Tips and Tricks (Possible Spoilers)

[Tragic]

I'm going to collect some simple tips and tricks in this thread.. if you have any.. post away and I'll add to this post at the top of the thread. If this thread grows well I'll move all the tips into a guide.

Build in Perfect 4x4 Squares as much as possible from the Start

In mid game you will be adjusting your city layout a lot, to fit in more space efficient buildings. You will also need to put in various large public works at some point and this will all be a lot easier if you have a neat 4x4 grid layout from the start. It is tempting to get variance in your city by staggering the housing buildings and stuff... but this will mean you will have to demolish tons of your city latter on.

You only need 1 Airport between all your cities

There is no reason to build 3 airports. They seem to only be used for drone production and once you build a town hall you can sell drones to other cliffs. This can save a large space on two of your cliffs.

When destroying buildings or in construction buildings, all stored resources are lost

Unlike many games if you destroy a construction building or a production building storing undelivered good, these goods are completely lost.

Disabling Storage buildings will NOT disable the removal of items

If you wish to rejig your storage units you can face issue caused by the fact that destroying a storage unit also destroys all the items stored there. You can get around this by disabling the storage unit. Your drones will still take items from it, but not put items in it. This way you can empty your storage units before demolition.

Some Trade Window Tricks

You can easily check your trade portal values by having the trade window open and then pressing the numeric value for the city.

You can also easily edit these values, but make sure you press ENTER before moving to another value or city or it will not lock in.

When selling to orders from station you do not need to adjust your overflow sale values at all. Simply use the One Time Sale section. This always works for me and I suspect it will over ride the overflow sale values .

Example of use: I get asked for 240 batteries to be sold to station... divide 240 by 3 = 80 units per city. I press 1 and the open the portal on that city. Then in ONE TIME SALE and make it 80. Press enter. Press 2 to switch cites keeping the window open, set to 80, press enter, press 3 set to 80 press enter. Unpause. Done.

[mudofNYnumber1]

If you need lots of power, take advantage of the empty space a Beacon of Hope gives you. You can intersect two to form a 'T' or '+'. You can also run 3 parallel and one thru the middle to form a box, and still toss a launch pad or park in the center.

Don't overlook Malls. They hold a lot of materials and give your drones less places to visit than 3+ separate storage yards. Cold storage can also work well for food when placed near your food production areas, assuming you keep them together.

When you start the 5th city, it's a good practice to keep all your drone-using buildings closer to the center, where you can't select where the ports get placed. Things that don't require drones occupy the outside better because your drones won't be affected by travel distance, meaning a lot less drone stations and falling short on grapes when your 'z' menu tells you are vastly overproducing grapes.

Battery buildings SHARE the excess power and split between them. You don't need a second one until your energy surplus is high enough that drones can't keep up. This varies, but you should probably not need more than 1 or 2, unless you have a cliff specifically for generation of power for other cliffs. At that point, 1 per every 800-1000 excess power seems to be a fair ratio from my personal experience.

On Quiet Coast and North Coast, you can sometimes put a small 1 tile object on the lower platform UNDERNEATH the bigger platform. It's basically free ecology or aesthetics. Or I guess other things, but I couldn't get 2x1, 2x2, or larger structures to work. Just the 1x1. Give it a try.

North Coast has the greatest amount of build-able ground space. The average of it and Quiet Coast since they always come together is a close 3rd, behind Way and Obsidian. So getting Coasts+Way or Obsidian is a great combo. Also, Way+Obsidian+Heaven Water is the next best combo in terms of space, plus a fishable spot.

Don't have fish and need fish? Build a Megaquarium thing. It provides fish.

Note that...the 6-space judicial building whose name escapes me right now, raises your Justice by 7% universally, and they stack. When you unlock the 5th map, you might want to take advantage of your extra space. The Church-type structure cannot be stacked, but also gives a Universal boost, so it's pretty useful to have 1 since it affects ALL your soil fertility. Definitely worth 6 tiles.

