Machine boosting

Owns, for each producing machine, a set of modifier slots or settings and the effect vector they sum to: speed, productivity (extra output per cycle), energy use, and sometimes pollution or quality. Cycle time divides by one plus the speed bonus, productivity fills a bonus bar that yields free outputs, and power draw scales with the boost, often superlinearly. Satisfactory clock speed runs from 1% to 250%, each of up to three Power Shards raises the cap by 50 points, and power scales with exponent 1.321928, so 250% draws 335.77% of base power. Factorio fills module slots with speed, productivity, efficiency, or quality modules, beacons project module effects onto nearby machines, and productivity bonuses are capped at +300%. Dyson Sphere Program coats items with proliferator so machines consuming them gain extra products or speed. Captain of Industry spends Unity on building boosts. Unlike production-chain, which owns recipes and buffers, and quality-tiers, which owns item grades, this mechanic owns the cost-benefit curve of pushing a single machine harder.

An optimization layer on top of ratio planning. Players decide whether to build more machines or push the ones they have, weighing floor space and materials against a growing power bill. Slotting the last productivity module or overclocking a bottleneck machine is a satisfying fix, and the power spike that follows is the bill.

• shape of the power or cost curve per unit of boost, linear or convex such as Satisfactory's exponent of about 1.32
• separate effect axes (speed, productivity, efficiency, pollution) and the tradeoffs bundled into one slot
• slot counts per machine and whether boosts can be shared with neighbors, as with beacons
• cost of the boost itself: crafted modules, rare world pickups such as Power Shards, or a currency such as Unity
• caps on stacked bonuses, such as Factorio's +300% productivity limit
• which machine types accept boosts: assemblers, drills, labs, turrets

• Productivity bonuses that stack without a cap create net-positive loops; Factorio caps productivity at +300% to prevent this.
• One dominant configuration, such as productivity modules everywhere with beacons for speed, becomes a solved template.
• Convex power costs that are not shown make overclocking feel like a sudden grid failure.
• Boosts gated on rare pickups push players into exploration chores unrelated to factory design.

• Players trade space for power: compact boosted builds compete with sprawling unboosted ones.
• Productivity bonuses on late stages save every upstream input, so players boost the end of a chain first.
• Boosting a bottleneck moves the bottleneck to power generation, coupling factory design to the grid.

• Can planners that solve module and clock settings for a target rate coexist with players who enjoy solving them by hand?
• Which cost curves keep boosted and unboosted builds both viable through the late game?