endless-space
I noticed that many of my systems have problems earning dust, and found the very negative factor "distance with empire" in the detailed dust report:
How does this mechanic work exactly? How is the distance calculated (to the starting system, or something else?). Are there any ways to reduce this, as it is pretty much crippling my economy even though the systems themselves are very strong.
There are two types of hero abilities. The first type is, as you mention, passive abilities which are triggered automatically by context. For example bonuses during combat or when assigned to a system.
The second type of abilities are Battle Actions, commonly called 'cards', these abilities have various effects and can be applied to each of the three stages of battle. All the ability battle actions have an associated dust cost ranging from 20 to 60 while the default battle actions cost 0.
The dust reduction makes almost no difference on game play because the ability battle actions are already quite cheap.
OK, so I experimented with it and I think I can now answer all of the questions:
+x% science from empire line to the "empire wide factors" list - for example, here's my modifier after building one while owning 24 portals:
S, over the 15 turns you build this improvement you lose 15*0.66*S = 10S science. Owning P portals does not exactly translate to an empire-wide P% bonus because it's a modifier on the base value (science from planets) and not final value (entire system science). Let's estimate that the base value is roughly 3/4 of the total value, which means the total science bonus per turn due to the improvement is 0.01*P*0.75*S = 0.0075PS, so the time it will take to get back the investment is 10S/0.0075PS = 1333.33/P. Here's how it looks plotted against the number of portals (axes don't matter since it's symmetric):
Best Answer
If you colonize a system outside of your colored influence area you create an outpost which carries this penalty. After 30 turns without being blockaded, your outpost becomes a colony and therefore generates its own influence area thus removing the penalty and starts to get the expansion disapproval as Garm stated in the question comments.
As far as I know, if another Planets influence area covers your outpost it wont get this penalty and will instead instantly get the expansion disapproval.