Optimal rate of transport production?

Hi!

Check Wiki under Game version 1.1. Numbers are still valid for DA.

BR, Iztok

Depends on a lot of things. In particular your racial pop growth bonus and your approval rate on the planet that you're using to provide transports. Also the rate at which you can build transports affects this as well.

The best I've been able to do is to produce a transport every other turn. I've experimented with a couple of different strategies. What's best will be dependent on the galaxy size and number of opponents. One method is to simply get your home planet up to producing one transport every other week and essentially colonize all your planets from your home planet. Another strategy is to use your home planet to first build up one or two other planets so that you can have essentially two or three "home planets" from which to colonize from. I've not seen any great difference on a gigantic map with 6 or 7 opponents in the total number of planets and thier relative strength at the end of the colony rush between these two methods.

In any case, assuming that you keep your "home planets" approval at or above 75% to get the 25% pop growth bonus and you selected the 30% racial pop growth bonus, you can pull off 244 colonists every other turn and maintain the same pop on the planet. With the same 75% approval and the 70% racial pop growth bonus this number is 350 colonists every other turn. However, You really don't need to worry too much about specific numbers. What I do is pick a quasi-arbitrary population that I'm not willing to go below on my "home planet" and only take off colonists down to that number. I usually use 5B as the arbitrary number. This means that my initial colonies get 500 colonists (and thus a better start towards profitability) than my later colonies do. Oh well.

A final point about getting your home planets production sufficient to produce a colony ship every other turn. You pretty much need 6~7 factories plus your manu cap to do this. Of course it depends on where you want to set your spending sliders. The 6~7 factories plus manu cap is sufficient for 60% divided between social and military production and 40% research, which seems a reasonable setting.

Here's how I figure it:

Base population growth is 75 million (assuming you have 2.5B population already).
100% approval makes that 150 million.
Aphrodisiac, Xeno Medicine, + Fertility tech is a 70% bonus, making that 255 million.


You can produce 1 billion population in:

4 turns with 0 Fertility Clinics
3 turns with 3 Fertility Clinics
2 turns with 7 Fertility Clinics

Subtract 1 clinic if you have +40% pop growth bonus.
If you're Super Breeder you can say it's just 1b every other turn (forget the clinics).

Correct so far...



Still OK...



Here's where you went wrong - that 70% is 70% of the base growth (i.e. 52.5 million) giving you a nominal total of 202.5 million.

Also, supposedly pop growth is capped at 200 million per week, and the only thing that can make it go above that is the pop growth bonus starting pick - so 40% would give a max pop growth of 280 million. There is something else that is getting applied after the cap though, because I regularly see 300 million +. I suspect it's the Aphrodisiac bonus.

I do not know if the fertility clinic bonus gets applied before or after the cap (as I've never bothered to build one), but for certain the approval bonus is applied before hand - so if pop is at 6.67 billion or more, it makes no difference if approval is 50% or 100%.

Not according to the Wiki site. The 100% approval bonus is multiplied by the other bonuses, not added. So I'm going to stand by my numbers.

The wiki is referring to v1.1 of GC2. You are referring to v1.5.x of DA.


Try it and see - when you've got a planet of 2.5 billion producing 500 million pop growth per turn (which may be possible if the fertility clinic bonus is applied after the cap), then let us know.   

Hi!

Erm... AFAIK all bonuses are multiplied...

Just checked with my game (DA 1.5x.59), where my race had 72% bonus in pop growth. A planet at 100% approval grow from 6.938B to 7.196B pop. That's 258M pop, very close to the wiki formula.

BR, Iztok

If all bonuses are multiplied as suggested above, you would expect:

base pop growth 100 million
+100% for 100% approval = 200m
+72% of 200m = 344m

What you are getting is much, much closer to the effect if the bonuses are not multiplied, but added:

base pop growth 100 million
+100% for 100% approval = 200m
+72% of 100m = 272m

Base is not 100m, it's 75m.

Hi!

I did. With 9 Fertility Clinics I grew there 594M pop. Other findings regarding FCs:

1) Ferility clinic seems to increase growth in the turn it is built.
2) each clinic increases base growth (3% or 75M) by 25%, with additive effect. The only bonus affecting it's efficiency is approval on a planet. No other bonuses apply.

Conclusion: basicaly a FC adds each turn 38M pop at 100% approval, and 19M below 75 approval. IMO it's not worth to build it.

Here are raw data. I obtained them with race growth bonus 72% by helding a homeworld at 100% approval, and letting the planet build several Fertility Clinics. First column notes the turn in which the FC was built, second is population, third is the difference of population to previous turn (growth), and the last is the change of growth to the previous turn.

new FC   pop   growth   dif-FC   
------+-------+-------+-------
	4258		
	4516	258	
f	4810	294	36
	5104	294	0
f	5436	332	38
f	5806	370	38
	6176	370	0
	6582	406	36
f	6988	406	0
	7432	444	38
f	7876	444	0
	8358	482	38
f	8840	482	0
	9360	520	38
	9882	522	2
f	10400	518	-4
	10958	558	40
	11516	558	0

The differences in last column are probably because of a float pop number rounding to display as an integer.

BR, Iztok