Why do the Galactic Memorials still have Gas upkeep?

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TranscendentalDragon

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Now that the regular Monuments have culture workers (yay!), and have only energy upkeep, upgraded Memorials seem like a downgrade, with their hefty upkeep and cost in Exotic Gasses. Before Culture Workers, you could argue that them giving jobs justified the cost difference, but now, those extra few points of stability, which is capped at a 100 btw, hardly seem worth it. Am I missing something?
 
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Was one from the vanilla Custodian team and the other from the DLC Crisis team?

Maybe they just can't overstep their assigned areas?
 
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They actually don't have ANY upkeep. Not sure that's intentional.

With how strong they are now, I think the advanced versions should definitely have some advanced resource upkeep.
should they though? they seem like they're meant to be built on every world
 
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should they though? they seem like they're meant to be built on every world
I noticed that same impact/logic on my recent new game start, and as result the pace of gaining Unity has certainly changed (which then means faster pace for Ascension/Perks). I actually hope the Dev's leave this in place long enough to get some play-throughs in and essentially "test as you play" to see how this changes things.
 
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should they though? they seem like they're meant to be built on every world
Upgraded Machine Assembly Plants are also meant to be built on every world, yet they have a Rare Crystal Upkeep. Why would one disqualify the other?

In terms of strength, they definitely warrant a rare resource upkeep compared to other buildings that have said upkeep.
 
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Upgraded Machine Assembly Plants are also meant to be built on every world, yet they have a Rare Crystal Upkeep. Why would one disqualify the other?
because extra housing (for fanatic egalitarians) is not exactly on the same tier of benefits as doubling your popgrowth. the autochton monument upgrades costing rare resources would mean if you have 20 colonies you have 20 rare resource upkeep per month. Do you really think fanatic egalitarians with fully upgraded autochton monuments are so OP they should pay 20 rare resources a month for the privilege of saving on some housing? Is that cost/benefit fair to you?
 

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This was asked in the dev diary thread where they announced culture workers, but it didn't get a response. Monuments used to be extremely powerful because they had pop free, upkeep free unity production, and they still do, if you turn off the jobs. I hope they don't take that away.

Memorialists really took a hit, though. The gas upkeep is too punishing now that they don't get any extra jobs. The only things you get are even more governing ethics attraction on the right worlds and the stability.

Something that could make it better, if they still want it to have some gas upkeep for the upgraded version:

Tie the gas upkeep to the job, *through* the upgraded building (e.g. upgraded building gives +1 unity, +.25 gas upkeep to death chronicler jobs, switching to +1.5, +.33 at level 3). This lets the level 1 monument still serve its gas-free purpose and lets you still use the monument for pop free unity. At higher levels, the upkeep would be equivalent (though it would go up slightly with capital levels).

If the numbers are too awkward, you could break the perfect 0-1-2 upkeep curve to mirror other buildings like alloy foundries (giving exactly double benefit when upgraded).
 
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because extra housing (for fanatic egalitarians) is not exactly on the same tier of benefits as doubling your popgrowth. the autochton monument upgrades costing rare resources would mean if you have 20 colonies you have 20 rare resource upkeep per month. Do you really think fanatic egalitarians with fully upgraded autochton monuments are so OP they should pay 20 rare resources a month for the privilege of saving on some housing? Is that cost/benefit fair to you?
It's not like housing is everything Culture Workers do for an Egalitarian, they also produce as much unity as a Bureaucrat, a job whose upgraded production building also costs advanced resources.

And if you have 20 colonies, finding space for the ~4 buildings you'll need in the late game to produce the 20 rare resources you need should not be too difficult. Or if you think it's not worth it, you can always ignore the upgraded versions and just place one unupgraded building everywhere. This kind of design is in line with other effects, too.
 
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Strategic resource sots are not meant to discourage building, but to demand a certain amount of support industry to produce those.

At least that's how it is used.
Yet, it's still too punishing (for the benefit they get) to add gas upkeep to memorialists when, without the civic, you just get free jobs.

Would you pay 6 minerals and 2 gas per month per planet for +12 stability on all your planets (where you actually employ culture workers), even the tiny ones you don't care about (or else you give up 2/3 of the free unity on those planets)?
 
