Posted by: skoormit
« on: August 04, 2020, 03:40:36 PM »Not sure the tax income from the terraformer workers is how I'd look at this here. More terraforming modules, and more easily moving them, effectively means more terraforming can be done for the same investment cost. More terraforming means more habitable worlds, which means more taxable population once they've brought the worlds to habitable, which the extra stations can achieve faster.
Absolutely. Any holistic economic analysis over any duration favors building modules.
The only reason to prefer the tax income is if you are exceedingly constrained by short-term cash flow.
But if that is the case, you are almost certainly better off building financial centres, unless you have no corbomite.
One fincen plus one module costs 620 wealth, and provides 20% more income and the same terraforming capacity as one tf installation, which costs 600 wealth.
You'll spend another ~25 wealth per module on overhead to build the station, but you will more than make up the cost difference by spending far, far less for the tugs to move the stations around than you would spend for the freighters to move the installations around.
Installations are also not as vulnerable to attack as orbital modules.
But if you don't expect the system to be secure from hostile activity, why are you spending to increase terraforming capacity there?
You should be increasing military capacity there, or spending your resources elsewhere.
So really, the only reason to build terraforming installations is if you haven't yet researched the tech for terraforming modules and tractor beams, and you just can't stand to wait for that research to be done before you start forming Luna.