Gold and coinage

[Blais]

It is a waste od time making gold and turning it into coins.

It costs 1.4k marble, 1.4k hardwood and 1.5k tools to build a gold mine which yields 300 gold ore. It then costs 1.2k coal to turn that into gold and this yields 75 gold.

I can sell those resources on the open market for 350-400 gold.

I suggest that you rethink this.

[Dorotheus]

Here is a post I send out to all new players who join my guild.

Gold/coin production based on Aug 2015 trade prices

To build 1 gold mine it will cost you 70 coins worth of Hardwood planks, 140 coins worth of Marble, 75 coins worth of tools. So it costs 285 coins to build 1 mine. From that mine you will get just 32 coins. In otherwords you have built a gold mine and it lost you 250 coins.

What if you buff it.
To buy a gold feaver buff will cost 200 coins, to buy 4 feasts to run your smelter and coinage it costs 40 coins. Total cost to you is 525 coins, you will make 384 coins. You still lost 141 coins.

Whats the best things you can do.
Build 1 mine and use refils from adventures to top it up. Only run it when you have more than 500 ore in the mine. Use feasts on the gold chain. This will cost you 50 coins and you will make about 200 coins profit.
Second for more coins sell the hardwood planks, marble and tools for 285 coin profit.

Is there anyway to make more profit from a gold chain.
Yes there is but you need artifact skill on your explorers. With the current pricing of 3x and 4x buffs in trade it's simply not worth buying them. But it's well worth having the right explorers to find them for free.

Obviously for the quests you have to run them I suggest you use the best buffs that you have availble at the time without buying any from trade or merchant.

[CoffeePowered]

i run mine for the extra gold , to me the mats sink it doesnt matter i dont sell the marble , hardwood , tools needed to build gold mines anyways they just build up and get used for all mines, the Trade office doesnt seem as active as it used to be either .

all i do is buff the lvl 3 coinage and lvl 3 smelter, and logout xD because watching production tick over is too boring

[MorellaCarter]

The chain can be made more profitable though in a few different ways.
1. Make sure that you can be online when the mine is almost empty. I destroy my mines when there's 1 ore left, giving me 350 marble and hardwood and 375 tools.
2. Make sure one of your geologists have all the relevant gold skills (24% chance finding gold ore, 24% bigger gold deposits, 45% chance finding gold deposits that can be mined faster and 8% bigger deposits of all kind)
3. As mentioned before, try to top up your mine before it runs empty.
4. Never, EVER run any part of the chain unbuffed. Without buffs, a 300 gold mine will get you 37.5 coins. By simply applying *2 buffs (which are easily attained by most without paying gold), you instead get 300 gold. HUGE difference!
5. Try to get extra good buffs to use mainly on the coinage. The mine and smelter takes shorter per cycle, but the coinage uses 4 gold (+ coal) to make 1 coin. I produced plenty of tricks and treats to use, and I also have an explorer that can find buffs.

With a 372 gold mine that you destroy when there's one ore left, *2 buffs on the mine and smelter/s and *3 on the coinage you get 556,5 coins for 1.050 hardwood and marble and 1.175 tools. If you're able to use *4 buffs, you instead get 742 coins. And also, the specialized geologists will find mined gold once in a while.

[Xibor]

The chain can be made more profitable though in a few different ways.
1. Make sure that you can be online when the mine is almost empty. I destroy my mines when there's 1 ore left, giving me 350 marble and hardwood and 375 tools.
2. Make sure one of your geologists have all the relevant gold skills (24% chance finding gold ore, 24% bigger gold deposits, 45% chance finding gold deposits that can be mined faster and 8% bigger deposits of all kind)
3. As mentioned before, try to top up your mine before it runs empty.
4. Never, EVER run any part of the chain unbuffed. Without buffs, a 300 gold mine will get you 37.5 coins. By simply applying *2 buffs (which are easily attained by most without paying gold), you instead get 300 gold. HUGE difference!
5. Try to get extra good buffs to use mainly on the coinage. The mine and smelter takes shorter per cycle, but the coinage uses 4 gold (+ coal) to make 1 coin. I produced plenty of tricks and treats to use, and I also have an explorer that can find buffs.

