Do branch offices compensate higher administrative penalty?

[DimeDrol]

Question in the topic. I am playing megacorporation now and it feels underpowered comparing with regular empires.
I am trying not to exceed administrative cap but AI develops its planets veeeery slowly, so even on capitals branch offices are barely better than regular districts.
Maybe I play wrong?

 

[KopiG]

Well I think they are worth it:

 

[permeakra]

I am trying not to exceed administrative cap but AI develops its planets veeeery slowly, so even on capitals branch offices are barely better than regular districts.

They do not really compete with districts early game. They offer buildings slots that you don't have to provide pops and non-energy upkeep for. So early game they are best used for science labs. Late game, when you have tons of branch offices, they can serve as a source of minerals for your ecu's beyond what you can mine on your planets.

 

[Ancillary]

I'd say they are definitely worth it. The buildings are a nice bonus (You can gain crazy amenities on all your planets by stacking Executive Retreats.), but the real value comes from the branch office income. Two energy districts (using 2 admin points) will yield a base 16 energy; with a bunch of modifiers you might be able to double that output to 32. Meanwhile, a branch office on a well-populated world can produce several times this.

 

[DimeDrol]

Ok, maybe my mistake was in taking Temples of Prosperity as first buildings.
Is it worth to go beyond administrative cap?

 

[Ancillary]

Ok, maybe my mistake was in taking Temples of Prosperity as first buildings.
Is it worth to go beyond administrative cap?

Yeah, I found Gospel of the Masses to be one of the best megacorp civics, but that was strictly due to the extra income from your own pops. The Temple of Prosperity was pretty useless.

There's really no reason not to go beyond the admin cap. That said, as a megacorp you will generally want to expand through districts and branch offices, not through grabbing systems.

 

[RoverStorm]

Short answer: really kinda depends.

Long answer:

LETS DO THE MATH!!!

A branch office is 2 ES (Empire Sprawl/Size) while a District is 1 ES. From all variables being at their base and assuming robots are not included in the equation, here is a list of what 2 Empire Size can get you in terms of resource districts:

1 Agri District & 1 Mining district (-2 energy total) provides 2 farmers (+12 food) and 2 miners (+8 minerals) and housing for them. Since 4 worker pops need a total of 4 food and 1 consumer good (1 mineral), this means the net result for 2 ES is: -2 Energy, +8 Food, +7 Minerals.

Another possibility:
1 Agri & 1 Generator (-2 energy), +2 farmers (+12 food) +2 technicians (+8 energy). 4 pops eat 4 food and 1 consumer good. Result: +6 energy, +8 food, -1 minerals.
So in total:

1 Agri 1 Mining: -2 energy, +8 food, +7 minerals.
1 Agri 1 Gen: +6 energy, +8 food, -1 mineral.
2 Agri gives: +16 food, -2 energy, -1 mineral.
1 Mining 1 Gen: +6 energy, +7 minerals, -4 food.
2 Mining: +15 minerals, -2 energy, -4 food.
2 Energy: +14 energy, -4 food, -1 mineral.

For basic resource districts, the net gain trying to balance resources seems to typically be either +9 or +13 raw resources.

What this means is that when it comes to raw resources, a branch office is worth more than 2 rural districts once it would create about 15 energy, assuming base values for everything.

Cities districts get more complicated for a few reasons. As a whole, they are valuable for housing for specific buildings. This is where they shine, as they can house an entire factory for example, generating lots of alloys. Usually this means city districts are in fact worth a lot more when comparing to branch offices. They also get dramatically better with tech and traditions.

But if your workers have high living standards or nutritional plenitude and generally have a higher upkeep on food/consumer goods, then Branch Offices are almost ALWAYS better than districts, assuming the target planet wasn't settled three days ago.

Branch offices provide value equal to half the trade value on the planet. This varies wildly, but typically I find that low pop planets give 1-10 energy. A planet with 100 pops gives upwards of 100-200 energy. You also get the highly valuable buildings at 25, 50, 75, and 100 pops. This means that a branch office scales in value with the size of the planet (if that wasn't obvious).

And this is where the math goes bonkers. See, empire-wide bonuses affect all resources from branch offices, but naturally they do NOT receive bonuses for specific jobs. Meanwhile the base values for jobs and districts improves throughout the game. You can get (as of 2.2.5) +60% output for rural jobs from basic technologies targeting those jobs. Specializing a planet (giving +5% to specific output) and building the "resource building" (the ones that give either +15% or +25% to raw resources), and then +30% from 100 stability, and THEN combine your ascension paths, this means that late game jobs can potentially provide something like +150% to resource output.

