FE buildings don't make sense thematically

[Dr Pippy]

It seems like the FE buildings have caused some persistent balance issues. While they now appear on the back burner for a little while, and reasonably so, I'd expect that they'll be getting another look before too long. With that in mind, it's worth taking a step back and thinking about the concept behind FE buildings.

Balance issues aside, my main criticism of the FE buildings is that they don't make sense from a thematic/lore perspective. Most of them produce some flat amount of resources and then provide a lot of jobs: usually 600. I don't think the jobs component fits the worldbuilding: FEs would not create buildings with jobs, because they're not interested in doing jobs. If I'm remembering correctly; their living standards are always something like "Hedonist." You're not going to have Bob the Militant Isolationist coming home after a hard day at the Class-4 Singularity making sure the empire has enough energy; Bob's going to spend the day binge-watching Spaceflix at his floating luxury villa while 142 nerve-stapled domestic servants cater to his every whim. Whatever you think of flat jobs buildings, it doesn't make sense for fallen empires to build them.

Instead, FE buildings should provide signficant amounts of job-free resources and some sort of planet-wide boost. Some of the T2 buildings already do things like this: for example, the auto-forge gives (in addition to 600 metallurgist jobs) 25 alloys and -5% planetary infrastructure upkeep. It would be better to drop the thematically inappropriate jobs, lean into the automated (and very lazy) nature of FE society, and change it to something like 50 alloys and -5% infrastructure upkeep. Likewise, maybe the Class-4 singularity would go from 600 technician jobs and 125 energy to something like 125 energy and +10% energy generated on the planet.

I like this for thematic reasons rather than balance, but I think it could potentially help address some of the existing balance issues (while creating entirely new ones, I'm sure). For one thing, you'd avoid the situation where the T1 FE building is strictly worse than the non-FE equivalent. (E.g., a Hyper-forge and the Alloy Nanoplants both give 600 metallurgist jobs and nothing else, but the Hyper-forge costs more than double the upkeep.) Also, positive modifiers tend to have diminishing returns (i.e., going from 100% to 120% is obviously a 20% increase, but going from 120% to 140% is only a 17% increase, and by the time you're going from 200% to 220% you're down to a 10% increase). So there's perhaps less incentive to spam them indiscriminately: you might have a normal building that would actually provide more benefit.

In short, this would make the FE buildings more thematically appropriate, while giving them a unique and still powerful role that's something other than normal buildings with bigger numbers.

 

[Wolfgang I]

Most FE buildings just produced stuff in previous versions.

I was surprised that they provided jobs when I returned to the game.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Most FE buildings just produced stuff in previous versions.

I was surprised that they provided jobs when I returned to the game.

They did this rework with Cosmogenesis; not sure why.

It seems like the FE buildings have caused some persistent balance issues. While they now appear on the back burner for a little while, and reasonably so, I'd expect that they'll be getting another look before too long. With that in mind, it's worth taking a step back and thinking about the concept behind FE buildings.

Balance issues aside, my main criticism of the FE buildings is that they don't make sense from a thematic/lore perspective. Most of them produce some flat amount of resources and then provide a lot of jobs: usually 600. I don't think the jobs component fits the worldbuilding: FEs would not create buildings with jobs, because they're not interested in doing jobs. If I'm remembering correctly; their living standards are always something like "Hedonist." You're not going to have Bob the Militant Isolationist coming home after a hard day at the Class-4 Singularity making sure the empire has enough energy; Bob's going to spend the day binge-watching Spaceflix at his floating luxury villa while 142 nerve-stapled domestic servants cater to his every whim. Whatever you think of flat jobs buildings, it doesn't make sense for fallen empires to build them.

Instead, FE buildings should provide signficant amounts of job-free resources and some sort of planet-wide boost. Some of the T2 buildings already do things like this: for example, the auto-forge gives (in addition to 600 metallurgist jobs) 25 alloys and -5% planetary infrastructure upkeep. It would be better to drop the thematically inappropriate jobs, lean into the automated (and very lazy) nature of FE society, and change it to something like 50 alloys and -5% infrastructure upkeep. Likewise, maybe the Class-4 singularity would go from 600 technician jobs and 125 energy to something like 125 energy and +10% energy generated on the planet.

I like this for thematic reasons rather than balance, but I think it could potentially help address some of the existing balance issues (while creating entirely new ones, I'm sure). For one thing, you'd avoid the situation where the T1 FE building is strictly worse than the non-FE equivalent. (E.g., a Hyper-forge and the Alloy Nanoplants both give 600 metallurgist jobs and nothing else, but the Hyper-forge costs more than double the upkeep.) Also, positive modifiers tend to have diminishing returns (i.e., going from 100% to 120% is obviously a 20% increase, but going from 120% to 140% is only a 17% increase, and by the time you're going from 200% to 220% you're down to a 10% increase). So there's perhaps less incentive to spam them indiscriminately: you might have a normal building that would actually provide more benefit.

