Purpose of Corporate Headquarters?

[DaLagga]

What is the point of this massive undertaking? I mean, it basically counts as a big city center, costs a fortune to build, takes forever to complete, and has obscene maintenance costs. And all it does is provide the basic needs that are relatively easy and cheap to provide anyway (community, activity, participation, information)? How is that actaully worth it? Am I missing something?

One problem I have is that another faction took all the islands with uranium so I have to rely on coal power, but even still, at max level it costs 300 power and 1000 credits to maintain. I could provide basic needs for less than that anyway. So am I missing something, or is this huge project just a big waste of time? Keep in mind that this I'm on my first real game after doing a few of the tutorial missions, so I don't really know what I'm doing. Thanks for any information you can provide!

[Stanfiem]

It saves room so you can add more houses. Plus the amount of space that a casino, city center, and public building take up is a good bit. I think it also provides the needs for all factions. So you can add other factions in with it, I think. Also Skylar gives you quests as well. And you get an achievment and it is -500 maintence cost not 1000 like you said.

One thing to note is the Techs version the "science forum" provides for needs for the entire island. With every faction if you have the Deep ocean add on.

I would build it just because when you get to that point in the game where you are building a monument you should have a solid 7-15 thousand hourly credits to "waste" and at least a million dollars. Provided you have all 3 factions at their top tier civilizations.

Another thing is this game is almost as much about building cool cities as much as it is goods managemnet. So the monumnets just add to the cityscape. Every time I get a chance i build the corporate headquarters and the science forum.

AS for your second question the fun of the game, at least to me, really begins. Now you get to wage war on the faction and take over the island in order to mine uranium. Depending on who it is will differ on how you go about taking over that faction. War is really fun in this game. Granted it is a bit slow paced but still fun. If you need advice on waging war and tactics just ask. I just hope it is not tori bartok. That pesky asian is a pro at aerial warfare. She has loads of upgrades for her planes and choppers

[DaLagga]

Thanks for the response. I don't have the expansion, so I guess I'm missing out on a few things for now. As far as combat goes, it seems pretty simple unless I'm missing something. I don't think there's a way to actually invade and island, is there? All I can see to do is bombard their warehouses from the shore and use aircraft to destroy their cities and stuff further inland. Then once all there stuff is destroyed, you can occupy the island. Or am I missing something?

Also, I was wondering. I just got jewelry and noticed that supplying my city with it didn't result in a population increase or anything, but just an increase in tax income. Is the executive mansion the highest tier of housing there is and all you get after that is more tax income from providing more luxuries? Thanks again.

Edit:
Oh, and I just checked, and the Corporate Headquarters is indeed costing me 1000 credits per interval, not 500. Maybe 500 was for the first tier? All in all, I'm not so sure that it's worth it. It's more convenient for sure, but I would imagine it would be more cost effective to just plan well and use city centers. Idk.

Edit2:
Oh, and one more thing. How do you order a transport to load up on more than one slot full of the same good? No matter what I seem to do, they will only load up on one full stack of the same item even though they have space for 3 stacks. I can get them to load up on one stack of a particular good and a second stack of a different good. But not multiple stacks of the same good unless I do it manually. What gives? Sorry for all the questions!

[clvnhbs]

@DaLagga about loading more than one stack on a ship. Just go into the trade routes dialog and add the same good to the other slots. So for the basic ship, you can add alcohol 3 times and it will load everything until all the 3 stacks are full.

[DaLagga]

How do I select the slot to load it onto? I tried using the option to pick up plastics 3 times in a row, and then a drop off order 3 times in a row but it didn't work.

[clvnhbs]

First go into the trading screen (F6-default shortcut). It should look something like this: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=269445200

For each slot, just click the red/green button to load/unload the good you want. In the above screen, the ship will fill up all of its 3 slots with alcohol to bring back to my main island.

Hope this helps!

[Stanfiem]

For this trade stacks the post above me is correct.

For the combat, like you said, you Need to first take out the Warehouse on the island to hinder production of depots once you destroy them. Then you destroy the depots. But one thing to note is that even if you destroy everything on the island The NPC can still try to reclaim the island if you do not have depots covering the entire island. The influence circle of the depot is territory you own. Depending on the npc this can be hard or not. That is the easiest way. You can set up a blockade that blocks all ships from coming in or you can destroy a tanker near the island which will set the ecobalance to low and slowly destroy the population. Or you can nuke the island using the missiles which brings me to my next point.

The last tier is in fact the executives fro ECOS and TYCOONS and the Geniuses for the techs. (if you have the expansion) If not then i think just researchers. The last thing you unlock is the missile silos Which are nuclear missiles with their own mushroom cloud explosion and everything. But another product becomes available to build the pharmaceuticals which you may or may not have unlocked yet I forget the exact order. If you are looking for something to do I would start by settling your eco population.

One other thing is research plays a big role in combat because you can create buffs that increase things like attack speed and there are also some pretty nifty items like cloaking devices that hide the ship and hijacking items that allow you to take over an enemy ship and use it for your own. But you may need the expansion for some of those research items.

I was going off of the wiki article that stated the headquarters is -500 tax income, but if you say your game has it at 1000 then it must be wrong. It may be more cost effective to use city centers but the fact that it supplies the entertainment needs for all 4 teirs I find the ease of using it far outweighs the cost. I always leave the Ministry of truth up in order to increase the living space so i can get a higher population, and more income.

[Warlord]

Monuments are the bread and butter of any city. You want them and there is a reason why they take forever to build, because they are amaze balls.

[DaLagga]

Thanks a lot for the replies Your screenshot helped sugarcandy243. I get it now. I'm enjoying the game a lot and love the city building aspect. I just got gold jewelry supplied to my largest island but it didn't seem to increase the population or anything - just tax income. Is that what it's supposed to do?

