I've been working with auditor to model the profit from these corps, and our collaboration resulted in a complicated modification of the spread sheet that I use for optimizing profit from corporations.
It's especially difficult to think about the profitably of a corp that only makes one unit of product every 8-10 game months. Because, These corps always produce negative for a few game years and then have a big profit year. This all goes in a cycle. Most months show a steady loss. Also, In the case of Public corps, one has to reason out the country resources used as well. It's difficult to say what profit these make. So it's understandable that the game master may not realize how bad the profits are.
So I decided finally that to think about profit of these is to frame it as "Profit per unit produced".
Other complications include the rounding errors since the game seems limited to 2 decimals for production figures. 1.2 divided by 12 is 0.1. This number goes up slightly with increasing salaries and country welfare indexes. Due to rounding errors a wide variety of conditions can result in the same production number. Much wider than for "regular corps". I've used the Round function in Excel to limit some numbers to only 2 decimals in order to simulate this.
I collected the corp data and after discussion with Auditor. One thing to note is we concluded based on the observed periodicity of the "Heart beats" in monthly profit charts that the Annual production of these is 1.2 batteries a year. So if If Andy would be so kind to clarify this number it would be helpful. I put all the data into my spread sheet and modified the all the necessary calculations to express how much money is made by producing one. These produce 1 every 7-10 months, so you can get monthly profit by dividing the profit by the number of months to get that profit.
If I've managed to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts, these things are not profitable. They might make 1B / month if you set the salaries to 30 and supplies quality to 120. (Caveat, I've only seen public and Ceo controlled corps and no state controlled ones. So the N is limited).
I hope all of us can go through some discussion and figure out if my math is right and whether it is wise to improve profitability by simply raising the the base price.
The sheet is attached below for everyone's inspection. Explanatory notes are included there.
Please engage everyone, because players will not engage in trade of these things unless there is a lot a money to be made. It is costly to go get the targon and requires a lot of real life work. These should be the most profitable corps in the game. I think if they produced 10B a month, there would be a real possibility they could be worth while to players to build. Then the rest of us could buy the products.
The sheet once verified could be used to calculate the needed changes.
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For those who don't trust files or don't have excel. I know this will import into google sheets. For those from above who also hate google, you probably have open office. Auditor says it works there too.
