How you deal with loyalty

[FungusMouse]

I'm curious to hear how people tackle loyalty best. I know it can vary a bit by faction, so I'll assume we're talking about normal one pop is one loyalty type of factions.

How do you best deal with it? Best I can see is just spamming a few loyalty buildings in each city, but that kinda sucks to have to do. Is it that simple though? Reserve a tile or two for loyalty buildings and go on your merry way?

[L'Oreal]

You don't worry about loyalty till it's -12 or so. Before then, the penalty is negligible. Which usually means: don't worry till you have second city, at the very least.

No need to go over 0 unless you have sprawling cities already and it's like turn 200 for some reason.

[FungusMouse]

Oh interesting, I guess I never looked at the penalty for negative loyalty close enough, I just always tried to make sure it was at or above 0. I'll look at it closer next time and not worry about it so much.

[Stardustfire]

when i build a worker barack i normal plan at the same time a loyalty building. if you have a recaf field in the city and/or unit building baracks that produce Loyalty (normaly the hero ones) it can differ.

[TemplarGR]

Don't listen to bad advice. Always plan in advance to maintain near 0 loyalty or a little higher. Negative loyalty not only lowers resource production capacity significantly (-2% for each negative point across the board), but it also slows building speed and unit building speed significantly. It can lead to a "spiral of death" because usually you need to build stuff in order to get more loyalty (and building stuff takes time in Gladius and need to be planned in advance), and since with low loyalty building stuff is slower, you need to disable buildings (thus running an unoptimized economy for some time) to make up for it. Population growth never stops even with lower loyalty (and each pop lowers it more), unless you refuse to add housing, and if you refuse to add housing, you run an inefficient growth speed as well (so unless you are doing an extreme rushing strategy and win, you have no mid-late game, you are going to lag behind)...

Your economy will all around suffer with even a -5 loyalty significantly.

(Lots of) Positive loyalty sure, it is not needed before a later stage when you have an established production, but negative does 2X the penalty and is a sure way to destroy your economy.

Basically, unless you are playing a multiplayer very fast 1vs1 HEAVILY MODDED GAME, where only extreme rushing matters, like some people who pretend to be good at the vanilla game are doing, keep your loyalty above zero at all times.

[Jey]

As you can see TemplarGR has some unhealthy fixation on "multiplayer very fast 1v1 heavily modded game", which is code word for "All the people that knows how to make efficient builds who explained me several times that I don't know ♥♥♥♥ and should really refrain from acting as though my opinion is fact".

The question of loyalty comes often
Such as https://steamcommunity.com/app/489630/discussions/0/3461605794236964719/ .

I went up to january 2022, and I can't find the post where I went in-depth on the maths of loyalty.

But here's a quick thing.

Let's say you built your second city. You have probably about 3 buildings (research + production or ore + settler building) and you should have about 5 population on your first city.
This means that you should have roughly -5 loyalty.

Let's assume that you build a loyalty building.
You'll gain 0.6 research from the building, 0.4 resource from the military building (or 0.6 ore from the ore building), 0.4 resource from the settler building, 0.6 from the crane building and 3 from the HQ.
It will take you 6 turns to build and you will pay 2 upkeep.

net gain :
3 resources spread across the board per turn after 6 turns


Let's assume you build a military building.
You'll get 180% speed on it (2 buildings at 90% each) against the 101% you would have with the loyalty. Which honestly can be rounded to "twice as fast".

I have an army twice as big as yours. You lost.

Let's assume you build an eco building.
Net gain :
5.4 resource -1 upkeep = 4.4 resource
And it took me 2 turns fewer to build it, so I have a bonus 10.8 resources for free during those two turns.

I got 1.4 ressource per turn +10.8 resources more than you. My army is bigger/is reinforced for longer. You lost.

Loyalty is a percentage bonus. To be meaningful, it must have a high base to apply on.

I also didn't take in account terrain bonus (which will make a specialized building even more advantageous compared to a loyalty building) nor the fact that among the 3 flat resources you get from the loyalty some can be meaningless early on (You really don't care about +0.6 food early on if you go for full vehicles. +0.6 influence is often useless too)

TL;DR : Don't build loyalty until you have 10 buildings running in your city.


You may ask "Ok but later in the game, what do I do?"

After your first loyalty building, you should strive to keep your loyalty above -10. If you don't need urgently a resource/military building, try to keep it above -5 even. The rule of "specialized eco building > loyalty building" remains ;)

Later in the game (when you have ~14-15 resources building on your city), it becomes more interesting to keep loyalty above 0 or even to spam loyalty only (though it's more expensive, at that time pop economy becomes more important than resource economy.)

[Stardustfire]

as you can see Jey has a unhealth fixation at "im ever right, no matter what other say"
his example let me cringe hard, if i build a second city and dont fix its Loyalty out of the negative its useless for around 20 Turns, what shows that his "unmodded example" is not really unmodded, because talking about "no negative effects" and stating all is fine and dandy and still fast constructed shows he fiddled with game speed and/or other stuff.

