These seem quite weak as they have high maintenance and only give small %tage bonuses. Somemore you have to research them on a separate tree. When are they really worth it?
When the percentage boost of the power plant is greater than simply adding another factory. Usually you just dump them on your huge industrial planets, maintanance costs be damned.
Example: If your plant adds 10% to manufacturing, and a factory adds 10 units, you would build 11 factories, then a power plant would provide 11 units as opposed 10 units from just another factory. I think I used a power plant one time in a game, just to say i did it. Everyone else was doing it and peer pressure got to me.
Why add additional techs (and more complications) to the tech tree for some improvements which have minimal use? By merely researching the factory techs, I can get all the production I want.
The powerplants can be upgraded, later ones add more cap, but yeah. Same goes for research coordination centers which I think are a 25% bonus, so I add them when I have 4 or more research centers.
Remember, though, if you have a factory on a tile with a bonus to count that tile the appropriate number of times -- two times for a 100% bonus, 4 for a 300%, 8 for a 700%.
Of course in TA the formula changes a bit if you play a race that has one-per-planet high-production factories/research centers, the spammable improvements tend to not provide as much as the % bonus improvements would.
The Fusion power plants are not terribly useful, but the Anti-Matter are.
You should make that "or more". If you have any other planetary research bonuses at all, 4 is *NOT* the break-even point for RCC's. I can spare everybody the algebra, but if you have a moon, for instance, the break-even point is closer to 4.4. So really it makes more sense to build an RCC after you have 5 labs.
On your Tech Capital, there's a good chance you shouldn't build an RCC at all. The break-even point is closer to 9.
A good rule of thumb, but the manufacturing points given by the inital colony should be thought of as well and oftentimes far outweigh the choice. w/o putting much thought into it though, yeah just follow the quoted peice...you won't go gray as soon in life.
The Yor in TA I beleive have one sick one that give 50% increase...them or the Iconians.
Do powerplants increase the production from asteroid mining?
When you do the rough calcs to decide whether a power plant is worth the tile, don't forget to include production from your Initial Colony tile. That ususally adds a 'factory' or two to your total, depending on the tech you have & whether it's your homeworld.
The Fusion plant is very rarely useful to me, but I don't play a wide range of game types and I can imagine it providing a helpful sliver of advantage on some maps. Even in TA as the Thalans, I still find Anti-Matter and Quantuum plants useful for serious manufacturing worlds. If a world already has 15-20 factories, that boost can help cut quite a few turns of ship production times.
I always just count that as 1. To simplify.
If you have a +10% production bonus, the break-even point for Anti-Matter is 5.5. Round up to 6. Quantum break-even is basically 4.
If you're Drengin, it makes even less sense. The first 20% PP (e.g. Devil's Forge) is the same as Anti-Matter, but the second, the break-even point is 6.5. But I would actually round that down to 6, due to the influence cost of adding another Slave Canyon.
If you're Iconian w/ that 50% Interstellar Refinery (or whatever), stacking an Anti-Matter won't help until you have 8 factories. 7, with Quantum.
Formula:
(1+planetary bonus+PP) x = (1+planetary bonus)(x+1)
Solve for x, that gives your break-even point. You could also plug in base ip for a more accurate result, but it's not worth it.
Stardock should have included an in-game calculator for this. V2.1 patch?
Anyone rememebr when Quantum Power Plants gave like a 100% bonus in the initial DA? Anyway I never build anything before the Quantum Power Plants. I typically don't even research the branch and either steal the tech on invasion or trade for it. I don't ever get too into the math of this game but I'll build one on a planet with 4 or more manufacturing buildings. However, for a planet to have only 4 manufactruing buildings it must be pretty low PQ 10 or less) and thereforte will most likely become and economic only planet (with 1 farm and maybe a lab type).
Don't ya love the AI planets you invade that have fussion power plants but no other production structures?
Yeah. To put it in plainer English, take a Tech Capital, on a planet with a moon. Build a Xeno Lab on it. You get 8rp * 110% = 16.8.
Take the same planet, 4 labs already there, add an RCC. RCC only adds 25% to the planet--not 50%. That's 8rp*4 + 10 (initial colony) = 42rp. 25% of that is 10.5rp. You come out ahead just building another lab, because RCC didn't get multiplied by the Tech Capital. P.S. the moon is irrelevant in this calculation, for the same reason.
