Tropicology: Tobacco and Cigars

[Senor Ruina]

I did an experiment with tobacco and cigar factories.

6 farms growing tobacco; two cigar factories.  Presidente with no bonuses to production.  Uneducated salaries were fixed at 12, and high-school at 21.  Ran for about 20 years, then fired the farmers and let the teamsters carry off the tobacco; then shut down the factories as they emptied their in queues.

The factories, once they got some inputs, never had an empty input queue until the end.  $3300 in tobacco was shipped, but otherwise it all went to the factories.

Data

Here's the raw data wages paid and profits:

Farms:

income wages
28610  9876
40550  11400
38220  12396
36040  10680
40030  10620
31760  10720

Factories:
income wages RSRC
362784 31458 114351
310464 32886  97560

Analysis

Total tobacco grown was $215210 worth, or 215.21 loads.  Total wages expended growing it was $65692.  At $12/man-month, that means that a total of 5474.3 man-months were used.  Thus the average growth rate achieved was .0393 loads/man-month, or .472 loads/man-year.  1.9 loads/year per farm.

This rate is lower than what I expected, but most of the terrain was not dark green for tobacco.  Some of it was light green, some of it yellow, varying over time.  I had expected to have a lot of surplus relative to what the factories needed, but I didn't.

On cigar rolling: the two factories together processed 211.91 loads of tobacco.  They spent $64344 on wages, at $21/man-month.  So they used 3064 man-months.  The rate they got was therefore .069 load/man-month, or 0.83/man-year.

Conclusion

Cigars are very profitable.  If you want to maximize throughput, you may need something like 2:1 farmers per factory worker, depending on the quality of the land for growing tobacco.

[Brf]

Tobacco by itself is pretty profitable too, and can be used to quickly raise the money for the factory. The cigar factory creates less pollution than the other factories too. I always setup tabacco and cigars as my main money raiser, unless I have a good reason not to.
 

[Senor Ruina]

Some more data.  I did another run to find out what the electrical widgets do to cigar factories.  I had 16 farms feeding 4 cigar factories.  The four cigar factories each had skylights, and then one of the four arrangements of autoroller or not, and climate control or not.

Here are the results.

The tobacco farms:
       income wages
1    34610  14604
2    54340  14964
3    57960  15756
4    64880  14892
5    42080  15276
6    64850  14952
7    58700  16008
8    55740  14976
9    46940  14964
10  40800  14748
11  40060  14796
12  59680  14832
13  42130  14592
14  38930  14748
15  52080  15696
16  51000  14304

cigar factories:
#   with   income wages RSRC
1 AR        557152 39564 198k
2 AR,CC   573724 40047 164k
3             396608 39774 123K
4   CC      406912 40695 98050

totals exported from the almanac:

tobacco: 219990
machine cigars 1127k
cigars:  806848

[Senor Ruina]

Analysis of that last data.

First off, let's track the tobacco.  The farms, in sum, had income of 804780, wages 240108.  So 20009 man-months were spent, to get 804.7 loads of tobacco, or  .04 loads/man-month.  (This was not great tobacco country.)

Of the tobacco produced, 220 loads went to the docks directly.  583 loads were paid for by factories.  That is all there is; these numbers add up with the total 804 loads.

At the factories, tobacco was processed then turned into loads of cigars (machine, or not) as follows:

      input  output
#1  198  193.4
#2  164  199.2
#3  123  123.9
#4   98   127.1

That's right - loads of input and output are not the same - different stuff, after all.  The climate control effect is described in the game as 'decreasing raw materials used per cigar by 20%'.  So you see that works by effectively decreasing the amounts of inputs the factory needs to get a certain output level.  

The autoroller, as advertised, increases the throughput of the factory by 50%.  This is easy enough to see in the raw data, but let's do the math with wages.  

The two autorolling factories spent 79611 on wages, that is, 3791 man-months.  They made 392.6 loads of cigars, that is, .103 loads/man-month.  That's a nice rate.

The two other factories spent 80469 on wages, or 3669 man-months.  They processed 251 loads.  That's a rate of 0.0684 loads/man-month, which is what I got in the first test of this series.

The autoroller rate as tested was 50.56% higher.

[El_Coronel]

Wow, something performs as documented!

[Laura_67]

Cigar factories are cheap compared to other factories at $10, 000.

[Brf]

And cigar factories produce less pollution than the other factories

[Laura_67]

Yup, Cigar Factories have tons of advantages, i usually build one in every game.

[MartialLawForAllHa]

yes i'll admit tobacco and cigars are good industries, but tourism is one of the best ways to get started

sometimes tourism can bring in well over 40,000

AND that's a year

i usually build at least one cigar factory and at least have 4 tobacco farms