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[ASK] What is "overdrive payback"?

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Hi all,

This is new for me, and because when I search for it, I found only changelog that mention payback, nothing that explain it in-depth.

1) What is the simple calculation explanation?
For example, say I have 1 mex with 100m/s. I have solar (called Solar-1) that can overdrive to +1m/s.
If I build another solar (called Solar-2) that can also overdrive to +1m/s, with solar price is 70m, is the payback time is 70s (only calculate existing Solar-1)? Or it's 35s (calculate Solar-1 and Solar-2)?

2) How can the knowledge of payback helps me to gain advantage? Will I gain more economic advantage if I choose low payback time? What is the priority in having good-payback in general overdrive system? Because I usually just build more mex, connect mex with wind/solar, deplete my met and have abundance energy, I'm confused about having good-payback priority. (Never thinking if this or that generator is more efficient for overdrive or not. I just want to have more energy.)

Thank you for reading and teaching me.
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Here is googlefrog's video on overdrive.

Quick overview: metal produced by overdrive is (sqrt(energy)/4)*BaseMetalExtraction. This is on an individual mex basis, and an energy grid will automatically overdrive the more efficient mexes more, spending the energy however is most efficient. Some synthisis on this is 1 energy gets 25% overdrive, 4 energy gets a mex to 50% overdrive, 16 energy gets it to 100% overdrive. higher value mexes produce more metal with overdrive because overdrive is an amplification of base.

Edit: Overdrive payback is how long it will take to pay for the metal cost in overdrive at current average baised on how much energy the building produces. if a solar takes 2 mins to "overdrive payback" that means overdrive will probably be around .6 m/s, coming to about 2 mins for 70 metal, the cost of the solar.
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6 years ago
just another feature that isn't explained for new players
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6 years ago
Your mother is clearly bad at explaining internet etiquette to new humans.
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6 years ago
It’s a legitimate point; the exact behaviour of ZK eco, especially in team games, is pretty opaque. Most new players don’t even realise income is shared between the team for a few games.
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If you're talking about "overdrive payback" in the tooltip, then nobody knows why it works. I wrote a naive method of calculating payback and was surprised when it worked reasonably well. It estimates the amount of time it will take for a structure to pay back its own cost in overdrive.
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