Economy efficiency report: harvesters vs. command stations

[Cyborg]

I wanted to draw attention to a discussion in the strategy forum about harvester versus economy command station resource efficiency. It's worthy of its own thread as a separate topic.


                                   knowledge                        benefit (+)
Harvester 2                       3250                               8/per resource node
Harvester 3                       4000                               16/per resource node
economy station 1            free                                32 metal and crystal
economy station 2           4000                               80 metal and crystal
economy station 3           5000                              160 metal and crystal

Starting position: 10,000--> 13,000 knowledge available
4 metal and 8 crystal nodes

Taking the Harvester Path
If you research crystal harvester 3 for 7250 knowledge,
16*8 = +128(Crystal) after home planet

And after taking one planet,

one crystal resource node              16
two crystal resource nodes            32
three crystal resource nodes         48
four crystal resource nodes          64

Results:
All things being equal, you could end up with up to 192 bonus crystal resources. Interestingly, if you go this kind of route, it's because you want to rush raid starships, antimatter (also known as the dreadnought, siege starship, piece of shi* starship), or missile frigate (LOL missile frigates  ). 64 + (8x)y adjusted!

If you want to divide by the average bonus in a ideal scenario, you get +96 resources. Conversion penalty is -11 (manufactories), so the adjusted resource bonus is +85 in the scenario where you get four crystal nodes.

Taking the economic command station 3 path

The knowledge cost isn't entirely equal, but let's say that you rushed economic 3.
9000 knowledge
+256 resources

Proportion comparison (knowledge per resource, lower is better):
9000/256 ! = 7250/128
35.15 ! = 56.64 kpr

0 resource bonus after home planet
After taking one planet, 256 resource bonus (128y adjusted!).

Results:
The balanced approach favors enclave, cloak, and Leech starships (yuck). It also favors fighters. There is no manufactory penalty .

Taking the economic command station 2 + harvester 2 path
7250 knowledge
64+96 (economy  2 -  economy 1) = +160 resources

kpr ratio (lower is better):
9000/256 ! = 7250/160
35.15 ! = 45.31

Let's look at this further…
8*8 = +64(Crystal) after home planet

And after taking one planet,

one crystal resource node              8
two crystal resource nodes            16
three crystal resource nodes         24
four crystal resource nodes           32


64 resource bonus after home planet
After taking one planet, 64+96+8x resource bonus, 160+8x. 32+80y+(4x)y adjusted.

Final conclusion:

Economy 3 > Hybrid (Econ 2/harvester 2) > harvester 3

With some exceptions, most notably if you are not going to take the bordering planet of your home planet. In addition, I have not calculated this over time.  The important statistics you should be getting out of this are that certain economic combinations favor different strategies. In addition, you should look at the starting position versus the position after one planet.

The difference between economy command stations and harvesters:
y is the number of additional planets after the home planet
x is the number of resource nodes
Adjustments are to average out resources, without regard to manufactory penalties, although we have mentioned them as -11 per manufactory. You can calculate that if you want.

	Adjustment	(home)	x = 4,y = 1	x =4,y = 2	x =4,y = 3
harvester	64 + (8x)y adjusted	64	96	128	160

Econ cmd station 3

128y adjusted

0

128

256

384

Hybrid (2/2)

32+80y+(4x)y adjusted

32

128

224

320

When you do factor in penalties, the economy command station path looks better and better.  But is it always? No. This is because you need to look at the whole game as occurring over time t. A slow start, deep strike, or rushing a certain ship could change your choice. Going full economy can make you militarily weak in the short term. By choosing the harvester or the hybrid path, it actually helps you in the short term with some knowledge left over for ship upgrades. However, as a general rule, economy command stations are noticeably superior with a 35.15 kpr!

I hope I didn't make any math errors! Feel free to point out any concerns, comments, or questions. I did use the tables feature to try and make this more readable, but it doesn't work at a certain size. 

[eRe4s3r]

going full (5 world) eco 3 would not make your military any weaker than any other option (you should always have the goal to minimize enemy incursion paths to 1 world). Usually if you are in a good position those 5 worlds are all you need to make the only contact point with the enemy 1 world far away from your home station. And the 160+ for 5 worlds is a huge boost which allows you to entirely ignore the worlds economic value which it could have with harvesters (harvester points would just be an extra benefit, not a vital decision point), which is often vital as it allows you to gain huge energy balances while still having a good economy thus you can support a maxed out fleet at all times, something you won't be doing with slower harvester dependent expansion) where your adjacent worlds might often be prohibitive to colonize due to bad/low harvester locations...

