Galaxy Legion: Permafrost Sub-Network

I mentioned yesterday that there are currently two holiday missions available in Galaxy Legion. The second one is called Beneath the Snow and has returned from, I believe, last year. I wasn't playing the game at the time so it's new to me. It's a mission with a pretty fantastic experience ratio: 65 experience for 25 energy. There are a few missions in the game which are better but not very many so it's worth considering doing the mission just for the experience even if it had no reward.

As for a reward... It takes 50 rounds to get a reward and you can get the reward 15 times. The reward is a planetary structure which takes up 1 space and provides 1 research, 50 cloak, and 50 population. These bonuses get doubled if built on an icy planet. (Note: If you build one of these on an icy planet and then convert that planet to an oceanic with a mass surface melter it will retain the doubled bonus.)

Any building with a 1-to-1 ratio and an added bonus is pretty good. A building with a 2-to-1 ratio and a pretty substantial bonus is amazing. You really want to have one of these on every icy planet you have with a reasonable research boost on it. Beyond that there isn't a huge need to get extras to put on other planets but they're still good to have on practically anything. A little cloak can go a long way towards protecting a planet, after all.

Given the great experience return on the mission and how good the building is I think everyone has to get one of these for every research icy they have. Beyond that I think it should be a relatively high priority to finish the mission off completely. I already have!

Galaxy Legion: Scruuge X-Deflector

Galaxy Legion recently added two new temporary missions. These aren't typical temporary missions which form a chain that will come into the game permanently. Instead they are special winter holiday event missions. I would guess they'll come back next year but that's going to be a pretty long delay if you want the rewards. On the plus side these missions last 3 weeks instead of 2 weeks to give people a better chance to collect them all.

The first mission is called Avarice of the Scruuge and is worth the standard 55 experience for 25 energy. It takes 90 rounds to complete it and can be completed up to 4 times. The reward is a fight with an easy NPC which drops a module. It's size 13 for 30 defense and 60 hull. Neither of those amounts are especially exciting but as a reader pointed out a couple months ago the upkeep cost on special modules is really small. For this module it's 3400 credits per day. Assign half of that value to the defense and you're paying 57 credits per defense per day. Compare that to my main defense module which has an upkeep of 107200000 per day for 626 defense. That's 171246 credits per defense per day which is more than 3000 times as much. My main modules are more space efficient but cost a ton more.

You do also get some hull. 60 hull is not a very big number. It probably doesn't even give me one more shot before I have to repair, but a bunch of small amounts do add up.

This module adds to two stats that I don't have a burning desire to max out but they are both also useful for almost everything I do. Given the small upkeep cost I think these modules are no-brainers to pick up and use. Especially given the fact that you only have 3 weeks to scoop them up before they disappear for at least a year and maybe forever and I think you should definitely get this done if at all possible.

Galaxy Legion: Vendoring Scanners vs Rebuying

I recently capped out my first research tree in Galaxy Legion. I now have access to the top tier (and very expensive) scanning module. I spent a week saving up the cash to build them and went on a scanning spree today. I found a handful of good planets but not nearly enough to satisfy my need for more stuff. I'm going to have to scan again once I collect enough star chart purgers...

Up to this point I've always vendored my scanners as soon as I finished a scanning run for a few reasons...

• I'm not terribly patient (though I am more patient than Andrew) and am typically broke after buying the scanners. I'd have found a bunch of new planets and want to colonize them and selling the scanners would give cash to immediately get an extra planet or two.
• I was very unlikely to scan again until after researching even better scanners. So the current ones would be obsolete...
• Scanners have a fairly hefty upkeep cost and storing them in my cargo hold for a long time may not be very efficient.

However, a couple things have now changed. I can't get better scanners so what I have now won't become obsolete ever. I have a 15% reduction in upkeep cost which prolongs how long I can store them without losing money in the process. Planets are starting to get pretty expensive to take and develop but I can still take probably 3 more planets right now if I sell off the scanners.

Should I keep the scanners around as an investment in the future? How often do I need to scan to make it worth storing them? What are the numbers here? (All numbers are per scanner. I can use 5 at a time so quintuple these to get the total costs.)

Initial cost - 6490M
Upkeep cost - 208M
Resell value - 2450M
Repair cost - 4900M

I currently have the scanners purchased and equipped. Going forward my options are either to sell them off right now and rebuy the next time I want to scan or I can unequip them (triggering 10% of a repair) and pay upkeep on them every day until I use them again. So next time I scan I can either pay:

initial - resell = 4040M

OR

.1*repair + x*upkeep = 490M+208xM  (where x is number of days between scanning runs)

The breakeven point here is going to be:

4040M = 490M+208xM
x = 3550M/208M = 17.1 days

Now, you expect to get one of each artifact per day for every 4000 artifact points you make per hour. I'm a little over 8000 now, so I should be getting 2 star chart purgers per day. This means at the breakeven point I'll be able to find 34 new planets. Today I scanned up 95 new planets and only found a few that were really good so I'm probably going to want to get more than 34 planets from my next run...

So either I need to wait more than 17 days between scanning runs or I'm going to have to get more star chart purgers from the bad experience repeatable mission.


It is also important to note that if I sell off the scanners I have now I get to make immediate use of that cash. So even if I was planning on scanning again in 17 days I'm going to be better off vendoring the scanners and rebuying them.

I thought I was going to be convincing myself to hold on to these things but I've managed to do the opposite. Well, I think I may have convinced myself to do the star chart purger mission... But even if I do that I'm not going to scan again soon enough to justify holding on to the scanners. Time to vendor them!

Galaxy Legion: Extracted Lithovoric Stem

The new mission this biweek is actually incredibly similar to the last one. The last one gave a building worth 10% more research points, this one gives a building worth 10% more mining points. The only difference is this one costs 125 less energy up front but requires you to kill an NPC. It probably takes less energy to kill the NPC and you do get some bonus experience for killing the NPC but basically they're about the same idea.

I wanted to get all of the research one and I think mining points are a little better than research are at this point in time so I wanted to get all of these ones, too. So I did.

Now I can only hope that in two weeks I get to get 10% more artifact points on my 15 best planets...

