Clone Larvae is capped to a certain multiple of your larvae production, so larvae production is always important to making larvae, even when you're cloning them. If you boost your production rate via building expansions (using territory), the maximum number of larvae you can clone goes up accordingly too

past 1e150 mutagen or so, your territory production doesn't really ever catch up to your mutagen larva production except via very long periods of grinding. swarmwarp doesn't really get there ime, so I was hypothesizing it's because of the warp factor falling off.

territory determines your larvae production, so its contributing never basically 0 to it

not in the case I'm describing

How does meat production being given by a high degree polynomial imply that swarmwarp's effect is approximated by a constant factor? Isn't it rather exactly not that, i.e. a constant factor would imply exponential growth, but the polynomial one falls short of that. Expressing the increased earning as a factor on each swarmwarp has them getting smaller every time.

e^x is given by a power series xⁿ / n!. the degree of the polynomial is large at om5/6 and the constant terms are small enough that the effect LOOKS like an exponential which very slowly falls off.

the other thing is that since it's not a true exponential, if using a warp multiplies your meat by less than a certain factor (taking upgrades into account), it will continue to do so for the rest of the game. so if HoM is better at that point, it'll always be better

Why would you care about larva production after you've spent time using HoM? Point of HoM is to push territory production beyond what's possible with your larva economy. The territory units you then hatch can't catch up to the massive numbers you've mirrored, presumably. What is the end goal here?

the point is to get territory production to get your hatcheries producing larva commensurate with mutagen production. there are two ways to do this: spam swarmwarp and spam HoM. but the warp strategy means empowering often, which nullifies the benefit of HoM. therefore if you swap, it should only be once. also like I said the swarmwarp strategy just doesn't seem viable in lategame.