For some time now, I've been curious as to whether importing
good to improve housing solely for the sake of getting more tax income
is always worthwhile.
There isn't any question that the tax income from the higher luxury
class housing is sufficient to justify importing whatever it takes to
get to those heights, but in some of the working class housing levels,
the practice is questionable. To get some numbers I set up the following
situation:
I imagined a housing block consisting of 100 squares. These squares
had evolved into 20 1x1's and 20 2x2's. I then tried to calculate the
financial returns given four resource patterns:
Detailed info can be found by following the above links. Below is a
summary of what I found:
Housing Level
|
Net Income When Importing
|
|
Nothing
|
Clay
|
Pottery
|
Beer & Pottery
|
Notes
|
|
Rough Cottage |
967
|
967
|
967
|
967
|
|
Ordinary Cottage |
1128
|
1128
|
1128
|
1128
|
|
Modest Homestead |
1138
|
803
|
-116
|
-116
|
Clay/Pottery Imports begin |
Spacious Homestead |
1208
|
873
|
-46
|
-46
|
|
Modest Apartment |
2088
|
1753
|
+834
|
-822
|
Barley/Beer imports begin |
Spacious Apartment |
2158
|
1823
|
904
|
-752
|
|
Common Residence |
1793
|
1586
|
1013
|
-37
|
|
Looking at this, it seems to me that:
- Unless the goal is to evolve luxury housing, importing both pottery
and beer is not a good idea.
- One finished good (either beer or pottery) can be profitably imported
when the ultimate goal is to get housing to Elegant Residence level
or higher.
- If you have the ability to make pottery and brew beer, but need
to import one raw material, it makes sense to do so if you are going
to end up with Modest Apartments or higher.
- If you must import both raw materials, you should strive to evolve
your housing to Elegant Resident level or higher
There are, of course, other than financial reasons to
evolve housing. In those cases you do what you have to
|