[Saxon]

Value Improvement Facilities. Those delightful facilities which improve the values of your planets. Climate Control Facilities. Those delightful facilities which change your climate to something more pleasing.

It strikes me that these facilities are similar and that one must strike a balance in using them. Building one of them stops you from building another productive facility. For example, the Value improvement plant will boost resource production on a planet, but is it a good investment? Would just building a monolith bring you more resources over the short and medium term than improving the planet and then building a monolith? It gets more complicated if you look at building just a mineral mine or an radioactives mine, as they cost less but also return less. Further, the size of your galaxy and the expected game length will also have an impact on your decision on what to build.

In terms of the climate control facilities, are they worth the trouble? Population isn’t so critical in the game, so is it wiser to ignore your population growth rates except on the homeworlds, where you can ship out millions and still get the population back quickly?

Changing the atmosphere of your planet is, in my non-mathematical thinking, generally worth it as you get many more spaces to build facilities. However, if it is a short game, you might be better off just boosting your technology for extracting resources (and upgrading facilities) than bothering to convert planets, which can take a while and uses up a lot of resource points.

Has anyone done the math (read, I don’t know how) on when they are worth building? I created some charts once for Empire Deluxe, where leaving a city idle boosted the production. I remember discovering that it was very rarely worth doing, but in some situations it made sense. Right now I am in a tight game of PBEM and am looking for any advantage I can get.