Bureaucracy formula help...

[Fitz]

Ned, since I wrote this post, I recieved info that my statement about the drones only appearing in new bases is false, and that they appear randomly. My own (new) observations from games confirms this, so I've editted the above post.

I'm still not sure I'm willing to go along with your statement on captured bases yet, but don't have the time to test it for at least two weeks. Feel free to test it yourself. Go up to the limit, count you unmodified drones in every base, capture a single base, and see if your drones increase in any of your old bases.

Of course, if the random drone appears in your newly captured base, you'll never be able to tell.

Incidentally, I have had drone riots the turn after capturing a base plenty of times, but that could easily be due to pop growth or some other factor I overlooked.

Incidentally, IIRC from another thread, negative efficiency counts as 0 for this formula.

Mis, you're talking about a three axis table.

1) efficiency
2) world size
3) difficulty

That means you need a set of tables. Either one table per efficieny, one per world size, or one per difficulty. If I get really bored, maybe I'll do them for you.

[Ned]

Fitz, Thanks for confirming what I had long observed about bureaucracy drones. As I also said, they seem to be "fixed" to a base, once they are created. You have to have extra police or psych facilities in such a base.

If you increase efficiency so that once again you are below the limit, the extra drones problems disappear. Drop it back, they reappear - in the very same cities, not randomly.

Two things we need to understand are the following:

Whether this "fixation" is only for your faction, or whether it applies to another faction if you give the base to a pact mate.

Whether the capturing of bases affects bureaucracy drones.

I suspect that both can easily be verified by using the SE. I'll give it a shot.

Ned

[johndmuller]

Ned: Regarding captured bases.

IIRC, after a time, captured bases "assimilate"; I think it can be observed in the Psych subScreen where it says "Captured Base" or "Unmodified" (perhaps there are other categories too).

I would expect that the transition to assimilated could lead to a change in the drone status. Unfortunately, bases in the "Captured Base" state appear to have their own form of drone penalty, making it a little more complicated.

My guess would be that the assimilated base would show less drones (if you don't have so many bases as to make that impossible) and also that likely (but untested) a new drone or two might appear somewhere as a result of a recalculation of the drone formula.

I don't expect to have perfect control of drones when I don't have any spare psych capacity, but if I bother to look at the F4 screen before the turn ends, I might spot a problem by noticing the base name in red, which spares me most of these drone problems.

[Ned]

Guys, Some results from the SE:

First Captured Bases do count!

Second, giving away a base has no effect! It does not reduce the number of bureaucracy drones. This indicates that the drone counter is a faction counter that is set by the addition of bases and is not recaculated each turn.

Third, the number of drones appears to be more than one on the average. In fact, the average number of drones appears to be two per added base, but there also appears to be some random number generator assigning just how many extra drones you will receive and their location.

I present data below. I ran the test on a standard map with 0 effeciency. I ran at two difficulty levels. The results are very interesting:

Transcend										
B's over 6	1	2	3	4	5	6				
Drones	1	4	6	8	10	12				
										
Thinker										
B's over 10	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Drones	1	2	4	7	9	10	11	13	16	20

[Fitz]

Are you absolutely sure all those are created by beuracracy?

[Ned]

Fitz, Yes. I created size one bases from start using the SE, adding pods and just pressing B. As bases were founded, typically, but not always, the new base beyond the limit would have a drone; and zero, one, or two additional drones would randomly appear elsewhere, even in the home base.

Give those same bases to a different faction, the drones disappear. Switching to that faction changes nothing. The base still has no drones. (I did this to test whether there was a difference between whether the AI or a human owned the base in question.)

I tried coming up with a formula to explain the pattern, but gave up in favor of a random number generator that would average two extra drones. Ned

[Ned]

I would just like to update this thread with recent data from a current game. The map was larger, so Transcend B/W was 12 at zero efficiency.

I had founded 24 bases and had captured 42. Each base, at zero efficiency, had at least 3 B drones. As well, it appeared that each captured base had two additional "captured-base" drones.

This data is highly consistent with the SE data. It indicates that on the average, one gets two B drones per base over the b/w. These b-drones also spread evenly, that is, if a base has a b-drone, it will not get another one until all other bases get one too. Etc., for the second b-drone.

I was also very surprised by the two, not one, extra drones in captured bases. This is also not consistent with the Datalinks.


Ned

[WhiteElephants]

Ned -- I guess we'll resume this here. Anyway, from what I understand the amount of drones per base past the bueracracy warning are cumulative, so finding the average doesn't mean anything.

For instance, if the price of beer was one dollar for the first 10 cans, and two dollars for the next 10 cans you could say that the average cost of 20 cans of beer is 1.50. But if you bought 15 cans you wouldn't pay a dollar fifty for each can (1.50 X 15 = 22.50). You'd pay 10 dollars for the first 10 (10 X 1 = 10) and two dollars for the next 5 (5 X 2 = 10) for a total of 20 dollars (10 + 10 = 20) not 22.50. The same can be applied to the bueracracy formula IF it works on the principle of twice the limit equals twice the drones.

[Ned]

WE, I agree with you that just looking at a snapshot at 5 times the b/w level does not give us complete information concerning how we got there, however, I do suggest that I have hard data reported here that one does get an average of two b-drones per base over the b/w between the first and second b/w, regardless of difficulty level. Ned

[WhiteElephants]

Well, I still think you only get one drone per base after the first bueracracy warning, yet I haven't gotten home to test it.