Combat, on the other hand, seems pretty bad. I've played a lot of RTS's in my day but I just don't see much strategy being involved in warfare in this game. It seems more like all you can really do is spam more units than your opponent is able to spam. Sure, there's a tiny bit of the standard paper/rock/scissors stuff going on, but not much else. For example, when attacking an enemy island by air, they had tons of AA guns. But I can't see any good way to take them out aside for just mass attacking and accepting losses. Am I missing something there?

[clvnhbs]

Glad my screenshot helped :D

I'm not much for combat in general. In most of the Anno games, it is very peripheral to the actual city-building. In 2070, it is at least more colorful. But still, the action elements are not very well-developed IMO. I don't mind because I rarely use combat unless forced to in a global mission/campaign but I can understand it will be disappointing to someone else.

[DaLagga]

Ok, I stumbled across another issue. I had a moderately sized city of 8k tycoons and they were bringing in about 13k in tax income. I had all of their needs met except pharmaceuticals. So I spent about an hour and roughly 3k credits/tick in setting up a decent sized industry to produce those pharmaceuticals. After fully meeting their needs (everything at 100%), my total population had risen to about 9.2k (a gain of ~1200 executives), but my income only went up to 13.3k.

What gives? I invested about 3k/tick in an industry that only has a credit return of .3k/tick? Why are all those extra executives (about a 50% increase over the amount that I had previously) paying so little in taxes? Is it just worthless to fully satisfy their luxury needs? I mean, sure, you need a certain number of executives to unlock all of a faction's tech. But you don't need all that many (about 1250 IIRC) and you can easily hit that goal without resorting to more advanced luxury goods. So did I just waste a lot of time and money or am I missing something?

[Strandly]

The monuments are amazing because 1.) they look b.a.d.a.s.s., and 2.) they save you space by letting you destroy most of your community centers, and all of your casinos, media towers, financial buildings, etc.

The reason your pharmacutical operation isn't giving a very good return is probably because your city is puny and/or you are grossly overproducing the pills. You don't just plop down one monument and spam some houses inside its circle of influence and call it a day. You make the entire island a city with 2-4 monuments (filling in the gaps between their circles of influence with community centers); setup factory operations on the smaller islands and pipe in goods on cargo ships.

If you think 13 K income is high you are.. maybe in for a surprise, in my game I have something like 60 K income, around 300 million in banked money, and I'm not even done maximizing my cities. :p I can't remember exactly but I think my tycoon and eco islands each have a container ship hauling JUST liquor or tea to the city because the citizens burn through 200-300 per trip.

But that's besides the point. The top tier luxuries are expensive to produce but are also more "potent". You don't need 15 or 20 phamacutical factories like you do liquor farms so if you have pills accumulating in your supply depots that's your first problem. Either build more housing to get more executives to eat the extra pills, or destroy some factories, or set your warehouse to sell excess pills to the visitng AI ships.

[DaLagga]

First off, the 13k income was just from one of my cities - my smallest one actually. I was just wanting to test the waters with higher end luxury goods. Secondly, I'm not overproducing by much. I set up enough industry to keep 8 pharmaceutical plants running and according to the wiki, that's enough to supply ~4k executives and I currently have 3.2k in that city. So at best, I could maybe get rid of 1 plant and its production chain and maybe save .5k/tick. That still leaves me with a net loss of about 2.2k after all is said and done.

Also, having more poeple isn't going to change anything at all because the ratios are going to remain relatively constant, arent' they? If going from a little over 2k executives to 3.2k only resulted in a total gain of ~3% gross income, then the same is going to hold true even if I have 20k executives and grow to 30k due to the pharmaceuticals. In other words, no matter how big my city is, the cost of pharmaceutical production is always going to dramatically out pace any increase in tax income because more executives means more pharmaceuticals along with other commodities.

Finally, the insane pharmaceutcal costs are only one part of the equation (albeit the most expensive part) because the growth in population also meant that I needed to start producing more goods in other areas (jewelry, convenience food, plastics, etc). All in all, I don't see how top tier luxury goods can ever be worth it.

[Strandly]

I don't get what you're talking about with a net loss. You said before the pharmacuticals you were at 13 K and after you were at 13.3? That looks like a gain to me. Anyway, I've never gone by the ratios that websites list, I think they're probably wrong or were made obsolete by patches. I can't remember how many pharmacutical factories I've used in the past but I think I never had more than 3 or 4 running so I dunno. I would simply smash factories until I started losing inventory from my depots and then rebuild one and see if that levels things out. Lastly, you'll want to have factories for every type of good even if it's a weak return on investment because the daily quests will usually ask for top tier goods.

[DaLagga]

I said that I had a net loss because the cost of the production network was about 3k while my tax income only increased by around 1/10th of that value (13k to 13.3k). Therefore, my net loss was around 2.7k just counting the costs of the pharma industry (it's much higher if you count the costs from the increase in demand for other goods). After messing around with it a bit I'd say the wiki is roughly correct and you do need a pharmaceutical factory for every 500'ish executives. As such, I don't see how you can ever make a profit off of pharmaceuticals because a larger population simply means that you need to produce more of them - making your net loss even greater.

Long story short, unless I'm missing something, pharmaceuticals are never worth producing. I guess you could argue that they're worth it for the daily quests, but it seems kind of crummy that they'd make such a high tier resource otherwise worthless.

[clvnhbs]

But if nothing else, the pharma pills make for really good trade income. I admit I haven't really watched the income/expense for individual production chains but overall, I try to produce everything needed for my cities even if they cause me a slight loss. By the time I get to luxury goods, I'm rolling in money anyway so it's not worth (to me) to think too much about each good's profit/loss equation.