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Just a divergent view on "upgrades" to buildings in general, where we double the number of workers in that facility. The game design and metrics do not follow the ideal of basic efficiencies of scale. What I mean by that:
- Almost always, the basic resource cost to expand the facility is more than doubled. As example, basic structure takes -2 Energy to sustain, level 2/upgraded building takes -5 Energy to sustain. Logically, I should have something LESS than the baseline -2 Energy cost, added toward sustaining a doubling of capacity, because I use the same facility foundation and life support systems/labs/etc. Normally in real world, or even typical fantasy world/movie/game build, the logic flow is that an expansion holds "efficiencies of scale" and you should normally see something less than an increase of -2 Energy. As in, at most, the Level 2 as an inefficient upgrade, would be the same -2 Energy sustainment cost (so it would be -4 Energy total, not -5), and with logical efficiencies, would instead be something less than -4 (whether as little efficiency as -3.9 or as great as -3.0).

While this thread has especially focused on the rare resource costs for upgrades, we are actually overlooking the base resource cost increases that have never been logical nor scaled for efficiencies.
 
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Just a divergent view on "upgrades" to buildings in general, where we double the number of workers in that facility. The game design and metrics do not follow the ideal of basic efficiencies of scale. What I mean by that:
- Almost always, the basic resource cost to expand the facility is more than doubled. As example, basic structure takes -2 Energy to sustain, level 2/upgraded building takes -5 Energy to sustain. Logically, I should have something LESS than the baseline -2 Energy cost, added toward sustaining a doubling of capacity, because I use the same facility foundation and life support systems/labs/etc. Normally in real world, or even typical fantasy world/movie/game build, the logic flow is that an expansion holds "efficiencies of scale" and you should normally see something less than an increase of -2 Energy. As in, at most, the Level 2 as an inefficient upgrade, would be the same -2 Energy sustainment cost (so it would be -4 Energy total, not -5), and with logical efficiencies, would instead be something less than -4 (whether as little efficiency as -3.9 or as great as -3.0).

While this thread has especially focused on the rare resource costs for upgrades, we are actually overlooking the base resource cost increases that have never been logical nor scaled for efficiencies.
You are paying extra for density: in the early game, you often have only a few good worlds, and it's worth it to pay a premium to stack your workers on just those worlds. Late game, you just have all your building slots full, so each upgraded lab is just more space.

ex. it's better to pay an extra 1 energy and 1 gas in upkeep to have 2 more researchers working on a planet with 80% habitability than to put them on a tomb world with only 0%. 1 refiner/extractor makes 2 or 3 gas, so you're paying .5-.33 worth of a pop to save yourself .8 worth of a pop (plus maybe another .12 of a pop from not having increased upkeep from low habitability). Plus, you can share other modifiers (like research assistance) by putting more pops on a single planet.

If you don't need the density, don't upgrade buildings (I don't usually research the upgraded lab techs at all until later). Scattering a ton of un-upgraded research labs throughout your empire is a strategy that works pretty well, if you have the space for it (and enough of your planets have good habitability).

"Economy of scale" means you're making the same thing, over and over again, more efficiently every time. The economy of scale goes the opposite way when you're trying to build the same thing, but bigger. Compare the cost of a skyscraper, per square foot, to the cost of a residential house, if you ignore the cost of the land. Dense buildings are more expensive, but when land (or building slots) are precious, it makes sense to pay 10x as much to cram 3x as much stuff into the same space.
 

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You are paying extra for density: in the early game, you often have only a few good worlds, and it's worth it to pay a premium to stack your workers on just those worlds. Late game, you just have all your building slots full, so each upgraded lab is just more space.

ex. it's better to pay an extra 1 energy and 1 gas in upkeep to have 2 more researchers working on a planet with 80% habitability than to put them on a tomb world with only 0%. 1 refiner/extractor makes 2 or 3 gas, so you're paying .5-.33 worth of a pop to save yourself .8 worth of a pop (plus maybe another .12 of a pop from not having increased upkeep from low habitability). Plus, you can share other modifiers (like research assistance) by putting more pops on a single planet.

If you don't need the density, don't upgrade buildings (I don't usually research the upgraded lab techs at all until later). Scattering a ton of un-upgraded research labs throughout your empire is a strategy that works pretty well, if you have the space for it (and enough of your planets have good habitability).

