This is one of the two resources that are gathered from the land. Each citizen consumes 1 food/turn, and if this cannot be provided then you will have reduced growth and starvation. Food has no inherent value except to keep your people alive. As the game progresses and you get more bonuses to food production, more of your citizens can be freed up from farming to go work in more productive areas.

1 Food: Minimal Yield. Not worth farming unless it is to avoid starvation
2 Food: Standard Yield. Produced by Ocean tiles, Fertile terrain (Grassland/Tropical), and Marginal terrain (Tundra/Plains) with a farm.
3 Food: Improved Yield. Produced by Fertile terrain with a farm, and later by Ocean farms.
4+ Food: Bonus Yield. This terrain has a bonus resource and is a great source of food. One farmer can feed many citizens with such a tile. Always make sure to farm it.

Minerals are also gathered from the land, but land which is good for Minerals is generally bad for food and vice-versa. Minerals are the life-blood of an empire and the limiting factor for your industry. You should always try to maximize the amount of minerals your empire can produce (within the limits of efficiency and pollution). Minerals = Production. When quickly developing a new city, you will need to subsidize it with minerals from the rest of your empire.

1 Mineral: Minimal Yield. Don't bother mining this unless your factories are badly starved for minerals.
2 Minerals: Standard Yield. Produced by Mountains and Hills with mines. These tiles will be your bread and butter for mineral production. Terra Salvum faction can produce this from Forests.
3 Minerals: Improved Yield. Produced by Mountains with mines (and hill-based Mexallon deposits that you haven't mined yet for some reason.) Mountains are the best mineral source you can get in good volume, and 3 Minerals/miner is something to be proud of. Mountain ranges are your friend.
4+ Minerals: Bonus Yield. There's a mineral bonus here, make use of it! Mine it! It will feed your factories.
-Mexallon (+2) has no downside, but its bonus isn't as big as the others.
-Aquatic Mexallon (4) gives you decent minerals from the sea, but can't have a mine until Mechanization Era.
Isogen (+3) is great, and its pollution can be easily managed.
Noxium (+4) is a dilemma. It's a lot of minerals but the morale loss cannot be reversed.

Production represents the labor of your people as they transform Minerals into Stuff. Unlike most other games, production isn't free. Each point of production consumes 1 mineral. Increasing your production just increases the rate at which you turn minerals into Stuff. This will be frustrating for new players who are aggravated that the only reward for their shiny new factory is a huge Mineral Deficit. I should be getting MORE stuff, but now I have less! What gives?
Production bonuses are Labor Efficiency. +50% Production doesn't mean 50% more stuff, it means that 2 Workers can do the job of 3, and so that 3rd guy can be reassigned. This seems a little disappointing until you realize that the factory-workers are the #1 source of pollution in your city. Being able to get away with using as few of them as possible is great!

2 Production: Normal Worker. Production takes place inside the city, and the base value isn't affected by terrain.
3 Production: Construction Bay. The base value IS however affected by terrain improvements. This tile improvement lets one of your Workers have a production throughput of 3. Very valuable for developing new cities with small population, and raising the efficiency of large ones.

Science is a tricky beast. It is a "Free" output, meaning there is no limit to the number of scientists you can run, so long as you have food to feed them. It's also the least polluting activity a citizen can do. Scientific advances are the lifeblood of the game, allowing for greater economic and military power, and unlocking new and powerful abilities. Science is great! Is there any such thing as "Too much Science"?

...Maybe.
In Pandora, technology gives nothing for free:
Amazing new ability?
Gotta build the Special Project first.
New type of unit?
Gotta build it.
New building to help your city?
Sure, but you have to BUILD it.

Having a surplus of technology isn't a problem per se, it just means that you'll have a bunch of shiny new buildings sitting useless and un-built in your build queue. However, surplus technology sure beats the alternative! Being behind in tech means that you'll have a bunch of production capacity sitting around that you can only spend on obsolete military units. Enough of those can probably capture you a city though, so it's not so bad. Figuring out the optimal "Science to Industry" ratio is an important and subtle strategic choice in Pandora.

2 Science: Normal Scientist. This is the proper role for any "surplus population" that can't do anything else of value. There's no such thing as overpopulation, just More Science!
3 Science: Field Laboratory. One of your scientists is now making 3 science instead of 2. Useful in cities with the Observatory which can multiply that bonus even further. Less useful in other places, because boosting the efficiency of terrain is usually used to shift population towards science, not away from it.

Credits are an ephemeral resource that comes not from the land but from the people themselves, and can turn into raw hard production. Their production varies with your tax rate which will swing up and down as your morale dictates. Credits are used for paying the ongoing maintenance cost for all of your Units in the field, Buildings in your cities, and special Terrain Improvements on your Land. Any surplus after that will accumulate in your bank account and can be used to Upgrade Units or rush-buy Production in cities.

Your base income at 100% taxes is, 4 credits/citizen per turn.
-A Size 10 city at 50% tax rate will earn you 20 credits.
-A Size 13 city at 70% tax rate will earn you 36.4 credits.

Rush-Buying production, whether it is for a Building, Unit, or Project, costs 8 credits per Production. (This can be figured as 4 credits to buy the minerals, and 4 credits to hurry the factories.) A basic Colonial Trooper (16p) can be rushed for 128 Credits, and Holo-Theater (64p) will cost 512 Credits. (Noxium Corp has 75% rush-buy costs, so pays only 6 Credits/Production.)

Credits are easy to spend, but hard to get more of when you run short, since your tax rate is capped at 100% (and morale should never go negative). Nonetheless, with the massive populations and numerous credit-multiplying facilities available in the late-game, you will find yourself with plenty of surplus to spend...or save.

One important thing to note about credits is that CREDITS ARE A WAY TO WIN THE GAME. If you have enough credits saved up (equal to the 75% of the rush-buy{?} cost of all buildings in all cities)...you win! Go you! You should feel special. It's hard to save up that much instead of spending it.

Morale ends up being one of THE most important 'resources' in the game. It's effects seem tiny at first, but they grow with time, because morale is a City-Wide Production Multiplier. The more population you have, the bigger the total impact of morale.

Sources of Morale:
-Base Morale: Most factions start with a base of 7 morale. Divine Ascension has 9, and Togra University has 5.
-Tax Rate: Every 10% you tax your citizens costs you 1 point of Morale. The UI combines Base-Morale with Tax-Morale, showing 70% taxes as +0 Morale, and 0% taxes as +7 Morale.
-Overcrowding: Every population in your city beyond its available Habitation costs you 1 Morale.
-Pollution: Every point of pollution beyond what your terrain and buildings can absorb also costs you 1 Morale.

Effects of Morale
Each point of Morale in your city earns you a +4% bonus to Food, Minerals, Production, Science, and even Credits. The effect on credits is funny, since the tax rate affects the credit supply in two ways, making it non-linear. (If you could tax above 100%, tax income would actually peak at 155% and then start dropping due to nasty negative morale.)
Negative morale will also hurt your population growth rate. Population is power. DON'T LET IT GO NEGATIVE!!!

The credits generated by your taxes are usually worth slightly more than the Morale-boosted production, so a good rule of thumb is to keep taxes as high as possible without going negative. My calculations have shown that +1 Morale is usually close to peak performance. Later in the game with the prevalence of many morale-boosting buildings, your tax rate should go up to 100% and stay there.

Implications of Morale:
A +4% production bonus doesn't seem like much, but it means that in a Size 25 city, every +1 Morale you have is like +1 Population. When cities get very large, their focus should be on maintaining and maximizing their morale at all times. In a large and crowded city, it even makes sense to pave over Mines with Suburbs and Purifiers, since the morale-loss they protect against can be larger than the total output of the Mine. In fact, a sufficiently large city should be surrounded by nothing BUT morale-boosting improvements(!), since anything else will cost you more than it would gain.
...Such a city is probably TOO big since you're now losing terrain efficiency. You should really think about founding a new city.

Pollution is an inevitable consequence of Industry. It is produced by your citizens from their labor, and if not dealt with will have a negative impact on your morale. Early in the game, the only way to mitigate pollution is with Forests, whether adjacent to your start or planted by an early former. Pollution can also be managed by changing your citizens from heavily polluting jobs like Workers and Miners to minimally polluting ones like Scientists. The pollution limit for a city can serve as a good rule of thumb for balancing your Industry/Science ratio: once you have enough industry to hit your pollution limit, you should probably make everybody else a Scientist.
Sources of Pollution:
0.2: Scientists
0.4: Farmers
0.6: Miners
0.8: Workers
1: Fungus, Isogen Fields
Pollution Mitigation
-1: Forests, Gaia Forests
-2: Purifiers, Planetary Awareness Project
-4: Pollution Recycler
-8: Air Recycler
-16: Atmotron

Your people need to have someplace to live and if they don't they get unhappy. Every citizen in a city uses up 1 Habitation point, and when the population exceeds the total available habitation, you suffer a morale penalty.

Having places to put all your people is vitally important, since the demand for housing is the one thing you have very little control over. With Food shortages you can just increase the number of farmers. With Pollution you can convert citizens to be Scientists and spare the air. But with Habitat, there is no quick or easy way to adjust the housing Supply or Demand. You have to plan ahead, since a housing shortage will only continue to get worse, since your population never stops growing. Fortunately, a growing population also means more land, and therefore room to place Suburbs to ease your crisis.

Suburbs:
Suburbs are a bit of a conundrum. They are simultaneously essential, and something to be AVOIDED where possible. Suburbs are a quick and easy way to earn back a whole 2 points of morale, which is hugely valuable. Plus they only cost the labor of Formers, not your citizen's production and Minerals. They are the main tool for ending a housing crisis.
However they are fundamentally a "non-productive" terrain improvement, and every tile of land covered by Suburbs is one that is lacking a Farm, Mine, Construction Bay or Field Lab. They represent an opportunity cost, since fundamentally all true production comes from the Terrain.
But don't skimp on them, either! Because for all of their costs, if you are suffering from a Habitat shortage, then a Suburb is the best thing you can possibly build, morale is so valuable.

Cities:
Cities are the space-efficient solution to Habitation limits. They immediately provide free space for 8 citizens (+2 for TS, -2 for NC) with the potential for even more Habitat with Buildings and Projects. All this and they only take up 1 tile of terrain...a tile which also gains the benefits of a Farm and a Mine. Not exactly wasted space.

However, the down-side is that whenever you build a new city, not only do the extra Habitat-buildings cost Production and Minerals, but you have to re-build ALL of the efficiency-boosting structures that your old city had, or else suffer a further opportunity cost of having your citizens working without a production bonus. A new city is as expensive as an army, but is an investment in the FUTURE, allowing you to use your land productively and efficiently to pay off for a stronger tomorrow. *cue inspirational music*

Sources of Habitat:
-1: Citizens. (they're worth it though)
2: Suburbs, Advanced City Planning (project)
4: Wendo Apartments
6: Noxium Corporation's Cities
8: Normal Cities, Sky Dome
10: Terra Salvum's Cities
16: Neuromatrix

Migration:
Population migrates from cities with little Housing to those with a surplus. A new city will always start with ~7 surplus Habitat points, making it a very attractive place to move to. The size of a city doesn't matter for migration appeal, only the quantity of free housing. (Morale is also a factor, but is not as big as Housing.)

Population is Power.
Population is the source of all Production, Science, and Wealth in the game. Everything that gains you power in the world comes from your people. More people = more power. You should never attempt to curtail your natural growth, and should in fact seek to enhance it wherever possible.

Population Growth:
~Population growth comes from the accumulation of "Baby Points" in your cities. When a city accumulates enough baby-points, it will grow an extra size and the growth cost for all cities will go up. The growth threshold is shared among all cities and is based on your faction's total Population.

Each citizen produces 1 Baby-point per turn. This can be increased by Buildings and special Projects up to 1.4 growth/turn. These buildings will also provide some innate baby-points for free.

Initially, population growth is Linear and the growth-time is constant:
But the growth cost starts slowing down, making each population come faster.
Eventually reaching an asymptote of 120. When the Growth-Cost stops increasing, but the Growth Rate is proportional to population, this means that you have entered a regime of EXPONENTIAL GROWTH.

The Value of Population
How much is a Population unit worth? How much does a citizen give you? This is a complicated question, as it changes over time and varies with terrain. Your ultimate goal is to get the most value possible out of each and every citizen. But let's start with the basics: Each turn, citizens eat 1 food, generate up to 4 credits, and if working an average tile give 2 resources (multiplied by production bonuses). Each resource point is worth about 4 credits, so we can generate a single number.
As you can see, the value of a citizen increases dramatically as you improve the Terrain and acquire buildings that boost Production and Morale.

Boosting Growth
It is possible to convert Production into Baby-Points at a rate of 2:1, but this is a very steep price indeed. As valuable as Population is, I would not say that paying 240 Production for +1 citizen is a very good deal. Not without solid production multipliers and having nothing better to build.

But in the very beginning? When a population costs 6, 12, or 17 baby-points? What a deal! Spending your first few turns on "Growth" has one of the best returns on investment in the game. Assign your first citizen to be a Worker, build Growth, and you'll get your second Population in 2 turns, rather than 6. You just bought yourself 4 turns on the growth-curve and all it cost was a measly 8 production. Spend all your starting minerals in this way and you're on your way to a strong start. Just be aware that you're also cruising in the fast-lane towards a Housing Crisis.

Buildings make your cities better, but they cost Resources to do so. When you create a Building, you are seeking a Return on Investment, and it's important to know what it is and how to maximize it. RoI is the income divided by the cost, so you must first calculate your building's income. Since cities grow over time, the income of the buildings will continue to rise, but when you're deciding what to build first, you can use your city's current values for a good base estimate.

As an example, let's look at the Refining Array. Suppose your miners are producing 7 minerals (1 mountain and 2 hills). The Refining array will earn you +1.75 Minerals from your miners, and +2 from its inherent bonus for a total of 3.75 Minerals. This is worth approximately 15 Credits, but you must then subtract the building's 2 credit maintenance cost for a total Income of +13 Credits.
The construction cost was 32 which has an equivalent credit cost of 256. 256/13 = 19.7, which gives us a payback period of about 20 turns. For a game that lasts 200+ turns, That's pretty good!

Each Era has the same set of buildings as the previous one, just doubled in Cost and doubled in Potency (except for the flat bonuses).
Resources/Credits: +25%, +50%, +100% (+175% total, +2 per building)
Pop Growth: +10%, +20%, +40% (+70% total, +1 per building)
Pollution/Habitation/Morale: +4, +8, +16 (+28 total)
Training: +2, +4, +8 (+14 total)

Building Costs in the Colonization era range from 32 for early buildings to 48 for mid-level structures and 64 for the most advanced ones. These costs get doubled in the Mechanization Era to 64 / 96 / 128, and then double again in Transcendence to 128 / 192 / 256.


Food buildings serve as a way to re-allocate labor away from Food Production and towards Science, or to allow your farming cities to keep feeding your empire.
The Cultivation Facility is a must-have in every city because of it's low cost relative to its flat bonus. The more advanced food buildings are mostly useful in specialized farm cities to allow them to shoulder more and more of the burden of feeding your empire. Eventually they can handle it all, since food consumption is only as high as your population. Paying 64 or 128 production for the flat +2 food in cities without farms is not cost effective.


Minerals are the life-blood of your industry. Your mineral supply is what determines your industrial capacity. Your factories are useless without minerals to feed them. Mineral buildings thus serve the essential role of expanding your industrial base. The Refining Array is the best building in the game, bar none. It should be the first building built in every city. Unlike all the other classes of buildings, the Mineral buildings play a direct role in paying for their own creation. As soon as you build them, you have more building-power. Thus, you should seek to build them whenever and wherever possible. So long as there is even moderate mining activity (~4 miners), the Drone Excavation Center and Mineral Warp Relay will quickly pay for themselves.


