Increasing the economic incentives of specialized empire production

Maybe the first a bit lower as it is basically another full permit (475 area - unused vs. 450 + unused from permit 1).

But I think that for example extra space on your HQ planet would be interesting so that your HQ would actually have more meaning. Like for example + 10 area per HQ level and +5 area for additional permits. I think that will be interesting with corp HQ bonus as it would incentivise having the HQ and corp HQ at the same planet which would mean more sub corps for HQ locations (sub corps with different specializations = comp wide bonus if you want to go further down that road?).
(Just throwing ideas around, company wide bonus would need to be unbound from HQ position for that, or it could be coupled to CoGC instead of system color)

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Most of these I agree with.

sub corps with different specializations

I dont think this is a great idea, cause it makes things even tougher for small corps.
They won’t have the resources to spin up tons of subcorp hqs and subcorps are kinda clunky.

Actually we could marry this up with my earlier proposal to disconnect the HQ level with a strict number of permits. (reminder- HQ would give you points toward new bases - and bases would cost different amounts of points based on location, etc) - The number of points could also be different - a base on a planet with a COGC that matches your specialty could be cheaper then one in a differetn COGC. Now we wouldn’t want it recalculated dynamically if the COGC changes - but most planets don’t really change COGC that much so I don’t think that is as much of an issue.

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With that proposal you create a massive incentive to change COGC, so people would be changing COGC more regularly. The solution is have the permit cost be recalculated but allow people to go over the limit, with a mechanical debuff. Like your production is multiplied by the recprical of how much you are over the permit count only when you are over it.

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But what do HQ levels provide then?

I think a more abstract point value.
So permits would consume these points depending on what your build is.

HQ Levels do provide “permit points” - but the cost for individual bases is variable. For example, bases further from the main population centers might be 7 points, while a base on Montem would be 10 points. You can also vary based on environment - the more red the cheaper the base. It can also vary with population on a planet.

This mechanic would drive players, as they increase the HQ level, to favor moving out of the center of the universe because the could get more bang out of their permit ‘bucks’ by having bases in the fringes, with red environments and smaller - which is one of the big complaints we talk about in terms of planets ‘filling up’.

justs to post it here too, here is my basic version to have a system in place to see how players and the economy react to it and collect further feedback and improve from there:
Company wide specialization - Feedback - Prosperous Universe Community
TL;DR: A company gets a certain amount of boost (lets say 75%) which is distributed according to the distribution of all experts the company has, with a limit per profession (lets say 25%). This means you can fully specialize in three professions, or go into more but with a lower boost. And new player will have the max boost and thus have no margin disadvantage because of the system.

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I’d be happy with this system. Its specialization and in terms of a pure % bonus system its not bad. (Although I think just having company-level experts with a higher boost per expert might be simpler and easier to understand)
I really like systems that provide an edge in permits or area cause they only provide a volume advantage.
I think systems that provide a volume benefit from specialization are better and safer than one that provides an edge on margins.
It makes it more of a reward to specialize instead of making it a mandatory thing to be profitable.
So you’re encouraged to do it if you want to grow fast or climb a leaderboard. But you never would be forced to do it (which might be the case with margins)
It can also be more aggressive with the boost. Like margins
They’re less problematic for new players.
Here’s an example how margins can get problematic.
I a specialized player, want to control the market for a good. Since I have better margins, I can force the price down to a point at which it becomes unprofitable to normal players. But is still profitable to me. So I can do that indefinitely. A similar issue can occur with volume but its less prounouced cause at least you’d take equity loses doing that.

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The thing is that increasing production volume per base through more production buildings still means that the base makes more per permit so that there too is a profitability gap which can be used to squeeze the price down.

But with the big margins the game has I don’t see a problem with driving vertical players into the reds as no matter how it is done they still have the benefits of cheaper planets and logistics, and are save from market fluctuations and spikes. They have to pay some price for it or it won’t be worth it and we would be back to the same situation we currently have.

