Question: Generic Investment vs. Specialization for Your Cities

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Question: Generic Investment vs. Specialization for Your Cities

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Question: Generic Investment vs. Specialization for You... - 7/4/2020 3:36:01 PM

Sequitor2000

Posts: 6
Joined: 7/1/2020
Status: offline

I know that this isn't a pure 4X, but I'm unsure on how far to push the similarity when it comes to building up my economy. In Civ type games, the optimal investment strategy is usually to specialize your cities towards certain goals (money, research, etc.) to compound multipliers. This game doesn't seem to have the same underlying mechanic, but I'm not positive of that. Would it make any sense to think of one city as my bureaucratic hub, another as my industrial center, etc. or does it not matter?

If it doesn't matter, would it make more sense to focus investment in your most productive city (recognizing that your other cities need some attention to ensure they don't do bad things like revolt), and use that megalopolis to supply the rest of your economy?

Post #: 1

RE: Question: Generic Investment vs. Specialization for... - 7/4/2020 3:51:05 PM

Tomn

Posts: 148
Joined: 4/22/2013
Status: offline

It's...complex. Specialization in specific fields isn't really a benefit unless we're talking resource deposits that just don't exist elsewhere in your empire, and there USUALLY isn't a specific benefit to focusing on a megapolis...to a point.

Basically, the only real limit on how productive a given city can be is how many resource deposits it has nearby and how much population it has. The more population it has, the more economic activity it can support, and the more resource deposits it has, the more of that specific resource it can extract without suffering from admin strain due to faraway assets. If is, if anything, arguably more effective to have a lot of relatively small cities so that you can build small, cheap and efficient versions of unique city-only assets like bureaucratic offices/factories, but if one of your cities (probably your starting city) has an overwhelmingly large population it makes sense to build as much as you can there because there actually are workers available to fill those job slots, and the private economy probably can't keep up the sheer amount of jobs people are clamoring for. But then again migration is a thing, and if you have one megapolis with few available jobs and a massive population and a whole lot of nearby smaller pop cities reaching the edges of their available workforce, there's almost certainly going to be a significant amount of emigration to smooth out the imbalances.

But on the other hand there IS one particular multiplicative bonuses: Governors. If you have a highly skilled governor with whom you have excellent relations, it can make sense to pile as much as you can manage into a single large city he controls. But again, there are upper limits on how much you can benefit from this before the population starts emigrating, so...yeah. It's complicated.

(in reply to Sequitor2000)

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RE: Question: Generic Investment vs. Specialization for... - 7/4/2020 7:34:41 PM

zgrssd

Posts: 3385
Joined: 6/9/2020
Status: offline

I try to put as much as possible into the Capitol.
Otherwise, I try to put stuff as close to the consumer (or the consumer as close to the producer) as possible. Some things are just better build locally, then centralized (Food, most mining is never near the consumers).

Moving some stuff (particulary food and metal), tends to cause massive Logistics strain.
While stuff like Water, Fuel and Energy travels for free.
And recruits, troops and Unit supply is just something I have to have Logistics leftover for.

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4834257

< Message edited by zgrssd -- 7/4/2020 7:36:11 PM >

(in reply to Tomn)

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