Exploration value formulae

marx

marx
MattG said:
The same median ELW should net somewhere around 4.2million if you were original first discoverer, and then go back and become first mapper. Also, I don't believe this requirement actually needs you to have discovered the body pre-FSS - if you discover an ELW now, sell data then go back and map it, and sell mapping data you should still get the boosted payout. Probably more effort than it's worth though :)
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Hm, that's odd. From having recently gone around, I'm fairly certain I got five million per pre-FSS ELW. Maybe it's still different... or maybe I just didn't notice, since I mostly looked at the overall payout, where the difference might have been made up from the increased honk values and such.
Either way, unfortunately I couldn't check now without having to go far.

ReXxX said:
I find that a bit surprising, actually. I ALWAYS take the trip if there are AW's to scan. I'll even travel 200kLs+ for Metal-rich bodies, at least if there's more than one. MRB's alone has earned me nearly half a billion credits, out of a ~Cr10bn total payout earned from exploration, so I'll keep scanning them :)
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Sure, MR are usually closer, but AWs are both less valuable than the various TCs and are farther out than them. Since you only get extra credits and an extra tag for mapping them, but no extra information, from both a credits / hour and a systems | bodies per hour perspective, it's more worth it to just leave them be, jump to your next system and explore that instead.
But this is assuming you care about the time spent, of course.
Metal rich bodies, on the other hand, can be landable, so if they have POIs, then there's also that an as extra reward.
 

MattG

MattG
marx said:
Hm, that's odd. From having recently gone around, I'm fairly certain I got five million per pre-FSS ELW. Maybe it's still different... or maybe I just didn't notice, since I mostly looked at the overall payout, where the difference might have been made up from the increased honk values and such.
Either way, unfortunately I couldn't check now without having to go far.
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You know, I might’ve mistakenly divided by one of the other factors (1.23), which would put median over 5m. I blame Monday though.
 

ReXxX

ReXxX
marx said:
[...]
But this is assuming you care about the time spent, of course.
[...]
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Nah, not very much, at least :p I've got over 3200 played hours on this game already, and I've used 90% of that time in the black, exploring all over. That being said, I still haven't gotten around to taking the trip to Beagle Point, or Hutton Orbital for that matter :p But they are both on my to-do-list :p I just recently started messing around with Engineering, and even more recently got my first Guardian upgrade, despite the fact that they've been in the game for a LONG time. My point is, I still have a lot of aspects of this game to dive into, so I know I'm gonna spend at least another 3200+ hours in-game before, if ever, I abandon the game. This, combined with the fact that I'm on 100% disability pay, and will never work again, gives me all the time in the world to play the game as I see fit :)

Maybe one day, I'll even see a living Thargoid. I've only seen one so far, and that was in the form of a wreckage site :p AFAIK, I've never been in the same system as a live Thargoid. If it hadn't been for youtube/screenshots, I wouldn't know what they look like, even :p Not that I'm complaining about this, I'd probably last 10 seconds TOPS against a Thargoid, seeing as my fighting skills are non-existing :p

O7
 

Valije

Valije
marx said:
Well, @MattG
Either way, as you can see from Matt's reply, you get a surprisingly large amount of credits for mapping stuff that someone else discovered. I don't know about others, but personally, when the fleet carriers' price was announced, I went and looked through my earlier ELWs that I hadn't mapped yet. Turns out that seventy were already mapped by others in those 16 months, and that represented a quarter of mine. Interestingly, the majority of them were mapped by three Commanders in particular, so it looks like they were going after shared ELWs.
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A case of "road to riches", probably.
 

ReXxX

ReXxX
Redfox said:
A case of "road to depression" if someone would force me to do that. I can barely imagine how boring and sad it must be scrounging the exploration remains of objects discovered by others.
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In part, I see where you're coming from. If I were forced to do it, I wouldn't even consider it. I'm also quite firm in my opinion that "If you follow a path through the galaxy that someone else has already taken, you are NOT an explorer. You are a traveler."

Exploration is, IMHO, ALL about finding new stuff, not what everyone has already seen or know about. At the very least: If the end goal is to go to BP or Colonia or Sag A*, that's fine. But find your own path to get there, you never know what you might discover.

The other part would say that there might be half a billion credits in mapping just the ELW's I've discovered pre-FSS, and if I were to take that path and retrace my jumps to map all of them, I know there has to be at least an additional 4 or 5 billion credits in all the WW's, TCHMC's, AW's and other stuff in between those ELW's. And that's a nice payout, accompanied by a nice trip around the galaxy.

But yeah, if you'd do something like that, it would absolutely HAVE to be by your own choice only. And, seeing that there are a lot of ways to earn those sums waaaay quicker, it'd have to be for more than just the payout, like the trip itself or a personal goal of some sort. :)

O7
 

Frankymole

Frankymole
MattG said:
It's a yes/no thing, you either get full bonus or nothing.
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The only difference with using a different number of probes either side of the "efficiency" number is that you could get kudos (or shame, respectively) when someone looks at the body on EDSM, since it lists the number of probes used to map each body since the new DSS came in. Though if you're the first person there, and it's far out, possibly no-one but you would ever look it up :)
 

ReXxX

ReXxX
Frankymole said:
The only difference with using a different number of probes either side of the "efficiency" number is that you could get kudos (or shame, respectively) when someone looks at the body on EDSM, since it lists the number of probes used to map each body since the new DSS came in. Though if you're the first person there, and it's far out, possibly no-one but you would ever look it up :)
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If anyone would actually go to the point of shaming me for using any given amount of probes, or even be at the point where they consider that to be a notable thing in any way, I would do everything in my power to find out who they are IRL, travel to their home, hug them really good and apologize on behalf of all humanity and evolution for being cursed with a micro-willy, if they have one at all :p
 

Vorticity

Vorticity
q seems to be a constant. It, too, probably needs tweaking - and I can't help but feel I'm missing it's significance - but it's approximately: 0.56591828
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Just curious if anyone has ever tried to write the payout formulae based upon Radius in stead of Mass.