Obviously it depends on the map though, on grid eco 3 path might even be suicidal because you would (potentially) have 5 incursion paths from your 5 expansion points. Which with the low HP eco 3 has.. is bad

Anyhow, as a long-term Eco 3 addict it was obvious to me that this is the most effective choice currently when your strategy is "1 point of contact front-line" - often i would even start to just neutralize but not conquer worlds after eco 3 5-limit  to gain a foothold at a hub connection with many incoming wormholes so that i can control the flow of enemies across a large range of worlds into the hub, away from my eco 3 worlds. And then start a new capturing progress (this time with combat I stations) towards ARS and factories. Where the eco 3 worlds would be my "all time warpgate factories"

Point is, i like eco 3 And its good to see the math supports my feeling ^^

[keith.lamothe]

going full (5 world) eco 3 would not make your military any weaker than any other option

Even considering what you could have put that knowledge to in terms of higher-mark fleet ships or starships?  Or do you mean combined offense+defense at a certain point in the early game where someone who didn't tech-up resources simply can't have filled out all their turret, fleet ship, and starship caps?

[eRe4s3r]

My line of thinking is more along the lines of "replacing losses" near instant.

There is no point in having a super doom fleet when losing it means losing the game because you couldn't rebuild it without wasting an hour, and usually that hour is when 3 mining golems spawn at once all in worlds you don't want to be destroyed ;p

As more a turtle player i love building very intricate turret worlds where nothing, not even 2000 MKIII sized waves get anywhere NEAR the exit wormhole. And when you think about maxing out MK2 turret caps, you simply need eco 3 Particularly snipers.

The only reason that is not an abusive OP strategy is because of those shield gens that provide protection to command stations, forcing me to advance there with my fleet, instead of just hitting the command station and seeing what trickles back into my turret world. Naturally, thats exactly what i do after my fleet got there and achieved dominance

Eco 3 simply allows you full military dominance and the largest amount of choices how to proceed (after you got 5 eco 3 worlds..) - i find that to win, you want a totally OP economy packed on as few planets as possible. Better than spreading out and getting negative resource flow from each colony, which will definitely set your tactical choices back substantially.

Or simply put, eco 3 = more carnage ;p

[Wanderer]

I'm forced to agree with the conclusions here for normal games, even if I'm not as eloquent in my discussion.

The only time I would recommend the harvester boost is when you're multi-homeworld.  At least 5-6 homeworlds, too.  It's the only time the spread of the boost will be equivalent.  Also, you'll be more turtled so getting 5-6 systems quickly is less likely.

I've recently stalled out two games due to economics.  Now, that's not to say I didn't earn said stall.  But Eraser's dead on target.  A quickly rebuilt TI fleet is worth more then a TII fleet that takes you 4x longer to rebuild.  A TI fleet that you can replace easily allows for more 'suicidal' options when dealing with strategies.  Need to take down a fort?  Send in the main fleet sans bombers, ship them to a corner of the galaxy dragging off the defenders, and send the bombers down its throat.

With a fleet that could take you upwards of 30 minutes to rebuild because of a weaker economy, you're much more careful and you'll miss opportunities due to time.  Add to that you can throw your TI fleet away during a wave attack and rebuild it and be going again, whereas if you had spent that 9k on a TIII ship (just one, mind you), you'll be sitting around awhile waiting to be able to use that knowledge.

Econ is god.  Love your econ.

[Cyborg]

I would just like to point out that there are at least two other people besides me who say rebuilding a fleet takes a really long time.    eraser says that it takes him an hour. He's right, it does; it takes that long with the gametime speed accelerated! The later in the game you are, the longer it takes.

I have no qualms with punishment for losing a high mark fleet, but taking an hour out of your life to rebuild is rarely fun. You can only hope you have a turret ball to watch while you wait.

[keith.lamothe]

I would just like to point out that there are at least two other people besides me who say rebuilding a fleet takes a really long time.

Yes, the massive-rebuilding-time problem is one I've thought about a lot over the past year or so.  Simply removing economic constraints won't actually make the game better, as the costs associated with time passage are very important. 

I have two main categories of solution in mind:
1) Provide some way for the player to accept the "costs associated with time passage" in a very rapid fashion, and receive in turn the corresponding amount of resources/build-effort.
2) Provide the player something else fun to do while they wait.

Both have issues; the latter is appealing but ultimately it would be difficult to provide alternate activities that would not in turn be sufficiently important that you'd feel punished for not having enough human players to take advantage of them.  The former has various technical and balance issues: the game sim is too complex (too many cpu cycles per sim cycle) to just say "simulate 10 game minutes all at once" and get any decent response time.  And any significant truncation of the sim for "hibernation time" would inevitably introduce reasons why the optimization-minded player would have an artificial incentive to either use or not use the feature at various times.