This means mid/late-game, Branch Offices are probably going to need to provide at least 45 energy or 30 energy and a building slot before they're worth the Empire Size compared to Districts.

BUT End game? Just research +15 Admin Cap over and over. Each time you research it that's another 7 or 8 branch offices, or 15 districts, or whatever you feel like spending it on.

(Note on TRADE value: jobs are not the only source of trade. Pops also generate trade value based on their living standards and stratum, but I can't find the exact value anywhere on the wiki or in-game, and it seems to be extremely tiny. A brand new empire I started up had 2 rulers, 7 specialists, and 15 workers. The pops generated 4.80 trade. I switched to social welfare, it went up to 6.30. Utopian Abundance brought it up to 9.60. Based on those values, If it's based purely on how many consumer goods a pop eats, then a pop that eats 1 CG gives 0.4 trade, a pop that eats 0.5 CG gives 0.25 trade, and a pop that eats 0.25 CG gives 0.15 trade. BUT it may very well consider the stratum of the pop and the precise living standards or some other weird complicated math that I simply don't have an easy way to check. Aaaaand "Gospel of the Masses" makes EVERYTHING HARDER because it ALSO affects trade value from pops naturally but only if the pop is spiritualist! I think I read somewhere the value is a flat 0.25 per spiritualist pop, but don't quote me on that.)

Ok, maybe my mistake was in taking Temples of Prosperity as first buildings.
Is it worth to go beyond administrative cap?

OK, now THAT'S an even BETTER question!

No, do not build Temple of Prosperity first. People question building it at all in fact. It provides YOU with 1 energy from the 6 trade produced by the job divided in half then subtract the -2 for upkeep. Over a long period of time, it may increase trade by a bit. But if it was already a hyper spiritualist empire then it basically just gives you 1 energy.

As for going over Admin cap....actually lemme take this to a new comment.

 

[Dustman]

Temples can convert pops if you want to go that way. Nothing big but can be fun. Anyway, many more useful buildings to go for first.

 

[RoverStorm]

So the penalties for going over the admin cap(acity) are as follows:

Each Empire Size over gives:
+0.3% research cost (how many science points you must accumulate to unlock a tech. Base value depends on the technology)
+0.5% unity cost (how much unity until your next tradition)
+1% Leader Cost/upkeep
+1% Campaign cost (which are edicts that use energy. They always cost 1000, so this means each ES increases campaign cost by 10.)

Not listed: Empire size ALWAYS increases Strategic Resource edict cost, even if you are under the Admin Cap. I don't know the exactly values, but suffice to say I will ignore this penalty since it's not something technically within the limits of the question, and they're mostly just "you happen to have lots of resources to throw at these or you don't" situation.

By far, looking at this list the BIGGEST penalty is Leader Upkeep. This is because new planets will need new governors, while the upkeep of all leaders including PREVIOUSLY owned governors goes up. With no penalty and 1 Governor that could be -2 energy. Spent 100 ES over Admin cap to claim a new sector and it's space, needing a second Governor? Now you're paying 8 energy in leader upkeep. Do the exact same thing? Now it's 18 energy upkeep. Again? 32 energy upkeep. Then it's 50 energy. Then 72. Then 98. 128. 162.
You are completely screwed if you get a bad alignment of sectors too, and every planet has it's own governor. Then you're easily looking at 200-300 governor upkeep at ten-fifteen large planets.

I had one game where I conquered half the galaxy and basically every planet had it's own sector, and I tried to staff governors for all of them. I was looking at a horrifying -4k Energy from leader upkeep alone, due to this penalty. If Empire Size penalties didn't affect leader upkeep, it'd probably have dropped to just a 100 energy.

And that's just governors. Every scientist for each research world goes up by 2 upkeep for each 100 ES over admin cap. Every Admiral also goes up, which you will need more admirals for a larger empire. Thank God Generals are useless.

Technology: So this scales. The 0.6% research cost is easy to offset on cheap technologies, but harder on later-technologies. Thankfully these are additive modifiers, which means you can offset it with additive bonuses. So the average early-game tech cost is about 3k, meaning you need to gain 3k research of that type to obtain it. With a 0.6% (one branch office) worth, that goes up to 3036. That is........nothing. By build a science building on your branch office, that alone will pay the cost in six months; it'll then help research faster if the technology was going to take more than six months to research anyways (which it PROBABLY was). The rest of your branch office can be whatever you want.

