Terraforming Mars: Valuing Resources

Resources

The goal of this post is to normalize the cost of all resources for comparison purposes.

Normalized & Actual Cost of Resources

Calculating the Actual value of a resource requires looking at that Resources Standard Project cost and dividing by its conversion rate (typically 8). Similarly, the Normalized cost is the VP cost (13) divided by the resources conversion rate.

Money (mc)

Money is the easiest to calculate, as it is the basis of all analysis, 1mc=1mc. This is both the Normalized and the Actual cost for money.

Steel & Titanium

Iron and Steel are worth 2mc and 3mc. This is because Iron and Steel may be traded 2 to 1 and Titanium 3 to 1 when play Buildings or Space tags, respectively. For this to work, we will assume every token of generated either resource is also spent.

 Normalized Heat & Energy

It takes 8 Heat to generate one Temp increase (1VP).Thus, Heat and Energy have the same "normalized" cost of 1.625mc.

Plants

8 Plants will generate 1 Greenery tile. This will provide either 1 or 2 VP depending on if Oxygen will increase or not. With Oxygen, the Normalized value of Plants becomes 3.25mc, and without Oxygen it is the same as Heat or Energy, 1.625mc.

Cards (Patents)

It costs 3mc to keep a card in a player's hand. Therefore, if a card is generated it "saves" the player spending 3mc to keep the card. A card's value will differ depending on the card, but all cards can be sold for 1mc. Thus, the card's least value can be calculated as 1mc. If, after calculating a card's effectiveness, it is less than the value of selling a card, it would be best to sell the card.

Summary

In this post the value of individual resources were determined. From this, the calculated values for each resource are as follows:

Resources	Actual Cost	Normalized	Effectiveness
Plant w/oxy	2.875	3.250	1.130
Plant-no oxy	2.875	1.625	0.565
Heat	1.750	1.625	0.929
Electricity	1.375	1.625	1.182
Card (traded)	3.000	1.000	0.333
Iron	2.000	2.000	1.000
Titanium	3.000	3.000	1.000
Money	1.000	1.000	1.000

The most surprising result of this analysis is the most effective move possible is to gain Energy, although no cards offer this. This is because of the reduced cost in comparison to Heat. Next post will concern with calculating Production values of various resources.