I’d like this system a lot. It shouldnt be too restrictive and players should be relatively free to venture into other types of industry too, most things mentioned in OP would create a better incentive to specialize.

An option I like the idea of could be that we have a scaling production efficiency modifier tied to what portion of your production buildings that consume input goods are a particular type.

The equation I would propose tentatively would be: Cost Multiplier = .8 + .2(1 - Building Portion)2

If p is the building portion and c is the cost multiplier this would mean:

At p=0: c=100
At p=50: c=85
At p=75: c=81.25
At p=90: c=80.2
At p=100: c=80

So a player with 50% the same building would receive a 15% reduction in input costs for that building. If they increase that to 100% they would get a 20% reduction.

Some examples;

1. Let’s say you had a small empire with three permits, two metalurgy planets and one resource extraction planet. Each metalurgy planet has 20 SME on it and the resource extraction planet has 14 EXT on it. You would have a total of 40 production buildings that consume input goods as the EXT do not qualify, all 40 of which are metallurgy. That gives a building portion of exactly 1 so you would get the full benefit of 80%

2. Let’s say you had a medium rainbow empire with ten permits, 4 Metal, 4 Res, 1 Chem, 1 Fuel. In total this empire has, 80 SME, 16 CHP and 7 REF along with some Resource extraction buildings. This empire would get a cost reduction of very nearly 19% on it’s SME, 5.7% on it’s CHP and only 2.63% on it’s REF. This makes this empire significantly less efficient at it’s chemical and fuel refining jobs than a player dedicated to those buildings without very significantly harming their efficiency with their primary building, SME.

3. Let’s say you had a fairly large empire with 24 permits (values taken from a player’s real empire which is fairly well rainbowed); 3 Const, 3 Manu, 6 Elec, 4 Chem, 1 Metal, 1 Agri, 5 Res. In total, excluding buildings that don’t take input, this empire has; 9 PP2, 6 PP3, 15 PP4, 2 WEL, 22 SCA, 21 PPF, 16 ELP, 1 EDM, 5 DRS, 1 ECA, 69 (nice) SD, 33 CHP, 11 POL, 6 LAB, 5 PHF, 19 SME, 21 HYF, 48 INC. It goes without saying that most of these buildings would receive almost no cost reduction. The 69 SD’s would receive the highest cost reduction of only 8%.

This has the benefit that the player doesn’t have to assign any points or chose any specialisation, it is automatically calculated. The player is incentivised to specialize without being coerced into it. A rainbow empire will function almost identical if not exactly identical to current while incentivising players to source more of their goods outside their company. It incentivises intermediate products which are produced and exclusively consumed by the same cogc being traded, where other solutions given wouldn’t produce this outcome. It also allows anyone to participate in Resource extraction using EXT, RIG, COL as much as they want with no negative effect on the rest of their empire, allowing for more permits to stack extracting valuable resources on efficient planets.

Just some problems:

  • how do you make partial items if you save 0,15C per run?
  • some bases have only 10 buildings or less while others have over 30, so you would have a biased system towards these (PIO) buildings and against big buildings (high tier pops)
  • while in PIO buildings the input is only a minor part is it in for example APFs the main cost factor. A AIR base for example would get free 50k+ profit with only 10%, so with full 20% it would be over 100k per base which is about what a ordinary base makes total. And this is only the free profit from the specialization and doesn’t include the normal recipe profit

Yeah, I think adjusting input/outputs on recipes is not a great idea. Just manage the efficiency.

Different items have different margins. Some have extremely thin margins, and rely on extremely high cashflow to achieve profitability.

High-end electronics function here. Your inputs cost $50,000, your output is valued at $55,000, and because you make 20 of them a day the base achieves x profitability. 20 * 5000 = $100,000\day profit, but you’re very sensitive to the price of inputs and outputs. If you increase the yield by 10%, you double your profit to $210,000\day. This is a low margin, high throughput example.

