A base in Prosperous Universe uses some goods every day, some as consumables for the workforce, some as materials of input for the production buildings. If any of these materials aren’t available, production stops, or at least slows down. Thus a large part of the game consists of shipping your products to market, selling them, buying the goods that your base needs, and shipping those back to your base,

I currently have over two weeks worth of input materials on my base on Verdant. Since I also increased storage space, I could easily not log on for a week or more, and my base would keep on running. Great, isn’t it? Well, maybe not. After looking at it closer, this amount of inventory might actually be already too much.

The “problem” is the incredible growth rate of the economy. My Verdant base has a payback period of under 20 days, which is to say that the value of my base doubles every 20 days, or 18 times in a year, to 2^18 times or 26,214,400%. 26 million percent annual growth is incredibly fast, and not comparable to anything in real world economics. As a consequence, any capital held in inventory is basically dead capital that isn’t growing. I would be considerably better off if I had a much smaller inventory, and used the money on constructing more production buildings instead. Note that this growth rate is just my current rate, annualized. Exponential growth like that isn’t sustainable over long periods, and growth will slow down when I hit certain limits, like number of base permits and area per base.

Now if I ever ran out of anything, it would take at least 3 days to make the trip from Verdant to Moria and back to restock. Running on less than 3 days of inventory is dangerous, and with some safety margin a week’s worth of inventory is probably a good compromise, but not more. So the plan for the coming weeks is to draw down my inventory and work on a slimmer “just-in-time” model for faster growth.

Having said that, this is just a game, and while growth is certainly a good goal for the first months of playing, it isn’t everything. Different players spend different amounts of time in the game, and a somewhat more relaxed and slower pace of growth can be fun too. Especially if a player wants to spend less time optimizing, and to log on only once every one or two days. During my 3 weeks of summer holiday for example, I will not have access to a PC, and the PrUn user interface on a tablet is limited; so I might want to stock up on materials for that.