Galaxy Legion: Xecti Signal Repeater

It's time for the next temporary mission in Galaxy Legion: The Broodmind Hunt. This mission returns to the old standard where each button press is worth 55 xp and costs 25 energy. You have to do the mission 75 times to get a reward and you can get the reward 15 times total. The reward, for a mere 1875 energy, is a planetary building of size 1 which increases research produced by 10%.

At first glance this seemed pretty good. My top plasma planet makes 390 research per hour so adding 10% onto that would be 39 research which seems awesome. But then you need to consider that it takes up a space so that number goes down a little. You need to actually consider how good it is not so much in terms of raw production but in terms of how space efficient it is. (That plasma, for example, has 52 base production. Assuming I have to replace a 2 research for 1 space building then this new building is worth 5 research for 1 space.) Ok, in that light it's simply amazing. But that's on my best research specific planet. How does it fare elsewhere? I jiggered my spreadsheet a little to work it out...

I could put it on my artifact specialized dyson planet for a gain of 68.35 research points but it would only be worth a little over 3 research per space. My 15th best gain in terms of actual production is 18 points per hour and is worth around 3.6 research per space.

I'm pretty sure the right answer is going to be just putting them where they make the most actual stuff but it doesn't really matter. If I put it where the building is most efficient or where it makes the most stuff it's still an excellent building and really worth getting.

This mission chain has rarely given me something I really wanted all the copies of but this one has managed to do it.

Galaxy Legion: Hull vs Shields

Hull and shields are two stats in the game Galaxy Legion with essentially the same purpose: they increase your maximum health. The two stats have a couple important differences but it really feels like one or the other should be superior most of the time. Both ships and bases use the two stats but they use them in different ways so it's possible what's right for one is wrong for the other. So, what are the differences between these two stats? Which should we use?

At any given level of research hull is more efficient on a per-space basis than shields are. For example, in a mid-high range (best one with an upkeep less than 1M) you can get either 222 shields in 39 space or 470 hull in 29 space. At the very top tier you can get 559 shields in 52 space or 1105 hull in 43 space. Hull is just better at increasing your maximum health. Is there something else going on to make shields better?

First of all there are artifacts which can temporarily buff each stat. I get enough of them that I can pretty much have both up the entire time I'm fighting if I want to. The shield buff is +100%, the hull buff is +50%. That chews up a lot of the gap between the two for sure, but not the entire thing. And to mitigate some of that advantage I actually have special modules which give me a flat +10% hull off the top...

The actual important difference is how you heal up damage to the two. Hull can be repaired to full by paying 1/6th of your upkeep cost. (You pay a proportional amount so if you were only half damaged you only pay 1/12th of your upkeep cost.) You can make this repair once every 5 minutes. Shields can't be repaired but instead recharge naturally. By default you recharge 2% of your maximum shields every 2 minutes but you can get modules which decrease the time between shield recharge ticks. (I'm down to a tick every 74 seconds.) So I can spend around 200M to repair my hull every 5 minutes or I can wait 62 minutes to heal my shields to full for free.

Also there are consumable artifacts that restore all of your hull, or all of your shields, or all of both. And when you level you get all of both. Optimally you'd probably focus on one of hull or shields and trade consumables with someone focusing on the other one but I'm too lazy to bother with that. I just use both when I feel the need to do so. (Typically when fighting a powerful enemy base!)

Which of those is better? Well, it depends on how you're playing. If you tend to do a lot of combat in a short period of time then paying for that repair is probably pretty good for you. The shields will probably only tick a couple times before you're done so they're really not very good at all. On the other hand if you're attacking sporadically throughout the day (say, for example, you're killing players off and on for red and yellow badges) then the shield recharge is a really substantial thing.

Personally I don't have any researched shield or hull modules equipped at all. I do have a bunch of mission reward stuff of both types equipped and would be more apt to equip a shield module than a hull module at this point because I tend to do a lot of periodic attacking throughout the day. Mostly I'm just making both of those numbers bigger with one-shot artifacts that permanently add to those stats without taking up any space at all.

Bases work a little differently. There's no way to speed up the rate their shields charge. Hull is always 50% better than shields are in terms of raw maximum health. There are no consumables to instantly restore either hull or shields. You can still repair to full but it has a 4 hour cooldown. You have an extra ability to heal hull, but not shields, based on how many fixer professions are in your legion. And perhaps most importantly you don't get to choose when the fight is happening. They do. It takes 50 minutes for the shields to charge up enough to break even with hull if you don't repair at all. If you do repair it takes 200 minutes for the shields to break even. Note you can actually repair a second time after 240 minutes so there's a pretty small window where shields could possibly beat hull. Nevermind the fact that pretty much every time our base has died most of the damage has come in a very short window of time, much smaller than 50 minutes. Massive shields can be demoralizing to legions that don't plan ahead and therefore get Bunged when they start attacking without realizing that they could win but they don't actually keep you alive better than equivalent level hull would.

So while I think shields vs hull is an interesting decision when it comes to how you build your ship I think it's a no-brainer when it comes to building a base. Shields are terrible. Unfortunately no one in my legion has researched hull high enough to build anything good at this point so we're stuck with shields. (Shield research helps defend planets and as such I've actually almost finished off the shield tree.)

Galaxy Legion: Base Defense

Yesterday my legion finally finished off the level 5 base upgrade. This ramps up our daily production and increases the number of defensive buildings we can build. To this point our defense has been pretty haphazard so I want to take a look at exactly what the different defensive structures do so I can say one way or another that we've built the 'right' defense.

There are four options for defensive structures and different values for each type. (Essentially we can pay 10x the cost and upkeep in order to double the values.) The four options are shields, hull, defense, and attack. Shields and hull both provide maximum health with slight variations. Defense reduces the amount of damage done per enemy shot. Attack increases the damage the enemies take per shot.

It's impossible to build a base such that the top legions can't disable it. What defending it does is increase how much it will cost them to do so in the hopes that they'll be persuaded to attack elsewhere. All the defensive stats work together to increase the cost to attack in either energy, money, or both.

