Power Plants or Mills?

[The_Pastmaster]

I've played this game a lot now and watched a few videos and are power plants really that bad? I see people spamming mills all around their colony but I rarely see anyone build power plants which I think are more efficient.

Am I wrong or not seeing the full downside?

BTW, WHY does the power plant need STONE of all things? o_O

[MixamTab]

Power plant takes 5 stone and 5 wood in addition to the power requirements and gold cost. Mill is way cheaper. Only time I make power plants is when I need lots of power really fast, or have no room to build mills. And don't ever upgrade mills to advanced mills unless you have no other option. They are even worse than power plants.

[Grarg]

Power plant is cheap for its power cost. It's much better than mills for a short term boost in power based on resource expenditure.

The problem is: power plants have 5 stone and 5 wood upkeep. It absolutely destroys your stone and wood income if you don't either of those. And the loss is felt throughout the game whereas mills just cost gold upkeep, which is relatively easy to make up for.

[The_Pastmaster]

I see...

[neuralnetwork]

Power plant is not a bad structure, just expensive.

If I recall, it gives +160 nrg compared +30 from mill so it's a huge boost and doesn't eat up space all that much. When you're hard pressed to find more expansion room it's a great building to plop down.
Due to PP eating stone and wood it's not to be used lightly but often times a few are handy in mid-late game when your economy is already robust and you need a lot of energy for upgrading cottages to stone houses or other energy-hungry projects.

The stone upkeep is a bit gamey but I guess it's just a balance issue. I think the devs idea is that PP should be used in late game as you slowly transit to higher tier resources. Wood is in high demand early but not so much in the later stages. Kinda same with stone, although it'll remain very useful since the (currently) best walls eat stone and 3rd tier housing eats it up too and one can never have enough houses.
As you tech up, you slowly move from high demand on wood -> stone -> iron -> oil depending on what stuff you build. So having PP eat up the not-so-desired early(ish) game wood & stone keeps your economy somewhat in balance.

[arnaud_defrance]

A thing too is that markets sell excess and when you have more markets you get more per unit sold. So effectively that 5 wood/stone upkeep skyrocket the "gold upkeep" if we consider things that way.

Mills at 6 gold upkeep are just plain better... and stone upkeep is really bad when you need thousands for stone houses and walls.

[VividFlash]

Power Plant hinders your ability to expand exponentially.

[Heka]

Power plant uses 5 stone per 8 hour tick. That is 15 stone per day which is 5 pieces of stone wall. If you build an early power plant and it runs for 60 days it means you have 300 stone walls less in the last defense. That can be the differense between success and a failure.

Power plant is decent building but you should only build it in the very late game or when you run out of places to place mills or if you have a map with very good stone production.

[^7ja^1co]

Mills for as long as you have room to build them.

[ap3741]

Originally posted by MixamTab:

Power plant takes 5 stone and 5 wood in addition to the power requirements and gold cost. Mill is way cheaper. Only time I make power plants is when I need lots of power really fast, or have no room to build mills. And don't ever upgrade mills to advanced mills unless you have no other option. They are even worse than power plants.

What's wrong with advanced Mills?

[Major Ducks]

Originally posted by The_Pastmaster:

I've played this game a lot now and watched a few videos and are power plants really that bad? I see people spamming mills all around their colony but I rarely see anyone build power plants which I think are more efficient.

Am I wrong or not seeing the full downside?

BTW, WHY does the power plant need STONE of all things? o_O

Short answer: Mills until you run out of space and then power plants

[unicode]

I've always upgraded all my mills to advanced mills and I don't see anything wrong with it. There is not enough space for regular mills and stones are always useful for buliding more walls in every defensive position.

[Venrez]

Originally posted by arnaud_defrance:

A thing too is that markets sell excess and when you have more markets you get more per unit sold. So effectively that 5 wood/stone upkeep skyrocket the "gold upkeep" if we consider things that way.

Mills at 6 gold upkeep are just plain better... and stone upkeep is really bad when you need thousands for stone houses and walls.

Do Markets automatically sell resources that are gained past your current supply capacity?

Lets say you have 150 / 150 Stone and then earn +15 Stone on the next delivery. Is that extra 15 Stone sold automatically and converted into Gold or lost?

The tooltip for the Market says it is automatic but I have seen no indication of it actually happening.

It may be but I never noticed any real change to my Gold income when maxxed out on tons upon tons of useless Stone and Wood late-game. I'd often have to pause and just empty those reserves via spamming the Sell button at the Market.

There should be a little popup (X resources converted, Gold Added) that appears on a Market for a few seconds whenever it occurs as a visual notification.

Originally posted by unicode:

I've always upgraded all my mills to advanced mills and I don't see anything wrong with it.

Same here.

However the game does need to have some sort of 'useful' resource sink late game.

Something that can be done late game which requires a huge amount of a particular resource but actually provides some benefit, even if only slight.

Early game the balancing seems alright with resource income, but late-game you start to drown in one particular resource or other with no viable use for it - and selling it at pennies for a ton at the inefficient Market is both bland and uninspired, if simple.

Oil is the worst offender. It takes such a long time to get any Oil-requiring units and they are generally so ineffective (especially the Flamethrower) that I just see Oil as a less-worthwhile Gold node.

Bonfires that have a constant Wood upkeep cost which can be placed to deliberately lure Zombies to an area. (Maybe upgradeable Oil variant).

Steel Walls that require Wood, Stone AND Iron would be a nice addition.

Paving 1x1 grid stones that increase the movement speed of your units on them, but do not block structure placement. (Can simply place new buildings over them like Walls).

[arnaud_defrance]

Upgrading mills is actually terrible because you don't just pay the upkeep, you pay the upgrade cost too. It's more expansive to upgrade than to build a new mill and you get only 2/3 of a mill in power through upgrading.

I plant mills between turrets in some of my defenses lines, you can't stack turrets or mills without the 1 space required so it works wonders.

[Qiox]

It depends on how big a colony you have. In my last game, on day 93 I had 34 Power Plants and 71 Advanced Mills. Without those I could never have powered my 87 Executors and all the rest of the buildings.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1249491134

[Qiox]

Originally posted by Venrez:

[Do Markets automatically sell resources that are gained past your current supply capacity?

Lets say you have 150 / 150 Stone and then earn +15 Stone on the next delivery. Is that extra 15 Stone sold automatically and converted into Gold or lost?

The tooltip for the Market says it is automatic but I have seen no indication of it actually happening.

It is trivially easy to see it happen. Just watch your actual gold total while capped on resources. It ticks up by a few dozen gold every few seconds as each individual sawmill, or quarry produces.

In the pic in the post above, when I was capped at 550/550 in all resources my gold income was climbing by over a 1000 every few seconds as the excess was auto sold. That was clearly seperate from my 7k+ income.