Value Chains

What Is a Value Chain?
Dependencies are not arbitrary in First Empire. They represent relationships between providers and consumers of goods, services, and ideas. Value chain satisfaction tells you how well an Investment blends in with your overall investment portfolio.

Calculation & Effect
In general, value chain satisfaction is calculated by comparing the number of dependent investments an investment could support to the number it does support. The effect of value chain satisfaction is a multiplier that can cascade to dependents, dependencies, or can affect the overall output of a class of investment.

Calculation of Satisfaction
The number of units of a dependent resource that can be supported by a dependency is the ideal number of units of that dependent investment. An investment's value chain satisfaction is a measurement of how close each of its dependencies is to their respective ideal numbers. 0% means that an investment is totally overbuilt. 100% means that you could not support any more units of any dependent investment.

Calculation of Effect
Every investment that is part of a value chain has two factors that matter: The two numbers are used to compute a multiplier using this equation 1 + (S * B). That is, if there is no bonus or no value chain satisfaction, then the multiplier is one. If the value chain satisfaction is 100%, then the multiplier is 1 + B. Otherwise, the multiplier scales from 1 to 1 + B in a linear fashion.
 * Its value chain satisfaction (S)
 * The maximum effect of fully satisfying a value chain (B)

Final Result
Every value chain is different in how its multipliers are used. Some cascade "up," meaning the dependencies apply multipliers to their dependents (as is the case with the Science Investments). Some cascade "down," meaning that dependents apply multipliers to their dependencies (as is the case with Wealth Investments). In some cases the multiplier of one investment is applied to another investment.

"Gotchas"
While a value-chain multiplier will never cause an investment to produce less than its base output, the multipliers do fluctuate. This means that your overall output can go down if you upset the balance of a value-chain.

Quandaries Posed by Players:
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Science & Value Chain Satisfaction
An anonymous user asked:"I don't understand the the how to control Value Chain Satisfaction. I noticed that after investing in a certain amount of science facilities (in my case, after [100K]) additional investments caused my core knowledge to decrease instead of increase. This coincided with a decrease in the 'Value Chain Satisfaction' %.  I assume [there] is a link, but I don't get it.  How to I keep the Value Chain Satisfaction high and increase my core knowledge?"