Not a newbie question

[Saxon]

Value Improvement Facilities. Those delightful facilities which improve the values of your planets. Climate Control Facilities. Those delightful facilities which change your climate to something more pleasing.

It strikes me that these facilities are similar and that one must strike a balance in using them. Building one of them stops you from building another productive facility. For example, the Value improvement plant will boost resource production on a planet, but is it a good investment? Would just building a monolith bring you more resources over the short and medium term than improving the planet and then building a monolith? It gets more complicated if you look at building just a mineral mine or an radioactives mine, as they cost less but also return less. Further, the size of your galaxy and the expected game length will also have an impact on your decision on what to build.

In terms of the climate control facilities, are they worth the trouble? Population isn’t so critical in the game, so is it wiser to ignore your population growth rates except on the homeworlds, where you can ship out millions and still get the population back quickly?

Changing the atmosphere of your planet is, in my non-mathematical thinking, generally worth it as you get many more spaces to build facilities. However, if it is a short game, you might be better off just boosting your technology for extracting resources (and upgrading facilities) than bothering to convert planets, which can take a while and uses up a lot of resource points.

Has anyone done the math (read, I don’t know how) on when they are worth building? I created some charts once for Empire Deluxe, where leaving a city idle boosted the production. I remember discovering that it was very rarely worth doing, but in some situations it made sense. Right now I am in a tight game of PBEM and am looking for any advantage I can get.

[Fyron]

For value improvement facilities, it depends on the size of the planet in question. If you have a small planet (or a domed colony), with small number of facilities, then it probably isn't worth building them because the increase in resource production would be nominal. On medium-huge planet of your atmosphere, it's definitely worth building them.

Say you have 20 Mineral Miner I on a 100% value planet. You'd produce 20x800x1.00=16000 minerals per turn. Add a Value Improvement Plant III (VIP), and the value increases by 3% per year, so you'd get:
20x800x1.00=16000 per turn in first year
20x800x1.03=16480 per turn after 1 year
20x800x1.06=16960 per turn after 2 years
20x800x1.09=17440 per turn after 3 years
20x800x1.12=17920 per turn after 4 years
20x800x1.15=18400 per turn after 5 years
20x800x1.18=18880 per turn after 6 years
20x800x1.21=19360 per turn after 7 years
20x800x1.24=19840 per turn after 8 years

If you had built another mineral miner instead of the VIP, you'd have this:
21x800x1.00=16800 per turn forever

So, after 2 years, the VIP will allow for more production. Here is a list of the total minerals produced for each situation:
20 Mineral Miners and VIP
Year 1: 10x16000=160000 minerals
Year 2: 10x16480=164800 minerals
Year 3: 10x16960=169600 minerals
Year 4: 10x17440=174400 minerals
Year 5: 10x17920=179200 minerals
Total: 848000 minerals

21 Mineral Miners
Year 1: 10x16800=168000 minerals
Year 2: 10x16800=168000 minerals
Year 3: 10x16800=168000 minerals
Year 4: 10x16800=168000 minerals
Year 5: 10x16800=168000 minerals
Total: 840000 minerals


So technically, during the first five years, you'd be better off with building the Mineral Miner than the VIP because you'd make a larger amount of minerals. After 5 years, you'd start making more with the VIP. However, the total doesn't really matter, its the per turn production that really matters. After just three short years, you'd be making more minerals per turn. So, in the short run, the 21 Mineral Miners are better, but in the medium and the long run, the VIP is significantly better.

Hope all that helps you!

[Skulky]

what about say, multiple VIP or Climate control. how about urban pacification centers, i don't know that those have values so how would you do math to figure that out. thanks so much for the math work imperator fyron

[Atrocities]

Stacking these facilities will not improve the performace.

[Spyder]

quote:

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Originally posted by Atrocities:
Stacking these facilities will not improve the performace.

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Are you saying that more than one VIP III won't increase the values more than 3% ?

[Taqwus]

Simplify the problem and choose Deeply Religious -- a Nature Shrine acts as a VIP+CCF for the entire system (affecting only your own colonised worlds, that is -- not uncolonised ones.).

That's one VERY nice facility in terms of saving facility slots, construction time, and research.

As for stacking, urban pacs don't stack. I'm not so sure about VIPs 'tho...