I noticed that 0.56591828 is pretty close to 1/sqrt(PI) = 0.56418958354.... (or '* q' in the formula is close to '/ sqrt(PI)')

Also the impact of mass is ~ power(mass, 1/5), but mass itself ~ power(radius, 3) (for a fixed density). Hmmm, maybe density is the missing link.

I've attached a plot which shows Mass (EM) vs Radius (m) for all my discoveries. Some planet types have one curve, some have multiple and some are all over the place.

Ah well, just a thought.
 

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SteAStro88

S
I tried to compare the 3.3 planetary formula to the Terraformable water world in the list of value examples and it doesn't make sense to me. We know the q value, we know the mass which is listed, we know the K.. But the formula "k+ (k*m*q)" doesn't bring the value in the list, especially " m0.2 " I'm not sure how to interpret it.. Can somebody explain it?
 

MattG

MattG
SteAStro88 said:
I tried to compare the 3.3 planetary formula to the Terraformable water world in the list of value examples and it doesn't make sense to me. We know the q value, we know the mass which is listed, we know the K.. But the formula "k+ (k*m*q)" doesn't bring the value in the list, especially " m0.2 " I'm not sure how to interpret it.. Can somebody explain it?
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So the forum "upgrade" a while back destroyed the formatting, but it should be "mass to the power of 0.2".

For terraformable ww, the average mass listed was 0.453011. To the power of 0.2, it becomes 0.8535358.
The value of k, assuming full terraformable bonus (often not true, but fine for the example) is (64831 + 116295) = 181126
And we have constant q as 0.56591828

This gives: 181126 + (181126 * 0.8535358 * 0.56591828) ~= 268616

That's obviously without First Discoverer, or Mapping etc, but hopefully shows how the formula works.
 

Staarlord

S
Question. On my old Staarlord (Xbox) account, I pretty much only sought undiscovered systems. On my new Spellsword (PC) account, I’ve been just searching for unmapped systems and finishing the mapping. In and just outside the bubble. As such I’m not really FSSng much and just approaching the bodies and letting them get auto discovered. Do I lose an FSS bonus this way?
 

iain666

iain666
Staarlord said:
Question. On my old Staarlord (Xbox) account, I pretty much only sought undiscovered systems. On my new Spellsword (PC) account, I’ve been just searching for unmapped systems and finishing the mapping. In and just outside the bubble. As such I’m not really FSSng much and just approaching the bodies and letting them get auto discovered. Do I lose an FSS bonus this way?
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No. You get the normal payout for planets very close to the jump in point that you always discover that way, so the fact that you flew a bit further to do it doesn't change that.
 

MattG

MattG
I've updated the first post with details of a new Odyssey bonus. TLDR, mapped bodies in Odyssey get a 30% increase.

If you map in Odyssey and sell in Horizons, you also get the bonus - but if you map in Horizons and sell in Odyssey you do not.

If 30% of the value of the mapped body (before First Discoverer and Efficiency) is below 555 credits, it will be uplifted to 555 credits. This only affects small rocky/icy bodies, and was particularly annoying to track down.

I see no evidence of First Footfall affecting payouts at all.

There is also something peculiar happening for bubble systems. They don't seem to get the new 30% bonus, but do seem to get the First Discoverer bonus - but seemingly not consistently. I expect it's related to the bodies being untaggable, and if it really interests you I encourage you to do your own investigation - but I personally don't care that much :)

I updated the table of median values for different bodies to assume Odyssey now when mapping. I will recheck the Horizons situation if/when it gets the new planetary tech and mechanics.

Many thanks to everyone on IGAU Discord that helped with working this out - particularly Coddiwompler who provided me with a great deal of data.
 

Eahlstan

E
MattG said:
There is also something peculiar happening for bubble systems. They don't seem to get the new 30% bonus, but do seem to get the First Discoverer bonus - but seemingly not consistently.
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There are bodies in the bubble that are reported as
Code: 
wasDiscovered: false, wasMapped: true
in the journals.

I did some test a while ago (surely not as intensive as you) and concluded that they don't really fit any calcualtions, but come close to the same as
Code: 
wasDiscovered: true, wasMapped: false
.
Of course this was before we knew about that 30% bonus, so I can't say if this is still true, but if you say that bonus doesn't apply it shouldn't have changed.
Sadly I only checked terraformables (force of habit), so the overestimating that occured when I did
Code: 
basevalue * firstdiscovery * 3.33333333 * effmapped
might have been caused by a wrongly applied terraformable bonus.
(
Code: 
basevalue * firstdiscovery * 3.33333333 * effmapped
overestimated by about 4.6% -
Code: 
basevalue * 8.0956 * effmapped
underestimated by about 3.6%)
Did you check those flags?
 
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