Having a base get disabled doesn't actually do all that much. It's a little demoralizing to have your base get disabled and it decreases the amount of artifact points produced each day. Basically for every day you go without being disabled you get 10% more stuff, to a maximum of 100% more stuff. We're set up to get about 8k artifact points per person per day after we've been disabled and could get that as high as 16k if we were never disabled. I'd say we'll probably average around 10k if we stay with our current defensive configuration, so we're trying to earn an extra 6k artifact points per person per day. Byung says he values artifact points at about 50k each, so we're trying to earn about 300M per person per day if we can fully defend the base. We'd be paying an extra 225M per module we upgrade to the top tier so it is plausible that going up to the most expensive defenses could make sense...

In order to get an idea on how we should mix the different stats we need to throw some example attackers up against different options to see what the potential results could be. I'll take myself as a first example though I'm pretty weak for a level 446 person. For attacking a base I have 5200 attack, 3000 defense, and 7500 hull. Repairing to full costs me around 180M, and I have a damage cap of 859. The questions that need to be asked are: how many shots does it take me to kill a given base and how many times do I have to repair in order to shoot that many times.

Right now, with our random bad configuration, the base has 3250 attack, 13255 defense, and 55725 health. It has a damage cap of 300. This would take me 2643 shots to kill and I'd have to repair 64 times. Now, I'm not going to be doing this on my own. Split that load 20 ways and all of a sudden those numbers aren't very big at all. A couple of repair nanodrones and 600 energy and we're dead. No wonder our base seems to explode whenever a decent legion so much as looks at it!

Of course, as I was writing this we actually got locked onto by a semi-decent legion. They're the 36th strongest legion by strength score and were starting to make short work of our base. So I quickly threw together a quick spreadsheet and tried to find a way to spend some money to make the base better. (I built some 3rd best modules quickly when we leveled up but I could add a lot of defensive stats to the base by replacing those with some 2nd best modules.) I didn't have time to take shield regen into account, sadly, and just fixed our shields as where they were and tried to find a good mix of attack to defense in order to maximize the amount of times I personally would have to repair. I arrived at a total of 9982 attack and 16690 defense which would force me to shoot 4026 times and have to repair 255 times. That's a pretty big gain from where we were before though it did cost me a lot of money and really raise the base upkeep.

The changes did cause the attack to slow down for a bit and our massive amount of shields did actually regen a fair bit while they stopped attacking but they seem to have regrouped and are making steady progress. I wish I could find out if they'd invited in more legions to help out and kill us.

Mike let me know that base shields regen at a rate of 2% every 2 minutes. I will need to take that into account, use some bigger examples, and crunch some numbers more to see if there's a better set-up and if it could be worth going up to the top tier defensive structures.

Galaxy Legion: Xectiphage Tower

Today saw the launch of the next 2-week mission in Galaxy Legion. This mission finally broke the experience ratio pattern that has been true for the last few missions... It's up to 70 experience for 30 energy. This makes it a slighter better experience return on energy investment than has been the case. (2.33 vs 2.20) Unfortunately it has the additional requirement of needing an engineered virus artifact along with the 30 energy. It takes 20 shots to get a reward and you can get the reward 15 times.

The reward itself initially seems really weak. It's a planet building with no production value at all. It is 2 space for 300 defense which is really bad. (You can ultimately research planet buildings which are 1200 defense for the same 2 space.) It also has the added bonus that you get to pick one of three lists of races and then the planet is immune from invasion by those races.

How good is this? Well, the top legion in the game has 60 people in it. 20 of them are in the first list of races. 16 are in the second list of races. 24 are in the third list of races. (The third list also has the two races which get bonuses to invade planets so they're the odds on best choice.) Even still, if someone in that legion finds your planet they can just share it with the rest of their legion and still have a full 60% of their membership capable of invading your planet. If someone really, really wants the planet they can even race change into a different race from the list to take it from you.

In short, this building is terrible when it comes to long-term defense. There are ways around it and it's too weak on its own to justify building.

But what else can be done with it? Well, you could keep them on hand and then when you notice a planet is being attacked you can build it to make it immune from the attacker. He'll still be able to share it but you can be annoying with it... I guess that's something?

Another thing you can do is use it as a temporary defense when you invade a planet. You can prevent the original owner from attacking back which does have some value. Chances are you're going to build a ton of defenses on the planet and then temp flux it away in a week. This building will prevent the original owner from pinging it every week to prevent you from fluxxing it. They could keep sharing it to get someone else to ping it but I bet they get bored in a real hurry.

For that reason alone I think I want to get a couple of these to keep on hand. I can always mylarai extractor them back off once I finish fluxxing them away!


It's a good thing I only want one or two of them because the virus clause is actually a huge problem. You may recall an earlier mission which required 500 flux probes. I still haven't completed that mission. 300 virii sounds easier than 500 flux probes but it turns out you actually get 2 flux probes at a time so these are even harder to get a hold of. I hope I don't want the final reward from this mission chain since it's going to take many months to build up to 300 virii!

Galaxy Legion: Modulated Xecti Disruptor

It's time for the next temporary mission in the chain! The energy and experience remain the same as always, 55 experience for 25 energy. This time you need to do it 90 times before you get a reward and you can get the reward a total of 4 times.

What do you get for your 2250 energy? You get an interesting ship module. It's size 15 for 40 cloak and 20 attack. For an attack module that's a really inefficient ratio but it's pretty decent for cloak. And since it's a mission reward the upkeep is going to be substantially lower than top-end guns so pretty much everyone should get all 4 of these as soon as they can. You often want to have the most attack possible at any given time and this module just makes the number bigger, space inefficient though it may be.

You're actually better off getting tactical officers instead of decks to put this on if you value the cloak at nothing, so maybe this isn't so hot? Well, it turns out there is an added twist. If your race is Zolazin or if your class is spy or hacker then the cloak bonus is doubled. And if your race is Konqul or Drannik or if your class is raider then the attack bonus is doubled. Pull that off and this becomes much better than tactical officers.

Right now I'm none of those things. (I'm a Mylarai miner.) So is this module actually worth putting on? For 15 rank points I can get the deck space to put this on or I can get 30 tactical officers. So is the 40 cloak worth giving up on 10 attack? I'm not sure it is. I do eventually intend on switching my race back to Konqul at some point, so I will want to have these on hand at the very least. So I'm going to get them for the future and will probably decide at some point that the cloak is good enough to make space for these.

Galaxy Legion: Repairing

I got to thinking today... What actually impacts the cost to repair your ship? I'm planning on looking into how to defend a base and knowing the costs of repairing will help with that. I had a few ideas that I wanted to test...

