Long time forum scroller, first time poster here. I've been attempting my own deep dive into the economic models of the various empire types to try and determine the "true" cost of various resources for normal empires as compared to hive mind and machine empires. I had heard that machine empires were considered borderline worthless in 2.2 because their main advantage (extra alloys per worker) had been given to the other empire types as well, and because energy was a more expensive pop maintenance resource than food. However, in my most recent playthrough I found that the AI machine empires were not only faring well, but tended to dominate against their biological neighbors. After building a lengthy spreadsheet, I've determined that machine empires are still on par with the other empire types, and are actually superior to non-gestalt biological empires under certain conditions.
In building an economic model to compare the various empire types, I first needed to find common denominators by which to compare. Sure, everything has an exchange ratio on the galactic market, but those are always in flux and ideally the market should eventually shift such that the market reflects the true values of resources, rather than driving them. Furthermore, how do you measure non-tradeable finite resources like building slots, district slots, pops etc.?
I eventually determined that rather than measuring economic value in goods like food, energy, etc., the TRUE value of produced resources are based around common fixed resources in the game: Pops, District Slots, Building Slots, and to a lesser extent Housing. Housing can be created via districts or buildings, so there's really only 3 resources (pop,building slots, district slots) with housing achievable via two exchange rates. I then modeled all of the basic resources to determine their true value in these resources. E.g., to NET one unit of extra food from a farm district in a regular empire, you need 0.2 pops, 0.1 energy, 0.05 consumer goods, and 0.1 farm districts. Notice that this is the net value, the housing costs and farmer food maintenance costs are baked in to the housing provided by the farm district and offset the net food output. Similarly, calculate out the costs for energy, minerals, and consumer goods.
The second consideration is the recursive costs. Take the above example: each unit of extra food costs 0.05 consumer goods. Those goods are produced by artisans, which themselves require extra food grown by farmers who require consumer goods made by artisans, and so on and so forth. I did a first or second order approximation of these recursive costs as appropriate. First or second order approximations seem to be acceptable as the additional costs imposed by each "loop" are frequently significant on the first pass, but fall off pretty dramatically after the first iteration.
Going back to the food example, you could then break down all of the costs to net one unit of extra food as something like: 0.24 pop, 0.01 housing, 0.005 building slots, and 0.12 district slots. For each empire type, I came up with base values as follows (note, these are rough approximations with several assumptions, your mileage may vary):
Regular Pops Housing Bldg District
Food: 0.24 0.009 0.005 0.12
Energy: 0.36 0.013 0.0065 0.19
Minerals: 0.35 0.011 0.0057 0.16
Consumer goods: 0.73 0.2 0.1 0.26
Alloy: 1.46 0.4 0.2 0.86
Research: 1.89 0.77 0.38 1.08
Hive Mind
Food: 0.22 0.073 0 0.07
Energy: 0.33 0.11 0 0.11
Minerals: 0.32 0.11 0 0.09
Alloy: 1.27 0.65 0.17 0.62
Research: 1.58 0.86 0.25 0.83
Machine
Energy: 0.4 0 0 0.2
Minerals: 0.27 0 0 0.18
Alloy: 1.27 0.33 0.17 0.57
Research: 1.63 0.5 0.25 0.67
The first takeaway is that both Hive and Machine empires appear to be more efficient in utilizing pops, building, and district slots into resources. By contrast, Machine empires appear to be the most housing efficient and Hive Minds are the least housing efficient. This is due to the fact that Hive mind non-city districts provide 3 basic jobs but only 2 of the 3 required housing to fill those jobs. This adds an additional housing requirement to basic resource production that simply does not exist with the 2-job, 2-housing districts of regular and machine empires. Offsetting this, of course, is the ability to convert extra building or district slots into housing via city districts or luxury residences. Therein, hive minds shine with extra housing provided per slot. Reducing the above charts to a 3-resource system (converting housing costs away with building/district costs), Hive Minds are more efficient across the board when utilizing city districts than their regular counterparts, while lagging behind in district/building efficiency somewhat when warrens are required for housing.
The second thing I noticed from this chart was.... what on Earth, Machine Empires are actually still very good?! Even though they are the absolute WORST at generating excess energy, requiring the most pop/district utilization to create one unit of surplus, they run away with mineral production, match hive minds for their alloy production, and still manage to beat regular empires at research. All the while, they remain incredibly housing and building efficient. At first I thought there was a typo somewhere in my spreadsheet. How can they be so efficient when their energy costs are higher than any other energy cost, they use energy in place of food, and their energy cost is worse than any equivalent food cost? It turns out that the culprit is in the recursive costs, as discussed earlier. Take an energy district for a regular empire. To run that district you need 2 pops, food for those 2 pops, consumer goods for those 2 pops, food and consumer goods for the pops making the food and consumer goods, extra housing for the people making the consumer goods, energy maintenance for the farm district and consumer goods buildings, it's turtles all the way down. Hive minds, you don't have the consumer goods cost, but you do have the food recursive costs AND have find the extra housing in there somewhere. But machine empires? Nada, nothing, zilch. 1 energy district requires 2 pops, no extra housing, consumes 1 energy in maintenance and 2 energy in drone food (both consumed from what is produced at THIS energy district), and nets you 5 energy. You only get 5 energy from these 2 pops, but there are NO recursive costs. You have a very simple, clean equation that 2 pops + 1 district = 5 energy. The math is similar for mining districts: 2 pops, 3 energy in maintenance, and that's it. Between the lack of food, the lack of consumer goods, and the complete removal of any recursive costs, the machine supply chain becomes incredibly efficient all the way to alloys and research points. Sure, you're off to a slow start with energy, but it's not as slow as it looks on the first pass, once you factor in the recursive costs. To counter balance, there's no compound interest holding you down and your path from start to finish is much shorter.
This analysis has one huge caveat: I'm comparing empires assuming that energy and consumer goods are coming solely from generator districts and industrial buildings: no trade value. This means that regular empires appear to be at a huge disadvantage, but that's because their benefits from trade value are not factored in. Trade value is a much harder resource to model in this instance for several reasons. First, trade can turn into energy, energy and consumer goods, or energy and unity (a non-economic resource). Second, assuming that you go energy and consumer goods for the shortened consumer good supply train, that's one resource input turning into multiple resource outputs, compared with the other way around which is much easier to work with. Finally, as end products, the ratio of energy to consumer goods varies wildly depending on whether your spending those resources to produce minerals, alloys, or especially research points. Solving a single equation for raw resource cost then instead turns into a system of equations depending on your relative output of minerals, alloys, and research points.
Nevertheless, I gave it a shot. I took a look at two possible scenarios to help reduce the complexity of the equation. First scenario: what if I'm swimming in trade value? I get a ton free from city districts, trade agreements, starbase modules, and stack huge multipliers. If energy and consumer goods were basically free (no generator districts or civilian industries required) and my limiting factors were instead food/mineral production, district and building slots, housing etc., what would my economy look like? Turns out, as you'd expect, a trading economy runs away from the rest.
"Free" Trade Pops Housing Bldg District
Food: 0.2 0 0 0.1
Energy: 0* 0* 0* 0*
Minerals: 0.3 0 0 0.13
Consumer goods: 0* 0* 0* 0*
Alloy: 1 0.33 0.16 0.62
Research: 0.6 0.5 0.25 0.55
Objectively better across the board, especially in research. Obviously, this is not a realistic scenario. You never have infinite trade value. Rather, this models what resources cost when they are consumed using energy and consumer goods generated up to your "trade I get for free" limit, whatever that may be. More realistically, you have to look at the real cost of generating trade value, typically in clerk jobs generated from city districts and commercial zones.
Turns out, trade value produced from city districts doesn't produce net value. 2 clerks producing 4 trade value (I'm assuming you have the prosperity tradition) provide 2 energy and 0.5 consumer goods.... which do nothing for you but offset the maintenance cost and consumer goods cost of the city district and clerks, respectively. It doesn't even factor in the recursive costs to feed the clerks. In short, city clerks do not actually generate value for you, they merely offset the costs of converting a district slot into extra housing (and even then they don't cover ALL the recursive costs).
So how about commercial zone clerks? They're even worse, if such a thing is possible. 1 building slot and 5 pops produce 10 trade value at the cost of 2 maintenance. That creates 5 energy and 2.5 consumer goods... but 2 energy and 1.25 consumer goods are immediately eaten in upkeep. Then you have to factor in the cost of 5 food recursively... and before you know it you've spent 1 building slot and 5 pops for almost nothing. Any energy or consumer goods you actually net out of the deal ends up being insanely more expensive than if you'd simply built a few generators and a civilian industries. Granted, trade value can get some pretty crazy multipliers so it's not quite so bad, but it's still miserable and a calculation with multipliers included is outside the scope of this post.
Parting thoughts:
1. I think the paradigm of measuring resource production as a function of pops, district slots, building slots, and to a lesser extent housing, is the way to go. District and building slots represent the available planet resources but require an investment in minerals to properly develop/exploit. Pops represent a time-gated method of exploiting the resources generated by building and district slots, and vary wildly in cost based on growth rate, resettlement policy, and game year. Housing provides an upper limit on the pop resource, and is convertable from district and building slots via two exchange rates (cities vs housing buildings) that can vary between empire types.
2. Based on this model, there is an opportunity to directly compare empire type production capacity and efficiency, as well as the ability to differentiate different empire playstyles. Right now, Hive Minds are king when it comes to pop and district efficiency and growth, but lag behind when housing becomes a limiting factor. For flavor, I'd be interested in seeing perhaps Hive Minds become even more zerg-like. Rapid growth, high maximum population, but lower individual pop efficiency. This might entail a slight nerf in per-pop efficiency, a matching buff to housing efficiency (merely to offset the per-pop nerf), while retaining the rapid-growth expand-or-die playstyle. They should be good early, but worsen as the game progresses if other empires can catch up.
3. Machine empires, amazingly, still fit their intended niche. They suck at producing energy for its own sake, but excel in producing the finished resources you actually care about. I think they should play the opposite of a hive mind. Slow as molasses growth, but incredibly efficient with what they have. I also believe there is room stylistically for them to excel at using the building resource efficiently: They should somehow always get more bang for their buck using the limited building slot resource. This can be by having their buildings produce more good per worker (as they used to be with alloys), or simply by being more efficient with a smaller population, therefore not hitting that 75pop building cap nearly as quickly or as often. They should be the worst early game, but snowball if they have the chance to catch up.
4. Regular empires... trade value needs some love. If you are swimming in trade, you are unstoppable. But actually GETTING that trade value is a major trap. And once you have to actually work for trade or collect energy/consumer goods manually, regular empires lag far behind. City clerks don't net positive resources, commercial clerks barely recover more than their base cost. And that doesn't even begin to consider the starbase trade hub/hangar bay/patrol costs. I think the niche for regular empires is that they are the "average" all around in total pops, pop growth rate, district efficiency, and building efficiency. However, their unique playstyle comes in trade value as a supplementary/alternate energy/consumer goods producer. When they have the trade to spare, they are above average, when they lack the trade, they fall behind. I think the playstyle is actually there, but in need of a numbers tweak. We need more "free" trade from non-commercial zone sources, more value from the existing trade sources to make them net positive, less micro and overhead in producing/collecting/transporting/protecting trade to the capital, or some combination of all three.
tl;dr
1. Machine empires are actually very good. Sure they suck at producing energy for its own sake, but in terms of producing what you ACTUALLY WANT, shorter supply chains and lack of recursive costs cause them to come out ahead.
2. Hive minds are in a really strong place right now. They grow faster than anyone, allowing them to more quickly consume the "true" resources (pops,district slots,housing slots). Eventually, they get a housing problem once their planets start to fill up. If they have spare city districts to use, they remain ahead, but become starved for building slots when they need to use building slots for housing. I think this fits very thematically with the Hive mind playstyle. They outpace everyone when they have room to expand, but stagnate easily when they've filled up the available space.
3. Regular empires are objectively the best when they are swimming in extra trade value, but objectively the worst when producing resources "manually" or by expending resources to generate trade. When generating trade, city clerks really don't actually help, but only (not quite) offset the cost of creating the city district to produce housing. Commercial zone clerks are almost a complete waste of time. Pops are better spent resettling almost anywhere else.
Edit:
I'm including modified numbers in this post for gestalt consciousness empires, baking in housing costs and factoring in the increased amenities cost as addressed by Promethian. Hive mind empires come across as noticeably worse on per-pop and per-building efficiency, but still excel on per-district efficiency. Now look to be worse at mineral and energy production across the board, but the shortened supply chain coupled with the adjustments to Hive Mind numbers show they are the clear leaders in Alloy and Research production.
Per sillyrobot, I've also adjusted the trading empires numbers a little to reflect the slight Consumer goods production created by city districts. Apologies, I can't seem to format the tables properly.
Trade Empires:
Pop Bldg District
Food 0.24, 0.005, 0.12
Energy 0.36, 0.006, 0.19
Mineral 0.35, 0.006, 0.16
Alloy 1.68, 0.2, 0.95
Research 2.31, 0.38, 1.25
Hive Mind
Pop Bldg District
Food 0.29, 0.018, 0.11
Energy 0.43, 0.027, 0.15
Mineral 0.42, 0.027, 0.13
Alloy 1.68, 0.27, 0.87
Research 2.1, 0.38, 1.16
Machine
Pop Bldg District
Energy 0.55, 0.04, 0.21
Mineral 0.37, 0.03, 0.19
Alloy 1.44, 0.2, 0.65
Research 1.89, 0.31, 0.79
In building an economic model to compare the various empire types, I first needed to find common denominators by which to compare. Sure, everything has an exchange ratio on the galactic market, but those are always in flux and ideally the market should eventually shift such that the market reflects the true values of resources, rather than driving them. Furthermore, how do you measure non-tradeable finite resources like building slots, district slots, pops etc.?
I eventually determined that rather than measuring economic value in goods like food, energy, etc., the TRUE value of produced resources are based around common fixed resources in the game: Pops, District Slots, Building Slots, and to a lesser extent Housing. Housing can be created via districts or buildings, so there's really only 3 resources (pop,building slots, district slots) with housing achievable via two exchange rates. I then modeled all of the basic resources to determine their true value in these resources. E.g., to NET one unit of extra food from a farm district in a regular empire, you need 0.2 pops, 0.1 energy, 0.05 consumer goods, and 0.1 farm districts. Notice that this is the net value, the housing costs and farmer food maintenance costs are baked in to the housing provided by the farm district and offset the net food output. Similarly, calculate out the costs for energy, minerals, and consumer goods.
The second consideration is the recursive costs. Take the above example: each unit of extra food costs 0.05 consumer goods. Those goods are produced by artisans, which themselves require extra food grown by farmers who require consumer goods made by artisans, and so on and so forth. I did a first or second order approximation of these recursive costs as appropriate. First or second order approximations seem to be acceptable as the additional costs imposed by each "loop" are frequently significant on the first pass, but fall off pretty dramatically after the first iteration.
