Adaptation buildings are nearly almost always better? Balance Issue?

[Commodus]

Some only use 1/3 of the requirements of progression buildings, and only trade off seems to be slightly higher workforce cost.

[Sythalin]

I've noticed this as well. There is usually little incentive to not use Adaptation tech as the cost difference is negligible for more benefit. I hope this gets changed in the future, or someone does a balance mod to make the choices more meaningful.

[Harris]

Adaptation lessens your heat requirements which puts less pressure on your fuel economy. There are only two things Progress really has going for it - Automated Workforce Factories and Deep Drills.

Automated Factories are kinda bugged in my experience, the production buffs make it produce less workforce rather than more. By the time they become available workforce is a non-issue. That leaves the drill. Taking buildings from opposite zeitgeist incurs tension after fully embracing, so you can't really build it on a mass scale. However, you are unlikely to ever have more than a handful of drills, so you might as well eat the tension, there are enough ways to decrease it. Same goes for Automated freight thing, you are unlikely to ever be in a situation where you want more than a couple of those. This lets you double dip and essentially leaves Progress in the dust.

That aside, disease > squalor, all day any day. There are tons of ways to manage disease, while only a couple of ways to manage squalor. Squalor is also much more annoying, as having to repair your districts one by one is... ugh. The #1 advantage of Progress is requiring less workers, but that's neither here nor there as soon as you find yourself with spare 10k workers you don't know what to do with.

So yeah, clearly a balance issue. Just like there's no point ever going Tradition over Reason. Reason gives you everything Tradition got in terms of population growth, but has a lot of its own stuff going for it:
- infinite food supply with Panaceum factories
- population control, for when you want to play a small settlement and it becomes a problem
- research
- disease/hunger

Tradition meanwhile gives you better tools to manage tension, but the thing with tension is it's a result of poor play, meanwhile Reason lets you take care of things that would cause tension in the first place. What also kills tradition is its focus on managing crime, meanwhile crime is never an issue as there are very few ways to get it.

Merit and Equality are kinda tied. Equality really eats into your heatstamps early game but completely trivializes them at the end. Merit's bonuses to production are good throughout the game, but the indentured are really lackluster. It would be cool if taking money from factions turned them into indentured or you could otherwise control the ratio of indentured in the city, but it's very random for the most part.

Back to Adaptation, it pairs amazingly with both Merit and Reason. All Adaptation buildings increase disease, which workers house of Merit does as well. And Panaceum factory in turn helps reduce that.

And one cool thing about tension is it only applies to buildings in your main city, unless they of the opposite zeitgeist. For example, if you went full Merit Labor camps will give tension in the city, but when built in the colonies will not give any. Same thing with Equality's workers cottage. This encourage you to move your production to colonies and focus your main city on research or generating money with pleasure clubs.

[Kazeck]

The advantage to Adaptation is that merit in deed pairs well, but even without merit, Adaptation has a lot of workforce reduction coupled with efficiency increases (apex workers is a pretty good counter to that, but it's the very end)

Progress is extremely good for building numerous colonies and raising productivity through the roof.

[Candidoes]

has someone checked if through progress+reason branch you can implement a positive loop of petrol into materials into charcoal into petrol?????? in theory seems viable but i have not been able to test it

[>//The_FALCON]

well, yeah. it kinda makes sense as progress is the boomer ideology and adaptation is the progressive ideology

you wouldn't say "the iphone 3 is kind of weak in comparison to todays android smartphones"

[Passer556]

Progress got the better Generator though? 1 oil for like 7 heat and the production boost when you topped off? The adaptive one is more or less pointless if you are not playing on a steam map.

[Commodus]

Originally posted by Passer556:

Progress got the better Generator though? 1 oil for like 7 heat and the production boost when you topped off? The adaptive one is more or less pointless if you are not playing on a steam map.

What ends up happening thou is take the oil generator from progress, then everything else adaption^^

[Kolyan]

Funny thing is you dont need any of faction speecific building, coz "game" plays itself even with districts only(goods can be problem before you will find a settlemnet with it, but it can be balanced with ppl quantity). Key to win is to reduce ppl to minimum and send newborns away asap

[Goul]

The Centers that lessens workforce need by -10% need themselfes 100 Workforce. Building that near 1 District without building reduces worforce by 60 but the Centre itself needs 100.

Only worth it if you need the Storage or if you have later in game multiple districts aroound it with buildings that raise workforce needs. You need at least combined workforce in the districts affected by that centre of 1000+ workers or you have a net loss of workforce.

[Passer556]

Originally posted by Commodus:

What ends up happening thou is take the oil generator from progress, then everything else adaption^^

Don't forget them deep drills, no adaption alternative here.

Also note the irony that Progress in better suited for Embrace route and vice versa. With Progress you can make more things happen with less workforce, freeing them up to throw at settlements. And if you are consolidating into one huge City, then you can freely apply its huge workforce into Adaption buildings without worries.

[Alt]

It is half and half in my opinion. In some cases adaptation is better. In others progressive choice is better. I had a ironman game right now, failed one, where i just stuck with a loop of not enough work force because i went adaptation route mostly. I just kept having problems with it. Its building versions require too much of it.

P.S. I can see why adaptation could be better on easier difficulty. But on the max one it is no that simple. Going full adaptation without careful planning will just see you dry of work force.

[DVN]

I went full progress and ran out of food tiles. Had to spam panaceum factory for food. That one deep drill doesn't feel powerful at all. Maybe it works with lots of productivity efficiencies law buff and hubs?

[Karsh]

tbh , going full adpative will increase disease by a lot , i'm thinking of a playthrough of going more of the squalor route cause it's easier to get suppressed then disease.

so i i'm going to try min max better .

granted adaptive gives msot of the times less heat best output but all of them increases disease . disease reduction is alway's a little but squalor reduce buildigns alway's do a lot

[gammon gaming]

Originally posted by Candidoes:

has someone checked if through progress+reason branch you can implement a positive loop of petrol into materials into charcoal into petrol?????? in theory seems viable but i have not been able to test it

that's not how it works, the materials -> charcol building can only be built on an extraction zone that uses wood.
you can have it be an infinite supply chain of wood -> charcoal -> oil if you have a deep drill, however it won't loop and you're going to need a LOT of factories, so it's not efficient on workforce or steam cores.

[Quill]

Originally posted by Commodus:

Some only use 1/3 of the requirements of progression buildings, and only trade off seems to be slightly higher workforce cost.

The trade off is needing a higher population, thus needing a lot more resources overall.

Going deep on Progress is quite strong, since you can cut down workforce by 50%, possibly more. When playing on Captain in the story, I was able to have a city of about 25k, zero growth, with 6k workers left over, and a huge amount of resource floating. Progress buildings consume more resources and heat, but the main perk is needing less of them.