Ummm, if the labs are 8rp and the RCC is 10.5, aren't you ahed with the RCC?
That's the base production, not what you actually get from a lab on the planet, which is 16.8 after the already-existing bonuses. The key is that it's a cost of opportunity situation- you can't get everything due to a limited number of land plots, so you need to balance your gains such that you get as much as possible out of the planet. If we had unlimited land available, then there's no reason not to eventually build every single multiplier building you can, though the order in which you build them would matter.
It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but the more multiplicative bonuses you already have on a planet, the less sense it makes to add more in the place of an expanded base production capacity. To illustrait, let's take a pair of planets that both have a plot of land to build on, both produce 100 RPs, and only differ in that Planet A is pure production for its 100 RPs (multiplier of 1.0), and planet B has a 100% bonus (multiplier of 2.0) to get it to 100 RP (base of 50). Now we build a 50% bonus building on that land (adds 0.5 to the multiplier). Planet A changes to a total of 150 RP (base(100)*1.5). However, Planet B only goes to 125 RP (base(50)*2.5). Planet B's already-existing multiplier bonus actually cut the end benefit from the building in half!
Is that true whether its a planetary bonus or one of the tile bonuses?
If you have, say, one of those 700% tile bonuses (which, I understand, gives you eight times the production ... since a 100% bonus gives you twice the production, a 300% bonus would give you four times and a 700% eight times ... stop me if I'm wrong there), does the multiplier not multiply the total production there?
That is, if you have an 8 RP building on a 700% research square, and then build an RCC, does the RCC give 25% to teh 8 RP building or the 64 RP total tile research?
Yes, bonus tile output is multiplied by bonus structures. If you have a lab on a 700% tile, it would count as 8 labs in all the formulas betting thrown around in this topic.
The bonus from your example would apply to the 64 RP total output.
Is anyone considering maint. cost? Even at equal output The boosting tile is usually way cheaper in maintenance cost. Isn't it worth it for that reason?
I think maintenance could be reasonably factored in, if you're near the break-even point. But you also have to factor in that building a RCC may take awhile, when you could just build a Xeno Lab now and upgrade it later. Also, by the time the RCC starts to make sense, you're already paying >60bc in maintenance + paid RP production, so a 7bc difference in maintenance may not matter much to you. But like I said, near the break-even point you may find you're paying another 7bc in maintenance just to get an extra 0.8rp, and that may be a little expensive.
BUT--bear in mind--we have not factored in race-wide research bonuses yet. If you accumulate +100% in racial bonuses (not hard to achieve, if you have multiple purple and/or economic starbases), even that razor-thin difference of 0.8rp now becomes 1.6rp, and 50% of that is free. Now suddenly you're paying closer to 4bc/1rp, which is starting to make more sense.
I'm with 'ya. Doh! Are you guys absolutely, positively sure the bonus works on base value only and not total output?
Anyone rememebr when Quantum Power Plants gave like a 100% bonus in the initial DA? Anyway I never build anything before the Quantum Power Plants. I typically don't even research the branch and either steal the tech on invasion or trade for it. I don't ever get too into the math of this game but I'll build one on a planet with 4 or more manufacturing buildings. However, for a planet to have only 4 manufactruing buildings it must be pretty low PQ 10 or less) and thereforte will most likely become and economic only planet (with 1 farm and maybe a lab type).Don't ya love the AI planets you invade that have fussion power plants but no other production structures?
I never research the branch (well, the first game of ToA I started to). The fusion obviously is useless, the anti-matter so-so, and the Quantum, well, when you have finished researching it you could have just gone for a tech victory. An AI civ will usually research it, but will almost never trade it. It seems to value both anti-matter and Quantums as highly as Space Mining, which leads me to believe that the devs intended the PPs to operate on total but forgot to change them. At least I was able to deduce that a fusion PP (10% bonus) requires 11 of a given production improvement to outperform building just another of the improvements. This situation never exists at the stage when Fusion PP's make it onto the intergalactic tech scene.
Just say, "No". Civs don't let other civs build Fusion Power Plants.
Excellent formulation of the problem. You get a little dingy.
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