"Economy of scale" means you're making the same thing, over and over again, more efficiently every time. The economy of scale goes the opposite way when you're trying to build the same thing, but bigger. Compare the cost of a skyscraper, per square foot, to the cost of a residential house, if you ignore the cost of the land. Dense buildings are more expensive, but when land (or building slots) are precious, it makes sense to pay 10x as much to cram 3x as much stuff into the same space.
That is not how Efficiencies of Scale work, anywhere except in video games with suspect design that doesn't hold logic.
I understand the cost of the Rare Resource that becomes a game-designed cost to expand, but core resource costs don't have to scale up. Efficiencies of scale take advantage of existing space - the "density" as you called it, costs LESS, not more, in any logically expanded facility or operation. For a 2-story building, you add a 3rd floor yet double your capacity, because the first floor doesn't require any additional security guards, or receptionists, or snack bar -- you only needed 50% more space to double your workforce primarily housed on the 2nd floor, in this simple example. That - is efficiency-of-scale, and density is often same/same for the expansions of a facility (not always, but in general you aren't compacting in double the effort in exact same square footage of space).

If one is trying to double capacity in the SAME volume of space, that is NOT efficiency of scale, that is simply an attempt at compressing in efficiencies in SAME SCALE, not the same argument btw.
 

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That is not how Efficiencies of Scale work, anywhere except in video games with suspect design that doesn't hold logic.
I understand the cost of the Rare Resource that becomes a game-designed cost to expand, but core resource costs don't have to scale up. Efficiencies of scale take advantage of existing space - the "density" as you called it, costs LESS, not more, in any logically expanded facility or operation. For a 2-story building, you add a 3rd floor yet double your capacity, because the first floor doesn't require any additional security guards, or receptionists, or snack bar -- you only needed 50% more space to double your workforce primarily housed on the 2nd floor, in this simple example. That - is efficiency-of-scale, and density is often same/same for the expansions of a facility (not always, but in general you aren't compacting in double the effort in exact same square footage of space).

If one is trying to double capacity in the SAME volume of space, that is NOT efficiency of scale, that is simply an attempt at compressing in efficiencies in SAME SCALE, not the same argument btw.
What's the cost to transition from a 2 story building to a 10 story building? You can't just add 8 more stories: the building would collapse before you got to 5, so you have to redo all the structural work, building out of much more expensive concrete and steel instead of wood. You can't keep the same stairwells and elevators: you have 5x as much traffic, and the traffic on elevators is moving 5x as far (tying the elevator up for longer), so you're looking at adding 3 or 4 more elevator shafts and upgrading to significantly faster machinery. So now instead of 6% of your building being taken up just by elevators and stairs, you're looking at 20%, and your 10 story building is actually only giving you 8.5 stories of space. You've also outscaled the basic water grid pressure, so now you need pumps just to get water to do more than drip from the taps on the upper floor. etc. etc.

Even in the 2 to 3 story example, just slapping another story on the top isn't what you're claiming it is. You're not getting 50% more equally-useful space for less cost, since the third floor is just not as useful as the first two. It takes longer to get up there, just by making the path longer. All the stairwells and elevators are more crowded, so the entire building is lower quality. Water pressure in the third floor is lower. etc. You're just ignoring the costs to the rest of the building and assuming the existing infrastructure will be good enough (which it generally is, going from 2 to 3 stories, which is why so many buildings are at that height).

Even just the square/cube law (or the 1D-2D equivalent) says that scaling something up (as a single thing, rather than repeating the same design) makes it more expensive, not less. Each floor has to support the weight of the floor above it: simple math says that without switching to a less cost effective material which is stronger in less space, the space you devote to structural members increases on each floor until you have almost no room. The same goes for transportation (stairs, elevators, hallways), water, electricity, etc. Some things are fixed costs (land price, security for the ground floor if it's that type of building, etc.), but most things scale, and often scale super-linearly.

The efficiency of scale comes from not having to pay fixed costs multiple times: have two of the same machine, and you only paid once to design it/figure out how to actually construct it once. But figuring out how to make the same machine/building/thing twice as big is not the same.
 
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What's the cost to transition from a 2 story building to a 10 story building? You can't just add 8 more stories: the building would collapse before you got to 5, so you have to redo all the structural work, building out of much more expensive concrete and steel instead of wood. You can't keep the same stairwells and elevators: you have 5x as much traffic, especially on elevators, so you're looking at adding 3 or 4 more elevator shafts. So now instead of 6% of your building being taken up just by elevators and stairs, you're looking at 20%, and your 10 story building is actually only giving you 8.5 stories of space. You've also outscaled the basic water grid pressure, so now you need pumps just to get water to do more than drip from the taps on the upper floor. etc. etc.

