Sunday, June 12, 2011

Galaxy Legion: Buffing Off-Spec?

Byung had an interesting idea on how to use the Kronyn Datacube mission reward. Rather than use it on a planet which specializes in research what would happen if we used it on a planet we actually use for mining or artifacts?

The reason this isn't as ludicrous as it sounds is there are two types of ways to boost your planet production. The first is to build lots of whatever your standard building is. You start with a building that occupies 4 space and makes 1 base research. As you tech up you can get better buildings. Byung has 13 space for 5 research, I have 16 space for 8 research, and the best you can eventually get is 18 space for 12 research. Other than teching up the building tree there's not really a way to impact how much you're getting from standard buildings and for the very massive research planets I was talking about last time these are pretty much the only source of production.

The other way is to put special buildings on your planet. Generally these buildings have a cap so you can only build 1 or 2 per planet. You get them in a variety of ways: completing missions, killing NPCs, fighting in PvP, or getting them from your random artifact point draws. An example of one of these buildings is the 'warp gate' which takes up 1 space and gives you 1 research, 1 artifact, and 1 mining. There are a bunch of dual-purpose buildings with multiple resources which you'll put on your best planets.

Now, eventually you're going to build these buildings on all your planets anyway so you'd still be better off buffing up your research planets. Except for the fact the datacube is twice as good if used on a 'abundant' or smaller stat. I don't have a research planet that low, but I do have some artifact planets with research on the side. How good would buffing those be?

It's a good idea but doesn't really pan out for me. I plugged a formula into my spreadsheet and using the datacube on my actually research planet will net 18.5 per hour. Using it on a non-research planet gets only 4.5 per hour. The problem is I just haven't built all the awesome research related buildings on my artifact planets with bad research. I've built them on actual research planets and on artifact planets with a better secondary research stat already. In fact, one of those planets gets 5.5 per hour out of it despite only getting the .25 multiplier instead of the .5.

But let's pretend I have loaded up a planet with everything I could. That 5.5 is missing one building it could have for research which would add another 1 per hour. So I could get 13 per hour bonus. A very massive planet has 69 space, so with no tech it could have a base of 17 research production. After all modifiers are taken into account the datacube would add on 8.5 research per hour. So with no buildings researched but a fully artifacted out planet I would be better off buffing the off-spec. In fact it breaks even with power 5 buildings and only gets worse at power 6. Interesting.

Now, that assumes you have a twinked out artifact planet and none of those buildings on the research planet. This may be the case early on, but personally I have a few artifact buildings on every planet (and no planet which even meets the optimal twinked criteria used). And in the long run you're going to research bigger buildings (in particular the 16 space for 8 building is awesome and worth striving for) and once you get up to them you're better off having buffed a very massive research planet.

I have 4 very massive research planets and I'm going to use my datacubes to bring them all up to very rich (x2.25) research production. I may end up losing them to an invasion at some point which would be sad but the same is true for any other planet I may use them on and I'd probably rather lose one of the 4 identical planets than buff up a good artifact planet and lose it.

No comments: