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ONLY time UP is worth having is if your building a bulk income account.
take my main - 2mil raw UP - 12mil total UP... this supports an army of 1.4/1.5bil ball park... so i can build income planets to match (currently has just shy of 1,5/tril turn income).
the extra income generated from having planets capped to an army of that size pays for the cost of building the UP... so, in the long run, its worth it.
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now, lets say you have an every day account, either built for war or balanced play... to get raw up from 0 to 2mil costs roughly 3.5 quad naq.
at current market price you can buy 8,750,000,000 uu for 3.5q naq... meaning in order for a 2mil raw UP to pay for itself, it would take just under 12 years of unit production before you start making a gain over buying uu.
now lets say you go through the effort of building a few pretty UP planets and bring your total UP to say 5mil.
depending on how many planets you build to get that UP, you can safely say it will still take over 8 years to see a return (being more UP, but more cost to build planets).
but now you have planets - they risk being taken, you need to keep them protected... this adds extra cost and stress.
so you see, unless your building a 10mil+ total UP to stay above pluage for income reasons, your better off saving your 3.5q, and buying the 8.7bil UU as you need them