• Does it matter what modules you have equipped?
• Does it matter what modules you have to pay upkeep on?
• Does it matter how much damage is being repaired?
• If so, is it by sheer quantity or by percentage of your max?

The first was easy to test. Take some damage, look at the repair cost, then put on a scan module. The repair cost didn't change. So, what you have equipped doesn't matter.

The second was also easy. I had a broken scan module in my inventory. I repaired it and the repair cost went up. So, what you have to pay upkeep on impacts the cost of repairing.

The third and fourth required a little manipulation but wasn't very hard. I played around a little bit by unequipping some hull modules and making note of how much it cost to repair each amount. It definitely varied as I changed the amount repaired and it turned out to vary exactly by percentage of hull repaired. In fact, the amount it cost to repair was UPKEEP/6*percentage_repaired.

I guess this wasn't all that much of a mystery and it didn't really take long to work out, but I wanted to know and now I do. Huzzah!

Galaxy Legion: Xecti Pathway Detector

A couple days late, but there's a new temporary mission up in Galaxy Legion. It has the now-standard experience to energy ratio of 55 for 25. It takes 60 completions to get the reward and you can get 15 of them. The reward is pretty unique this time around as it is a trap.

Traps are an interesting mechanic in the game. You can set a trap on your ship or on a planet and it stays there until a timer runs out or it gets triggered. Then it does something and disappears. A typical example is a trap you set on your ship that lasts a week and then if someone attacks you there's a chance they'll get debuffed to be unable to participate in combat for an hour. (They can use a null fuse artifact to remove it or wait out the hour.) This is a nice effect in that it may stop them from killing you but it doesn't really do much. But I get like 10 of them a week, so it's ok that it doesn't have a big impact since I can keep using it for a minor impact.

Having a trap be a mission reward is a bit different. I get 10 of the other trap every week without doing anything except have some artifact generating planets. I have to spend 1500 energy to get this trap and I can only get 15 of them so it better be pretty powerful and unique. Fortunately this one is. It's game altering! For one thing it lasts a year. So they're not expecting it to get triggered very often. You use it on a planet and it triggers if someone successfully obtains a scan of your planet. It doesn't matter how they learn about your planet, but when they do the trap triggers. You get immediately told that the planet was scanned, you get told by whom, and they can't share the planet with anyone for a day.

Without this artifact you can't really know if someone finds your planet until they attack it. (There is an artifact you can use which will tell you how many other people have found your planet but you don't know when to use them. If you're paranoid you may be using them every few days on your best planets but there's always going to be windows where people could find your planet and attack it.) Now you can sleep comfortably at night knowing that there's no way someone has found your planet without your knowledge. And if someone should ever find it they can't bring in help to attack it. Worst case scenario they can try to take it over alone and take one shot at the invasion.

I'm not even sure they'll get told when they hit it. If they don't then you're even safer since they probably won't even take their one shot until you get online yourself. Even if they do you're still pretty well off. One person may have a 5% or 10% chance to take over my best planet. 60 people with a 5% shot? They're over 95% to take it. That's a really substantial improvement and I get a full day to deal with the problem. (Probably I get Honest Bung to find a planet flux and just flux it away.)

So it's good, but you only get 15 of them. It feels like you should only use them on particularly good planets and save a few to retrap a planet that does get scanned. If you did the previous temp mission that put a lot of passive cloak and defense on a planet then it makes a great target for the trap (if there's no defense on the planet you still get notified when someone finds it but they get to take a 90% stab at it). So I think the planet needs to be so good you're willing to put up at least a nominal defense to use the trap. Personally I only have one planet good enough to do that (though I may build an awesome demon planet with my Mylarai racial) and  only did the mission 3 times. I figure I won't need more than that until the mission comes back around and I can grab more if I need them then. But I absolutely had to get a couple to really lock the door on my best planet.

Galaxy Legion: Damage Formula?

People on the message boards keep coming up with guesses as to what the damage formula is in Galaxy Legion. I care what the formula is because I want to be able to establish precisely what will happen when I add on specific amounts of extra attack. When, if ever, will it be better for leveling to spend my rank points on tactical officers instead of engineers, for example. Or exactly what impact switching to the Konqul or Drannik races will have.

The developer gave a hint early on that the formula wasn't just simple subtraction or anything and used a combination of a tanh function, a random factor, and the size of the ship being attacked. People have narrowed the likely formula down to the following:

dam = tanh(A*R/(5*D))*C

A = attacker's attack stat
R = some random factor
D = defender's defense stat
C = damage cap (2.5*rank for NPCs, MAX(decks/2, rank+19) for PCs)

It's not clear what the random factor is, or even where it should be in the formula. I've tracked 1180 shots against NPCs and it looks like R varies between .6 and 1.66 or so, with a single weird outlier at 2.1. Scan doesn't seem to impact the damage done to NPCs at all. It averages right around 1.01 and occurs more often around that point. Is is a sine wave? A normal distribution? I don't know!

What I care about most is how changing A changes the damage done. The random factor can be considered as a constant here since as far as I know it is fixed on any individual shot.

d/dA(dam) = d/dA(tanh(A*R/(5*D))*C) = C*R/(5*D)*sech^2(A*R/(5*D))

sech is a function that varies from 0 to 1. All of A, R, and D are positive so sech^2(A*R/5*D) is going to be strictly decreasing and is going to come awfully close to 0 when AR/5D gets into the 4-5 range.

As an example lets take a look at a typical NPC boss that seems to be cropping up a lot recently: lazuli fabrication plant. This guy has 2500 defense, a damage cap of 775, and 45000 health. 3 people can get rewards for him so I tend to do around 15000 damage to him. My buffed attack is 3678. Plugging this stuff into the formula above gets us:

d/dA(dam) = 775*R/(5*2500)*sech^2(3678*R/(5*2500))

Which for typical and extreme values of R gives us:

d/dA(dam){R=.6} = .036
d/dA(dam){R=1.01} = .057
d/dA(dam){R=1.66} = .082

dam{R=.6} = 135
dam{R=1.01} = 224
dam{R=1.66} = 351

To do my 15000 damage I need 67 'average' shots. Each shot costs 5 energy and I could, when I spend rank points, get 5 attack instead of that 5 energy. Adding 5 to my attack would increase my damage on every average shot by .285. So in order to break even on energy against this guy I would need to be taking average shots at him 786 times per level.

