Has anyone figured out what's going on with Orion?

Has anyone? If so, what did they figure out?

I just made a PTS account and I'm going to try to figure it out a little. Is anyone on the PTS and could help me out with some res? 3:412:12

I'll share learnings once I have something, if what I learn hasn't been posted yet.

Learnings:

The Interstellar Anomaly Scanner is a Facilities building. It requires Astrophysics 5, Shipyard 5, and Combustion 1 to build. Its base cost is 84 metal, 42 crystal, and 14 deut.

It produces 220 lithium/hour and "Anomaly Level" 1 at level 1, up to 12531 lithium/hour and "Anomaly Level" 15 at level 15.

I figured out some things.
Lithium production isn't free, you have to sacrifice another resource for it in real time. The lithium production level listed for the IAS level is the rate at which you can convert. At base levels, Deut converts 1:1, crystal 2:1, metal 3:1, and food 100:1. Food will probably be preferred since it is not a tradeable resource, but I haven't done math on how much it would cost to provision enough excess food for this.

IAS cost increases by 40% per level, obeys the usual relationship between cost and build time for structures, and the level where the res cost hits 1.2 million total is level 28. At level 48 it is almost exactly 1b res per level, which would not be hard at all for a late game player.

At level 30 at base levels you can convert about 104k lithium per hour per planet, so for me about 1.7 million lithium per hour or about 40m per day.
If I had 48s on all the planets it would be more like 940k per hour per planet, about 380 million a day.

At base, all of the missions amount to sending a fleet somewhere, if the fleet is adequate to the mission you complete it, and then when they come back, you get the opportunity to spend a fixed amount of lithium to get various rewards which most often seem to be resources.

The rate of conversion of lithium to resources seems to be, at base, about 10:1 on metal and about 3:1 or 4:1 on deut or crystal. So you are getting approximately 3-4x as much back as you put in to get the lithium, roughly, if you spend it all.

Right now with the level 30s, I am looking at about 900k lithium to scan, then I get missions costing between about 1 and 5m lithium to redeem the rewards from. They seem to be somewhere between a third and half peaceful and about 50/50 PvP and PvE, so if you are willing to take on any given missions, you can spend the vast bulk of your lithium on rewards, but if you want to play only PvE peaceful missions you could spend a large fraction of it on scanning.

You might have to do 10-40 missions a day to spend all your lithium, with these stats. It would be a real grind. I'm going to see if it scales at all with my levels.

The seven buildings are, in order:

Ships from anomalies, up .2% per level

Lithium from anomalies, up .2% per level

Metal from anomalies, up .2% per level

Crystal from anomalies, up .2% per level

Artifacts and LFE from anomalies, up .2% per level

Deuterium from anomalies, up .2% per level

Reduce cost of lithium, down .05% per level

They all hit 1m res in total cost between levels 5 and 7, and increase in cost by 50% per level. If you had 18 planets and were willing to spend up to 1b res for a level of any one of them, per planet, then you could approximately increase all rewards from anomalies by about 80%, and also decrease the cost of lithium by about 20%, i.e. increase the ratio of resources out to in to approximately 225% of what it was at base. Slightly more if you pushed it, but it does hit diminishing returns very quickly.

I'll write more as I learn more.

I did some math on ROI, and it looks like, at my account size, if I built approximately the optimal build with the current balance, the one I investigated, then:

It would be many times more cost effective to build farms and buy lithium with food than to buy it with tradable resources.

If I smashed lithium very hard and spent it all on PvE peace missions I could increase the net production of my account by about 60%. It's a lot, actually.

And doing that would require me to micro low tens of missions per day, a number which seems not to scale very much with the levels you choose, since the lithium production and lithium per mission seem to scale approximately the same.

So right now it looks valuable, but very...grind-ey.

Nothing about the balance seems to have changed in this week's patch.