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Maintenance costs driving me crazy, unable to make profit. Please help

W

Welka

New Member
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15
Alright folks, I’m absolutely loving this mod. Playing mayor inside Fallout 4 is just awesome.


But I’m having some issues and it’s driving me up the wall. First, let me just clarify that I don’t play RotC (but it’s installed). I want to design my own cities. Now, the issue is that I cannot make a profit, not even break even. The maintenance costs are just too steep. I must be doing something wrong.


My Sanctuary Hills settlement is the one I focus on at the moment. Being early on in the game and having Horizon installed as well, caps are really scarce so I go 2 or 3 settlements at a time. Sanctuary, Red Rocket and Abernathy are the only settlements I bother with at the moment.


I have 18 settlers, about 6 farms, 3 factories, 1 recreation, 4 martials and 3 shops. They are all minimum Lv2 or 3. Their happiness I constant around 80 and all dynamic needs bars are full. I have about 4 turrets to help with the defence. I’m still losing about 90 caps a day with my taxes set at standard. I only use windmills to save on fuel but it hardly makes a difference. I read somewhere we can use a coal plant for energy and level it up but I didn’t find it in the choices or building plans.


I’m kind of lost here. I don’t want to turn off maintenance costs and taxes because it’s part of the fun but it seems badly balanced or I’m doing something really wrong. Even though 1 in 3 settlers is farming and the plots are minimum lv2, I barely cover my food needs.


I would really appreciate some help to turn this around. This is kind of killing the fun putting in so much work into it and not getting any reward for it, constantly having to repair the generators and the turrets.

Thanks folks
 
You pay 1 cap per turret generated point of defense and fuel generated unit of power. How did you get so deep into red numbers. Something must not be working correctly.
 
Yes, i do know about the cost per defense point and energy. I need 4 windmills (80 energy) and about 50+ points of defense otherwise the dynamic needs bars aren't full.
 
windmills do not count towards your maintenance bill so you can spam them as you desire. If you limit turret usage you should easily make profit. Are you sure you didn't disable taxation?
 
Yes I'm pretty sure it's on. I get around 90 caps in tax but maintenance is about 170caps per day
 
Any fuel generators left around somewhere? Those burn caps as well as the turrets.
 
I actually just read another post where the poster was said that each windmill he placed was costing 20 caps.... so....
 
Yes, it might have been mine lol

I'm really at a loss here. It seems i'm using the windmill from Horizon which is considered a generator and therefore will cost maintenance caps. Ok that's fine, it's from another mod. There's a windmill you can build through SS but it's from a community add-on pack. So it seems that SS isn't balanced properly unfortunately if it's not possible to break even. Am I the only on who can't make a profit from a settlement?
 
Ah, ok that makes sense. What I did, since I have actually messed with wind generators in RL and found them to generally put out exceedingly more power than fuel generators, I used FO4Edit to make a tiny mod which simply copies the original windmill generator record and mods the output to 22. It also increases the cost to apx double the large fuel generator. If you did something along those lines that might fix your revenue issue. Otherwise with the default wind generator you have to spam an army of them to get any usable power - say for street lighting. You can get the FO4Edit on nexus in case you have never used it. Cheers!
 
The issue is that Horizon's windmills don't have the flag required to avoid maintenance costs. I used a generic value that is on the vanilla windmill, and those of the SOE pack.

You can definitely make a profit on the settlements. The following things cost no maintenance:

Martial Plots
Both Power Plots from Industrial Revolution
Windmills (there's one in the base game)
Guard Posts (though Martial plots are far more efficient)
Traps

The idea is to give an incentive to use the above things in the early to mid game when you have very little caps, and then you can replace them with more generators and automated turrets to free up people for production later on.

The amount of taxes you make are influenced by the plots you use. For example, Commercial will generate many more caps than Agricultural, and even individual commercial types have different profit levels. While the Commercial Income doesn't go towards maintenance costs, you can deposit caps in the supply safe to offset some of the maintenance costs knowing that you'll make those caps back from your cut of commercial income.

When you're using maintenance mode, you can also safely increase taxes as needed without worrying about game balance as the maintenance cap costs are designed to offset some of the benefits that can come from altering taxes. There are also penalties to happiness and production with increasing taxes.

We spent a lot of time balancing out the taxes with the maintenance costs so that you can find a good balance if you work for it. Though it's definitely a complex system, so finding the right mix will be a challenge. Especially if you're just designing a settlement to a vision as opposed to playing it like a living simulator. Not every combination of plots will result in a profit.

If it starts driving you too nuts, it's disabled by default for a reason lol - definitely not for everyone!

All that said, it's surely not perfect - and I'm open to changing it if someone wants to run numbers and show me major problems mathematically.
 
Hey again!

It's driving me nuts because I love the sim side of it and want to succeed. I replied to some of your comments here on the other thread about windmills. I appreciate you taking your time to answer me ;)

I have 2 types of windmills available, one with and one without sails. I suppose the one without sail is vanilla since I have been using the one with sails and they cost money. I'm pretty sure I had tried both but will double check anyway. I will try this but in fairness I didn't even know there were windmills in vanilla. I haven't played in a while and have started my playthrough about a month ago.

Now, I did look at a way to generate energy with industrial plots but I don't have any that do so in the IR add-on. The only one I have found is a windmill from the RuinedHouse pack. I haven't seen any power generating plot in your base mod. Am I missing something?
 
If you are using the three in one, there are two, but they require you to unlock them in the tech tree.
 
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