Canned coffee not worth it

[President of Parador]

Ran a little experiment last night.  I had a stable community with all of the requisite services and 5 fairly mature coffee plantations in 1965.

I let the island run on very fast autopilot, building a few canneries in 1980.  Ended experiment in 1991 with $603k in the Treasury.

Restored the original game of 1965 and let it run on autopilot until 1991, no canneries this time.  National Treasury: $862k.  Even taking into account the $54k I laid out for the canneries, I still came out ahead by over $200k.

This experiment wasn't perfect, as I paid the cannery workers more than I usually would to get them staffed quickly but it's apparent to me now canning coffee is simply not worth it.  It is, at best, a break even deal.

Has this been your experience?  Or were my results misleading?

[Maus]

Interesting.  A couple of questions about the experiment:

What was the total maintenance cost for the canneries, and were the "productivity" and "freeze-dry" upgrades installed?  Were the canneries processing only coffee, or was there competition from the lower-value fish and pineapple?

It appears that, if the canneries were processing coffee only, with the productivity and freeze-dry bonuses in place, the $200K loss is the price you have to pay to industrialize and make the capitalists happy.   Ah well, at least you get some of your investment back; keeping the religous faction happy requires construction/maintenance/salary costs for buildings that generate zero income.

[tropicohead]

Interesting experiment, but does the game programming behave consistently to allow you to do that?? If you run the same game twice on two separate occasions, from exactly the same starting point, and do exactly the same things (or nothing at all) do the game events all occur in exactly the same way...or is the programming random? In other words, maybe the second time you run the game the farms and everything else produce differently because the weather pattern is different, i.e. random. I'm not sure if this experiment is valid or not...kind of interesting though...how random are the natural events in Tropico?

[Malovane]

Well, the weather system doesn't really apply to coffee that much. It is primarily altitude that affects it. It is also a permanent plant, so you don't have to spend time every year planting it and waiting for it to grow. It will just pop out with beans after a while. It is the most stable crop in the game really.

If you start adding canneries, you have to add a lot more infrastructure to maintain them. Add a cannery and a teamsters office, some more churches, doctors, apartments... As Canned coffee creates an income of 2400 pesos over the normal Coffee's 1300, it in general is not worth it. I usually make around 3k on the canneries producing coffee per year. During the course of the game, it is very hard to recoup those expenses.

It can be worth it however if you have an Airport and a TV station. You can get a 70% markup on coffee from either US or Russia through use of the trade delegation, and a 20% markup on processed goods through use of the industry ad campaign. Just to round it off... if you are entreprenureal (sp?) that adds an extra 10%, so your export price of canned coffee can be up to 4800 pesos, or 100% market value.

This is probably the only reason to build the canneries, as they do begin to make larger profits. You start off making 1100 pesos per load that goes through processing. With diplomacy you can get it to around a 2500 peso profit per load.. not to mention the base value almost doubles. Eventually it will pay for its own weight.

In the end, coffee can be a lucrative business choice. It can be similar to gold mining/jewelry manufacture in profit, but the collection of the material is fast, painless, and outputs for the most part the same every year (which is an enormous quantity). It's easier on the environment as well

[PaulNAdhe]

I always build a cannery next to my coffee plantations, usually 5 per.  I always do both upgrades as soon as possible.  They always run in the red for many, many years.

But, I still think a cannery is a useful addition.  It keeps the capitalists happy, it provides good wages so I can make a small profit on my apartment only housing, and my pubs, cafes, whor ... eh cabarets, etc.  

Overall, I don't know if the profits from my other businesses outweigh the drag from the cannery; but, I'll always keep building them

[President of Parador]

What was the total maintenance cost for the canneries, and were the "productivity" and "freeze-dry" upgrades installed?  Were the canneries processing only coffee, or was there competition from the lower-value fish and pineapple?

I had the packing house upgrade built but not the flash freezer.  The numbers would have probably been much worse had I had to build and staff the electrical plant to run the freezer.  And it was coffee only, no fish or pineapple.

It wasn't a perfectly clean experiment, it was more ad hoc and on the fly.

[President of Parador]

I'm not sure if this experiment is valid or not...kind of interesting though...how random are the natural events in Tropico?

That's my next experiment, concerning weather.  I want to determine if we Tropicans live in a static universe or a dynamic one.  I'm hoping that the Heisenberg Principle doesn't interfere.

[President of Parador]

I always build a cannery next to my coffee plantations, usually 5 per.  

Check that raw material production isn't outstripping processing capacity.  I think two mature plantations can keep the input queue full for the cannery.  I learned the hard way that the excess raw materials are just sold straight off the dock, as coffee, not canned coffee.

[Coconut Kid]

..., but does the game programming behave consistently to allow you to do that?  If you run the same game twice ... from exactly the same starting point, and do exactly the same things (or nothing at all) do the game events all occur in exactly the same way  --  or is the programming random? ...

The dozens of random effects -- not just the weather -- are the reasons that running on very fast autopilot will NOT produce the same results two times in a row.

In this case PoP, did not properly set up or control the comparison. The big problem is that he just put the canneries on the map; he says nothing about whether or not any coffee actually was processed through them. The results indicate that most of the coffee missed the canneries.