With a 372 gold mine that you destroy when there's one ore left, *2 buffs on the mine and smelter/s and *3 on the coinage you get 556,5 coins for 1.050 hardwood and marble and 1.175 tools. If you're able to use *4 buffs, you instead get 742 coins. And also, the specialized geologists will find mined gold once in a while.

Agreed with most of this, but don't get the "can be mined faster" skill - it just makes you have to find them more often.
The way I look at it (I run a small chain... level 3 smelter, level 2 coinage, (3) level 1 mines) it is an offset to the cost of my adventure explorers. It will not make me rich, it just avoids coin loss from daily activity.

I don't really consider the 'cost' of the materials to build a mine, because I don't like being dependent on the market and I can't trust what gc I could get for those materials at any time. I have plenty of the materials anyway.

The most important thing is to always keep the entire chain buffed, and yes - look for the moments where there is only a little ore left and destroy the mine. This provides a huge reduction in the cost for the rebuild.

[MorellaCarter]

Agreed with most of this, but don't get the "can be mined faster" skill - it just makes you have to find them more often.

But it also makes the buff-time needed less. And if you have better buffs, it makes quite the difference.

[Xibor]

But it also makes the buff-time needed less. And if you have better buffs, it makes quite the difference.

Agreed - there are trade-offs.
I use grilled steak and just go with the 2x and forget about it. There are times I've optimized with badges or other 3x buffs but looking at the total gold returned it just isn't worth it to me - I'd rather use them on the higher weapons.

I guess my overall point is that the gold chain (and the gold towers for that matter) are not a short-cut to get rich (for me at least) but a nice way to just keep the expenses/income more or less even for my normal daily stuff. Regardless of all of this, if a player is interested in the gold chain it must be thought about and then attended to or it is indeed costly for the return.

[topgearfan]

Here is a post I send out to all new players who join my guild.

Gold/coin production based on Aug 2015 trade prices

To build 1 gold mine it will cost you 70 coins worth of Hardwood planks, 140 coins worth of Marble, 75 coins worth of tools. So it costs 285 coins to build 1 mine. From that mine you will get just 32 coins. In otherwords you have built a gold mine and it lost you 250 coins.

What if you buff it.
To buy a gold feaver buff will cost 200 coins, to buy 4 feasts to run your smelter and coinage it costs 40 coins. Total cost to you is 525 coins, you will make 384 coins. You still lost 141 coins.

Whats the best things you can do.
Build 1 mine and use refils from adventures to top it up. Only run it when you have more than 500 ore in the mine. Use feasts on the gold chain. This will cost you 50 coins and you will make about 200 coins profit.
Second for more coins sell the hardwood planks, marble and tools for 285 coin profit.

Is there anyway to make more profit from a gold chain.
Yes there is but you need artifact skill on your explorers. With the current pricing of 3x and 4x buffs in trade it's simply not worth buying them. But it's well worth having the right explorers to find them for free.

Obviously for the quests you have to run them I suggest you use the best buffs that you have availble at the time without buying any from trade or merchant.

I dont know sandycove prices but 300 gold ore cant be worth 32 coins..
It is kinda ok advice for the most part but when it gets to artifact skill it goes full sillyperson.
If its not worth buying them for using its not worth using the free ones. It is worth selling them, specially the x4 ones.

If the only reason for this letter is to scare off newbies from gold prod then it might do the trick but there will still be plenty ignoring it cause gold.

[Bluesavanah]

When your thinking of building a gold chain, ask yourself this what do I buy from the TO, a gold chain uses far too many license to make it feasible these days, you'd be far better off using the licenses somewhere else. You'd certainly be better off investing the granite it takes to build a gold chain elsewhere. By level 42 if you have a MMA you can make far more money in an hour doing a short BK and selling 2 ls than a small gold chain will make. So you'd be better off investing those license in a decent bronze chain with coking plants for the coal. Even if you can't find time to do the adventure you can always sell the swords.

Some people swear they don't have the time to do adventures yet everyday they spend hours searching and rebuilding mines. Dorotheus idea of having 1 level 5 or 6 gold mine has some merit if it's a fast mine and you get a steady supply of refills but you have the double problem of having to run adventures and generally speaking refills sell well in excess of their actual worth. Using x4 buffs is silly they are better used elsewhere or sold, x3 is situational whether they are better used elsewhere but generally they are and if your running a gold chain x2 your probably better off just selling the ore.