But a late game tech (say a repeatable) costs 50k. With a 0.6% cost increase, that is 50300. The +6 science from your branch office research building will now take 50 months to pay for that branch office, meaning the branch office does not slow down research IF it was already going to take 50 months anyways. If for some reason you are researching repeatable multiple times, then penalties for being over Admin Cap will ALWAYS out-scale what any planet can produce, but that's sort of the intended point of repeatable tech.

Except that branch office is still probably worth it because it can do a LOT more than just produce science; it can help your empire in a lot of OTHER ways that can make up for the tech penalty.

The tradition cost is the penalty most people will feel. It is not insignificant. BUT, traditions also eventually max out, and a smart player puts their unity buildings on every planet anyways.

Conclusion: Going over the Admin Cap is typically always worth it if whatever used it won't be sitting around useless. Never build districts if you don't need the jobs or housing yet. Don't expand to stars with nothing you need that no one else can reach unless you gave another player open borders or jump drives were invented. Planets are almost always worth it for obvious reasons, but be careful with low-habitability ones.

Just remember: Build your unity buildings on every planet until you have all traditions. Have a dedicated research world every 300-400 Empire Size. Maybe give up on using governors once leader upkeep is costing you thousands of credits because the sector creation system is $#!7. You will be fine, the additional resources almost always makes up for it.

 

[Incompetent]

The effect of empire sprawl kicks in slowly enough that as RoverStorm says, expansion is generally a net gain until you get into repeatable tech-stacking in the very late game. If you have already decided to be a Megacorp, then unless the planets in question are complete garbage, it's better to have more branch offices than fewer. However, the OP's question is more about a comparison between Megacorps and non-Megacorps, taken globally: cumulatively, you will incur a significantly higher sprawl penalty, just because you are a Megacorp. So the question is: do all your branch offices put together make up for the extra 50% sprawl penalty across your whole empire?

The main difficulty in answering is that there's a huge RNG factor that is mostly outside your control once the game has started: how suitable are the other empires for branch offices? Of course, you can always just conquer/subjugate anyone who isn't your kind of customer, but then you're just going full blob and may as well be playing with some other authority.

1 If the other empires are well-built and have friendly ethics/personality then it's easy to get trade deals and make lots of money.
2 If other empires are friendly but incompetent, or they happen to lack big planets, then you can set up branch offices, but income per branch office is severely curtailed.
3 If other empires are technically open for business but are ideological enemies, you're facing a constant uphill battle to keep them as friends. For non-Megacorps, there's a great way of
converting the galaxy to your ideological team without conquering it: liberation wars. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for megacorps: converting to your ideology means installing Corporate authority, which is on the banned list for branch offices.
4 If other empires are gestalts, fellow megacorps, purifiers or inward perfectionists, then sucks to be you, no branch offices are possible.

Number 2 will hopefully be alleviated by better AI. Number 3 could be easily fixed by a tweak to liberation wars: out of simple commercial self-interest, megacorps should force *Oligarchic* authority, not *Corporate*. Number 4, I suppose you just have to ignore or remove them like any other empire would. But as of the present version, the potential profits are going to vary wildly based on how your galaxy rolls. It seems the only way to make sure 'tall' megacorp play is worthwhile is to cheese the galaxy by forcing some friendly custom empire spawns.

 

[Masoz]

The main difficulty in answering is that there's a huge RNG factor that is mostly outside your control once the game has started: how suitable are the other empires for branch offices? Of course, you can always just conquer/subjugate anyone who isn't your kind of customer, but then you're just going full blob and may as well be playing with some other authority.

Going full blob with vassals actually kind of works for them pretty well because subsidiaries can be amazing. You get a percentage of their income, they are allowed to grow and take space you don't want, and they join your wars. It's kind of like the old feudal society civic mixed with tributaries, and you can forcibly build branch offices on them as well.

 

[Pooks1]

Going full blob with vassals actually kind of works for them pretty well because subsidiaries can be amazing. You get a percentage of their income, they are allowed to grow and take space you don't want, and they join your wars. It's kind of like the old feudal society civic mixed with tributaries, and you can forcibly build branch offices on them as well.

Imo this is the best way to play a megacorp - don't go over admin capacity too much, make a subsidiary anything that isn't friendly and you'll be swimming in money. Branch offices are a nice side hustle as they can generate a solid amount of revenue plus some aditional stuff.

I managed to become #1 in the galaxy by playing this way with relative ease, and bear in mind that I don't min-max (I often make decisions in a RP way since it's more fun that way for me) and in the later stages of the game I was even under my sprawl capacity, which means no penalties to research and whatnot.