Production buildings do not increase your production. What Production buildings DO do is to decrease your Pollution by allowing you to use fewer Workers. Cities are often constrained in what they can do by the total pollution they can tolerate (morale must be protected at all costs) and factory workers are the heaviest polluters so the fewer the better. When you build a new factory in a city, most of the surplus labor will become scientists, but sometimes the pollution will be lowered enough that you can afford another Miner, thus indirectly increasing your industrial output. But it's really all about the Pollution and general Labor Efficiency.
Automated Factories and Intelligent Factories are worthwhile in most cities, but are the most useful in production-specialized cities and newly founded cities that need to produce buildings as quickly as possible (assuming mineral availability).
Nano Factory is expensive and comes late when pollution-mitigation options are plentiful. Still useful in your dedicated Production Cities.


Research buildings are fairly simple and straightforward: they give you more research! They are usually my last priority compared to the other production buildings. When you build them last, you can build them using the production bonuses of your other buildings, and their efficiency bonuses translate into more scientists, which is what these buildings boost! Any city with a lot of scientists will benefit from this building. Since scientists consume only food, produce minimal pollution, and population grows continuously, this will eventually be all of your cities. Build them everywhere, but don't necessarily make them a priority.

Credit boosting buildings are a funny thing. In one respect they are not particularly cost-effective compared to the other buildings, but at the same time credits are really handy to have around for their flexibility. Since credits come directly from the population, the value of these buildings is in direct proportion to the size of the population (assuming 100% tax rate). I usually hold off on these until everything else in the city has already been built.

Morale buildings first allow you to increase your tax rate, and then once you cap out at 100% they exist as a production multiplier to all of your resources at once. Very valuable. High morale cities also attract immigrants, so these are handy in a new city you want to fill up fast. The only downside is that they are expensive and come late in the era. But a 64 production building that gives you a +16% across-the-board bonus to your city's output? Totally worth it. Build them in every era as soon as possible once you have the tech.


The purpose of Habitation buildings is not necessarily to hold more people in your city, but rather to free up your land. Fewer suburbs mean more Farms, Mines, and Labs which directly benefit your production! Wendo Apartments actually come usually before you can build suburbs, and when your habitation is tight, so they do in fact boost your city's capacities. But the Sky Dome and Neuromatrix mainly enable you to plow up your suburbs and replace them with something actually useful. Build these in any city that has or is soon to need suburbs. The free land is how they pay for themselves.

Pollution buildings work similarly to the Habitation buildings in that they allow you to free up your land for profitable activities. However, since cities have no innate Pollution Capacity, the Pollution Processor is vital to prevent morale loss. The Air Recycler comes at a time when Purifiers are common, and so can free up a lot of land, but can also just expand your "pollution budget" to allow you to access more minerals and work a few more factories. The Atmotron basically renders all of your pollution concerns obsolete except in the most production specialized cities.

Population is Power, and you should get these buildings as soon as you can afford them.

Terrain improvements make your cities better, either by providing additional resources or alleviating their problems.

In general, the purpose of a resource-based tile improvements is to change a citizen's base yield from 2 to 3, a +50% increase.

Farms:
Farms give you +1 food on the tile they are built, but only if that tile is worked. They are only useful on fertile land like Grassland and Tropical tiles, where they can provide you a 3-Food tile. Trying to farm Savanna or Tundra is pointless since 2-food sea tiles are abundant. Creating more 2-food tiles when you're not even using all the ones available to you is wasteful, since you could have built another more useful improvement.