Other bases have very high margins, like resource extraction. The inputs to make the materials are only $10, but the material sells for $110. And you produce 1000\day for $100k\day profit. So the final price of the output, and its input materials almost don’t matter and have a very weak influence on your overall profit margins. If you increase the yield by 10%, your profits only rise by 21%.

Messing with the yield of a recipe breaks this balance - and IMO the game isn’t designed for it. Production speed is the main mechanic by which this is achieved.

This seems fair enough. What if you took my whole suggestion and treated the cost reduction as a production speed, scaled the same as I said. It would still make specializing into specific buildings more efficient most of the time and have most of the benefits that I was talking about.

Even that breaks that game (to a lesser degree and in less cases though), see software and to a lesser degree AML and other buildings with high repair and consumable costs. But that could be “solved” by adding energy as an input.

This sounds basically the same as my idea: Increasing the economic incentives of specialized empire production - #48 by SLKLS

@lowstrife do you want to put links to other ideas posted here into the main post so that they don’t get swamped away and put up again and again? So that the main post because a up to date list with the different ideas.

I can’t edit the main post anymore. Here’s a claude summary

1. “Experts 2.0” (company-level experts) — Counterpoint (dev)
Move experts off individual bases and onto companies instead, with bonuses weighted more heavily toward higher-tier workforces to reward moving up the tech tree.
:link: https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/increasing-the-economic-incentives-of-specialized-empire-production/7117/2

2. Three-tier expert system + gated building tiers — Laaxus
Split experts into base/company/corporation tiers, and make new players unlock higher building tiers (SET, TEC, SCI) over time through industry XP rather than immediately, so vertical integration is hard early but not blocked forever.
:link: https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/increasing-the-economic-incentives-of-specialized-empire-production/7117/4

3. Flat, non-HQ-scaling empire bonus per industry — Weiiswurst
Give every company (new or old) a strong, stackable empire-wide production bonus for chosen industries that does not scale with HQ level, so it rewards specialization without disadvantaging new players.
:link: https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/increasing-the-economic-incentives-of-specialized-empire-production/7117/14

4. Fixed total boost pool split across professions (“Company-wide specialization”) — SLKLS
Give each company a fixed total bonus pool (e.g. 75%) distributed according to expert distribution with a per-profession cap (e.g. 25%), so full specialization in ~3 industries is possible while new players still start with the max boost and no margin disadvantage.
:link: https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/increasing-the-economic-incentives-of-specialized-empire-production/7117/48 (also has its own dedicated thread: https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/company-wide-specialization/7386)

5. Decoupled HQ “permit points” tied to location/COGC — CraftsmanThirteen
Replace the strict HQ-level-to-permit-count system with a “points” budget where base cost varies by location and matching COGC (cheaper on the fringe or in a base matching your specialty), pushing veteran players to spread out and specialize rather than stack bases in the core.
:link: https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/increasing-the-economic-incentives-of-specialized-empire-production/7117/33

Bonus (6th) — Automatic building-mix efficiency formula — startube
Proposed a formula that gives an input-cost discount scaling with what percentage of a company’s input-consuming buildings are one type (up to ~20% at full specialization), requiring no manual specialization choice at all.
:link: https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/increasing-the-economic-incentives-of-specialized-empire-production/7117/52

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Since I’m in Claude, I pointed Fable at the problem and here’s the output

The core diagnosis: the game’s specialization incentives operate at the wrong scope

The existing bonus stack is entirely planet-scoped. A CoGC advertising campaign grants 25% to one industry on that planet, experts are earned and activated per base (max 5 per industry, 6 active total), giving up to 28.4% for a full set, and the only company-scoped bonus is the HQ faction bonus, roughly 10% to industries determined by where your HQ sits, modified by the ratio of used to total base permits. CraftsmanThirteen’s numbers confirm how this stacks in practice: CoGC at 25%, a full expert set at 28.4%, and faction at 4–6% add up to a 60%+ production bonus that barely changes across profession.

