Grain Possibilities Part 1 - Steak Restaurant

Virtonomics - Lien Ledger |

Lien Ledger conducted a reader poll recently to see what articles would be of interest to our avid reader base.  One suggestion was an article analyzing grain based production chains.  One of the advantages of grain based production chains is the large number of options available and the length of the grain based chains.  The longer the production chain, the more value can be added along the way.

Based on the vast number of grain based production chain options, I've decided break the analysis into multiple articles.  In this article, part 1, we'll take a look at steak restaurants as the end of the production chain.

Below are a diagram and corresponding chart showing the full steak restaurant production chain using independent suppliers for the beginning raw materials.  As you can see, you'd need 3 different kinds of animals farms that use livestock qualification, 4 different kinds of factories that use production qualification and 1 type of restaurant that uses restaurant qualification.  Anyone including new players and play for free players can build this chain and supply their own steak restaurants.  You need to build up your livestock, production and restaurant qualifications for this to become a profit center and the only way to due that is to run animal farms, factories and restaurants for "experience points" that build your qualifications.  So if your qualifications are low, you may need to subsidize this set-up as you accumulate experience until you can raise qualification.  Also, running livestock vs. factories vs. a restaurant is each different, so you'd need to learn these parts of the game (which I consider the fun part!).

You can sell any of the items in your chain wholesale or you can retail them if you have more stock than the restaurants can handle.  You can also skip parts of the production process and buy wholesale (for example, buy glass on the market instead of having your own glass factory).

If you can get your hands on some game points for paid resources, a highly recommended purchase is an agricultural farm (I think beginning players get some points for just logging in, there are competitions for new players to win points and there are ongoing tender competitions to win point, and lastly you can use really money).  You would replace the independent grain supplier in the diagram above with your own grain supply.  It would have higher quality than the independent supplier which would result in higher quality output all throughout the chain.  You will need to build an extra qualification: agricultural farming.

Where to locate operations?  High level, I'd locate all animal farms and factories where labor costs are low, income tax costs are low and customs/transport fees are reasonable between the production location and your restaurant.  For livestock, there are governors who fund a special project to give 5% quality bonus to your output and Patagonia and Pampas has a natural 7% bonus to meat.

For restaurant location, it's tricky.  In my opinion big markets are best.  Trial and error may be needed.  That said, I'll share my analysis.  It's based on a major assumption: that if MDI (Market Development Index) is low there is room for the market volume to expand and if it's high then you'll need to steal away customers from the competition as the market will slowly expand if at all.  This assumption on my part may or may not be true as MDI is a mystery metric.

I apologize for the small type.  The chart above has lots of market information specific to restaurants in large cities in the Virtonomics Lien realm. 

The pop column is the population of the city, avg salary column is for all types of enterprises in the city not just restaurants.  MDI, Mkt Vol and # of restaurants are specific to restaurants, but they're for all restaurant types in the city not just steak.  The last three % columns are based on total $ market volume of all restaurant sales (I believe).  The steak restaurant % is hard to use because if there are very high margin restaurants (and assuming steak is low margin) in a city and the figure is 10% steak, I think that means that steak has 10% of the $ market share which means it must have a much higher % of actual number of restaurants.  In another city there may be less high margin restaurants and the % may be more representative of the % of steak restaurants.  The residential area % shows how much overall competition there is in this area of the city (you want a low #).  The other sellers is just a sign of diversity in the market, the higher the number the less a few big players are dominating the market.


Based on the data above, if I were opening a less competitive restaurant (due to the fact them I'm a new player with low qualification, tech and no access to paid resources that boost quality for example), I'd look to open my steak restaurant in the residential district of Athens.  Athens is large, average salary is nice for the folks who will end up dining in your establishment, MDI is low so I think it means the market volume can grow in total, 26 current restaurants is not a huge number and steak restaurant % is low.  Ideally the residential $ would be lower, but that could be driven by other restaurant types who knows.

If you have questions or comments, leave them and I'll respond promptly.

Stay tuned for part 2...