In short, this would make the FE buildings more thematically appropriate, while giving them a unique and still powerful role that's something other than normal buildings with bigger numbers.

My personal favorite solution to this: remove the base yield, but make the building half automated instead. I.e. Class-4 Singularity makes no base energy, but gives 1200 jobs (600 of which are automated) instead. So instead of +150 energy, you get 600 technicians for free (not affected by efficiency, but affected by output modifiers, like repeatables).

It's sorta going the other way (remove the flat yields, but add even more jobs), but you're not actually supposed to work any of the jobs in the first place.

As for why I like it better: it amplifies the effects of your civics (e.g. Anglers making trade as a side effect of food production) instead of replacing it. It makes more sense to me that an empire that has e.g. strong farmer jobs would love to use the farmer FE building, rather than avoiding it (because their manual jobs are better).

But I would like either proposal (yours or the automation one) better than the current state, which seems silly to me.

---

Not all FEs don't work jobs (intentionally), for what it's worth:

• Spiritualists have Acolytes of the Plow/Hammer/Hyperspanner
• Materialists and Xenophiles have their servitude Synthetics working lower level jobs (though the citizens seem to be taking some, now-a-days, which is probably a bug). And Materialists have a special Archivist job that's clearly supposed to be worked.
• Xenophobes have their nerve stapled slaves working jobs intentionally (same issue as the above, though).
• And the gestalts, of course, are gestalts doing gestalt things.

 

[LordNarvi]

The reason they gave them jobs is because flat sums don't scale well with all the bonuses pop work does. So FE buildings fell behind and don't feel special.

 

[Dr Pippy]

My personal favorite solution to this: remove the base yield, but make the building half automated instead. I.e. Class-4 Singularity makes no base energy, but gives 1200 jobs (600 of which are automated) instead. So instead of +150 energy, you get 600 technicians for free (not affected by efficiency, but affected by output modifiers, like repeatables).

It's sorta going the other way (remove the flat yields, but add even more jobs), but you're not actually supposed to work any of the jobs in the first place.

As for why I like it better: it amplifies the effects of your civics (e.g. Anglers making trade as a side effect of food production) instead of replacing it. It makes more sense to me that an empire that has e.g. strong farmer jobs would love to use the farmer FE building, rather than avoiding it (because their manual jobs are better).

But I would like either proposal (yours or the automation one) better than the current state, which seems silly to me.

Okay, I really like this! I assume that the base yield was intended to represent automated production before they had actual automation, so what you're suggesting makes a ton of sense thematically.

My only quibble — and this is contingent on me understanding automation correctly, which I'm not sure about — is that it should just be 600 jobs that are 100% automated. I think that gives the same yield, but if you're not supposed to be working those jobs then it's probably clearest if you just don't have the option to work those jobs. The question I have is whether potentially automated jobs get filled if you have pops that would otherwise be unemployed. (E.g. 600 jobs with 50% automation and you have 450 pops available: do you get 300 working pops, 300 automated workforce, and 150 civilians, or 450 working pops and 150 automation?)

The reason they gave them jobs is because flat sums don't scale well with all the bonuses pop work does. So FE buildings fell behind and don't feel special.

I think @Abdulijubjub's suggestion of using automation instead of a flat bonus at least partially resolves this.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

My only quibble — and this is contingent on me understanding automation correctly, which I'm not sure about — is that it should just be 600 jobs that are 100% automated. I think that gives the same yield, but if you're not supposed to be working those jobs then it's probably clearest if you just don't have the option to work those jobs. The question I have is whether potentially automated jobs get filled if you have pops that would otherwise be unemployed. (E.g. 600 jobs with 50% automation and you have 450 pops available: do you get 300 working pops, 300 automated workforce, and 150 civilians, or 450 working pops and 150 automation?)

The reason I'd leave them at 50% automated (by default) is so that the player has a choice: automate them fully, or work them.

It works better for virtual or e.g. cloning (pops are free, so better to have pops with efficiency boosts than base efficiency automation), it lets the FE's special jobs make sense, etc.

Though another way of doing that might be to make the base version 50% automated, and the T2 version 100% automated. That gives you the same customizability without relying on the automation building, specifically. But then the FEs that choose not to upgrade those buildings will look silly.

It's tough.

• Infinite scaling economy by spamming FE buildings on pop-less worlds is bad.
• Unrewarding FE buildings that are supposedly advanced technology is bad.
• Wiping out the distinctiveness of civics or origin with flat resource output is bad.
• FEs working undesirable jobs like filthy primitive civilizations is bad.

There are just competing incentives, where you want them to be good, but not too good.

One thing that would help, of course, is to just hardcode some automation numbers for the FEs only so that you get the behavior you want regardless of the balance for Cosmogenesis. Then you could just focus on making the Cosmogenesis/Enigmatic Engineering design work for player empires. But there's a certain elegance in having the FEs economy make sense as a natural result the buildings' behavior that would be lost, with that approach.

Even with the FEs, though, it's still a hard problem to make them valuable, but not so abusable as the old version.

 

[Dr Pippy]

It's tough.

• Infinite scaling economy by spamming FE buildings on pop-less worlds is bad.
• Unrewarding FE buildings that are supposedly advanced technology is bad.
• Wiping out the distinctiveness of civics or origin with flat resource output is bad.
• FEs working undesirable jobs like filthy primitive civilizations is bad.

There are just competing incentives, where you want them to be good, but not too good.

I'd say this is why you really want to lean into the modifiers. Particularly in a 4.0 economy, you can generate lots of resources. (Maybe it's just my playstyle, but I don't notice much economic difference between a CG run and a non-CG run.) So the automated jobs are necessary for (1) flavor; and (2) so the FEs can have some sort of functional economy.

But I think it's the modifiers where you have the opportunity to provide unique effects that distinguish them from normal buildings. E.g., give the auto-forge something like -1% empire-wide alloy upkeep for habitat districts (on the grounds that it produces advanced materials that require less maintenance and repair, or something like that). The Ziggurat of Justice could keep the -40 deviancy and +20 edict fund, but also maybe something like +5 stability or +25% ethics attraction.

You'd have to be careful to make sure these are well-balanced as well as creative (and my examples aren't either, particularly), but the whole idea should be to have buildings that do different things that you can't get from normal buildings, rather than just the same things but with bigger numbers.

 

[Calvax]

I think it makes sense thematically in the context that they’re fallen. At their peak they would have worked jobs, but since the buildings give flat resources those jobs just aren’t worked. The fact the production is lesser because of this entirely fits.

However I agree with others that the flat production should be replaced by partial automation of those jobs. Perhaps 25% so that with an upgraded automation building it can go all the way to 75%.

I’d also have them add an efficiency modifier to any job worked so that there is an advantage to working to them and so they compete more with output boosting buildings.

 

[Thiend]

FE buildings as the "lazy" route instead of the "superior" route is better worldbuilding, better balance (because production using those same slots but also pops can be better) and leans into the small population of Fallen Empires/properly functioning Lathe empires.

To be honest, I'd make them repeatedly upgradeable, for increasing costs, but with an empire-wide limit. If they forced you to lose population to the Lathe to pay for them and replaced your pop economy within that smaller empire, the entire system would be easier to balance, thematically sharpened, and perhaps most importantly no longer a final tier of tech everyone wants.

The ships would remain a major problem. Those I would decouple from Cosmogenesis entirely, and the ascension/leviathan components simply shouldn't be part of it.

 

[DiscoRay]

I think it's okay FE buildings give jobs, but I do agree that when an FE that owns/runs them they should produce loads of resources for the pops rather than any jobs. As touched on by a few of the posts already, thematically the FEs are at the end of the cycle with them, so have mastered the tech to the point it fully serves their pops without the pops having to work them manually.

For us and the other normal AI empires it's "new", and seen merely as the next step up in resource generation tech, so it makes sense they provide more jobs than the lower tier buildings. I suppose depending on the traits, civics, or APs one has, there could be a long-term situation with tech researching to automate in the same fashion, but I'm not sure how much value there would be to that, as you've probably already won by the time you reach that point anyway.

 

[BrokenSky]

They did this rework with Cosmogenesis; not sure why.

Presumably because (at the time) pop free resources, while efficient, weren't a good use of a building slot on major planets where you had the population, which created the weird situations where the most advanced facilities in the galaxy were best placed on some backwater, while the most economically powerful planets all used technologically inferior options because they were more efficient building-slot wise.

 

[HFY]

One FE building idea:

- Supplies one resource to meet the local planet's deficit, no matter how high, at some cost (e.g. 2 energy -> 1 food up to any number of food).
- Energy buildings instead supply some fixed quantity of energy.

This meshes with the FE size limits -- they have very few colonies, and their colonies are apparently quite self-sufficient.


Another FE building idea:

- Each planet-unique building gives +200% efficiency to the fake jobs from the Automation building for one kind of job.

Automation jobs are usually low-efficiency, this changes that. Still costs energy upkeep per district but at least you're getting value from it. This version is not great for FE lore -- it would help a blob more than it helps a single-colony empire.

 

[Critical Ethics]

FE buildings as the "lazy" route instead of the "superior" route is better worldbuilding, better balance (because production using those same slots but also pops can be better) and leans into the small population of Fallen Empires/properly functioning Lathe empires.

To be honest, I'd make them repeatedly upgradeable, for increasing costs, but with an empire-wide limit. If they forced you to lose population to the Lathe to pay for them and replaced your pop economy within that smaller empire, the entire system would be easier to balance, thematically sharpened, and perhaps most importantly no longer a final tier of tech everyone wants.

Lazy over superior is a good theme. I, as usual, think the FE buildings being isolated buildings that provide a set of fixed benefits independent of the structure of the rest of the planet to be working against the current system and a wasted opportunity to make use of the tools 4.0 provides.

I'd love if the resource FE buildings weren't buildings at all, but instead fancy specialisations that came with the standard +100 jobs per district but also an in-built job automation percentage and increased per-district upkeep, as well as, for rural districts, completely ignoring planetary deposits for build limits. Make each zone planet-unique and allow building the rurals in city and ecu zones, and limit the number of planets you can FE-ify. FE-ing a planet isn't just about slapping down a few fancy buildings and calling it a day, it's a complete re-organisation of the planet's attitude toward productivity.

Cosmogenesis have unlimited FE zones (or a per-zone FE cap equal to their Fe planet cap, whichever), meaning once they slap one FE zone down on a planet they can FE zone all the other (non-duplicate) zones on the same one, but they need to complete a repeatable project (or something) to do the next planet. Or just abandon that planet as not woth an FE slot and feed the pops into the lathe. Meanwhile a regular empire that lucks into a Science FE Zone slot from arcane deciphering or whatever gets +1 FE world slot and +1 FE science zone, meaning they're incentivised to pick their best science planet and turn it into a fully automated space science explosion.

e: the amenities building can stay just a building, that's how amenities do.

 

[Trigaea]

FE buildings spammable for normal empires was a mistake.

If we needed to give Cosmogenesis special buildings, I would have preferred new buildings entirely and let the FE buildings remain special buildings that are (mostly) exclusive to FE worlds.

Thematically, FE buildings should represent the decay and decadence of super-ancient civilizations whereas Cosmogenesis and end-game empires should be constructing something more ascendent-y. You can even see this in the building icons: they have the same shade of tan that you associate with ancient Mesopotamia, not of giga-advanced space civilizations at the height of their technological supremacy.

 

[Dr Pippy]

FE buildings as the "lazy" route instead of the "superior" route is better worldbuilding, better balance (because production using those same slots but also pops can be better) and leans into the small population of Fallen Empires/properly functioning Lathe empires.

To be honest, I'd make them repeatedly upgradeable, for increasing costs, but with an empire-wide limit. If they forced you to lose population to the Lathe to pay for them and replaced your pop economy within that smaller empire, the entire system would be easier to balance, thematically sharpened, and perhaps most importantly no longer a final tier of tech everyone wants.

Something along these lines could work, but there you can also get FE buildings from EE or if you get lucky reverse-engineering artifacts, so I don't think you can tie FE building costs to the Lathe/Advanced Logic. Dark Matter upkeep would make a lot of sense, though.

The ships would remain a major problem. Those I would decouple from Cosmogenesis entirely, and the ascension/leviathan components simply shouldn't be part of it.

I would not be opposed to non-CG empires getting the ships. By the time you have enough alloys to mass-produce them, you're already well into the win-more stage. (Or at least I am...) It seems like the main place where you need them is the last couple crises in high-strength all-crises runs, and I don't know that game balance needs to be much of a consideration at that stage.

 

[Thiend]

Something along these lines could work, but there you can also get FE buildings from EE or if you get lucky reverse-engineering artifacts, so I don't think you can tie FE building costs to the Lathe/Advanced Logic. Dark Matter upkeep would make a lot of sense, though.

That's a problem only if EE and reverse-engineering use the same buildings post-rework.

 

[Jay Sherman]

One FE building idea:

- Supplies one resource to meet the local planet's deficit, no matter how high, at some cost (e.g. 2 energy -> 1 food up to any number of food).
- Energy buildings instead supply some fixed quantity of energy.

This meshes with the FE size limits -- they have very few colonies, and their colonies are apparently quite self-sufficient.

I really like this! "We're not really sure how it works but we connected all the infrastructure to it and it's supplying raw material to them":

 

[Edorath]

Why not make FE buildings provide automation to the relevant job(s)?

 

[Nakkivene]

Maybe they could give advanced jobs/convert current jobs to some. Like 50 singularity technician and 350 pointlessness manager jobs.