Preliminary Exploration A naly

Currently I have restarted, again as Aspha, but this time researching mining. This allows me to create enough income from strip mining alone to fund exploration fleets plus a bit more from minerals.

The current strategy is:

1) Explore 5 planets, Cluster to C1
2) If you have enough C1s you cluster to C2 and go to Step 4.
3) Otherwise, build mines on new C1. Go to Step 1.
4) As soon as your C2 hits 0 ore you plunder. Go to Step 1

Exploring a C2 takes at least 34 turns. 25 for exploring + 4 for building mines + 5 for plundering when dry. Mean ore and land for non special planets is 366 and 166 respectively. This gives a mean quantity of 9k ore per C2 drained, or roughly 2.5m creds per turn.

I will soon be moving onto artifacts. I`ve updated the previous graphs and enabled index listing: http://annanfay.com/gc/

> - did you find the same amount of each type of the e.class planets?

Everything except Dead and U. thingie planets come up about 10-12% of the time. That`s 9 types (Balanced, Barren, Desert, Forest, Gas, Icy, Marshy, Oceanic, Rocky). I suspect the code may be as simple as 99% of the time giving you one of those planets and 1% of the time giving you a Dead or U. thingie planet.

> - Could you plot the land and ore of all the planets found in two histograms? I suggest 20 bins for each.

You mean like this: http://annanfay.com/gc/hist_land_exploration_data.png , http://annanfay.com/gc/hist_ore_exploration_data.png

Also slightly updated the original graph.

(PS: After this I`ll probably do the same for artifacts. Need to do it with all different planet types, population sizes, loyalty and time of day. Will be quite a bit more difficult)

Addendum to below:

Getting S class/type..... What is the correct terminology anyway? There`s (E/X/S) and (U/Ocean/Rocky/etc). Is it `E class, Rocky type`, or `E class, Rocky sub-class`, or?

Anyway, getting S thingies is about 1 every 300 so far. (with an even smaller sample size obviously)

@TheBlueKnight

I`m getting a U class every ~120 planets or so. However this is with a small sample size.

@duckduckbrick

If you`ve not had any near 1200 then it sounds like the limit is about 950, since 950 * 1.2 = 1140.

Did you get any over 1140?

Thanks! ^_^

Yeah, it`s not very surprising so far. I`m working on gathering more data so I can figure out how S class and U type planets are organised.

It would also be nice to work out if there`s any effect from time of day or if anything affects mineral type.

The most interesting question is: How many planets do I need to explore to create an X-cluster from barrens with over Y land.

Barrens make up approximately 11% of all planets however I`ve not explored enough of them to figure out if it`s really equally distributed. I`ve not yet had one over 950 yet have 7 above 900. So the maximum is probably not 1000, or it`s not evenly distributed.

For some reason this forum hates me. "A naly" is supposed to be A n a l y s i s!