The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 25, 2006

Official News - page 3

NOTES ON EFFICIENCY

The implementation of the canal infrastructure build last week allows you to increase your planet's efficiency, but there are a couple of things you need to know about how efficiency works.

The most important is that building a canal is not going to have an immediate effect on the efficiency, because this value is only calculated at reset. You therefore won't see the benefit of your brand new canal until the next reset.

When the game fires up after the reset, it takes a look at all the things that might affect the efficiency of your planet as a whole, or of individual commodities, and tots them all up to produce the figures that will apply to that game session. As well as canals, each of which give a 1% increase in efficiency to all the agricultural and resource commodities, your merchant fleet can also boost the efficiency of your economy across the board - and later, there will no doubt be more infrastructure builds which have a similar effect.

The second thing you need to know is that a 1% increase in efficiency is not as big a deal as it sounds. It doesn't mean 1 production point added - it means 1% of whatever the current production figure is. So for a commodity with a production of 10, the new production figure is only going to be 10.1 - and since you can't product .1 of a load, that's not going to make any difference. A 1% increase is only going to be valuable if you happen to have a commodity with a production of 100 or more. No, the value is going to be in the cumulative effect of increased efficiency, together with the increases in production points that other builds will give you. Build 5 canals (that's the maximum) and you will get a 5% increase in production. That will effect any commodity with a production figure of 20 or more. Add in the increased efficiency you will get from building up your merchant fleet - a 1% efficiency boost for every ten ships in your fleet (up to a maximum of 10%) and you could start seeing real gains.


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