There are more than a few guides and posts around the place that make reference to the concept of "disposable income". Some people don't entirely understand what that is, and I must confess I didn't really get it - at least in the case of AR - until relatively recently. So, I'm writing a bit about it.

What is disposable income? It's the portion of your resources (both in the strict Stars! sense and to a lesser degree minerals) that you can throw down the drain (in any of various ways) without adversely affecting your economic growth. You can do anything you like with these resources and your curve won't know the difference (unless you get invaded ).

So, in the strict sense, disposable income is resources you can't spend on your economy. In a slightly looser sense, it's resources you can't spend on your economy with an appreciable rate of return.

What counts as spending resources on your economy? In rough order of directness, and assuming a relatively-standard race:

*Factories (directly gives resources)
*Mines (to improve your mineral output, which improves how many factories you can build)
*Terraforming (to improve your pop growth, which improves your future resources)
*Freighters (up to the amount you need to manage your pop and - for factoried races - Germanium; this is to improve your pop growth and to improve how many factories you can build)
*Colony ships (to give valid targets for your freighters)
*Scouts (to find targets for the colony ships)
*Economic technology research (i.e. that necessary to unlock better terraforming and better freighters, up to the point at which each is sufficient for current purposes)

(Note that some of these also need minerals; those minerals aren't disposable.)

Everything you can't spend productively on any of those is disposable income. In theory, nobody has disposable income until they've maxed out their terraforming tech and have the best freighters possible at maximum miniaturisation, but the last levels of terraforming don't have an especially-high rate of return (unless you're CA) and neither does freighter research beyond "LF that can go Warp 9 with a decent load" or even "privateer that can go Warp 9 without a zillion boosters".

Of course, removing some of these from the equation will increase your fraction of disposable resources. Some examples:

*-f don't need to build factories (which also drastically reduces "economic" mineral demand and thus the need for mines)
*CA don't need to build terraforming
*IFE and HE don't need to research Prop 9 to get "good enough" freighters

And now of course we come to the trap: Alternate Reality.

It's easy to think that AR has a ton of disposable income since they have no planetary installations. It's also wrong. Here's what you can do as AR to better your economy, again in rough order of directness:

*Research Energy (directly gives resources)
*Terraforming (directly gives resources and improves pop growth)
*Colony ships (to spread your population, which directly gives resources, as well as getting more minerals)
*Bigger starbases (to improve your pop growth, which improves your future resources)
*Freighters (to manage your pop and thus improve your pop growth, as well as recycle colony-ship minerals; there's also a direct spreading effect but it's not super-huge)
*Economic tech besides Energy (unlocks terraforming and bigger starbases)
*Remote miners (to get more minerals, although AR's innate mining fulfils most of its economic needs if you're good at recycling)
*Scouts (to find targets for the colony ships)

That's a different list, but it's still quite a list, and two of them (Energy and colony ships) are extremely open-ended and can be built by any planet. In the strict sense, therefore, an AR has zero disposable income until they reach Energy 26 and have colonised every planet available. In the looser sense, they still need to colonise every planet available (Pinta-ing a red has a payback time in resources of ~3 turns + travel time with Ener

[Updated on: Mon, 02 March 2020 05:12]

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[Updated on: Sun, 17 September 2006 11:42]

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Greetings, fellow space travelers,

I recently dug out a few tidbits from ancient rgcs posts. I'm posting them here for their possible interest to modders, tinkerers, and/or clone coders.

The Battle Speed for any given engine is determined by its fuel consumption at every warp. The "Best" Speed will be the last warp *before* fuel consumption rises above 120% (as the Stars! helpfile hints). Some rgcs posts mention 125% or even higher, so tests with modded fuelusage tables would be welcome. That "ideal" warp will be used to compute Movement points in the Battleboard.

Battle Movement (for the engine alone) = (ideal_warp - 2) / 4. So, Warp6 gives 1 square of movement, and every warp above it gives another 1/4 square. The full Movement Formula (for a ship design) is outside the scope of this post.

For some engines, that Battle Speed should be 10, but is only 9. Why? Because they're unsafe at warp 10. And it seems "Warp10-safety" is determined thru fuel consumption, too. Thus, any engine that burns fuel over a 105% "safe" rate will be unsafe for Warp10 travel. The cutoff isn't clearly stated, but 108% fuel consumption makes an engine unsafe, so the margins are small.

Enjoy,

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Ages ago Jason Cawley wrote in RGCS newsgroup about minerals per concentration point (if mined with remote miners or 10 efficency mines):

> So my guess is it is supposed to be something like this ->
> con greater than 30 -> 12500 kT * ln (starting con/ending con)
> less than 30, greater than 3 -> 456 kT per point

Later there were made tests that from 4 to 3 and from 3 to 2 were about 1000 kT minerals and from 2 to 1 about 2000 kT of minerals.
On case the mine efficiency is not 10 then these amounts have to be multiplied with mine efficiency/10.
It seemed correct enough back then.

My recent testing however shows that the logarithmic formula does not fit for concentrations above 100. There seems to be like 123 or 124 kT of minerals per point above 100. I am not sure if it was always so or only in latest patches.

The maximum mineral conc possible seems to be 200 (even huge comet does not push it higher).

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LEit mentioned to me that ships disengage after 8 moves rather than 7 as mentioned in the help file. To confirm this I fired up the game and gave it a try - the battle viewer showed my scout with tactic "Disengage in 7 moves", so I thought "phoey - what does LEit know anyway ?".

I've just looked a bit closer, and noticed that after the 1st move the scout still says "Disengage in 7 moves". After that it does count down though. So, LEit was right, and disengaging takes 8 moves. The help file and the battle viewer are wrong

Jason Cawley mentioned this in rgcs on 26 Feb 1997, so it's not exactly news, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway.

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What is your favorite PRT[ 39 votes ]
1.	HE	1 / 3%
2.	SS	4 / 10%
3.	WM	3 / 8%
4.	CA	2 / 5%
5.	IS	2 / 5%
6.	PP	1 / 3%
7.	SD	4 / 10%
8.	IT	10 / 26%
9.	AR	7 / 18%
10.	JOAT	5 / 13%

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