Research:Helping Hands

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Description

If our citizens help out a little underground instead of tanning themselves on the beach, we'll get more raw materials and they'll get less sunburn. There's always a need for help down the mines, saw mills and vineyards.

Effects

Allows: Overloading of resources.

You can assign up to 50% extra manpower to work, but each worker, being unskilled, is only 25% as effective. In total you can boost resource production by 12.5%.

Analysis

This section contains economic terminology you could probably not understand, if so, read the "explanation" section.

Marginal opportunity cost for goods production starts at 3 gold and multiplies by 4 when you use Helping Hands. Take this into consideration before boosting your production.

For example, suppose that you have a Quarry Level 20 and 542 workers working in it (which is the maximum of workers you can put to work without Helping Hands), and suppose you have a Stonemason Level 5 in your town (which means 10% more marble production). The production will be $542+542\times10\%=596.2$ per hour. If you put those workers to produce gold rather than marble, they will produce $542\times3=1,626$ gold per hour. This means that marble production has an opportunity cost of $1,626/596.2\approx2.73$ gold per unit. However, if you put one more, unskilled, worker, he will produce just $0.25+0.25\times10\%=0.275$ marble per hour, which has an opportunity cost of $3/0.275\approx10.91$ gold per unit, which means it's better to put those workers to make money and save it to buy the goods rather than produce them, unless you need them fast.

We can do the same calculation for other levels of buildings that increase resource production:

Level of production building	Cost of production by unskilled worker
-	12
1	11.8
2	11.5
3	11.3
4	11.1
5	10.9
6	10.7
7	10.5
8	10.3
9	10.1
10	10
11	9.8
12	9.7
13	9.5
14	9.3
15	9.2
16	9.1
17	8.9
18	8.8
19	8.7
20	8.6
21	8.5
22	8.3
23	8.2
24	8.1
25	8
26	7.9
27	7.8
28	7.7
29	7.6
30	7.5
31	7.4
32	7.3

Conclusion

Do not use helping hands if you can buy goods at less than 11 or 12 gold and you are not in a hurry: it's better to save that gold to buy the goods rather than produce them.