There are a few problems with that. For one, this boss is near optimal for adding attack, I think. He has a reasonably high defense and he has enough health that I'm less likely to get hurt by rounding issues. To explain what I mean about that, take a look at the flimsiest NPC that I can spawn, the sha'din charger. When I last attacked him (he levels as I do so things change a little) his stats were 1120 defense, 1400 health, damage cap of 815. My attack at the time was 4438. So for him...

d/dA(dam) = 815*R/(5*1120)*sech^2(4438*R/(5*1120))

Which for typical and extreme values of R gives us:

d/dA(dam){R=.6} = .070
d/dA(dam){R=1.01} = .082
d/dA(dam){R=1.66} = .061

dam{R=.6} = 361
dam{R=1.01} = 541
dam{R=1.66} = 706

I find it interesting that if I roll high on the random number roll here the impact of more attack is actually decreased. A high roll edges me closer and closer to the 4-5 range of X where sech^2x trends to 0, so even though I'm multiplying by a bigger external factor out front with the higher R it gets overshadowed by the much smaller sech^2 factor. Do note that I was Konqul at the time with a 20% bonus to my attack, and probably had used a limited attack buff as well.

I almost always killed these guys in 3 shots. On one occasion I did manage to kill one in 2 shots. But in general it feels like adding on an extra couple damage isn't going to be able to bring me down from 3 shots to 2 shots and therefore any actual 'gain' is completely wasted as overkill. I'd need to know the distribution of R to work out how many shots I could expect to save but I'm pretty confident it wouldn't ever overpower the impact of just having more energy to shoot with.

Of course I'm actually somewhere between these two extremes. I kill some chargers. I kill some boss refineries. If I was fighting exclusively bosses then going with more attack makes sense for now. But since I'm fighting a lot of lesser guys and spending an awful lot of energy on missions instead of fighting it makes sense to keep pounding away at engineers.

Galaxy Legion: Planet Buffing Races

There are three races in the game which have to be unlocked by doing a long mission chain and which have the ability to permanently buff a planet. These buffs all work the same way, the different races just buff a different planet production resource. Every 40 hours you can spend 200 energy with no experience gain. In return you get to increase the abundance of one planet by one tier (you add .25 to the multiplier).

I've been working towards completing the mission chain to unlock the artifact race but have hit a bit of a snag. It turns out I've actually been running at a money deficit for the last little while by working on that mission chain. (It requires a very high amount of scanning to do the missions, so I've had to keep switching in and out scanners, weapons, and energy modules as I work on it. Each time you unequip something it takes damage and it costs money to repair them, and I've been paying an awful lot of money to do so.)

I'm also very close to completing the mission chain to unlock the mining race. (I did most of the chain already because I wanted to get a passive cloak reward for my awesome planet.) I'm running low on money and the way you net more money is by spending less or earning more. Stopping the artifact chain for a while is a good way to spend less. Buffing my mining planets is a good way to earn more. So it seems like spending a couple days to finish off the mining chain could make a lot of sense.

The question then is what exactly will this ability do? How will I use it? Overall planet production pretty much boils down to size times abundance so it will be more efficient when used on a bigger planet. Most of my current mining planets are not very big but the thought crossed my mind of taking a truly terrible research planet that happens to be very massive and buff it up over time. Let's compare...

I have very massive planets now and their production from buildings is 40. Double that for owning the planet for 5 days and multiply by the .25 bonus and I'd be adding 20 points per hour every time I use the ability on a very massive planet. Large planets seem to have a base of 30 and very large a base of 34. So a large would get 15 per hour and a very large 17. My very large starts at a 2.25 multiplier. It will take 18 uses to max it out. If I were to abandon it and replace it with a very massive planet with no mining at all my two potential income functions are:

40*34*2*18/2*(2.5+6.75)+34*2*6.75*t = 459t+226440

40*40*2*18/2*(.25+4.5)+40*2*4.5*t = 360t+136800

Huh. I will admit to being surprised at this outcome. I was expecting it would make sense to grab the worthless very massive planet and buff it up but it looks to be not even close. I guess the difference between the two sizes isn't actually that big (I gain 3 per hour per use) and the difference in starting value is huge (153 compared to 0). If I could use this ability into infinity then I'd start profiting after using it 52 times.

It's capped at 6.75 per planet, but I can actually use it more often on the naked planet. I only got it up to 4.5 in the example; I could have used it 9 more times. Maybe a better comparison would be to look at what I could do with 3 planets? I could have three copies of my base 34@2.25 planet or I could have two copies of my base 40@0 and one copy of a base 34@2.25.

3*34*2*2.25*(t+40*53)+40*54/2*(17+918)+918*t = 459t+973080+1009800+918t = 1377t+1982880

1*34*2*2.25*(t+40*53)+40*54/2*(20+1080)+1080*t = 153t+324360+1188000+1080t = 1233t+1512360

Even in the 'fair' comparison the huge planets lose out. Both the flat amount earned as we use the ability 54 times and the amount earned every hour thereafter are lower with this option. As long as you have access to a large number of 34@2.25 planets you're golden.

I don't have an unlimited number of them, but I do have a lot and the ability to get more. It takes a month to fill out one of those planets and I can colonize 22 new planets each month so I'll have plenty of places to use the ability. Right now I actually can't afford to take that many planets, unfortunately, but hence why I want to start buffing my mining points.

Of course there is also the issue that I'm building awesome planets without having any plans for defending them. That could actually be a real problem but I figure I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. (Possibly I'll need to start cloaking planets as I buff them?)

Galaxy Legion: Xecti Ensconcing Field

Another temporary mission launched today. The reward is an interesting one, to be sure. The mission is the standard 55 xp for 25 energy (which I have come to detest... I've been doing missions with a 2.6:1 ratio instead of a 2.2:1 ratio and the difference in leveling speed is staggering). You have to do that 50 times to get the reward, and you can get the reward 15 times total. The reward is an NPC spawn which drops an item you can use on any planet to give a permanent passive bonus of 80 cloak and 80 defense. If the planet should happen to be unscanned (check with a flux probe) the bonus is doubled up to 160 of each. Do it all 15 times and you're looking at a passive 2400 to cloak and defense before taking legion bonus into account.