The two drones your seeing when you capture a base are a standard thing. They remain for some fixed amount of turns (I forget how many) and then are gone. You'll notice that the graphic of the captured base looks like the enemy's base still only the color of the flag is yours. I believe that the graphic changing to look like your base represents those drones changing back to citizens. During the time of the drones that base is more likely to be subverted by the enemy at a reduced cost, so beware.

How are you counting the drones by the way?

I'd think if you were clicking on the psych button in the base screen you'd realize what those two drones are from as they're listed there, which also calls into question your method for tallying the large (too large, in my humble opinion) amount of drones you claim are from bueracracy.

(Lets stick to this thread as it seems to apply to the title).

[Ned]

WE, I count the drones by looking at the Psych screen. Dark red counts as one. Bright red counts as two.

The screen reports drone data prior to accounting for police, psych, facilities or SP's.

What I saw I reported in the table. I founded a new base and then checked the new base and all previous bases for new drones. They occur in bunches, not two every time. Sometimes 1. Sometimes 2. At other times, 3 and 4. The table is very interesting.

Ned

[Ned]

WE, et al., You may want to clip the following an paste it on the wall. The drone pattern is highly repeateable. The following is the pattern for a standard planet.

What apparently is happening is that as you reach the end of the first b/w, all bases have one b-drone. At the end of the second, all have two. At the end of the third, three. And so on.

Here is the data:

Transcend, Standard, 0 Efficiency.  B/W after 6 bases.
Bases start with two content workers, third is a drone		
Bases	Drones	Location
0-6	0	0
7	1	2
8	3	2, 7-8
9	4	2, 6-8
10	5	2, 5-8
11	8	2, 4-8, 10-11
12	12	1-12
13	15	1-13, 2, 8
14	19	1-14, 2. 7-8. 14-15
15	22	1-15, 2, 6-8, 12-14
16	25	1-16, 2. 5-8, 11-14
17	30	1-17, 2,  4-8, 10-14, 16-17
18	36	1-18 (2)
19	41	1-19(2), 2, 8, 14
20	47	1-20(2), 2, 7-8, 13-14, 19-20
21	52	1-21(2), 2, 6-8, 12-14, 18-20
22	57	1-22(2), 2, 5-8, 11-14, 17-20
23	64	1-23(2), 2, 4-8, 10-14, 16-20, 22-23
24	72	1-24(3)

[Basil]

Drones in captured bases

My understanding of how drones in captured bases work (and this is only something I read somewhere, not something I've tested, so take it with a pinch of salt) is this: it depends on the difficulty rating of the game and the number of years since the base was captured.
- At most 5 - ceiling(years_since_capture/10) citizens are drones
- At most 7-difficulty_setting citizens are drones (difficulty_setting = 6 for transcend, 5 for thinker, etc.)

So at Transcend you get one extra drone until 50 years are up. However, at Citizen you get 5 extra drones for the first 9 years, 4 extra drones for years 10-19, etc. At Thinker you would get 2 extra drones for the first 39 years then 1 extra drone for years 40-49.

Like I said, this is just something I read somewhere I can't find now, so feel free to shoot it down !

[Ned]

Basil, Interesting that the captured-base drone problem would be more severe the easier the game!

However, the table I posted pertains only to bureaucracy drones, b-drones for short. I stopped the test after the third bureaucracy warning, so I have no I idea whether there is a cap at some point.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, it seems, and I want to double-check this, that your b-drones are not reduced in your remaining bases if you give a captured base away. This factor really complicates you life if you are capturing bases and giving them to a submissive with the partial intention of minimizing your b-drone problem so that, for example, your main bases can stay in GA.

Assume that you do not want to go over the third b/w - which apparently gives 3 b-drones per base. If you religiously give bases away as you capture them and approach the warning, you could theorectically do this and minimize your GA problems. But, as I said, it seems that the computer still counts bases given away as your bases regardless, so this is not possible.

As I said, I will double-check this.

[johndmuller]

Originally posted by Ned
What apparently is happening is that as you reach the end of the first b/w, all bases have one b-drone. At the end of the second, all have two. At the end of the third, three. And so on.

Ned, this sounds like an elegant and perfectly logical approach to your b-drones, for each (complete) level of the b-warnings, you get another drone in each of your bases. Even if it turns out not to be the way they do it, it should have been the way they did it. It is reasonably simple to calculate, and it maintains the handicapping over the various skill levels and efficiency ratings and whatever else the b-warnings key off of. The bunching effect probably is another artifact of the integer arithmatic or some such thing.

It looks like you are saying that the particular affected bases are also predictable - I gather by base age. (It would have been a nicer trouch, IMhO, to make the distribution random, though.) Does this mean that a captured base would reshuffle the b-drones insofar as the captured base's age appeared in the middle of the existing bases' age spectrum?


Basil, I can see why you distanced yourself from those formulas, the reverse handicap for max drones does look a little counter-intuitive.

The formulas would make more sense to me if the second line (7-diff) fed into the first as in:
#c-drones = 5 - ((7 - Diff) * (years_since_capture/10))

I have no idea whether or not this is true, but it is a reasonable interpretation of those equations and it looks like the handicapping would be consistent with usual practice.