Going back to the food example, you could then break down all of the costs to net one unit of extra food as something like: 0.24 pop, 0.01 housing, 0.005 building slots, and 0.12 district slots. For each empire type, I came up with base values as follows (note, these are rough approximations with several assumptions, your mileage may vary):
Regular Pops Housing Bldg District
Food: 0.24 0.009 0.005 0.12
Energy: 0.36 0.013 0.0065 0.19
Minerals: 0.35 0.011 0.0057 0.16
Consumer goods: 0.73 0.2 0.1 0.26
Alloy: 1.46 0.4 0.2 0.86
Research: 1.89 0.77 0.38 1.08
Hive Mind
Food: 0.22 0.073 0 0.07
Energy: 0.33 0.11 0 0.11
Minerals: 0.32 0.11 0 0.09
Alloy: 1.27 0.65 0.17 0.62
Research: 1.58 0.86 0.25 0.83
Machine
Energy: 0.4 0 0 0.2
Minerals: 0.27 0 0 0.18
Alloy: 1.27 0.33 0.17 0.57
Research: 1.63 0.5 0.25 0.67
The first takeaway is that both Hive and Machine empires appear to be more efficient in utilizing pops, building, and district slots into resources. By contrast, Machine empires appear to be the most housing efficient and Hive Minds are the least housing efficient. This is due to the fact that Hive mind non-city districts provide 3 basic jobs but only 2 of the 3 required housing to fill those jobs. This adds an additional housing requirement to basic resource production that simply does not exist with the 2-job, 2-housing districts of regular and machine empires. Offsetting this, of course, is the ability to convert extra building or district slots into housing via city districts or luxury residences. Therein, hive minds shine with extra housing provided per slot. Reducing the above charts to a 3-resource system (converting housing costs away with building/district costs), Hive Minds are more efficient across the board when utilizing city districts than their regular counterparts, while lagging behind in district/building efficiency somewhat when warrens are required for housing.
The second thing I noticed from this chart was.... what on Earth, Machine Empires are actually still very good?! Even though they are the absolute WORST at generating excess energy, requiring the most pop/district utilization to create one unit of surplus, they run away with mineral production, match hive minds for their alloy production, and still manage to beat regular empires at research. All the while, they remain incredibly housing and building efficient. At first I thought there was a typo somewhere in my spreadsheet. How can they be so efficient when their energy costs are higher than any other energy cost, they use energy in place of food, and their energy cost is worse than any equivalent food cost? It turns out that the culprit is in the recursive costs, as discussed earlier. Take an energy district for a regular empire. To run that district you need 2 pops, food for those 2 pops, consumer goods for those 2 pops, food and consumer goods for the pops making the food and consumer goods, extra housing for the people making the consumer goods, energy maintenance for the farm district and consumer goods buildings, it's turtles all the way down. Hive minds, you don't have the consumer goods cost, but you do have the food recursive costs AND have find the extra housing in there somewhere. But machine empires? Nada, nothing, zilch. 1 energy district requires 2 pops, no extra housing, consumes 1 energy in maintenance and 2 energy in drone food (both consumed from what is produced at THIS energy district), and nets you 5 energy. You only get 5 energy from these 2 pops, but there are NO recursive costs. You have a very simple, clean equation that 2 pops + 1 district = 5 energy. The math is similar for mining districts: 2 pops, 3 energy in maintenance, and that's it. Between the lack of food, the lack of consumer goods, and the complete removal of any recursive costs, the machine supply chain becomes incredibly efficient all the way to alloys and research points. Sure, you're off to a slow start with energy, but it's not as slow as it looks on the first pass, once you factor in the recursive costs. To counter balance, there's no compound interest holding you down and your path from start to finish is much shorter.
