Stellaris – Math on Virtuality

Rough Math on Virtuality

I saw some people arguing on just how many planets you should have with virtuality, so I did some napkin math.

• Column A represents number of planets
• Column B is the total penalty you’ll be receiving from having clustered capacity
• Column C is Production per planet. This is calculated by adding 1 (Base Production) + 1.75 (Clustered Capacity Bonus) + Additional Pop Output (A variable set to 0 in the picture, I’ll get around to that in a second) and subtracting 0.25 * The number of planets (for Clustered Capacity’s Penalty)
• Column D is the total production across your entire empire, which is just Production per planet * Number of Planets. This doesn’t account for types of planets, different qualities of planets, empire sprawl, or anything else, but it serves as a good starting point

With no additional bonuses, our maximum production is located at 5.5 planets, or 5 & 6 planets in practical terms both being equally good. (Reference #1).

Past this point, the penalty is far more damaging than the potential return from an added colony, resulting in a net loss in production empire wide.

Taking into account any additional pop production gets weird, but thankfully I don’t really have to! After playing around with the numbers a bit, I noticed that every 50% increase increases the maximum planet number by exactly 1. A 0% bonus is 5.5 (5-6), a 50% bonus is 6.5 (6-7), a 100% bonus is 7.5 (7-8), and so on.

Because of this, you can rather easily get a rough estimate on how many colonies you should have by starting at 5-6 and adding one for every 50% bonus to output that job gets (not counting clustered capacity).

Hopefully someone gets some use out of this. Thanks for reading my incoherent ramblings!