I micromanage, so my turns take longer to play. I'm up to only turn 88. (Terran, Large, 3 Godlike)
I hope these comments illuminate for those of us who do pay attention to the numbers.
1. Ideology costs lowered, but traversal now breadth-first
The Ideology tree is revamped. All costs got lowered. However, a new rule seems to be in effect:
- At each unlocking, (new cost of that tier) is deducted from your Ideology points.
- I had reported this as bugs in 0.40 because it happened inconsistently. Looks like it's now a feature.
- Corollary: Ideology tree traversal is now breadth-first (instead of depth-first). When you re-reach a non-empty tier's (new) points, you must unlock again in that tier. So you can't skip choices and beeline for tier 5.
Assuming 10 points per colonization event, and that you don't dabble across ideologies, this effectively correlates "tier choices" to "colonies", until you reach tier 3 and take your ideology's point-generating center.
- 15/22/33/50/75 = initial tier costs. (Don't worry about 75 being cheap: it will cost much more by the time you get there.)
- 2nd colony (turn 28) = 20: unlock tier 1 (cost 15). Costs increase to 18/25/x/y/z. Deduct 18 = you keep 2 pts.
- 5th colony (turn 70) = 32: unlock tier 2a (cost 25). Costs increase to 20/28/42/62/92. Deduct 28 = 4 pts.
- 8th colony (turn 91) = 34: unlock tier 2b (cost 28). Costs increase to 23/32/46/68/101. Deduct 32 = 2 pts.
- See how insidiously they calibrated this so your 12th colony = 42 pts just misses the next threshold!! they are evil
- 13th colony = 52: unlock tier 3a (cost 46). Always, always take your point-generating tile improvement here, or it'll take you another 5 colonies to get back to tier 3.
Corollary: For Benevolent players, it is worthwhile to beeline for a 2nd colony ship just to unlock your tier 1 Benevolence for the Approval +10%. Do this before you even finish building out your homeworld.
2. Approval tweaks: Entertainment Center early; new starbase modules
The Governance/Commerce tech path now has more Approval bonus items. This makes it easier to run your empire at 100% approval for the monster Production bonuses.
- Entertainment Center (tier 1 tile, +10%) moved from tier 4 Xeno Entertainment to tier 2 Xeno Commerce.
- Tier 4 Xeno Entertainment now gives starbase module Recreation Center (Approval +10%!).
- Typo: It says "Approval: +0.1". So its formatting is floating-point, instead of percentage.
- Bug: Tier 4 Xeno Economics' module Orbital Shopping Center (wealth +15%) replaces Recreation Center (and vice versa?). They don't stack. So "upgrading" a starbase can suddenly lose an approval bonus for multiple planets. Gahh.
- Tier 5 Interstellar Tourism now gives starbase module Orbital Resort (Approval +20%!!).
3. Gameplay notes: the Technological Capital gambit
Ironically, to build up to a Techno Capital on a research world, it must also be a pretty robust manuf world.
- I had a candidate planet: class 18, triangle+1 = manuf (Solar + 3), nigh-hex of 6 = something big. I pondered going for a Tech Capital.
- During preliminary build-up, just put a tier 1 Research Laboratory in the middle. The +10 levels of mutual adjacency bonuses (5 each way) pays for itself many times over (until you reach the point where you're ready to replace it).
- To upgrade, you destroy the RL in the middle and build the TC. This loses 10 adjacency levels during construction. The simplest way to shrug off that loss is ... to set 100% manuf and get it built ASAP. Then you don't care about those -10 levels
- My build time was surprisingly short: only 8 turns. Let BT denote this build time. Considering that my Age of Expansion goes ~110 turns, that's potentially a sound investment, if I can earn back those 8 turns.
- Omitting my empire-wide rp% bonuses, I calculated:
- +205% with a Research Laboratory (rp +10%) in the middle. Adding the base 100% from your unpumped pop, and letting E denote your off-planet bonuses, then let RLP = (305% + E) denote the base case, i.e. your rp% if you don't upgrade.
- Upgrading to TC bumps that up by an additional +190% (lose +10%, gain +200%), +50% for an extra +10 levels of adjacencies (5 neighbors each went from +1 level to +3 levels). Let TCP = +240% be the gain you get after the big build is done.
- Hence, my net rp% (ignoring pop growth) increases from RLP to (RCP + 240%).
- So when do I break even? Let that be BE turns. Then I could have had:
- (BT + BE) * RLP without the gambit, or
- BE * (RLP + TCP) with the gambit.
- Solving for equality, we get BT * RLP = BE * TCP, or BE = BT * RLP / TCP = 8 turns * (305% + E) / 240% ~= 11 turns. Empire-wide bonuses make this slightly worse, because your gain after the build is a smaller fraction of your total capability. Plus we should add in the 4-6 turns it took me to fully upgrade my manuf capability first (e.g. going to tier 3 Mega Factories, which is really a costly way to squeeze out only +5% above Xeno Factories), pro-rated by the fraction of RLP I was getting in those turns.
- Even so, this instance of the Technological Capital gambit "breaks even" in about 20 turns. Thereafter, it's all profit. So my research lags for turns 66-76, but by turn 100 I'll be way ahead of a non-TC economy. This gets me through the Age of Expansion faster than not doing it.
Upkeep and Approval throws a monkey wrench into the above -- but it's a transient penalty, which soon goes away. The Technological Capital's whopping upkeep of 10 bc will hammer your Planetary Wealth approval penalty. My TC world was running at Approval +40% bonus tier while building it, but had to drop to +10% bonus tier afterward (since that was the bonus tier that maximized rp).
- What boots it to gain +60% to your techworld's total rp output (+335% to +550%), if it forces you to drop -22% in Approval production bonus? (actually that would still be a profit ... but it means your turns to break-even BE goes way up, maybe from 20 turns to 50)
Solution: Entertainment Network +20%, starbase Recreation Center +10% ... and Mindfulness +25% I actually got my techworld back up to Approval 100%, even on the rim of the wheel.
This game is a devious ploy to make us solve algebra problems. Will one of the add-ons encourage us to use calculus? (in the complex plane? You collect 2i * pi * k for every black hole within this circuit, for each lap you complete) A closed-form expression for Ideology costs at tier k involves a summation ...