Offices, big or small, occupy the greatest amount of workers per tile. This is not always favorable early game but a big asset late-game when you need to keep people busy.

When space starts getting tight, Modular Structures are generally have the best 'per tile' rate for Population, Judicial, Education, Entertainment, and Medical, assuming you can stack all 6. The exceptions being the 250 population landmark AND schools which outshine at 500 education or higher. However, you probably won't need those schools due to the below point.

Once you reach the end-game (honor 29), prestige is entirely useless (might change in future updates). You need to maintain Water, Food, Ecology*, Maintenance, Vitamins, and Medical. Justice is good too. Everything else can be ignored. No need for 3D printing, education, aesthetics, entertainment, wine, or social transport.
*Ecology may only need to be 50%+ (or 30%+) to maintain your health. Being less than 100% doesn't affect worker health for manpower, but I haven't tested if it affects the rate of death by disease, nor have I tested anything below 50%.

Endgame keeping the clock running to keep population going... A day at 6x speed is 50 seconds. Disasters (if enabled) happen every 10 to 11 days whereupon it changes speed to 1x. New Years also changes to 1x. If you want to push ridiculous populations without modding, you'll probably want to create a new cliff with disasters off (need buildings unlocked enabled so you start with 15 honor) and let the clock run when you're asleep and/or at work. 5 hours and 5 minutes or so per game-year. It's a timely grind but once you hit about 14,500 population you'll get 1,000+ births per year, keeping you mildly busy with Netflix on the 2nd monitor. I imagine once you hit 20,000 or so it starts keeping you very busy.

[Tragic]

Cool.. I'll add some of these.. but I am not at endgame so skipping reading parts beyond the space station.

Originally posted by mudofNYnumber1:

Don't overlook Malls. They hold a lot of materials and give your drones less places to visit than 3+ separate storage yards. Cold storage can also work well for food when placed near your food production areas, assuming you keep them together.

Agreed. 1 Storage upgraded + a Cold Storage is same footprint and less storage than a mall.

Originally posted by mudofNYnumber1:

Battery buildings SHARE the excess power and split between them. You don't need a second one until your energy surplus is high enough that drones can't keep up. This varies, but you should probably not need more than 1 or 2, unless you have a cliff specifically for generation of power for other cliffs. At that point, 1 per every 800-1000 excess power seems to be a fair ratio from my personal experience.

Wow.. so your saying between cliffs? I have 1 battery building on each cliff.

Also, the Capsule Charger at the base is like this. BUT.. I found that having 2 chargers or 3 actually works better for the drones. When I was running 1 capsule charger at the base it was maxing out and doing nothing now and then and my blue stations on the cliffs were empty. I think there is a under the hood priority system based on first come first served or something. Building another charger station allows me to store 6 if it is full and gives 2 dock points for drones. This completely fixed my bottleneck at the blue stations, even though each individual charger was running at 1/2 the efficiency (sharing the ground power). I ended up building 3, 1 for each city. I am not sure it improved anything but it didn't make it worse. I had 3 hanging "down drones" stations per cliff and a extra one on Obsidian... or whatever that huge triangular one is.

[mudofNYnumber1]

I didn't clarify well enough. The battery buildings are per cliff. There was a topic 2 weeks ago or so that there wasn't usually a need to have more than one battery building per cliff. Some, including myself, stacked up like 8 and not sure why. I just figured more would make that mistake and it would be a useful tip.

[Liwet]

There's a research that allows your batteries to get shared among all your cliffs so you could keep all your battery buildings on the same cliff if you want.

[TheRedKhajiit]

Ty man, airport tip helped a lot.

[CalamityCannonKiwi]

Originally posted by mudofNYnumber1:

I didn't clarify well enough. The battery buildings are per cliff. There was a topic 2 weeks ago or so that there wasn't usually a need to have more than one battery building per cliff. Some, including myself, stacked up like 8 and not sure why. I just figured more would make that mistake and it would be a useful tip.

I often build extra battery stations and turn them on/off if there are more pop than jobs to keep people busy. And it doesn't hurt to do this either