megacorp mastercraft inc on voidborn

[NPC]

so I have my habitat dwellers but mastercraft inc doesn't give extra slots from more districts on my habitats, is that enough of a reason to not take this civic and take PR specialists?

[Vovarush]

megacorp vd can just go mercantile tree first and forget about cg completely

[CrUsHeR]

Start over with a different civic. As megacorp you should be producing consumer goods exclusively from your trade value conversion through the "consumer benefits" policy.
Then you can already turn your third habitat (generator) into an alloy foundry, and your first expansion habitat only does research.


I know some people said they use the "marketplace of ideas" policy instead, but that makes even less sense because you still need to employ both artisans and miners to produce consumer goods from minerals.

[HappySack]

Why would you ever pick Mastercraft as a civic for a Megacorp when you can just convert your trade value into consumer goods?

And if you want more building slots then don't pick a Megacorp so you can get the Functional Architecture civic instead (as well as the inevitable Voidborne perk).

[Garatgh Deloi]

Just out of curiosity, i know using trade for consumer goods is rather easy and all, but doesn't other boosted sources of consumer goods open up interesting strategies where it might be better to use your trade value for something else? Like unity perhaps? Combined with the fact that master crafters also creates a bit of trade (admittedly not much) it would be interesting to see what one could do with it.

(And yes, i know about the trade policy you get from a trade federation, but you don't always want to create a federation, heck you may even be unable to if you are part of the imperium late game).

[CrUsHeR]

Originally posted by Garatgh Deloi:

Just out of curiosity, i know using trade for consumer goods is rather easy and all, but doesn't other boosted sources of consumer goods open up interesting strategies where it might be better to use your trade value for something else? Like unity perhaps? Combined with the fact that master crafters also creates a bit of trade (admittedly not much) it would be interesting to see what one could do with it.

(And yes, i know about the trade policy you get from a trade federation, but you don't always want to create a federation, heck you may even be unable to if you are part of the imperium late game).

The base output of miners is 4 minerals. And artisans convert minerals to consumer goods in a 1:1 ratio. Note that both jobs already cost consumer goods in upkeep, so this would have to be deducted from the formula.
Also the amount of minerals you can get is restricted by deep space mining sites and miner job slots, while trade value can simply be generated everywhere without restrictions.

Thing is that you will need a significant portion of your population employed in this production chain alone. And whenever you create any other job, you proportionally need more miners and artisans.

Also, consumer goods are a hard requirement; without them your pops cannot do their job, and you need them to build colony ships. Higher living standards also cost very large amounts of consumer goods, and so does giving citizen rights to robots eventually. The recurring planetary decision to distribute luxury goods also gets VERY expensive once you have a lot of populated colonies.



Unity in turn is optional. There even is a spot where unlocking more ascension slots doesn't do anything, because you are missing the technologies to get the perks you needed to buy.
So you should balance your unity and research production, where research is generally much more beneficial for our empire development than tradition perks.

And what is the most limiting factor to increase your research output? Indeed, consumer goods and pops. So the removed CG production chain does not only create an obscene amount of CGs out of thin air, it also frees up all those pops to work as researchers or other things (alloys etc).


For the formula to actually produce unity because you can't / won't have a Trade League federation, the fun already starts with your colony centers employing Executives instead of Administrators, who produce unity and trade value. So this really scales with your number of colonies. E.g. 10 habitats with 2 executives each produce 40 unity and 120 trade value before any bonuses.

Culture Workers are replaced with a Managers, who produce 3 trade value on top of 3 unity and society research, plus whatever their living standard adds in trade value, so again they partially pay their own upkeep through Consumer Benefits.


The only downside is that you cannot buy Unity from the market like you can do with Consumer Goods.



TBH the greatest plus for aligning your economy to Consumer Benefits right from the start: Even if you don't have a Trade League federation for the first 50 or 100 years, perhaps you do get one later?

Now if you were running with the Unity policy all the way, you will suddenly face something like +1000 (random example) monthly consumer goods with absolutely no use. Converting your entire economy back to not produce CGs would be a massive pain.
While with the CG policy, your baseline economy wouldn't change, and you would simply look at some bonus unity.

[Xilo The Odd]

Originally posted by CrUsHeR:

Start over with a different civic. As megacorp you should be producing consumer goods exclusively from your trade value conversion through the "consumer benefits" policy.
Then you can already turn your third habitat (generator) into an alloy foundry, and your first expansion habitat only does research.


I know some people said they use the "marketplace of ideas" policy instead, but that makes even less sense because you still need to employ both artisans and miners to produce consumer goods from minerals.

sometimes this is a temp thing to blow through the traditins for a bit to get the essentials very quickly. because you can always change it later.