That's enough to make a planet really hard to scan on its own. Coupled with a bunch of buildings you can get all the way to undetectable. Even if you're not going to go all the way the extra 2400 passive defense will at least give you a chance of surviving should someone hit the lottery and actually scan your planet. (I constantly live in fear that someone is going to scan my awesome planet, but now it feels like it actually has enough defense to maybe not fall.)

At any rate, I have a planet that is 4 times as good as my second best planet and 10 times as good as my new colonizing options so I have a clear place to use these items. In fact, I already have. I cleared the whole thing out with the aid of a couple energy cubes and buffed up my planet nice and spiffy like. If I didn't have an awesome planet I'm not sure I'd bother with this mission. Sure, you can protect something pretty good, but you can also spend the ~20000 energy someplace else and do this mission when it comes back if you even get a planet you really want to defend.

Galaxy Legion: PvP Badge Values

While I was off at WBC the Galaxy Legion game updated with a bunch of new features. One of the things they added was legion base combat where essentially you can spawn a random enemy base to attack. The enemy base will have some abilities they can use to try to defend themselves from your invasion and they can build defensive structures. You have 8 hours to kill it. If you do then the top X damage dealers (where X is defined as 5 times the level of the base you're attacking) get some silver badges as a reward. Also the enemy legion suffers a penalty to their base resource production for having their base destroyed. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot you can do to stop them other than building the right defenses and having someone to hit your 4 hour repair cooldown at the right time so it isn't really interactive but there is something there.

Your legion can find a base to attack every 8 hours. In order to spawn a base you need to spend red badges which are earned for disabling enemy ships. There are a bunch of rewards you can buy with red and silver badges so the question is what do they do and is it better to get the red badge ones first or to try to convert them into silver badges?

Red badges really only turn into one thing other than silver badges: guns. You can have up to 4 of these guns total and there are three tiers of guns. I have 4 of the first tier already, purchased before they added the next two in. If I buy the higher ones I will have to replace the lower ones. So I can spend 128 red badges and 9 ship space for 100 attack. I can do that 4 times. After that the only thing left to do with red badges is turn them into silver badges (or stop earning them at all).

Silver badges turn into 4 different and unique items. You can get a permanent base health buff, you can get a planet defensive building, you can get a ship module for attacking NPCs, and you can get a ship module for attacking bases. In detail:

2 silver badges adds 10 shields and 15 hull to your base. There's no space usage here, it's just a permanent buff. It's awfully minor though, and I imagine it exists mostly as a badge sink for people who have maxed out on everything else.

10 silver badges gets you a planet structure which is size 1 and gives artifact 1. This is a decent but not spectacular production building. On top of that it also gives 300 defense which is worse than the best defensive buildings but not by a lot. Oh, and it gives +20% defense on the planet. You can build 2 per planet. Adding 40% on to your actual defensive buildings is a really big deal if you're trying to defend a planet with defense. As such you're probably going to want 2 of these on any planet worth defending. (Which I don't think is very many planets, to be fair.)

24 silver badges gets you a ship module which is size 20 for 40 scan. This is again not spectacular but is still decent, especially since scan is a stat you want to max out whenever you're really using it. On top of that it adds 5% to your attack when attacking a base. You can have 3 of these equipped and you really want 3 of them.

32 silver badges gets you a ship module which is size 20 for 50 energy. Like above this is not a great ratio but more energy is always good even if it isn't terrible efficient. On top of that it adds 5% to your attack when attacking NPCs. You can have 3 of these equipped and you still really want all 3 of them for the energy alone.


How good is the extra attack? I'll look into it in more detail at a later date but I built a pivot on my spreadsheet to work out what would have happened to the fights I'd tracked if my attack was different. I have data for 1079 shots. Over those shots I would have saved 77 shots if I had an extra x1.15 multiplier on my NPC attack value. By contrast, adding 300 attack from the bigger red badge guns would have shaved off 75 shots. Either way I'm only looking at saving 7% of my energy spent on attacking NPCs. (I built this part of my sheet to look into what switching to a Drannik race would do. It's +40% NPC attack and I decided it wasn't good enough.)

Note that those 77 shots would only cost 385 energy. So the 3 modules which add 50 energy each every time I level will have a much greater impact than the NPC attack will when it comes to killing NPCs. And will do something when I'm attacking other things too.

The base attack is in some ways worse (I don't shoot bases very often) and in some ways better. One of the reasons the NPC attack isn't very good is it often doesn't do anything. Because most NPCs don't have much health I already kill them in 3 or 4 shots. In order for NPC attack to actually have an impact it has to knock off a full shot; mostly it just means I overkill them more which does nothing. Bases have a much larger health pool and therefore the odds of just adding overkill instead of real damage goes down.


The questions now are how much does it actually cost to get a red badge, and how much does it cost to convert into silver badges?

You get a red badge each time you kill another player with a couple restrictions. They have to be within a certain level range (60%-140% of your level) and you can't have killed them in the last 12 hours. (To prevent you from just farming some easy target.) You get a 'battle tab' which has 10 random players within your level range on it at any given time. Shoot them even once and they disappear and a new random player comes in. I've been keeping mental note of how many shots it takes me to kill other players and it seems to be around 10 on average, but I'm picking off the people who seem weakest first. If I was really going at it I'd probably end up at more like 12 shots per kill. Also sometimes they have defended themselves with traps so I need to use null fuses to keep going. And there's the repair cost involved from the damage they do back to me. (Though I have a lot of shields so that doesn't tend to be very high.)

At any rate, I think saying it costs about 60 energy is valid. These shots tend to have a very high experience per energy ratio.

How about a silver badge? Well, in order to spawn a base it costs 5 red badges. You can keep the random base you spawn or you can spend 5 more to get a new random base. (I imagine if you do this a lot you'd start identifying which bases are well defended and which ones aren't.)

Bases are defended to varying degrees and I haven't fought enough to have a good idea how many shots they take to kill. I just spawned one and it will take 24 shots to kill and will return a total of 15 silver badges assuming 10 different people shoot the base. I will get at most 2 of those 15. So for this base (which seems particularly weak) the total spend is 420 energy to get a spread of 15 silver badges. 28 energy per badge.

