Least useful buildings

[LSD]

What buildings do you rarely use?

Science Academy: fairly expensive, eats up professors, and though the clone inspiring buildings is nice, it just doesn't seem worth building most of the time. Seems to cost more than it saves in blueprint fees.

Radar Dish: expensive, eats professors, and useless to me, since intellectuals are easy to please, spy information will cost more than it produces, and subversive activities are way too passive to need "preventing".

Sports Complex: huuuuuuuge, expensive, power drain, and it just never seems to turn a profit for me. Every time i've built it, it's become a money sink.

Furniture Factory: awful. So expensive to set up, and most of the time will cost more than it will ever produce. Plus it ties up all the excess lumber from the lumber mill, since the game won't export it if it can be further processed, besides the fact the factory is snail-pace slow.

Anyone found use for these? Or got any other useless buildings?

[Jimmy McGill]

Totally agree with you. Especially the Science Academy, it's either not worht it anyway to save that much at that point for that cost, and the cloning takes too long anyway to be of any real use.

[LSD]

Just forced myself to build one early, and realised the clone doesn't even move very far from the academy...which is even worse.

Stock Exchange is another pretty terrible building. So much to build and maintain, comes late, but earns basically nothing, and almost always ends up bankrupt. Especially when the offers have wages half of what you're currently paying (so nobody ever works there).

[Jimmy McGill]

Originally posted by LSD:

Just forced myself to build one early, and realised the clone doesn't even move very far from the academy...which is even worse.

Stock Exchange is another pretty terrible building. So much to build and maintain, comes late, but earns basically nothing, and almost always ends up bankrupt. Especially when the offers have wages half of what you're currently paying (so nobody ever works there).

Yeah, I don't get why you'd ever build it outside off missions that force you to. Though I do like some of the house and hotel deal buildings.

[aqvarivs]

I don't know where you get you idea about the furniture factory. It's one of the big income factories for me. I usually have two lumber mills importing logs feeding two furniture factories plus selling the excess lumber. I average somewhere around $25,000 of furniture sales per ship docking. Easy. Distillery might do something more but it has 3x the employees too. And I pay crap wages on top of that. By 2000 my educated workforce is only getting $18.

I try to not build too much entertainment. The more enteretainment the less work you get out of the employed. Work, home, church, clinic, and if they are lucky some entertainment. If not back to work and maybe next time. Crack the whip. After all dictatorships don't build themselves. :D

[Gallifrey - CSSC Gaming Founder]

I get (or rather got - might play some different games having finished both campaigns) the Research Academy for the blue prints. Particularly if you're building a tourist economy or lots of different industries it comes in useful.

I'd agree with Radar Dishes - very scenario specific unless there's more attacks than your secret police can stop.

Sports Complex - agree but it does boost Tourism.

Furniture Factory - Agree with Aquarius - money spinner.

I don't use Conventillos unless the scenario asks for one - the referb fees make them expensive. Also I don't build any accommodation more expensive than a house or modern apartment depending on which campaign I'm playing. That keeps most Tropicans happy.

No newspapers - in Tropico 1 the "Coupons and More" newspaper was a big earner but now it's a drain. One TV station set to BBC will boost liberty enough on most islands for you to introduce anti-littering without upsetting the Intellectuals.

I avoid ranches since they need large amounts of space to be productive which their income rarely justifies. Organic ranches are different.

S.x.

[Uzi Master]

Science accadamy's are required for GMC mode of the horitculture station, which can double corn production, in addition to reducing the price of blueprints.

Yeah, furniture factory has terrible profit margins, certainly not worth it, either you import and make little profit, or you have the whole chain and tie up tripple the workers that you would for other, more profitable industry buildings.

The newspapers coupon setting can still make plenty of money if you place it right, just remember it'll take a little while before the journalists have enough expierience to actually generate money from it, same is true of the radio and TV station. It's also the only media building that doesn't require power.

[LSD]

The placement of media buildings is really annoying. I avoid the newspaper only because it's so big and ugly, since you have to place those buildings right where you'd place a house for them to make profits. Same thing with the business tower. Wish they'd give us some indication of the range on them, or just tied the range to the telecoms tower.

