that you can, which is 330Q.

Standard military units have a quality cap of 450Q, which can only be achieved via Weapon and Ammunition Upgrade items that you can manufacture yourself or purchase from the market. These upgrades will work at any level from the minimum 120Q up to the 450 cap, and each upgrade grants 1Q to the selected weapon. Note the unit is made up from many weapons, so say upgrading a unit of 400 Interceptors would take 400 Weapon Upgrades, one per Interceptor.

These upgrades are often overlooked by many outside of players looking to squeeze the most out of their units and are viewed as a luxury. But the truth is if you are willing to plan your military out ahead of time, they can actually save you money. A unit can be upgraded 2 times per game month, which may be set to automatically occur provided you have the upgrades available.

If time is of the essence and you want to get to war quickly so you can make your kill, this post really isn't for you. You're going to buy your weapons at 330Q and start dropping those bombs. If you're willing to plan ahead however, you could save yourself a potentially significant amount of money, especially on offensive weapons, airforce weapons, and naval weapons as you build your arsenal.

We all know that Quality influences price for every item in the game, military units are no different. Every 1Q above 100 is a 1% increase in the price you pay above market price for the product, so for a 330Q military weapon you will pay 3.3x market price - which makes sense since the weapon is significantly stronger than at base quality. But remember, the Weapon Upgrade also provides a 1% increase in quality. For some weapons, that upgrade is considerably cheaper than the weapon itself, and the quality of the upgrade item does not matter.

Using an example on my world:
Weapon Upgrade market price - 475,650 (570,780 @ 120Q)
Interceptor market price - 218,950,000

Based on the Interceptor's market price, we know that for every point of added Quality, we will be paying 2,189,500 additional in the purchase price of the Interceptor.

Interceptor bought @ 330Q - 722,535,000 cost
Interceptor bought @ 120Q & given 210 Weapon Upgrades - 338,813,800 cost

Assuming you make a standard Interceptor Wing with 360 Interceptors, this planning ahead and purchasing lower quality Interceptors would save you 138.14B in setup costs for just this one air wing. The draw back of course would be that those 210 weapon upgrades would take 105 game months (17.5 actual days) to be utilized. The financial savings may not seem significant to higher end players, but at the same time higher end players don't generally have the financial crunch that many experience early in their time. Interceptors are only one example, you can of course do the math yourself, just multiply the market value of your desired weapon by 0.01 and compare the result to the price of a Weapon Upgrade on your world and determine for yourself if you would rather save some time or some money.

Excellent, thank you. Will be using this as got a whole army to build.

Does the quality of the Weapons Upgrade itself influence anything? Does a 330Q Weapons Upgrade upgrade 2.75 times more equipment than a 120Q?

Nope, as someone purchasing the Weapon/Ammunition Upgrades for your own use, the only difference between 120Q and 330Q is the price you pay. You'll get 1 upgrade used for 1Q increase to the weapon/ammo regardless of the upgrade item quality.

How about the defense cost while upgrading this unit. Either way you might still have to pay. Nice write up auditor.

You're still absolutely paying something at some point no matter how you cut it, and this little cost vs time analysis is certainly not the only factor to consider when building your military. Maintenance costs absolutely do add up over time but to my knowledge (I could be wrong because i haven't tested it specifically in depth) the maintenance costs associated with military units isn't necessarily linked to their quality level as a unit outside of ammunition consumption being lower at higher quality ammo but at the same time of course costing more per ammo. While there are some instances of time vs cost being something worth exploring for ammunition, in most cases 330Q ammo is still the preferred path. It is primarily the weapons themselves that can yield significant savings in buying at lower quality and improving quality on with upgrade items. Of course again that assumes you plan on maintaining the military for some time, people who buy a quick invasion force then disband and sell it after the war would likely prefer buying at 330Q across the board regardless of upgrade cost savings because they're valuing the time saved above the money saved. So there's no real universal right or wrong answer in how to approach the growth of your military, at least in this regard.

For the sake of being thorough I did just look up an old spreadsheet I found when I was actually looking into maintenance costs more. Unfortunately I don't have ammo quality on this sheet so I can't say for certain what quality I had them at when testing, but for the sake of the Interceptor Wing we'll assume 1 Interceptor Missile in maintenance per month for every 5 Interceptors (my sheet shows 0.18 ammo per active weapon).

So for the 360 Interceptors in that Wing, if they were bought at 120Q and improved through upgrades, it'd take ideally 105 turns assuming the player had the needed upgrades. So ammo maintenance for that time would be 7560 Interceptor Missiles. Assuming market price of 634,200 and purchase quality of 330, ammo part of maintenance cost would be 15.8B during the process of upgrading the Interceptors themselves to 330 so savings would still be ~ 122B.

Still more factors of course as always with Def Weapons Maintenance though that cost is relatively tame when you break it down to individual units, and of course payroll costs for the soldiers/officers which itself can also be a social security cost reduction and an income tax increase if its clearing unemployed.