A guide to the big picture: Turmoil and Overheads

There seems to be a bit of confusion around some of the mechanics of Powerplay, so I thought I’d go into some detail on the more esoteric parts of the system.

 

GLOSSARY

Upkeep: Each control system has an Upkeep cost in CC that is subtracted from our balance every cycle. The only thing that determines it is its distance from Polevnic. You can see it on the Powerplay view on the Galaxy Map.

Income: Each control system has an Income that is added to our balance every cycle. The only thing that determines it is the number and population of its exploited systems. You can see it on the Powerplay view on the Galaxy Map.

Profit: This is Income - Upkeep. You can see it on the Powerplay view on the Galaxy Map.

Overhead: The power as a whole has an Overhead cost that is subtracted from our balance every cycle. The only thing that determines it is the number of control systems we have. You can see it on the summary page of the Power view.

 

TURMOIL

When the cycle ticks, if our CC balance is negative, some of our systems will go into turmoil. Systems go into turmoil starting with the ones with the highest upkeep, until enough Upkeep worth of systems have gone into turmoil at least equal to the deficit. For example, if our balance at the end of the cycle is -200CC, at least 200 Upkeep worth of systems will go into turmoil.

Remember that Undermined systems have their Upkeep increased by an amount approximately equal to their Income, fortified systems have their upkeep reduced to zero and fortification and undermining cancel each other out.

This is much easier to illustrate than it is to explain. Take a look at the new and improved “Turmoil Risk Calculator” tab in the System Summary Sheet to see which systems are at risk based on which ones are undermined and/or fortified.

Systems in Turmoil have their Income reduced to zero. Their Upkeep remains the same, and they still are affected by Undermining and Fortification exactly as normal. We cannot prepare any systems if we have any systems in turmoil. If we have any systems in turmoil during a cycle, one of two things happen:

• If CC balance is positive when the cycle ticks, all turmoil stops and everything returns to normal.

• If CC balance is negative, we lose each turmoil system one at a time (starting with the ones with the highest upkeep) until we reach a positive CC balance.

Please note that this contradicts the official manual, which says that all turmoil systems are lost if you end a cycle with a negative balance. This was true once, but is no longer the case.

 

OVERHEAD

Income and Upkeep are relatively easy to understand, but a lot of people don’t even know that overhead exists! Overhead is a stat that is basically an additional payment we have to pay in CC at the end of a cycle, and is calculated as follows:

The smallest of:

a) (11.5[number of control systems]/42)^3*

*b) 62.1 [number of control systems]

What this means in English is that if we have less than 55 systems, you use formula a, where for each extra system you gain, overhead increases exponentially. When you reach 55, formula b takes over and each extra system increases overheads by 62.1 in a linear fashion.

Again, this is a lot easier to illustrate than explain. Take a look at this breakdown to see our situation in detail.

In short, our current Overhead at 43 control systems is 1,632. If we get one more control system, it becomes 1,749. If we go up to 45 control systems, Overhead becomes 1,871. We’re coming up to the steepest part of the hill, and we're simply not fit enough to keep going - it costs 111CC extra a week if we expand into another system. We could handle that if we were running a big surplus at the start of the cycle, but not in our current state!

 

THE FUTURE

The sad fact is that unless we can keep our CC balance positive but very low indeed, we’re going to have non-Redditors expanding whenever they can. The worst kind of expansions are low-income systems close to the core. They jack up our Overheads but their Upkeep is so low we can never effectively lose them to Turmoil, even if they’re undermined. This is exactly what happened with Xi Wang Mu.

And if we do keep expanding, then Turmoil IS coming. We fortified a record number of systems last cycle, and we ended up with a pathetic surplus, and that’s because our Overheads are so high compared to our income. One or two more control systems, and we’ll never be able to fortify enough systems to stay solvent.

So should we stop our expansion into HIP 108110? Not necessarily, it’s a pretty good system. The important thing is to understand that we are going to hit Turmoil at some point, and we need to make sure that the systems we lose to turmoil aren’t our high-income border systems that our rivals might want to snap up.

Systems that are well behind our lines aren’t so bad to lose, their Income will be compensated for by the decrease in Overhead, and once we shed a few crap systems, we can re-expand into them later once we’re in better health. As a rule of thumb, it’s more important to lose bad systems in turmoil than retain good ones! Use the Turmoil Risk Calculator to help make Turmoil work for us rather than against us!

And of course, System Flipping remains our number one priority, making fortification easier helps us no matter what happens! Maybe soon we’ll have some spare time to do something other than shipping dissidents all day!