I disagree with ranches though. Especially early on, and with the 2000 investment in a smoke house, they make incredible money from just 2 workers. Problem is how they deteriorate the land quality and make so much pollution.

Still don't understand furniture factories though. Blueprints, building costs, both eat highschool workers up, and then you've got loggers to add to the equation, and the horrible way the game handles moving goods about.
Loggers and a sawmill can make some (not that much) money, but as soon as you add the third building to the equation...calamity presidente.

[aqvarivs]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=533900918

[Uzi Master]

And that's supposed to prove what, exactly? That's a really small income for that point in a game, assuming you started at 1950. Regardless, furniture factories have one of, if not the worst profit ratios of all the industry buildings.

[aqvarivs]

What it shows is that in this instance furniture production is second in generating revenue and I have provided evidence of that with a listing of partial totals from manufacting sales. This is a snapshot from one ships docking and not a year end almanac. If you look closely you will also see substantial stock ready to be delivered to the dock.
You, well you have shown no evidence. Just your unsubstantiated opinion about furniture factories having the worst profit ratio of all industrial buildings. I've shown the contrary to that, so other readers can make up their own minds based on some actual evidence.

[Uzi Master]

No one said it can't generate revenue, I said it was one of the worst industry buildings when it comes to generating it. And all that picture shows is income from exporting furniture, on its own it doesn't substantiate anything, not any more than someones opinion anyway. We don't see the total upkeep cost of the industry chain, which is going to be more for furniture than other goods, nor do we see how many of each factory you have, there could be more urniture factories off screen. We also don't see how long it's been there for, if the other factories are newer, they wouldn't have had tiem to reach full productivity yet. Also, as you said there's more resources waiting to be brought to the dock, it's highly unlikely the production and transportation of all your goods are syncronised, so furniture being second revenue wise after one freighter is meaningless. pictures of the lifetime profits of different buildings would be a better indicator.

Besides, the factors that make the furniture factory worse are pretty easy to see for anyone who plays the game, everyone already has the proof right there. It takes an extra step of processing, meaning more workers to make it than other products, and its sell price isn't terribly high compared to other industry products, which is easily seen in the almanac. That means you're making less money for more workers, thus, it's the worst industry building revenue wise.

[aqvarivs]

Yep. Sounds Like you should stay away from it. Not everyone can get these things up and running successfully.

[Uzi Master]

At what point did I say it can't make a profit? Is insulting the person who disagrees with you the only way you can engage? I said it was one of the worst industry building for making a profit (I think only the cement factory, and a cannery canning fish are worse, maybe chemical plant) and that's mathematically true. I can make it work if I want, but other buildings work better, that's the point. It's much better than tourist buildings and such for sure, but I was specifically reffering to industry buildings. Granted the thread does say least useful buildings in a general sense, but being the least profitable industry building does make it pretty comparatively useless, unless it had some special bonuses.

And what "problems" do you think I've encountered? How is my argument based on a bad situation? I really don't see where that's coming from.

Nice edit, probably should've quoted, though the insulting tone is still there.

To continue the topic a bit, I don't think anyone's mentioned Shanty's yet, and I can't think of any situation I'd want to use those over anything else sans a story mission.

[Matthew]

Well, the one thing I can think of is that furniture (or basically just wood) is easy to come by, where as oil and mining needs specific locations. So I guess it is balanced in the sense that you can essentially set up lumber production anywhere at the cost of slightly more workers.

Unless the point is more that lumber is successful, but going the extra step of making it into furniture generally isn't worth it. I don't know about that stuff, I haven't played the game long enough to know numbers like that off the top of my head.

I agree with shanty shacks though. Outside of flavor/role-playing, I'd at least try and just save up for a tenament (sp?). I don't use the bunkhouse things much either, but I have on occasion.

[Matthew]

How about banks? It seems like they are kind of like the academy thing which reduces blueprint cost. By the time you get multiple banks and staff them and work up to the full building cost discount, most of your island is already developed.

I haven't tried a strategy where you try and get banks up early, and also I suppose they are nice for reducing costs of some of the more expensive buildings, but in general it seems like banks cost as much as they save.