Lets say we'd randomly spawned my legion's base. It would take me about 6700 shots to kill my base. It's a higher level base so the returns are higher: 50 silver badges spread 20 ways. Nevermind the fact we don't have 20 people who could help. So the total spend is 33800 energy for 50 silver badges. Of which I'd get at most 4. 676 energy per badge.

It's also important to note that while the experience for shooting players is actually good the experience for shooting bases is very bad. I practically soloed a level 3 base a couple weeks ago and the substantially lower experience return cost me about 2 levels. So there is a very real extra cost to killing defended bases.

Galaxy Legion: Adaptive Spire

It's been a little while since the last temporary mission chain came to a close and a new one finally started today. The last chain started with a real doozy, needing 500 flux probes to get it done. This one is a lot more lenient. For a mere 1500 energy you get 3300 experience which is a 2.2 xp/e ratio. This is a fairly standard and unexciting amount. The reward for doing so is an interesting little size 1 planet building that changes depending on the type of planet on which it gets built.

If the planet is typically a mining planet (barren, toxic, volcanic) then the building gives 2 mining production.

If the planet is typically an artifact planet (icy, terra, desert) then the building gives 2 artifact production.

If the planet is typically a research planet (metallic, gas) then the building gives 2 research production.

If the planet is awesome (exotic, dyson) then the building gives one of each production.

2 production for 1 size is pretty much as good as it gets. If you don't have a high level of building tech researched these are going to be awesome. If you do have a lot of building tech researched these are still going to be pretty good. Just the way the pieces fit together it won't be good on every planet but it will be worth putting somewhere for sure. Especially since you can only get 20 of them and you can put up to 2 on each planet.

But how good are they actually going to be? I have a dyson and on it they're worth almost 48 points per hour. For 1500 energy? Sign me up. Beyond that it gets a lot worse. My next best planet has them worth only 14 per hour. My 10th best planet for them has them worth less than 10 per hour. That's ok to be sure, but is it really worth 1500 energy? I'm spending my energy right now trying to race change into a Taltherian, and if I do that I'll gain the ability to spend 200 energy for 20 artifact production per hour. That's 15 times as efficient which is a pretty big deal.

I don't actually think it's going to be worth delaying that while I scoop up 20 of these buildings. I'm thinking I'll probably grab 2 for my dyson but beyond that I'll ignore it until it comes back around a second time.

Galaxy Legion: Rank Points

Each time you level up in Galaxy Legion you get 5 points to spend upgrading your ship in some way. There are 6 different things you can spend these points on and unlike most Facebook games there isn't a strictly correct choice between them. There are a couple duds but there are 3 top tier choices that lead to different play styles. You can get cargo space, ship size, attack, defense, energy, or research.

Cargo space increases the size of your cargo hold by 5. This lets you hold 5 extra artifacts, or 50 extra minerals, or extra modules you aren't actually equipping on your ship. In some games this would be a good way to increase your income (in the game Gazillionaire how much money you could make was directly related with how much cargo space you had) but that isn't the case in Galaxy Legion. The mineral system is a way to seamlessly increase income as you level up and to give slight discounts on purchases to people who plan far enough ahead but having more cargo space really just means less button clicks for minerals. Being able to carry around extra stuff provides some level of flexibility but it's not that impactful. Cargo space is the sort of thing where you _need_ enough to store a basic amount of stuff and any beyond that is just convenience. There are two different artifacts that increase your cargo space as well as some mission rewards that do so as well so you're not stuck buying it with rank points. I suspect everyone who starts out spends a few points here to get up to a decent size but it's not something you're going to sink all your points in. Unless you're Honest Bung and are trying to corner the market on everything...

Ship size increases the size of your ship by 1. Ship size does two things: it increases the amount of damage you take in combat and it lets you equip more stuff. There's a plethora of random modules you can earn from missions and from killing NPCs that you'll want to equip on your ship. As you research better stuff in the different research trees you'll find that the size of those modules also gets bigger as well. Until you get to a very high level you'll always be able to get some benefit from more ship size as there's bound to be something you don't have space for right now. Focusing on ship size is a very strong strategy, and is the one recommended by many veterans on the forums and the wiki. It's important to note that having a bigger ship doesn't really make you much better at any specific task but lets you be more versatile and do lots of things with the same ship setup. (I can equip all of my scanners with my ship, doubling its size wouldn't make me any better at scanning but would let me keep guns or armor equipped while scanning.) There is an artifact you can get with artifact points to increase this value as well along with a few NPC drops. One downside to ship size is if you're really into raiding disabled ships. Success chance there is based on crew size, which is the next 4 categories combined. Spending your points here instead of on one of them will make you worse at raiding.

Tactical officers give you 2 more attack. Note that very quickly you'll have weapons with a better space to damage ratio than 2 to 1, so getting ship size is better than getting tactical officers while you still have more guns to put on. Once all your guns are on, though, tactical officers is the only way to get more attack. Want to be the best planet invader around? You need tactical officers. Want to do the most damage possible to other players in pvp? You need tactical officers. Pvp in this game tends to center around people near your level and someone who has tactical officers has a huge advantage in those situations. They'll tend to have a smaller ship so they'll take less damage and deal more because they have a higher attack. There is no other recurring way to get tactical officers than by spending rank points. (And there are ways to lose them! You start with 5 and I'm down to 3. I think Mike has none at all.)

Helmsmen give you 2 more defense. This sounds analogous to attack but it's actually a lot worse for a few reasons. Attack is useful in planet invasions, ship defense is worthless. Attack increases the damage you do which decreases the amount of energy you need to spend to kill enemies. Defense decreases the damage you take but you have many ways to heal to full with the press of a button (and some cash) so it doesn't really do a lot. Stacking on more health can be just as effective (or even more so) though I don't really think either is very good. Defense certainly has a place in reducing how often you need to repair but the key is you never need to max out your defense. Getting more ship size so you can equip more defenses is probably a better way to go. And finally there is actually an artifact that gives you 3 helmsmen so even if you felt like you needed a little more defense you're going to get it for free eventually.

