new abilities when researching techs

Hello all,

Just restarted playing this game and immediately running into something i've never fully understood. Suppose you've researched a new tech, say Space Defense, it lists: 'new abilities: defense +10' in the tech description. I suppose your defense gets better when in battle, obviously. But what exactly does the '+10' mean ? For another tech it can list for example: influence +5. Again, what does this '+5' mean ? Is it a large or a tiny improvement compared to the influence i've already got? How does it factor into the total amount of influence generated per turn ? By how much does my defense improve ? Are those numbers linked to the values given in the startup menu when you pick your races bonus abilities or are they unrelated altogether ?

Locked Post

Advanced Search

Watch this post

Do not email me updates for this post Email me updates for this post

Successfully updated karma reason!

Those numbers are percentages. So +10 defense will increase your defense by 10%

Successfully updated karma reason!

MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

When you have an improvement in Influence, it will show up as an increase in 'Native Ability' when you're looking at the ip number's tooltip on the planet screen.

Have to bear in mind that +10 Defence isn't very useful until you actually have defences loaded onto your ships. Even then, it'll go a lot further if you've built up mining starbases on military (red) resources, which further boost your Weapons and Defence abilities.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Thanks for your replies.

dnzrx1, it had occurred to me that these numbers could be percentages. However, as in most cases the description gives just a bare number ('+10'), but in some cases it does give an explicit percentage (I've also seen descriptions like '+5% social engineering'), I thought these bare numbers might refer to something different. Obviously not, and hence I'll just have to interpret it as the descriptions being a tiny bit negligent in this respect.

MarvinKosh, thanks for your answer. I wasn't interested in influence/defense per se, though, I just cited these as examples. I could also have mentioned for example social engineering, or research.

Successfully updated karma reason!

MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

Well, Research and Military/Social Production abilities affect how much bonus research or production you get on a given planet. The bonus from your abilities is a percentage added to the base research or production on that planet. Thing to understand here is that while each unit of base production or research costs 1bc to fund, bonus production or research costs half that much, and has its own entry on the economic screen. The higher your ability here, the more half-price production you get.

Successfully updated karma reason!