Bitten by the MoO bug again

[sargon0]

haphazard, I don't have the numbers here but the effect is large. I recall it being a 20-25% cut. If you have IT+10, Barren colony tech and IER in your starting tech tree along with only Death Spores on the next rung, I'd definitely research all 3 (in that order) before Death Spores. The miniaturization and the production bonus (Planetology tech makes your colonists more productive) will be well worth it.

You may see a significant improvement (but I think it will be less than 15%) in colony ship build times, but most of that would be because IER cuts your clean up costs from 25% of industrial output to about 16.6% of industrial output. So you jump from 75% of factory output being useful to 83.x% being useful, which is a bit more than an 11% gain. And IER gives a small boost to per citizen production as well. But I just do not believe that it cuts the colony ship cost by anywhere near that much. I doubt it even cuts the colony base module cost by more than 10%, and the large hull has significant cost by itself that is unaffected by IER.

Forgive me for picking up an old thread but I've been missing a while and a good tech debate especially about early IER always intrigues me. Different percentage cuts have been mentioned but it depends on what you are measuring. This is how I look at it.
With IER Colony ship build cost reduces from 570 to 486 - about 15% reduction
With IER population production increases and factory waste cleanup reduces to give (for normal races):
Net production (after cleanup but before maintenance) on full max homeworld increases from 153 to 199 - a 30% increase
Combining these factors colony ship production reduces from 3.73 turns to 2.44 turns - over 34% reduction
On Impossible with normal races IER is expensive for early production and if you do not want the micro exploiting tech interest then by all means defer. However do not underestimate the benefit you are missing. Below impossible or with races good at Planetology then early IER is insanely powerful.

[RefSteel]

Hey, welcome back! No need to apologize for reviving an old thread, especially a thread that helped revive this entire MoO forum last year!

I'm still using (and recently re-posted, since the forums went down recently and ate all the attached files) the ship design and savefile mapping spreadsheets you created years ago - and I'm slowly getting better at rexx programming to create different maps and so forth too. Thanks very much for all your help with stuff like that - and all your great reports of utterly dominant victories in the early (well, early by my standards) Imperia!

[MaxPower]

haphazard, I don't have the numbers here but the effect is large. I recall it being a 20-25% cut. If you have IT+10, Barren colony tech and IER in your starting tech tree along with only Death Spores on the next rung, I'd definitely research all 3 (in that order) before Death Spores. The miniaturization and the production bonus (Planetology tech makes your colonists more productive) will be well worth it.

You may see a significant improvement (but I think it will be less than 15%) in colony ship build times, but most of that would be because IER cuts your clean up costs from 25% of industrial output to about 16.6% of industrial output. So you jump from 75% of factory output being useful to 83.x% being useful, which is a bit more than an 11% gain. And IER gives a small boost to per citizen production as well. But I just do not believe that it cuts the colony ship cost by anywhere near that much. I doubt it even cuts the colony base module cost by more than 10%, and the large hull has significant cost by itself that is unaffected by IER.

Forgive me for picking up an old thread but I've been missing a while and a good tech debate especially about early IER always intrigues me. Different percentage cuts have been mentioned but it depends on what you are measuring. This is how I look at it.
With IER Colony ship build cost reduces from 570 to 486 - about 15% reduction
With IER population production increases and factory waste cleanup reduces to give (for normal races):
Net production (after cleanup but before maintenance) on full max homeworld increases from 153 to 199 - a 30% increase
Combining these factors colony ship production reduces from 3.73 turns to 2.44 turns - over 34% reduction
On Impossible with normal races IER is expensive for early production and if you do not want the micro exploiting tech interest then by all means defer. However do not underestimate the benefit you are missing. Below impossible or with races good at Planetology then early IER is insanely powerful.

IER is the tech that has the most significant impact on your early game expansion, once it comes available.

1) It increases pop production from 0.53 BCT to 0.65 BCT (pop productivity = 0.5 + planetologyLevel*0.03), a 22% increase, which means new colonized planets can build their first rows of factories more quickly.

2) It increases factories net production (after clean up) form 0.5 BCT to 0.66 BCT, a 33% increase. This also has a significant impact in the economic exponential growth curve: with standard techs a factory costs 10BC and produces 0.5 BCT, each factory pay itself in 10/0.5=20 turns. With IER, it pay itself in 10/0.66= 15 turns.

3) It cuts the cost of colony ships from 570BC to 486BC as Sargon said.

None of the other initial techs give as many benefits as IER.

For example IT10, another nice initial tech, won't benefit new colonies as much, as you still need to invest 50BC for terraforming. Mature colonies must spend 250 BC (50 for terraforming and 200 for new factories), for a benefit of 15BCT (5 from 10 pop, 20 from 20 factories -10 for clean up).