I had this all ready to go yesterday, and then I remembered I had installed Colin Grey's mod pack from over Infogrames forum and that might have changed all the numbers. I'm pretty sure I removed it all and what follows if valid; if your results are different we'd have to see if you have a mod or I still have one active...
OK, here's your base situation setting ALL the sliders to 0%: (Well, I WAS going to include a pic here, but the site help directions are not too helpful and I haven't got a clue how to do it...)
On the right side of your planet screen you have 79 Industry and 64 Test Tubes and on the left when you open the Economics panel in the middle there are three lines marked Production, Maintenance and Pollution which are at 0, 113 and 0, respectively.
Other than saying that the Maintenance cost is based on the current amount of buildings, terraforming level and certain forces present, we're going to ignore it because the 113 AU you're paying here is constant for the rest of the discussion.
The easiest way to see how it works is to start with the bottom slider: Research Development. You have the capacity to make 64 Test Tubes here, and Test Tubes are turned into Research Points in exactly the same way that IPPs are turned into PPs--you pay AUs to pay the scientists to use the labs to make the discoveries.
With that in mind you'd expect that setting the slider to 64 AU will give you 64 RPs. The easiest way to do that is to move the slider over 4 ticks when it is in % mode--you'll see the PRODUCTION line move up by 15 each tick. This is the first oddity; since there is no separate line for this, ALL the sliders, this, Terraforming, Normal Economic Development, Planetary and Military ALL go into the Production line. Which is rather annoying later on, as we'll see...
Anyway, when you get to 4% the Production line will read 60. Now switch the radio button to AU and click-up to 63. The slider bar will be green, the Production line will read 63, and if you close the Economic window, the main window updates to say you have 63 RPs.
Go back in and click it to 64. Now the slider turns yellow, and the odd thing is that the Production line says 65--not 64! If you exit and check the main screen it says you are making 64 RPs, though. Go back in and click to 65 and the Production line stays at 65; exit and you still only get 64 RPs. Back in and up it to 66 and the Production line says 66; exit and you get 65 RPs. This is now exactly as expected: You get 64 RPs for the first 64 AUs put in, then it takes 2 more AUs in to get 1 more RP out.
So to get 128 RPs out, we expect we'd need 64 + 2*64 = 192 AUs in. Go and do that and come back out and YES!--that amount of AUs into Research Development yields 128 RPs. However, along the way you may have noticed something odd. The color of the bar should change when we need to spend 3 AUs to get each RP, but it changed way before that. It in fact changed to an orange at 128 AUs input. Hmmm, that's exactly 64 past our 1:1 level, which basically means that the program is changing the bar color based on multiples of your base instead of the actual growing sequence.
So to get 192 RPs out, we'd need 64 + 2*64 + 3*64 = 384--but try that and it only gives us 176?!? What gives? Change the formula to 64 + 2*64 + 4*64 = 448 and THAT amount in gets us 192 RPs out! To get 256 RPs out would be 64 + 2*64 + 4*64 + 8*64? = 960. Testing says: YES!!! Whoa! it's a power of 2 deal! Click the AUs down 4 ticks (to 956) and you move down to 255 RPs--we were in the 4:1 band??? Click UP to 965 AUs (5 more than the original 960) and it's still 256. 966->257. 968->257. 969->257. You have to go all the way up to 976--16 greater than 960, to get the RPs up to 257! We SHOULD be in the 16:1 band! Go back to 960 and start moving down and we find that at 952 we're still at 255 RPs, and 8 less than that we're at 254, so we were in the 8:1 band. It just must be that it changes in weird places for some reason. (Rounding, perhaps?)
Clearly the table on manual page 49 is way out of whack as applied to the Research Development slider. The REAL ratios are 1:1, 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, 16:1 and presumably 32:1--the first 6 powers of 2. The color changes for the bar is way off, too, and can't be trusted to tell you anything meaningful at all. You'll almost always see this one in the dark brown.
We can't Terraform, and the Normal Economic Development has the "do not" sign by it since you have all your DEA slots filled; the same logic applies to the Planetary one since there is nothing you can select to build in there! Set the Research Development slider all the way back to zero and let's move up to the Military slider...
Click it up and click it up and click it up and watch the Production line AND the Pollution line change! The slider-bar turns yellow when the PRODUCTION line gets to 79 AUs--which matches how many IPPs you have on this planet--but Holy Crap!--you have to put 164 AUs into the slider to get 79 AUs into Production since 86 AUs are going to combat pollution!!! (Again there is that annoying +1 error on the exact borders.) This really, really points up the value of those pollution reducing techs like decomposition centers, which reduce it by 1/3!!!
