Mathematics of Planetary Wealth

Planetary Wealth is an approval bonus/penalty. You can see it if you hover over Approval in the planetary screen. I intended to reverse engineer it, unsuccessfully, but I found some things that are a step in the right direction.

1. Planetary Wealth is a function of Wealth and Maintenance. As far as I can tell, there is no other variable.

2. The reason changes to the High Approval production bonus do not apply this turn is because if it did it would impact Wealth, which would impact Planetary Wealth, which would impact Approval, which would impact the High Approval production bonus. The game cannot allow this kind of circular math.

3. In all my tests, having Wealth = Maintenance + 2bc, the Planetary Wealth is 0%

4. The Planetary Wealth function shape resembles an exponential curve, i.e. Planetary Wealth increase/decreases faster than linearly as Wealth - Maintenance increases.

5. Wealth improvements/research/starbase modules are also approval improvements, assuming some production is allocated to wealth. So are farms, eventually.

Okay Gilmoy, you're up. What's the function?

7,506 views 2 replies
Reply #1 Top

On Earth #3 was correct. On Mars it was not. So it's probably not correct.

Reply #2 Top

Uh ... I sidestep the issue by exploiting the heck out of the Mindfulness bug :hrmph: .  That plus some starbases/Stadia, and all of my planets play on the bottom rim.  Just like the 0.31 Alpha economy!  then it's a race for tourism tech before my yolk runs out

For my starbase influence growth test, I whipped Iridium through 80 turns in 20 minutes, and didn't care a whit about my Approval (which hit 53% before I got Adaptive Farms).  That was ... quite refreshing.  Drengin's fleet attacked my starbase ... and lost \o/ hit me for 72 damage, nyah nyah

 

BTW: The dockable colony ship, with pop slider on exit, creates two more Turn 1 Gambits:

  1. Dock colony ship on homeworld to disembark 2.5 bp additional workers.  But actually, this sucks because your homeworld is already >1/2 full, and it crushes your early-game Approval.  To counteract that:
  2. ... and promptly exit, taking 5.0 bp.  Now that's worth a think or two.  You lose 2.5 bp of base production, but you gain higher Approval % for the early game.  Will that compensate enough?  Do you actually come out ahead?  must ... play another game and run this experiment, hot dang