But the former can probably be made to work to some extent.  To at least make the waiting problem less onerous.  But I'm not sure how much more than that it (or any other solution) could accomplish.

[Wanderer]

But the former can probably be made to work to some extent.  To at least make the waiting problem less onerous.  But I'm not sure how much more than that it (or any other solution) could accomplish.

I'm not personally sure it *should* be fixed.  Careless play in the late game causes stalemates or actual losses. 

What I would like, however, is some kind of resource 'bank' I could build.  Think of it like personal Distribution Nodes.  This way if my econ is maxxing off I can build a reserve of some kind.  Maybe 10 Build:7 Recovery or something, but in those 'quiet' moments, I'd like to not be spinning my resources off into the nether.

[eRe4s3r]

To be honest, i think a bank would make the game too easy. AI War with its, let me say it this way.. "low complexity expansion and resource system" is simply not made to be an actual economic sim and banking a +1000 metal (per second!) rate for even 20 minutes would give you a buffer way beyond anything you ever need for the entire game. Not to mention the galactic bank already literally nullifies the idea of any kind of balance to this banking system, if we can build more galactic bank space, there would be absolutely NO reason not to do it.

I would agree that this does not need fixing, but harvesters 3 should probably get a boost to make them equal to econ 3's in MOST situations and BETTER in some rare situations, else there is no reason to even bother with harvesters....

AI War does not lend itself to a more complex economy, and because of this, it's fact that rebuilding takes time..

The only way i see for this to be any kind of fixable would be to literally reinvent the resource system, down to the very basic idea of galactic bank, flow based economy, etc. And i don't see that ending up in any good way unless we like, make the complexity akin to anno 2070 (several dozen resource types , secondary industries, and effects of production on environment).

Remember my long long ago suggestion of space weather? ;P

[chemical_art]

With banking the optimal idea would be to bank on the home world for several hours, maybe dozens of hours, stockpiling resources while ignoring puny waves. Then blitz to take worlds to maintain good defensive positions, then bank again.

No thanks!

[Orelius]

Perhaps it could be possible to add a banking system if it were terribly inefficient, but it's really not a good idea because it allows too much control for the player.  Perhaps the cap for the amount of resources you can store could be raised by capturing specific structures or building them at an exorbitant cost at a zenith trader.  For example, you could spend 2 million m/c on a fragile building for the privilege of storing 100,000 more m/c.  Of course, there will be a cap on the number you can build.

I agree that harvester upgrades are subpar compared to the economy 3 stations, but I normally end up unlocking both to supplement my economy.  When I play games with mass expanding, the harvesters help supplement the economy quite a bit.  They only get better as you capture more planets, while the econ 3 stations only give you that +160 m/c on six planets.

A more complex economy in AI War would be difficult if not impossible to pull off unless major changes are in the works (which is rather unlikely at this point in time).

[zoutzakje]

I always unlock harvesters in any of my games. I never use eco stations, only logistics... so the harvesters get better really quick.

[keith.lamothe]

To clarify, the only problem my previous post was about addressing is that in a lot of cases the player has to spend wall-clock-time (and nothing else) rebuilding.  I don't want to in any way adjust the in-game costs of having to rebuild: AIP-over-time, more waves, more AI reinforcements, more exo progression, etc.  I just want y'all to not be sitting there doing nothing (or going to do something else in real life) just waiting on resources.  So, basically, a much faster "time-lapse" option than performance-profile=extremely-low with +10 speed.  It's tricky to do, and I'm not sure it can really be pulled off in a fully satisfactory way, but I think it would help.

[Orelius]

Yeah, I agree that a faster time-lapse option would be absolutely great and useful.  Especially since I almost always play on those settings to make the game run as fast as possible.

[TechSY730]

Changing the topic slightly, I would like to point out that from the math I've seen, it seems that Mk. II and Mk. III harvesters are a little too rewarding for their knowledge cost. Now I undersand that the harvester upgrades aren't really supposed to pay off until you have lots of harvesters (read, lots of planets), but right now, the number of planets it takes to make them worth it seems too high compared to the econ stations. Basically, in a normal game, Mk. III harvester's aren't worth it until the mid-late endgame, at which point, if you are having economy issues, the AI will probably crush you.

Now, I guess it should remain that harvester upgrades will on average pay off less than econ station upgrades until you get lots of resource plentiful planets, but can that "tipping" point be made a little earlier?

I guess reduce the harvest upgrade knowledge cost, and/or increase the additional resources each upgrade provides.