Even just the square/cube law says that scaling something up (as a single thing, rather than repeating the same design) makes it more expensive, not less. Each floor has the support the weight of the floor above it: simple math says that without switching to a less cost effective material, the space you devote to structural members increases on each floor until you have almost no room. The same goes for transportation (stairs, elevators, hallways), water, electricity, etc.

The efficiency of scale comes from not having to pay fixed costs multiple times: have two of the same machine, and you only paid once to design it/figure out how to actually construct it once. But figuring out how to make the same machine/building/thing twice as big is not the same.
Apples vs Oranges. You start your example as a Wood building to expand with Concrete. I framed this as generic where same/same materials would be involved. "Efficiencies of Scale" account for the Scale increased, not material science changes (as you did with wood vs concrete and steel). That again - is outside the Efficiencies of Scale argument. And core building support systems can be built for expansion - depends what your base building was. In this game - there are always assumptions of 2nd/3rd tier upgrades when building the 1st tier, as example. This would logically be an example of Modular construction. Modular construction methods would be expected for space travel and rapid expansion, and then you're not even talking Material Science shifts, it's simply a Modular add/subtract for facility builds. In the game, we're not even talking single buildings, but the concept of arguably a series of buildings toward a single purpose (just as every data point is representative data, such as a population of, say, 50, on a planet in Stellaris, is probably 10 Billion people or more, logically).

On average, "scaling up" to double a facility, takes LESS energy, less resources to sustain, for most all upgrades on our current planet Earth, so we should use the same basic logic to forecast how it would be on external planets as well.
 

Abdulijubjub

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Apples vs Oranges. You start your example as a Wood building to expand with Concrete. I framed this as generic where same/same materials would be involved. "Efficiencies of Scale" account for the Scale increased, not material science changes (as you did with wood vs concrete and steel). That again - is outside the Efficiencies of Scale argument. And core building support systems can be built for expansion - depends what your base building was. In this game - there are always assumptions of 2nd/3rd tier upgrades when building the 1st tier, as example. This would logically be an example of Modular construction. Modular construction methods would be expected for space travel and rapid expansion, and then you're not even talking Material Science shifts, it's simply a Modular add/subtract for facility builds. In the game, we're not even talking single buildings, but the concept of arguably a series of buildings toward a single purpose (just as every data point is representative data, such as a population of, say, 50, on a planet in Stellaris, is probably 10 Billion people or more, logically).

On average, "scaling up" to double a facility, takes LESS energy, less resources to sustain, for most all upgrades on our current planet Earth, so we should use the same basic logic to forecast how it would be on external planets as well.
The entire reason why you can't "just scale it up" is that you have to transition to different materials or construction methods.

Is your argument basically "if you ignore the fact that it's impossible to just build it taller, you can just build it taller and pay less per square foot"?

Modular construction works for space because there's no gravity, but even with that, you can't just make it bigger. In the classic modular-construction-space-habitat concept, you have cubes or spheres that are connected on each face. Just using those as hallways and relying on simple diffusion for air quality works great when you have, like, 3 cubes. But once you have 20 or 30, you clearly need to devote some of the spheres exclusively as hallways, air handlers, pipes for water, etc., which means your space utilization efficiency drops as you scale a single unit up in size.

Even this argument, literally (coincidentally) and figuratively in a vacuum, without any of the structural constraints of gravity, doesn't work. Taking a single unit and making it bigger means more and more of its internal space is devoted to infrastructure.

A simple question: if you need one bathroom per floor in a 3 story building, how much more pipe do you need to lay in order to connect them all to the main buried below the ground floor? The answer is not 3x, it's 6x. You need the 1x pipe for the first floor, 2x as much for the second floor, 3x as much for the third floor. If you add a 4th floor, you need 10x as much pipe as the 1 story building. It scales quadratically.

So it goes with everything.
 
Last edited:

Silesian Burd

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I don't know, they seem more like a sidegrade now, what with the 10% stability from having 4 Death Chroniclers.

Why the heck do they use Gases, though? I thought they used Crystals. Crystals would make more sense, unless you huffed Gas to see the guys being memorialized or enshrined.