Here’s the perverse consequence: because the big bonuses are planetary, they successfully forced bases to specialize — and in doing so made empires modular. A vertically integrated 30-base empire isn’t fighting the specialization incentives at all; it’s a portfolio of individually specialized bases, each sitting on its matching CoGC world with full experts. The only differential between “one company running the whole chain” and “five companies trading with each other” is the single-digit faction bonus. lowstrife’s framing is exactly right — once your company grows enough to vertically integrate everything on its own CoGC worlds, the negative incentives vanish and only the ~10% empire bonus remains — but I’d sharpen it: the fix has to operate at company scope, which is why Counterpoint’s “Experts 2.0” instinct — experts attached to companies rather than bases — is aimed at the right structural layer.

The second, deeper driver: integration is insurance, not yield

The thread’s most economically important post is CraftsmanThirteen’s #12, and it’s not about bonuses at all. He wants to be vertically integrated because the market can’t guarantee reasonably-priced inputs — 49 ZR on the book when he consumes more weekly, LFL bid below its ZR replacement cost — and because his supply chain collapsed when the game’s largest carbon producer quit, leaving him with money problems for weeks. Profit is secondary; there’s too much uncertainty in the market to rely on it.

That means the marginal veteran isn’t weighing “10% bonus vs. 0%.” They’re weighing “10% bonus vs. an insurance premium.” If a supply disruption idles a high-tier base for two weeks a couple of times a year — plus permanent counterparty-attrition risk in a game with a small population — the implied insurance value of integration is plausibly 10–20% of annual profit, with fat tails. No plausible production bonus outbids that, and one large enough to try creates worse problems (below). This is a two-equilibrium coordination problem, and lowstrife nailed the loop: the markets are not robust because nobody specializes; if specialization were encouraged, trade would flourish — as it visibly did for the new electronics intermediates after the MM changes. The economy is sitting in the autarky equilibrium, and it’s locally rational for every individual to stay there. Bonuses change relative payoffs; they don’t, by themselves, provide the shove between equilibria. A liquidity backstop does. So any real solution is a package: reward channel + risk-reduction channel.

The margin-vs-volume insight is the correct sorting criterion for proposals

AGM-114’s contribution is the sharpest design constraint in the thread, and it holds up quantitatively. Production modifiers don’t scale consumable and building-fab usage, so they improve margins — a strongly specialized player can drive a price below the generalist’s breakeven and hold it there indefinitely, which means the modifier must stay conservative, and conservative modifiers don’t do much (see the existing HQ bonus). Formally: if a good’s daily cost is inputs I·r + fixed time-costs C (consumables, degradation), a speed bonus b moves your breakeven unit cost from I + C/r to I + C/(r(1+b)) — the effect is small for input-heavy goods but large for time-cost-heavy ones (SD, AML, resource extraction), which is exactly the class SLKLS flagged as breaking under speed buffs too. Whereas an area/permit advantage scales throughput and time-costs together: unit economics unchanged, profit per permit up. Specialization becomes a reward for growth rather than a requirement for profitability. This also protects the autarky playstyle, which matters for retention — Filefolders and CraftsmanThirteen both said they’d disengage if end-to-end shipbuilding stopped being viable, and Laaxus’s warning that players quit when they lose freedom is the right constraint to honor. Carrot-only design: integration stays exactly as good as today in absolute terms, specialization gets better in relative terms.

Against that criterion, my ranking of the in-thread mechanisms:

Best bonus mechanism: SLKLS’s distributed pool, with the payout partially converted from efficiency to capacity. A fixed company-wide boost budget (say 75%) distributed according to your expert/activity distribution, capped per profession (say 25%), so full strength means three professions — and a new player is automatically at max boost with no margin disadvantage. This is elegant for four reasons: it’s automatic (no point-assignment UI, no gaming a declaration), it satisfies Weiiswurst’s hard constraint that the boost must not scale with HQ level or you make the new-player experience worse, it repurposes an existing system, and — if the distribution is computed over a trailing window of production activity — re-speccing is organically slow, which threads Laaxus’s needle between commitment and freedom. Its one weakness is that as written it’s a pure margin-channel bonus. I’d split the payout: a modest efficiency component (≤10% per specialized industry, visible and motivating) plus a capacity component (buildings of your specialized industries consume ~15–20% less area, or equivalently bases gain bonus area restricted to matching buildings and habitation). The capacity piece is where the real power goes, because it’s competition-safe and because area/permits are the actual binding constraint in the endgame — note lowstrife’s own instinct that realization should be slow since you can’t magically reformat your bases every time you unlock something; area bonuses have exactly that property.

One measurement detail: weight the specialization index by area or workforce cost, not building count — SLKLS correctly noted that building-count portions bias toward bases with 30 small pioneer buildings over bases with 10 big high-tier ones, which would perversely punish exactly the players you want moving up the tech tree.

Worth adopting alongside: CraftsmanThirteen’s permit-point idea, in reduced form. Full decoupling of HQ level from permits is a big rework with the CoGC-flipping incentive problem AGM-114 identified, but the narrow version — permits cost fewer points when the base matches your specialization and/or sits on the frontier — is another volume-channel reward and attacks planet-crowding simultaneously.

What to avoid: recipe input/output modification (startube’s original form) — lowstrife’s rebuttal is the right one: items are balanced across wildly different margin structures, from thin-margin high-throughput electronics to fat-margin extraction, and yield changes break that balance; production speed is the designed lever. Also avoid the two dangerous perks in the OP’s list: the Marketeer MM-price bonus (an inflationary faucet with obvious wash-trade abuse surface, in a game whose price bands have already been manipulated historically) and the plot-limit bypass (deletes planetary scarcity, one of the few genuine sources of geographic trade). And avoid tying the core bonus to HQ level or ARC level as the strength axis — Tonatsi’s corporation idea is fine as flavor, but jcheung’s HQ-level scaling runs straight into Weiiswurst’s objection. The rest of lowstrife’s perk list (specialized cargo capacity, reduced consumable variety, governor upgrades) is good Layer-3 material: identity, resource sinks, volume-flavored, safe.

The recommendation, as a package

Layer 1 — Company charters (the reward): activity-derived specialization index per industry, trailing 8–12 week window, area-weighted; benefits capped at ~1/3 share so three industries is full strength. Payout: small efficiency (cap ~8–10%) + significant matching-industry area discount (~15–20%) + specialization-gated permit discounts. New players are at full charter strength from day one by construction.

Layer 2 — Market de-risking (the shove): this is the part I’d argue is necessary, not optional. Expand MM coverage onto the chokepoint intermediates (the ZR/MHL/FLX class — single-recipe, ship-critical, currently one-player-deep), with deliberately wide bands that algorithmically tighten or withdraw as organic book depth develops — CraftsmanThirteen already proposed the bootstrap-then-scale-back pattern, and lowstrife’s post-MM-change electronics volume chart is direct evidence the mechanism works. Add recurring supply contracts (auto-renewing, deposit-backed penalty terms) so the “corp-mate who sells me cheap carbon” relationship survives as an institution rather than a friendship — this directly attacks the attrition risk that drove CraftsmanThirteen out of corporations. The linked commodity-futures discussion is the ambitious version of the same idea. Separately, liquidity fragmentation across four CXs with this population size makes every book four times thinner; anything that funnels flow (new-player routing toward Moria/Antares, cheaper cross-CX arbitrage) compounds Layer 2.

Layer 3 — perk trees as long-term sinks, cherry-picked from the OP, added only after 1+2 stabilize.

If forced to pick a single minimal change instead: decouple the HQ faction bonus from unused permits (everyone in the thread agrees it’s never worth leaving permits unused for the bonus, so that modifier is dead weight), make the industries player-allocatable per CoinCrafter’s idea but flat rather than HQ-scaled, and add the chokepoint MMs. That’s maybe 60% of the value at 20% of the dev cost.