This analysis has one huge caveat: I'm comparing empires assuming that energy and consumer goods are coming solely from generator districts and industrial buildings: no trade value. This means that regular empires appear to be at a huge disadvantage, but that's because their benefits from trade value are not factored in. Trade value is a much harder resource to model in this instance for several reasons. First, trade can turn into energy, energy and consumer goods, or energy and unity (a non-economic resource). Second, assuming that you go energy and consumer goods for the shortened consumer good supply train, that's one resource input turning into multiple resource outputs, compared with the other way around which is much easier to work with. Finally, as end products, the ratio of energy to consumer goods varies wildly depending on whether your spending those resources to produce minerals, alloys, or especially research points. Solving a single equation for raw resource cost then instead turns into a system of equations depending on your relative output of minerals, alloys, and research points.
Nevertheless, I gave it a shot. I took a look at two possible scenarios to help reduce the complexity of the equation. First scenario: what if I'm swimming in trade value? I get a ton free from city districts, trade agreements, starbase modules, and stack huge multipliers. If energy and consumer goods were basically free (no generator districts or civilian industries required) and my limiting factors were instead food/mineral production, district and building slots, housing etc., what would my economy look like? Turns out, as you'd expect, a trading economy runs away from the rest.
"Free" Trade Pops Housing Bldg District
Food: 0.2 0 0 0.1
Energy: 0* 0* 0* 0*
Minerals: 0.3 0 0 0.13
Consumer goods: 0* 0* 0* 0*
Alloy: 1 0.33 0.16 0.62
Research: 0.6 0.5 0.25 0.55
Objectively better across the board, especially in research. Obviously, this is not a realistic scenario. You never have infinite trade value. Rather, this models what resources cost when they are consumed using energy and consumer goods generated up to your "trade I get for free" limit, whatever that may be. More realistically, you have to look at the real cost of generating trade value, typically in clerk jobs generated from city districts and commercial zones.
Turns out, trade value produced from city districts doesn't produce net value. 2 clerks producing 4 trade value (I'm assuming you have the prosperity tradition) provide 2 energy and 0.5 consumer goods.... which do nothing for you but offset the maintenance cost and consumer goods cost of the city district and clerks, respectively. It doesn't even factor in the recursive costs to feed the clerks. In short, city clerks do not actually generate value for you, they merely offset the costs of converting a district slot into extra housing (and even then they don't cover ALL the recursive costs).
So how about commercial zone clerks? They're even worse, if such a thing is possible. 1 building slot and 5 pops produce 10 trade value at the cost of 2 maintenance. That creates 5 energy and 2.5 consumer goods... but 2 energy and 1.25 consumer goods are immediately eaten in upkeep. Then you have to factor in the cost of 5 food recursively... and before you know it you've spent 1 building slot and 5 pops for almost nothing. Any energy or consumer goods you actually net out of the deal ends up being insanely more expensive than if you'd simply built a few generators and a civilian industries. Granted, trade value can get some pretty crazy multipliers so it's not quite so bad, but it's still miserable and a calculation with multipliers included is outside the scope of this post.
Parting thoughts:
1. I think the paradigm of measuring resource production as a function of pops, district slots, building slots, and to a lesser extent housing, is the way to go. District and building slots represent the available planet resources but require an investment in minerals to properly develop/exploit. Pops represent a time-gated method of exploiting the resources generated by building and district slots, and vary wildly in cost based on growth rate, resettlement policy, and game year. Housing provides an upper limit on the pop resource, and is convertable from district and building slots via two exchange rates (cities vs housing buildings) that can vary between empire types.
2. Based on this model, there is an opportunity to directly compare empire type production capacity and efficiency, as well as the ability to differentiate different empire playstyles. Right now, Hive Minds are king when it comes to pop and district efficiency and growth, but lag behind when housing becomes a limiting factor. For flavor, I'd be interested in seeing perhaps Hive Minds become even more zerg-like. Rapid growth, high maximum population, but lower individual pop efficiency. This might entail a slight nerf in per-pop efficiency, a matching buff to housing efficiency (merely to offset the per-pop nerf), while retaining the rapid-growth expand-or-die playstyle. They should be good early, but worsen as the game progresses if other empires can catch up.
