# Management bonuses in Influence

With the recently completed [High Commander auction](https://opensea.io/assets/0x746db7b1728af413c4e2b98216c6171b2fc9d00e/7539) there has been a lot of chat about how bonuses from the Management job department should work. Here is my 2c on this.

The stated aims from the team to date have been that Management bonuses would be a "small overall bonus". We have a bit more info now since the release of the [Exploitation Guide](https://wiki.influenceth.io/files/exploitation-guide.pdf) to second guess how these overall bonuses might work.

(note this is not a discussion about what the actual Management bonus % might be!)

First, some assumptions:

**1. The Management bonus impacts actions that a player's *team* undertakes. The Management crew member must physically be on the team, not unassigned. The bonus DOES NOT apply to other crews on the same asteroid or ship, controlled by either yourself or other players.**

**2. Management bonuses should NOT be as strong as the bonuses of other, more specialised crew, of the same job tier.**

#1 above should be obvious but #2 requires some expansion.  Easiest to explain using the following example:

A Tier 1 Management crew member (Justice) will give bonuses to any action taken by its own team, including Pilot actions. No doubt other actions for Pilots will become available as the game expands, but as at Exploitation, the only listed action for Pilots is Ship Flight.

On the assumption that the Navigation job category bonus applies directly to Ship Flight, a Tier 1 Pilot Navigator bonus should be greater than that of the Tier 1 Pilot Justice for the Ship Flight action.

Pilot actions heirarchy:

God Tier - Chief Navigator!
S Tier - Navigation Pilot
A Tier - Management Pilot
B Tier - Pilot with non-synergised job role
C Tier - Adalian Pilot with no bonus

(the above gets more complicated when you incorporate job tiers and the Speicalist/Citizen distinction, but this is roughly there)

Here then is Assumption #3, and where the Management Bonus comes into its own:

**3. Management crew will be able to use their bonus across the board for every one of the action types available across all classes. For Exploitation, that's to the eleven different action types listed, but will continue to apply to any other actions that are added to the game in future.**

## Let's do numbers

Here we have to look at the diminishing returns efficiency model outlined in the [Exploitation guide](https://wiki.influenceth.io/files/exploitation-guide.pdf):

0 crew, efficiency = 50%
1 crew, efficiency = 100%
2 crew, efficiency = 125%
3 crew, efficiency = 138%
4 crew, efficiency = 144%
5 crew, efficiency = 147%

Using the above example with Ship Flight as the action, a single Pilot taking the Ship Flight action is going to operate at 100% efficiency, all other factors being even.

Let's say a Tier 1 Pilot Navigator has the completely arbitrary bonus of 10% to this action, which we simply add raw giving us %110 efficiency. Under assumption #2 a T1 Pilot Justice should not be as good as the Navigator for pilot actions, so might give, again completely arbitrary, a bonus of 5% to the action instead for 105% efficiency.

If you had them on the same crew, **assuming the bonuses are additive rather than multiplicative for ease**, you would get a scenario like:
Pilot Navigator = 100% base, 10% for Navigator.
Pilot Justice = addition of 25% for the second pilot, + 5% for Management bonus.
Total: 140%

Note this is clearly not as good as stacking 2x Pilot Navigators which would be:
Pilot Navigator 1 = 110%
Pilot Navigator 2 = +25%, and +10%
Total: 145%

Another case is where the Management crew member is of a different class:
Pilot Navigator = 110%
Scientist Justice = + 5% Management bonus only.
Total: 115%

This leads to a new assumption:

**4. Job title bonuses do not suffer from efficiency reductions when stacked.**

I.e. the bonus for a T1 Navigator is always 10% (or whatever it ends up being), and this does not reduce if other Navigators are also on the same team. 

This would mean that the most efficient possible Ship Flight action would require a team full of Pilot / Navigators (let's disregard the HoDs for now), but in doing so you sacrifice the ability to be 100% efficient in ANY other action class. This is definitely a valid trade-off however... I can think of many cases where you might want a super-specilised team operating at max efficiency possible. Management is probably not suitable in that case.

## So, how best to use Management crew?

Where Management crew members will likely shine is in the fact that their bonus will apply to everything a crew does, including their own class. True jacks of all trades, masters of none.

This is something that no other crew type will be able to achieve.

On a mixed team where you have a crew member of every class, literally everything you do is going to be better than vs the Management crew member not being on the team. Mining, building, science, refining, etc.

Consider this scenario:

Team = 
Pilot Management
Engineer any
Scientist any
Miner any 
Merchant any

This team is going to be better at all engineering, scientist, miner, and merchant actions than the same team where the Pilot is, say, Navigation.

If Pilot actions are used infrequently by the player (because maybe their team is asteroid-based), then the above team is much better off in the long run with the Management role vs Navigation as Management is boosting everything, every time.

Another use case is where you want to stack several crew of the same class to get a large efficiency bonus for something specific (lets say extraction) but you dont want to stack too many as the incremental bonus becomes too harsh.

Team =
3x Miners, baseline extraction efficiency 138%
1x Engineer, coz you gotta build stuff at 100% effiency at least
1x Merchant Justice... adds 5% to your extraction efficiency
Total extraction efficiency = 143%

This is only slightly worse than if the same team used 4x Miners (144% extraction efficiency) and a single Engineer, but you now get to take Merchant actions at 100% + adding bonuses to other Engineering, Merchant, and Mining actions as well. I'd take that trade-off

In the case of adding a fifth Miner to your team vs a Management role in a different class, the Management bonus alone is likely going to be comparable to or even better than the 2% incremental added by the fifth miner. No brainer!

So Management roles are a way to boost baseline efficiency where it would otherwise be hit by scaling, but you get the addition of being able to take the Management crew member's actions at 100% efficiency. Merchant actions in the above example.

Phew! That's pretty cool.

Last point to note is that Management bonuses are a way of boosting efficiency in cases where you simply do not possess a crew member that you might otherwise need/want... eg, you telling me you can't afford to purchase a full crew of 5x Navigation Pilots on Opensea to get your Adalia Prime to 104 flight time down? ;) Maybe sub a couple Pilot Block Captains instead. Not quite as fast but still better bonus on pilot actions vs a pure Adalian crew with no bonuses as all.

## Summary

So, assuming all of the above holds true:
* The Management bonus, irrespective of the eventual %, will be super flexible. A team with a Management crew member on it is going to be much better at everything vs a generic crew with no bonuses.
* Assuming the Management bonus will keep applying as new class actions are added to the game, **Management should keep getting better** as the game goes on as its possible applications expand.
* Management is a neat way of boosting things where there are other constraints affecting efficiency eg dimishing returns due to stacking, you lack specific crew bonuses etc.
* Management won't be as useful on a min/maxed team seeking max efficiency on something specific.