[Noodlesocks]

Generally speaking I just pop down a loyalty building when it's getting close to 0. You can let it go a little into the negative which is more likely to happen in the early game, especially when settling new cities but I generally prefer to keep it above 0. Doesn't really matter how much above 0 it is, the penalties only start when it goes negative and the positive bonuses won't really affect a whole lot until later game.

Faction specific:
Space Marines: I usually rely solely on Chaplains for loyalty. It is riskier cause they can be killed but a single Chaplain can provide +6 loyalty through promotions. A lot of the time I don't have to spend any time building loyalty buildings as Space Marines if I can keep my Chaplains alive

T'au: Level 6 Fire Cadres can provide +6 loyalty in every city which can be a really strong boost to T'au economy. They're pretty cheap to produce so you can build a lot of them. EDIT: Also forgot that T'au get +1 loyalty for each unique building in a city. This really helps for early expansion. I usually try to get my third city out around the same time as my second because their Utopia bonus will mitigate a lot of the city loyalty penalties and you'll generally want to play wide with T'au for as long as you maintain Utopia.

Tyranids: Hive Tyrant is another hero that can boost loyalty in every hive but they are expensive to produce. Grey matter dispersion research will reduce the loyalty penalty for the amount of cities.

Late game faction loyalty
Imperial guard: They have a tier 10 edict that will boost loyalty in a city. Combined with edicts that boost resources, they can have a really good economy for pumping out tanks

Chaos: They have a Tier 9 (I think) research that sacrifices population to boost loyalty in a city. Combined with cultist sacrifice, any deficiency from sacrificing pop is quickly remedied

Sisters of Battle: They gain loyalty for each city tile and a late tier research to boost this bonus. If you find yourself in a position where population growth is going to take longer than your next building, you might as well just grab another tile that turn for the free loyalty. EDIT: Like the T'au, I like to play this faction wide instead of tall because of their tile loyalty bonus and because only their capital can expand beyond a 1 tile range. I usually put out my third city around the same time as second and having them focus on unit production, allowing my main city to expand for economy.

[FungusMouse]

Seems like there's two schools of thought/styles here, and I can get the justification behind both. I appreciate the in-depth responses and the math breakdown! It's helped me look at loyalty as a necessary building block of the whole strategy rather than just an annoying mechanic. And thanks Noodlesocks for the faction specific stuff.

[Jey]

Originally posted by FungusMouse:

Seems like there's two schools of thought/styles here.

Yep'.
There's the "Casual I want to make a long campaign PvE and I don't care if what I do is inefficient" and the "I want to play efficiently and crush my enemy with the least amount of effort" schools.

[Noodlesocks]

Originally posted by FungusMouse:

Seems like there's two schools of thought/styles here, and I can get the justification behind both. I appreciate the in-depth responses and the math breakdown! It's helped me look at loyalty as a necessary building block of the whole strategy rather than just an annoying mechanic. And thanks Noodlesocks for the faction specific stuff.

Indeed. If you are playing PvP you will want to study the metas and min/max your gameplay because winning is the sole point of PvP. If you're playing PvE then you can just relax and play however you want, create your own narrative, assign your own challenges. I mean you can go full bore against the AI if you really want but you'll only achieve what you could just have easily done playing relaxed.

[SomeGuy1]

Originally posted by Jey:

lots

the break even point should be before 10 buildings, shouldn't it? The city base income is multiple resource buildings' worth (what, like 6 each of food, ore, power, influence, and research? up to something like 30 total resources just from that, depending on what you value) and loyalty hits that too.

Edit: I had to check again how much loyalty the building made, its 6 not 8. So I deleted that part, its close enough.

[Jey]

Originally posted by SomeGuy1:

the break even point should be before 10 buildings, shouldn't it? The city base income is multiple resource buildings' worth

But are all those resources valuable?
Do you want to gain 0.6 influence 0.6 energy 0.6 food and 0.6 ore or would you rather have 5 ore (Not forgetting the usual 2 upkeep for loyalty + longer time to build)

The answer is usually "5 ore thankyoubye".

[SomeGuy1]

Originally posted by Jey:

Originally posted by SomeGuy1:

the break even point should be before 10 buildings, shouldn't it? The city base income is multiple resource buildings' worth

But are all those resources valuable?
Do you want to gain 0.6 influence 0.6 energy 0.6 food and 0.6 ore or would you rather have 5 ore (Not forgetting the usual 2 upkeep for loyalty + longer time to build)

The answer is usually "5 ore thankyoubye".

... I like how you cut off the part that says "up to...depending on what you value", and then talked about not necessarily valuing all of those. really makes it look like you bothered to read what you were responding to.

All buildings use energy, and infantry (which use food) are a separate building channel from vehicles (which you will probably build as you research the tech for those vehicles, and we ARE talking about the stages of the game where they are still relevant).
Whereas you probably don't care about the influence (well, necrons might. all of their units have an activated ability that uses influence. they probably care about that instead of food) or research. 3 out of the 5.

[Jey]

You missed the point.

The point is "You don't care about tiny amount in everything, you want big amount in what you specialize".