Engineers give you 2 more max energy. Max energy is relevant when you're away from the game for a long time (so it has time to charge to full) or when you level (you get reset to full energy) or when you use an item which restores your energy to full (you get one of these once a week or so). Having more energy means you get to do more things. You can shoot at enemies more frequently. You can complete missions faster, getting the rewards faster. You also just flat out level faster as well. Leveling up gives you more planets to colonize which increases your income, artifacts, or research. It also puts you into pvp combat with higher level people and your ship rates to just be worse than theirs. Personally I decided artifacts were awesome when I started playing so I've put a premium on leveling up and therefore have spent most of my rank points here. I definitely level faster than most anyone else but am pretty bad at pvp. Fortunately if they aren't online I can just shoot them a lot of times if I really want to shoot them, and I can afford to do that since I have a lot of energy. I figure I make 284 energy per hour. 51 of that is from my constant charge from relays. 22 of that is from ship modules that add max energy. The remaining 201 comes from my 1935 engineers. (The effect they have compounds on itself. I level faster because I have more max energy and because my energy refreshes when I level I get my bigger energy pool more often.) This makes me feel like I need to keep spending all my points on engineers even though my ship is starting to get awfully cramped. There is no recurring way to get more engineers other than with rank points.

Spending a point on scientists give you 3 research per hour. I really don't know how to compare this to the other options. More research lets you get better ship modules, though you will need more ship size to make proper use of them. You can get a new planet every 4 levels and my typical research planet is worth 150 research per hour. Spending 4 levels worth of rank points will get you 60 research per hour. The big thing, I think, is eventually you cap out on research when you've researched everything in the game. All the other options (well, except maybe cargo space) keep providing their benefit over the whole game. The research seems like it will eventually tail off and you'll wish you had anything else. Possibly you could forgo ever colonizing research planets and just get artifacts and mining but I don't know that you'd really find enough good artifact planets to make that work out. Also, you can get an artifact with artifact points to get these.


Most people will focus on one of ship size, attack, or energy. I started off with a ship size focus but once my ship got big enough to hold all my guns I switched to energy and never looked back. I think that was the right plan for my style of play where I just want to get my numbers bigger. I level faster than I would under another plan and I get to complete more missions. I also focused heavily on artifact planets which has let me make up the gaps from having a relatively small ship size. (Artifact points can permanently increase max health, defense, ship size, cargo space, research, and give you more rank points.) But just because this was the right plan for me doesn't make it the strictly right plan which makes me happy with the game design. Someone who focuses on attack will have a different experience than I but they'll really get to blow dudes up which probably makes them happiest.

Galaxy Legion: All Modules

I took a journey through the wiki today and made a list of every module I could find that you could build on your ship. The question being, of course, just how big does my ship have to be before I actually suffer losses by not having access to every module in the game. (Because I vendored one, for example.) People often say that equipping the very high end researched stuff is impractical because the upkeep costs are ludicrous. I don't know that I believe that, but I made two lists: one using all the top tier stuff and one using the penultimate tier stuff. The space taken by everything I could find is therefore either 4381 or 4094.

Currently I have 679 deck space and get an extra 1 deck every 11.6 hours. If I wanted to I could also get 5 more every level, and I level in actually around that same frequency. (Though if I started spending my level up bonus on decks instead of engineers that rate would certainly fall.)

Assuming I don't spend level ups on deck I will max out in 1789 days, or 1651 days.

Assuming I do spend level ups on deck and somehow keep the same pace I will max out in 298 days, or 275 days.

I'm going to continue to increase my artifact points per hour number so my rate will pick up as time goes on also. If I was willing to level up on deck it's actual conceivable I might max out. If I don't, well, I just don't see it happening. Also consider that the game keeps adding in more and more new modules and it's quite possible I'll just never get to max ever without buying more decks which is something I'm convinced I don't really want to do.

Galaxy Legion: Ship-Bot Frequency

The only way I'm increasing my ship size at the moment is via artifact points. One artifact, the ship-bot, increases your ship size by 2. Assuming each artifact has equal odds of being chosen (I've seen some distributions from people who tracked what they got and it seemed pretty even) how many artifact points does it take to get a ship-bot? 

The average cost for an artifact is 1596 and there are 60 different ones. As such it seems reasonable to assume that for every 95750 artifact points earned you'll get 2 decks. (It's actually better than this since one of the artifacts costs 20000 and you can remove it from the list of options by hitting the button with fewer than 20000 points stored up. 

I make 4135 artifact points per hour so I can expect to get 1 deck space every 11.6 hours. Now I just need to figure out how much deck space I need for all the modules in the known universe!

Galaxy Legion: Kronyn Anomaly Engine

Another two weeks have passed and it's time to take a look at the next mission in the temporary chain. Every mission in the chain thus far has had rewards I've really wanted to get so I had high hopes for this next one. Unfortunately it doesn't immediately pop out at me as being fantastic. The mission can be done 4 times, costs 2250 energy per completion, and is worth 2.2 xp per energy. The reward is a ship module:

size 10: 40 defense, 25 cloak

As it stands right now I'm using standard defense modules which are size 42 for 126 defense. Clearly getting these new modules is better than what I'm using now since all 4 of them would take less space, have more defense, and give some cloak for free. On the other hand defense isn't a huge priority for me right now as evidenced by the fact I'm using such bad defense modules in the first place. I'm using 2 standard defense modules right now for a total of 84 space for 252 defense, but if I spent a bunch of research I could put on 60 space for 250 defense (44 hours of research) or 84 space for 478 defense (504 hours of research). I have no intention of doing even that much research anytime soon.

Similarly for cloak I don't even equip a single standard cloaking module most of the time. I can certainly do better than a 10 for 25 ratio if I ever do decide to put on some cloak to go hacking. I may well research better cloaking in the near future but my reason for doing so would be to get better planet cloak buildings, not better ship cloak modules.

I could get them and turn them into complex tech parts but the energy cost to do so is high compared to killing the NPC referred to yesterday so I don't think I want to get them for that reason. Eventually my ship size will be big enough to just have them equipped all the time for small gains (I should work out when that eventually will be) so I probably want to keep the option around to pick them up. But I don't think it's worth grabbing them during this temporary window. I'm going to have to wait months before I can do the prerequisite chain (500 flux probes) but since I don't really want them before then anyway I should be ok leaving them be and spending the 9000 energy on other stuff in the meantime.