Mines:
Mines give you +1 Minerals on the tile they are built. This turns Hills into a useful terrain, an Mountains into gold. Early on you want to mine every mountain in sight (very efficient tiles) and every hill you can afford to spare. Never mine flatlands. A 1-mineral tile is too inefficient in labor and pollution to be worth the bother. Your job with Mines is to create as many 2+ mineral tiles as possible.
Construction Bays:
Each Construction Bay allows a worker to produce a base value of 3 production instead of just 2. A 50% increase! After mines, probably the most profitable tile improvement. They can be built anywhere and still do their job, and they increase the efficiency of the most polluting job.
By building 2 CBs, you can take 3 factory-workers producing 6 production and 2.4 pollution and instead have 2 factory-workers and 1 scientist who produce 6 production, 2 science, and only 1.8 pollution. Bonus per tile: +1 science, -0.3 pollution.
Field Labs:
Each Field Lab allows a scientist to produce a base value of 3 science instead of just 2. Since you nearly always have scientists around this is a guaranteed +1 science per tile. Not as valuable as Construction Bays or Farms since those bolster the efficiency of jobs that are more polluting than Scientists. Although useful, Labs should be your last priority in terrain development.
Energy Parks:
+3 credits. The most useless terrain improvement ever. Not only is that yield pitifully low (+1 resource is worth 4 credits), but it doesn't even get boosted by Buildings or Morale! Its only saving grace is that it doesn't need to be worked to provide its bonus. If you ever have spare land but are short on population (which is never, because population is what gives you land), then you can build these for a little bit of extra money.
Suburbs:
Suburbs provide +2 habitation for the city that owns the tile, but at a cost of 3 credits/turn. For an overcrowded city, suburbs are extremely valuable, but since surplus habitation doesn't earn you anything, you should build only the minimum necessary. You are much better off with an actually productive tile improvement.
Purifiers:
Purifiers provide +2 pollution reduction for the city that owns the tile, but at a cost of 3 credits/turn. Pollution, unlike habitation, is under more direct control by the player, and so Purifiers are slightly less essential and more avoidable than Suburbs. But if you really need to increase your mineral/industrial capacity and have the spare land, then a Purifier will help you.
Forests:
Forests provide a flat 1 Food, 1 Mineral, and reduce Pollution by 1. The food and minerals are essentially worthless since they have to be harvested separately and 1-resource tiles are inefficient. The pollution reduction is all you really care about. Early in the game, before you have Pandoran Construction, forests are your only effective way of managing pollution. Once you can build Purifiers, forests are obsolete.
...unless you are playing Terra Salvum. Then Forests are one of the best tiles around. 2 minerals per tile puts them into solid "very useful" territory (equal to a mined hill), but when you couple that with the inherent pollution reduction? Now forests are golden.
Fungus:
Fungus provides +1 pollution. It is actively harmful to your cities. Purge it from your land.
In the Mechanization Era, you gain access to the Fungus Mutagenesis project which boosts fungus yield to 2 Food, 2 Minerals. Given that Food and Minerals must be harvested separately, this is a mediocre yield, and does not make up for the pollution.
in the Transcendence Era, you gain access to the Fungal Hormones project which adds a further +2/+2 to fungus, for a total of 4 Food, 4 Minerals. Now THAT is a tile worth working! Totally worth the Pollution.
Given that Fungus can be quickly and easily planted, there is no reason not to purge it all in the early game, and then re-seed your land at the end when it's useful.
Terra Salvum gets +1 minerals from Fungus, but the pollution penalty never makes it worthwhile.

One of the projects with the most greatest impact on the world is Terraforming. Raise and lower the terrain. Turn Hills into Mountains, dig Canals, build Bridges, and raise Islands from the sea. Mostly I just use it to turn everything into a mountain. Once you have Terraforming, Mountains become cheap, and Hills become useless. The only reason NOT to turn some terrain into a sweet luscious mineral-rich mountain is if you happen to be farming it. (Or you want your Mechs to walk quickly between cities, or you think it just looks really ugly). A Mountain is just as good as a mined-hill was, and if you felt that those were useful than you won't have any problem with building Suburbs, Purifiers, and Construction Bays on top of mountains as well. With a couple of turns of effort, you can turn a useless 1 Food Savanna tile into a 2 Mineral Mountain. What used to be a wasted tile is now productive again and your industrial power will grow. Raising a flat desert into a tall Mountain only takes as long as building a Farm and a Road. It's really very cheap. Turn all your land into mountains, and just get your food from the sea.

I hope that this guide has been useful to you for understanding this game's surprisingly deep economic system. The relationships between the different resources, though usually straightforward, are not necessarily obvious at first inspection. It takes some thinking to see how the puzzle fits together. And now I have done the thinking for you. Go forth and conquer, my unthinking minions!!!!