Proposition : Modify the PP2-BDE recipe

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Let’s talk about the BDE recipe in the PP2

Has anyone ever used it? Probably not! It’s way too expensive. The little time save cannot offset the extra cost of PG vs PE.

I’ve always though we needed more of these type of recipes, where going up the tier gets you the same item, for more expensive, but quicker. However, the current BDE recipe is not realistic, unlike the BBH/BTA recipe.

PG historicly ranged at around 3x to 4x the price of PE (sometime even up to 5x). This is still the case for the current time, where ANT has a ratio of 2.92x and BEN a ration of 4.63x (both extreme).

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Proposition would be to drop the PP2-BDE recipe to 50 PG instead of 75. While I don’t have all the cool tools to look at the % of ROI over time, it seems to match the extreme cases in terms of price, in exchange of a bit of a quicker process. This would keep a general setup of BMP + PP1 more efficient, but would open up the POL + PP2 to be slightly realistic. Quick napkin math with PG at 20 and BDE at 1400 would put PE at 6.1 to be more efficient through a PP1 vs a PP2 which is way more reasonable than before.

This would also put a slight pressure on the MG and PG which could be healthy for the market as they are both very heavily supplied.

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oki, so the main reason why PE is so much cheaper than PG is because of output yields; seem that 3:1 ratio would make it feasible.

Right now on ALO based planet like Deimos or Berthier it’s worthwhile to make BMP/PP1 only for the BDE. PP2 and POL is a good t1+/t2 compination, making it 50 PG => 1 BDE would allow us to skip that BMP/PP1 step.

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I think it’s important to compare raw materials. The PP1 uses FE for BBH, BSE, and BTA (with PE), while the PP2 uses AL instead (with GL). AL might be seen as a higher tier material, and glass definitely is over PE. Even though AL is superior in every way…
So the BDE recipe does use a higher tier material, but in a way that doesn’t make sense. A PP1-BDE takes 1.5 H, .75 C, and 30k pioneer-minutes for the PE. The PG in the PP2 takes 1.5 H, 1.5 C, 1.5 MG, and 7.56k pio-min + 18.9k set-min. The settlers can only be 20% more expensive before the work is a higher cost too. I roughly expect settlers to be double the cost of pioneers.
So the inputs strictly take more everything to make in a PP2: more C, more MG, more work, in a more expensive building.

The PP2, however, is faster, and uses less work: PP1 takes 34560 pio-min to make a BDE, PP2 takes 9k each pio-min and set-min, which if we use 2 pio=1 set, is 27k pio-min-corrected. To answer whether the PP2 BDE recipe would ever make sense, we’d need to know whether a 22% reduction in work can make up for requiring 100% more C, introduction of MG, and the higher work on the inputs. And since there are 15k more pio-min-corrected on the inputs, no, they cannot be cheaper than the 7.5k saved in the PP2.

It may be possible for PP2 plus HBB, or equal combinations of HB1+HB2, to be more space efficient. I’ll let someone else do that analysis.

Cutting the input cost to 1 cycle of the POL instead of 1.5 would give: 1 H, 1 C, 1 MG, and 5k pio-m+12.6k set-m for the PG. A quarter more C, a third less H, introduction of MG, similar work. There was an era in Antares history where this would have made sense - H was more expensive than C. Today, the PP1 would still be more efficient, but a constructor could make it up on volume.

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I think the distinction here is that the High-Cost is due to sub-optimal extraction of the raw mats; as the universe develops, better extraction rates and lower resource costs will propagate down the chain, making these recipes more viable.

The counter to this is shipping costs, but those too will come down when fuel production actually starts, rather than buying from or close to MM.

This is not a “things change overnight” situation, but a gradual progression over weeks and months.

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I dont think it was ever viable last uni even with PG being super overproduced. Most of the time when PG came down was due to H/C and not MG, which meant PE also went down (or up!)

Another interesting option would be some PG + X elements to not have something that can easly be spammed, but not sure which other elements could be interesting in this case (Maybe EPO? but than its the same recipe inputs as DEC? some popi stuff? lots of option in that route)

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There was a brief window the first time PG crashed while BDEs were still selling close to MM prices when that recipe was worth it. There may be also times where that recipe might be worth it if you’re just one BDE short of building something and you already have a PP2 and no PP1 and it saves you a trip to the CX or waiting on shipping, but yeah the recipe is kind of bad.

50 might be a bit too cheap? The PP2 is cheaper to operate and right now at Moria prices PG is trading just under 3x PE prices. That would make the recipe cheaper AND faster. Although maybe if this recipe was 50, PE would go down and PG would go up a bit to fix this issue.

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