Thread: Helping hands, worth the research?

I know it's been discussed a little in a few threads, but wow after I got this I automatically upped everything to the max without considering the costs. I looked at my P&L statement provided by my accountant and found out we were losing over 1000g per hour

So I started crunching some numbers: in my level 8 quarry, I max out at 159 workers who produce 87 pieces of marble per hour. With helping hands I max out at 238 workers producing 98 pieces of marble. So the each additional piece of marble produced by utilizing Helping Hands "costs" me 28.73g. An additional 79 workers, who if they weren't working would provide me with 4g each per hour ($316g per hour) and I get 11 pieces of marble during that hour. So $316 divided by 11 pieces = 28.73g per piece.

Now since I can buy marble from around me for usually 20-25g I'm losing money buy using helping hands. The only way I see this as beneficial is if no one in your trading post area is selling marble under 30g or you are in desperate need of luxury goods.


Other calculations:

Level 11 Saw mill: 196 workers max 196 pcs of wood w/helping hands 294 workers 220 pcs of wood. 16.33g per pc of wood
Level 8 Saw mill: 16.75g per pc of wood
Level 7 Wine garden: 29.78g per wine

So it appears that you can figure on spending basically 30g per unit of luxury item and 17g per unit of building materials.

I am going to utilize helping hands for wood production, but unless supplies dry up around me I don't see helping hands being very beneficial for luxury items.



EDIT:Also apparently there is a bug with luxury goods:

- Helping Hands research does not work for luxury goods. If you overload workers on luxury good resources, the display will change to show additional capacity, but the actual goods received per hour does not increase. Overloading saw mills is said to work properly.