Topic: Production is undervalued by game design
WALL OF TEXT, SCROLL DOWN TO SO WHAT FOR TL;DR
Specifically, any module that drops in quantities near to or greater than demand will never be (or should never be) profitable to produce. The exact ratio is not the point of this discussion, but it doesn't require demand to be fully satisfied to produce an undesirable effect on industry
This problem exists with or without the "minerals I mine are free" crowd, though that crowd exacerbates the problem.
Economic worth / "actual value"
The economic worth of an item is roughly speaking the maximum opportunity cost of the item to a player. That means that all alternatives considered (sell or recycle, essentially), the item is "worth" the maximum of those. This is important, because the "costs" associated with various methods of item acquisition lead to different total costs. It's also important because recycling never amounts to more than 50% (roughly) of the "components" listed on an items information page. This means that if an item were to suddenly appear in a player's hanger fully repaired (theoretical, I know), a "rational" economic actor would value the item at its "perfect recycle" rate (perfect because a perfect recycler would, in theory be willing to pay exactly mineral cost, assuming he wanted the minerals instead of the item), and any less means that the player suffers an "economic loss" (that is, failed to pursue the best opportunity cost). Of course, any method of acquiring a saleable item has additional costs associated with it....
Production
To produce an item, you're required to:
Reverse Engineer the item: this costs 1 (or 1000) of the original item and the cost of the RE process itself. While skills can reduce the cost to RE, you start at a "loss" of one item, and you lose a decoder, which also has economic value. This is slightly offset by the return on investment from the higher-rated CT (in some cases, easily offset), but for many items, this is a raw cost.
Acquire the necessary commodities: The most obvious cost, this is the variable cost of the commodities. Note that CTs starting at a default efficiency of 50%, so the listed commodities needed are significantly higher, this particularly effects newer industrialists.
Run the factory: This requires variable costs based on runtime. There's also the absolute time required (an economic cost) which is quite long, particularly for bots. The factory calibration skills are absurdly expensive, meaning very few industrialists (especially in the near term) are going to invest in these 1%-per-level skills over the more noticeable and immediate 2%-level. (note I don't actually have enough information to determine the relative cost of time-decline vs. commodity decline, but again, not really the point here)
So the total cost to me is:
((RE cost + Decryptor Cost + Original Item Cost) / # of Runs I use the CT for*) + (Factory cost per run + Commodity Cost X # of runs) (+ however I value my time)
*And again, this declines over time requiring another RE run eventually, but this is also relatively immaterial if we assume some 4-5 levels of intensive mass production giving us around 50+ items per CT at a minimum and a few hundred at max, however, this is also a dangerous assumption for newer industrialists, and for larger bots where the raw commodity cost is going to be very prohibitive for a multi-run, not to mention the economic cost of the high-level decryptor)
Item Drops and Repairing
While repairing is -somewhat- expensive, there are ALSO skills to reduce this, and higher tier facilities must be taken in to account. In fact, it's FAR, FAR, easier to get perfect repair and recycle skills than it is to get perfect manufacturing skills. There's 9 levels of efficiency, and expert factory calibration is a rank 9 by itself. A fully efficient producer (REing through producing. Recycling and Repair are rank 3 each/
So, the economic worth of the item to "everybody else" being 50% of the commodities listed on the item was mentioned earlier. Strictly speaking, since every item drops damaged, the actual worth of a dropped item is:
Repair cost + Perfect Recycle Value
Since every item drops damaged, the actual worth of an item should never actually equal the perfect recycle rate. REGARDLESS, this method of item acquisition is FAR less expensive than production. At minimum, an industrialist will acquire a near-perfect item and refine it (economic worth, 50% of listed commodities) AND produce an item that is likely to be at less than 100% of listed efficiency, so around 170-180% for average skilled industrialists for the first item, in commodities alone)
This alone doesn't make sense on the face of it.
So WHAT?
As it stands now, the "rational" value of EVERY item that drops in significant quantities is less than half of the amount of NIC that is sunk in to producing that item. This means producing ANY item which drops in sufficient quantities to satisfy some measure of demand will never be worthwhile to produce in the long run.
(Look at ANY item involving espitium to see this in action)
The proper equation should roughly be [repair cost + recycle value] = [Industrial Process described above]. This means people who acquire items via drop and people who manufacture the item (as rational economic actors, anyways) should view the item with the same "total value"
There are, of course, two ways to achieve this. One is absurdly high repair costs (turns drops, basically, in to a crappy source of commodities, and emphasizes mining acquisition) and the other is to have better recycle rates (emphasizes the actual industrial process, may devalue mining)
To make production of these items worthwhile, they should in theory be "floored" by the ability of rational economic actors snapping up underpriced sell orders and recycling them in to commodities to use in further production. As it stands this will never be achieved for any item which experiences a decent drop rate.
Although "perfect skill" characters MAY approach this 50% barrier, the theoretical model that's based on is absurdly difficult to achieve, especially with such a young game. Economic balancing due to a glut of perfect producers won't be achieved for ages.