Art academies compete with urban centers... and themselves.

[Xaelyn]

Art

They do.

But if you have tons of demand for fine art, you might as well cater to it. It's cheap to make, and the POPs that make it usually are going pretty good SOL wise.

In this screenshot, which factory do you expand next?

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And just what are those art academies up to?

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They are turning cheap paper, tools, and electricity into fine art.

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It pays well, too.

So, yes, those buildings could employ more people doing other things, but in the above situation, it seems to make sense to just spam out more art academies until I get the price of fine art down further.

Consider this art academy, that is almost twice as productive per worker than this extremely unproductive tooling workshop, but still provides substantially less tax revenue, and of course less value added for the economy in general. Per-employee productivity is simply a bad yardstick when the buildings don't have similar amounts of employees per level. Each level of the art academy requires the same construction investment as another factory, but has a substantially lower RoI.

Eventually of course you end up with huge amounts of construction and nothing better to build, but in the early to mid game there are always going to be substantially better options.

There is also the enormous urbanization they create per employee, meaning they are still crushing the services price by inducing far more production thereof than they do demand.

 

[yurcick]

To put this short: art academies are not a good late-game resource sink, neither realistically, nor (in their current form of operation, where they breed urbanization) mechanically.

 

[Secret Master]

Eventually of course you end up with huge amounts of construction and nothing better to build, but in the early to mid game there are always going to be substantially better options.

I wouldn't recommend them in the early or mid game in most cases. When you have plenty of labor that could be put to better use, and when you could be building things that either lower the cost of input goods for construction sectors or lowing the cost of critical goods POPs consume, they don't make a whole lot of sense.

But eventually there's real demand for them, and there's a bottleneck in demand for other things. Using your screenshot as an example, another 40k tools on the market might simply result in tooling workshops firing people. But if 500 fine art won't fire people, and it drives up demand for paper, tools, and electricity, then why not build them?

Consider this art academy, that is almost twice as productive per worker than this extremely unproductive tooling workshop, but still provides substantially less tax revenue, and of course less value added for the economy in general.

Of course. Build that tooling workshop when you need it. But if you are sitting at +75% base cost for art and tooling workshops are marginal, why even angst over it. Build that art academy to churn out the needed art while driving up demand for those tools.

There is also the enormous urbanization they create per employee, meaning they are still crushing the services price by inducing far more production thereof than they do demand.

Urban centers are "free" buildings. If my urban centers are only 10% employed because services are over-supplied, then who cares? Yes, I don't want POPs getting in a hiring/firing cycle, but if an urban center is employing 50k out of a possible 125k, and then I add urbanization to give it potential employment of 250k, it doesn't matter to me. It's still going to employ only 50k people because that's how much demand there is for services.

Where I care about urban centers is the following situations:

1) Do I need more transportation demand? Use public transit in urban centers.
2) Are urban centers using up goods that I need for something else? Then swap PMs around.
3) Do I need to drive up the demand for electricity? Make sure all urban centers are using electrical PM.
4) If it is the early game, can I make services cheaper by swapping to gaslights?

While services do compete with fine art for that category of goods, I don't care much about urban centers as I have only limited control of them anyway. If I'm growing urbanization via academies, it doesn't matter to me since urbanization happens no matter what factories I'm building. Even when services are dirt cheap, POPs still want art. And now that I'm not producing useless services alongside art, the academies make more sense.

I also want to point out that later in the game, as the SOL of your population grows, you might find it hard to increase demand for things like regular clothes, regular furniture, and so on. But art is one of those goods that increases in demand from SOL 30 onward. Luxury furniture and clothes increase in demand, but they are tied to factories that must produce regular clothes and furniture. This drags down their profitability. But now art is linked to nothing, so it can just keep expanding to meet demand without other considerations.

 

[Fawr]

It's not like that the one who comes first buys something at base price. He buys it at yesterday's equilibrium price. Which leads to him (if he still buys coal) massively overpaying for a unit of heating.

Yep, it's certainly not an ideal way of doing it.

 

[Notme1]

TBH Art Academies should be 5x bigger with same urbanization per level and employ some laborers, clerks and shopkeepers too.

 

[Gort11]

Yeah, my point on them being gluttons for infrastructure wasn't really that they're not worth having (they are) but that it doesn't make a lot of sense for a building that employs so few people and uses and produces so few materials to have the same need for railways as say, an iron mine.

TBH Art Academies should be 5x bigger with same urbanization per level and employ some laborers, clerks and shopkeepers too.

Yeah, it feels like the urbanisation and infrastructure costs don't line up with how small (in terms of employment and good consumption/production) each art academy is.

 

[Secret Master]

TBH Art Academies should be 5x bigger with same urbanization per level and employ some laborers, clerks and shopkeepers too.

I agree.

I've mentioned in another thread that it seems odd that the academics with an SOL of 30 are cleaning their own toilets in between performances of Macbeth or painting Woman with a Parasol.

Starving artists? Yeah. But look at the SOL of those guys in the screenshot. We both know they aren't fixing creaky door hinges at work or updating payroll records.

 

[yurcick]

There is certain elegancy in having a single industry producing art for each sub-era with PM changes. But maybe it's just wrong, and cinemas should employ very different workforce and be constructed separately.

 

[$ilent_$trider]

Art academies with Film PMs should employ artists, machinists, laborers, clerks and maybe capitalists/bureaucrats depending on ownership PM?