[Idea] industry bonuses for higher level corp/company HQ

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One of the things I find a little bit lacking in the experts system is that there’s no real synergy within the same company between bases on different planets. It’s perfectly normal in PrUn to have a base working on electronics, and another base working on farming. However, in the real world, companies tend to stick a little more to their area of expertise; you don’t see Intel or Apple buying up farms and working them.

What could be a cool feature is the ability to pick different bonuses for higher-level company HQs that are related to an industry. Just an example of what this might look like:

You’re upgrading company HQ to level 5. For an extra 20 LFabs, you can add an “electronics wing” that increases production in Electronics by 2% across the board, or an “Agricultural Research Facility” for a 15% boost in the speed your bases acquire agriculture experts.

Perhaps you could only have one of these bonuses active at a time, to give the feeling of running a cohesive company across multiple bases that has a main area of expertise.

Given that this could make older, larger corporations more overpowered and able to muscle out newer players, perhaps these bonuses should only apply on Settler+ tier buildings.

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HQ already gives a bonus depending on where its at

(its not much so not pushing ppl to specialize but its def already there)

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I think that the game already has a problem with a “snowballing” effect. Brand new players often complain that there isn’t anything to do except wait for their production runs to finish. Meanwhile, someone with 10 bases is producing 10x as much. So you don’t want to add a mechanism to allow those already advanced players to produce even faster.

I would actually propose something similar to the OP, but coming from the other direction. I think that all companies should have a general efficiency penalty, that grows with the size of the company. This mirrors real life - as a company grows, it incurs additional costs just to manage itself, e.g. HR, payroll, accounting, IT infrastructure, etc. So adding an additional building or base should always increase overall production, but not by quite as much as the previous building did. e.g. Your first (say) five buildings have no penalty. When you add your sixth building, your overall efficiency reduces to 99%. Your seventh building brings it down to 98.1%, and so on.

Of course, players will hate this. So then you can use OP’s suggestion of adding improvements to the HQ, to mitigate the penalty. The “electronics wing” halves the penalty for electronics. The “advanced electronics wing” halves it again, etc. This would then encourage the specialization of companies.

It would also be cool if these buldings used the same consumables as the planet-wide projects, since it would promote the production and trade of those - I’ve always thought it was a bit disappointing that half the interesting-looking things I can make in my BMP don’t have any use for me or other players directly.

In fact, I’d go further and say that most of those planet-wide projects should be able to be built in a “mini” form for the HQ, by each player. Although rather than improving population happiness they would reduce the efficiency penalty. Depending on the building it would either be globally, or in one specific area, e.g. just for electronics, or just for pioneers, or just on cold planets.

This way, veteran players can still grow, and gain the benefit of expanding, but you won’t have quite the production disparity between those guys who are already on their fourth base after only three months, versus the players who joined last week and are still saving up for their first additional building.

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I like it discern. Using Lfabs to build buildings that increase efficiency gets a thumbs up from me. If it is required to get into a market due to competition, it becomes a barrier to entry, which creates specialization! Your bottom line about settler+ tier buildings protects the new players. I like both of these things combined.

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@Ficks_Dinkum I completely agree with your point.

I think there should be a mechanism where small companies grow very fast, and slow down over time to prevent too much exponential growth.

This would mean new players could start with a lot less because they would still grow quickly, reducing the risk of COLIQ abuse as well.

Currently the exponential growth is presumably sort of slowed through the difficult logistics of having too many bases, and the cost of the higher levels HQ upgrades.

Growing quicker at the start would be good for new player retention as well, as they could feel progress more quickly.

All of the other basebuilding games have some mechanism like that where you start quick and slow over time