Contracts Vs. Market Trading (Little Upsilon)

Okay I am thouroughly befuddled. Everyone is saying that trading in a common market is not good because the quality of you products is not taken into account when determining your revenue. However, on the page itself it says that the price might change because of quality. Can someone with experience therefore clear up this question for me.

Is common market trading a good idea or bad one?

when you buy from the common market you get a contract. Contract trading and Market trading is the same thing. Both are bad for your economy. W3C has announced things that might make it less bad so this post may be dated.

A state corporation will never produce quality over 296. In addition the companies producing 296 will sometimes get less than 2.96 times the market price.

You can produce quality 296 using raw materials with quality 190. If your corporations buy quality 247 from the common market then you are wasting the money you paid for the extra 57 quality.

Quality 100 beans create the same gas that quality 292 beans create. Quality 100 bombs bang just as loud as quality 189 bombs.

Okay, so where do you get the speficics. Because if this is so, then it would be wise to upgrade some companies and others not.

No. Upgrade all of your companies. You shouldn't be supplying yourself. Just buy things from the world market and you can specify what quality you want.

Actually, I take that back.

Don't upgrade your plutonium and nuclear weapons corps since those can't be bought/sold on the world market.

Upgrade everything else though

On LU most things are selling much higher than the base price most of the time. The impact of the cost of factory maintenance is much lower. So Illuminatus is mostly correct either you should upgrade the corporation or you should not build that type of corporation at all.


Fixed costs are close to maintenance costs so doubling the sales is worthwhile. You can not upgrade company quality in state corps over 200. You can adjust the product quality by changing the supplies quality. In companies with very high raw materials costs you might want to use quality 100 materials.

Cool, thanks for your help everyone! I am implementing these strategies as we speak.