Power ceiling

Plunder is excluded. Marauder carries a +1,900% plunder modifier and Collective +1,100%, and neither is land income. Marauder's figure is the floor for a race built entirely around taking other people's credits, not an estimate of what it actually fields.

Land is fixed at 800 per planet. That one isn't a knob — the income figures were swept at it, so changing it would invalidate every stored number rather than rescaling them. Border posture is a knob because both settings were swept.

Each colony uses its own race's planet family, because the modifiers differ enormously: a standard Cluster Lvl 3 is agriculture +45% while Collective's Similare C.5 is −52% and Viral's Tainted C.4 is −35%. Captured clusters use the Infected family, the only one with positive agriculture and industry — which is what makes stolen land genuinely better than Viral's own. The six border colonies produce nothing at all: they're sacrificial buffer, and nobody develops a planet they expect to lose.

Research is 255 total across all five axes, not per axis, plus reallocatable mission grants (Terran +6, A.Miner +5, nobody else). At that budget every race specialises into essentially one income channel. Loyalty caps include mission rewards; Guardian starts at 2,500 and reaches 3,800, still short of everyone else's base.

Ships: Neutral ships, Starbases and Scouts are all excluded. Upkeep per PR is read live, so a rebalance moves these numbers without the income grid being rebuilt.

Viral is measured differently, on purpose. Every other race's bands are the median of its own catalog. Viral researches ships from other races, so its catalog is three native ships and reading it that way flatters Viral badly. Its bands instead come from the ships Viral empires have actually been observed fielding, natives included. Slow and Fast each assume Viral spends all nine research slots on that doctrine — three ships per donor race, most widely flown first — so they're separate repertoires rather than two halves of one. Typical is the mixed repertoire Virals are actually observed running. Best case is the cheapest ship in that legal mixed repertoire, the same definition as every other race.

Upkeep follows the owner, not the ship. Researching a donor ship is a build, not a capture, so a Viral pays the Viral race modifier on it. That matters enormously in both directions: Marauder's modifier is 1.9 against Viral's 7.0, so Marauder ships cost a Viral about 3.7× what they cost a Marauder, while A.Miner ships (modifier 10.1) come in around 0.7×. Reading the stored native upkeep would have made Viral look far cheaper than it is, on exactly the cheap Marauder ships it most wants.

Only single-planet NPC wins are counted — winning an existing cluster is possible and is excluded entirely. That understates Viral in particular, which can infect captured clusters and keep their original planet count, bypassing its own 64-planet ceiling.