3. Machine empires, amazingly, still fit their intended niche. They suck at producing energy for its own sake, but excel in producing the finished resources you actually care about. I think they should play the opposite of a hive mind. Slow as molasses growth, but incredibly efficient with what they have. I also believe there is room stylistically for them to excel at using the building resource efficiently: They should somehow always get more bang for their buck using the limited building slot resource. This can be by having their buildings produce more good per worker (as they used to be with alloys), or simply by being more efficient with a smaller population, therefore not hitting that 75pop building cap nearly as quickly or as often. They should be the worst early game, but snowball if they have the chance to catch up.
4. Regular empires... trade value needs some love. If you are swimming in trade, you are unstoppable. But actually GETTING that trade value is a major trap. And once you have to actually work for trade or collect energy/consumer goods manually, regular empires lag far behind. City clerks don't net positive resources, commercial clerks barely recover more than their base cost. And that doesn't even begin to consider the starbase trade hub/hangar bay/patrol costs. I think the niche for regular empires is that they are the "average" all around in total pops, pop growth rate, district efficiency, and building efficiency. However, their unique playstyle comes in trade value as a supplementary/alternate energy/consumer goods producer. When they have the trade to spare, they are above average, when they lack the trade, they fall behind. I think the playstyle is actually there, but in need of a numbers tweak. We need more "free" trade from non-commercial zone sources, more value from the existing trade sources to make them net positive, less micro and overhead in producing/collecting/transporting/protecting trade to the capital, or some combination of all three.
tl;dr
1. Machine empires are actually very good. Sure they suck at producing energy for its own sake, but in terms of producing what you ACTUALLY WANT, shorter supply chains and lack of recursive costs cause them to come out ahead.
2. Hive minds are in a really strong place right now. They grow faster than anyone, allowing them to more quickly consume the "true" resources (pops,district slots,housing slots). Eventually, they get a housing problem once their planets start to fill up. If they have spare city districts to use, they remain ahead, but become starved for building slots when they need to use building slots for housing. I think this fits very thematically with the Hive mind playstyle. They outpace everyone when they have room to expand, but stagnate easily when they've filled up the available space.
3. Regular empires are objectively the best when they are swimming in extra trade value, but objectively the worst when producing resources "manually" or by expending resources to generate trade. When generating trade, city clerks really don't actually help, but only (not quite) offset the cost of creating the city district to produce housing. Commercial zone clerks are almost a complete waste of time. Pops are better spent resettling almost anywhere else.
Edit:
I'm including modified numbers in this post for gestalt consciousness empires, baking in housing costs and factoring in the increased amenities cost as addressed by Promethian. Hive mind empires come across as noticeably worse on per-pop and per-building efficiency, but still excel on per-district efficiency. Now look to be worse at mineral and energy production across the board, but the shortened supply chain coupled with the adjustments to Hive Mind numbers show they are the clear leaders in Alloy and Research production.
Per sillyrobot, I've also adjusted the trading empires numbers a little to reflect the slight Consumer goods production created by city districts. Apologies, I can't seem to format the tables properly.
Trade Empires:
Pop Bldg District
Food 0.24, 0.005, 0.12
Energy 0.36, 0.006, 0.19
Mineral 0.35, 0.006, 0.16
Alloy 1.68, 0.2, 0.95
Research 2.31, 0.38, 1.25
Hive Mind
Pop Bldg District
Food 0.29, 0.018, 0.11
Energy 0.43, 0.027, 0.15
Mineral 0.42, 0.027, 0.13
Alloy 1.68, 0.27, 0.87
Research 2.1, 0.38, 1.16
Machine
Pop Bldg District
Energy 0.55, 0.04, 0.21
Mineral 0.37, 0.03, 0.19
Alloy 1.44, 0.2, 0.65
Research 1.89, 0.31, 0.79
Last edited:
. I seem to always get a lot of flak when I state this.
