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/M3WUKG4yp

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

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 D