If the Military slider is like the Research Development sliders, we'd expect it to be 79 + 2*79 = 237 to get 158 PPs out of our 79 IPP capacity. Actually, with the slider bar at 164 we'd expect something like 164 + 2*164 = 492 AUs in to get 158 PPs out. But does that pollution stay constant? It turns out you have to go up to 521 AUs in to get 237 Production line AUs with 287 Pollution line AUs (524 AUs total--the error increases!) to yield an actual 158 PP output from our 79 IPP capacity. So what we see is that the PRODUCTION line has to go to 237, like our base formula 79 + 2*79 said, but that the slider input was more than expected to get there...
The slider bar actually changed color when the Production line AUs got to 158 (186 Pollution), and again at 237 AUs (289 Pollution, 521 in the slider bar), so the color change is based on multiples of the Production Line AUs. Hmmm, to get 237 PPs out would we need 79 + 2*79 + 3*79 = 474 Production line AUs, or would it be 79 + 2*79 + 4*79 = 553 Production line AUs? If you said the latter, go to the head of the class! So again, the color of the bar is changing incorrectly, but it's MUCH less noticable here because of the pollution effect.
Now for the REALLY annoying part...
Set all the sliders back to zero, then go in and remove the first Bioharvest DEA from the planet and click the turn button. Go back into planets and check out what we have now. (First though, go and make sure that it says that it is building a Bioharvest.) What we see is that the Maintenance cost has gone down to 102, so it must have taken 13 to maintain that particular Bioharvest DEA.
We can now play with the Normal Economic Development slider. As you move it up, you'll notice that Pollution kicks-in when you get to 12 AU in the slider. When you get to 109 the exclamation point appears. At that point, you have 53 AUs in the Production line and 53 in Pollution (it caught up quickly as we increased spending) and 3 went into graft and corruption or something--OK probably rounding error. If you go look at the Bioharvest DEA, it say it takes 53 points to build! The exclamation is telling you putting more AUs in here is useless since nothing more can be built.
This is important to note because if you leave that slider at 109 and then go and set the Military and Research ones, all of a sudden all the numbers are added together in the Production and Pollution lines and you can't really tell what each part was doing by itself. Especially since the colors on the sliders don't really mean anything! So if you truly want to micro-manage, you'd practically have to set each slider to zero to determine what to spend on one of them, then set it back to zero to work on another one...man, just let the AI do it! ;-)
But wait! There's more! Since all the sliders are being added into that Production line, what are we getting out? Go ahead and switch to your other planet which has 7 Industry...
Put the sliders to spend 7 in Military and 7 in Normal Economic Development, since when we test those out by themselves, they yield 7 IPPs. But again, that is when they are BY THEMSELVES! We have really put 14 AU into the Production line by doing both at once, so we would expect to get what out? The first 7 will cost 7 and the the next 7 after that would be 2 each and we've put in 7 more AUs at this level so we'd get 3.5 PPs out...So we should get 10 or 11 PPs out of the 14 AUs in. And the answer is 10!
So what?
Well, this means that when you made your test and figured out how many AUs you need to put into a slider it's all thrown out the window because now you're not getting the same amount of production out of those same AUs anymore!
Switch back to the home world and with everything set to zero, put the Normal Economic Development at 109. You get the exclamation point. Now put some AUs into the Military slider and eventually the exclamation point will go away--meaning you then have to add some more to NED to get it to finish that DEA in one turn, which would reduce the amount of work that is actually getting done in your military slider so you'd add more there and...
And we haven't even added in Terraforming or Planetary Development! And to confuse it further, the Research Development AUs go into the Production line, but they're not affecting the IPs, just the test Tubes getting turned into RPs!
So the key is to always look at your PRODUCTION line and compare that (less Research Development!) to your IPP total to figure out how much you are REALLY overdriving your economy. Perhaps they should make the Production Line change color so you don't really waste exorbitant amounts of cash, because remember the TRUE ratios are 1:1, 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, 16:1 and 32:1 (and maybe higher!) for the little extra PPs.
When you consider that the gravity and atmosphere and terrain and planetary specials and your techs all affect how much it costs to build your stuff in the first place as well how much it costs to maintain it as well as how well it performs once it's built, you'd need to be..a..computer!..to keep up with all of it <g>.
Go look at the Demographics tab and you'll see that the planet population increased 0.336--and the IPPs went from 79 to 93 from turn 8 to turn 9! I wonder how THAT number works out...more workers on the job? (But that's an investigation for another day. <g>)
Anyway, the game really seems to want you to macro-manage this part...
The thing I learned from this investigation is that amount of AUs that go into pollution is horrendous. It's made me try to get those techs faster. I'm also playing with having a world that has all the dirty industry and some reseach labs and then just putting the cash into research and not letting it build anything so it WON'T go into pollution, but it doesn't seem to be worth the trouble...
