Planet M.U.L.E.

Does anyone know how assets are evaluated?  I see general correlations to the amount of land, and if it is developed, but it seems that there is much more to it than that.  I've played games where I thought I was ahead, but ended up loosing because somehow the other player's assets were higher.

Assets are valued based on what their market price is. If the market price of those assets is high, the value of those assets is high. If you have 50 units of Smithore and Smithore is currently being sold for $50, you have $2500 worth of Smithore. If you sit on your ass for a bit and Smithore goes up to $230, your smithore assets are now worth $11500, and this would be a very good time to sell them. In this scenario, your networth has gone up by nearly a factor of 5, and all you did was sit on your butt. The same applies to any other commodity.

So does this, too, apply at the end of the game? Thus selling all your stocked up resources at the very end would yield the same result?

Food and energy have a "store buy" price that is below their market value.

Assets are the combined total of your land holdings, the MULEs installed, the outfitting costs associated, and the current market value of all your goods at the end of the last round's auction:


$35 per MULE
$500 per empty plot
$525 per Food installation
$550 per Energy installation
$575 per Smithore installation
$600 per Crystite installation
$X per unit of goods, where X is that good's current market price

For purposes of valuation, treat Smithore and Crystite as if you sold them at the Round 12 auction. Food and Energy, like Keybounce said, are bought by the Store below their market value, so add $15 to the Store's buying price for each, to get their final value (as the market price isn't updated post-auction in the last round; Planet MULE emulates the C=64 version in this regard. Atari version does update the final price after the last round, which is a bit of a long-standing controversy between "versionists").

So as it stands, there's no reason to sell anything in the last round, as the game values it correctly as if you had sold it.

Understanding the mechanics of how prices are affected by surplus and shortage will help you decide when it's time to invest in commodities, and when to recover your "liquidity".