Which cliffside buildings are the best?

[Beric01]

So I just got honor level 3. All my cliffs are full so now I'm considering what to move to the side of the cliff to free up space for more important buildings (such as nuclear power/uranium mining). What is the most efficient? Housing? Food/vitamins? Ecology? Aesthetics? Or does it not really matter?

[Mistfox]

Depends on your preferences. Any of them can work. I just go with whatever I'm short of, which is usually farms and power.

[Midas]

Depends on the cliff. If you have a cliff with 50% or more windpower, you can build Windturbines. They produce power and grant a small building spott each. So you can outsorce houses on them, or build a small park etc on them. I personaly build on cliffs with below 50% windpower salat and wine farms there, perhaps solar. But cause you can build houses, battery charger on top of the turbines, its best tu take 5 energy from them + small house ;)

[Foskifoski]

I'm sorry to tell you, but if your three cliffs are full at this time, then you are not playing well. Surely you still have a long way to finish the technology tree, and then you have to unlock the floor structures and monuments.
During that time, events will bcome increasingly catastrophic, and soon you will start to notice that your surplus of energy, water and food disappears. If you don't have neither space to build nor enough storage capacity, your cities will become unstable very quickly. After that, all your balance will be lost, and you wont be able to find any way to solve it.
In this game the floor is the most scarce and valuable resource. All your decisions related to building need to consider the floor in first place.
TL;DR always leave some space to build.

So, about the question itself: I think the best you can do with walls is... to leave them empty (read before lol). But when the moment comes, wind turbines offer a lot of energy input in those cliffs with high wind source, because you can combine the turbine itself with another turbine on top, and thats about +80 energy or even more, depending on bonuses. On just one square; if you make 4, we are then talking about +320 energy, requiring just 4 workers, producing 100% ALWAYS. There is not any bigger energy source ingame.
I think that If you specialize your cities, the vertical farms are a good option for the main city, because at the long term it reduces the pressure on your transportation system.
The worst option in my opinion is the battery system or the ornaments. First case because I see it as a waste of space: the regular battery station requires just one small square of space, and you always have a lot of those in the corner of the cliff, where you can hardly build anything else. Second case because the beautiful city usually is not an efficient city; making it beautiful makes you loose a lot of resources at the long term.

[Cool Beans]

A few vertical options are worth less then the two tile normal counterpart. In example, the Vertical house can fit 35 people vs upgraded medium residence at 40. The vertical battery station, air purifier, and hotel are also worth less then the 2 tile counterpart buildings.

If at 100% efficiency the energy options are a great choice. The vertical solar station at 54 power is worth 3 tiles worth of power compared to 18 per tile for normal solar stations. The vertical wind turbine is worth 20 power, but adds a single small tile to build upon atop it - that can hold any single tile building. If an earthquake eats the turbine tho, you will lose the building atop it.

The aesthetic options are also valued considerably more then a 2 tile counterpart. A two tile garden is 3.2 aesthetics, the vertical garden and epic waterfall are 4.2 aesthetics and the monument park is 5 total aesthetics for more efficiency then 3 tiles worth of regular garden.

Sadly I have not used any of the vertical farms on my cliffs yet. They seem a decent choice if your cliff needs it. Be mindful of storage locations however, farms in general can need a lot of drone TLC and at the edge of your cliff, may represent the farthest possible path of travel for centralized storage.

[Beric01]

Originally posted by Foskifoski:

I'm sorry to tell you, but if your three cliffs are full at this time, then you are not playing well. Surely you still have a long way to finish the technology tree, and then you have to unlock the floor structures and monuments.
During that time, events will bcome increasingly catastrophic, and soon you will start to notice that your surplus of energy, water and food disappears. If you don't have neither space to build nor enough storage capacity, your cities will become unstable very quickly. After that, all your balance will be lost, and you wont be able to find any way to solve it.
In this game the floor is the most scarce and valuable resource. All your decisions related to building need to consider the floor in first place.
TL;DR always leave some space to build.

So, about the question itself: I think the best you can do with walls is... to leave them empty (read before lol). But when the moment comes, wind turbines offer a lot of energy input in those cliffs with high wind source, because you can combine the turbine itself with another turbine on top, and thats about +80 energy or even more, depending on bonuses. On just one square; if you make 4, we are then talking about +320 energy, requiring just 4 workers, producing 100% ALWAYS. There is not any bigger energy source ingame.
I think that If you specialize your cities, the vertical farms are a good option for the main city, because at the long term it reduces the pressure on your transportation system.
The worst option in my opinion is the battery system or the ornaments. First case because I see it as a waste of space: the regular battery station requires just one small square of space, and you always have a lot of those in the corner of the cliff, where you can hardly build anything else. Second case because the beautiful city usually is not an efficient city; making it beautiful makes you loose a lot of resources at the long term.

Thanks for your comments! I agree that my cliffs are too full - I have almost zero energy production buffer and not enough room for additional storage, so I will try to move some buildings cliffside to free up space. I wouldn't mind having room for a second trading portal too. I like your idea of building wind power on a windy cliff. I also will look into farms for one city. I guess housing is the no-brainer though just to free up space.

[Mistfox]

Don't worry, once you hit Honor 11, you unlock modular buildings which are 2x2 buildings that you can build "levels" on with different functions. They are a lot more efficient than normal ones so you can gain back some space from that.

[This PC]

Originally posted by Foskifoski:

I'm sorry to tell you, but if your three cliffs are full at this time, then you are not playing well. Surely you still have a long way to finish the technology tree, and then you have to unlock the floor structures and monuments.
During that time, events will bcome increasingly catastrophic, and soon you will start to notice that your surplus of energy, water and food disappears. If you don't have neither space to build nor enough storage capacity, your cities will become unstable very quickly. After that, all your balance will be lost, and you wont be able to find any way to solve it.

What... the hell. My cliffs are always full at the time I hit honor 3 and I'm hugely successful at this game. Point is to overproduce so you can profit.

Originally posted by Foskifoski:

In this game the floor is the most scarce and valuable resource. All your decisions related to building need to consider the floor in first place.
TL;DR always leave some space to build.

The floor is the most valuable resource, which is why you should use it.
You're allowed to destroy and replace buildings as your needs evolve.
Actually, game pretty much requires you to do this.
"My crystals are too precious, I can't run out of them, so I am only gonna harvest vespene gas"

Originally posted by Foskifoski:

So, about the question itself: I think the best you can do with walls is... to leave them empty (read before lol). But when the moment comes, wind turbines offer a lot of energy input in those cliffs with high wind source, because you can combine the turbine itself with another turbine on top, and thats about +80 energy or even more, depending on bonuses. On just one square; if you make 4, we are then talking about +320 energy, requiring just 4 workers, producing 100% ALWAYS. There is not any bigger energy source ingame.

Leave them empty ? What ? Like your topside ? Do nothing all game? :D
It comes up to less than 80 energy.
Vertical wind turbine = 20
Upright wind turbine = 10
A... lot less.

Originally posted by Foskifoski:

I think that If you specialize your cities, the vertical farms are a good option for the main city, because at the long term it reduces the pressure on your transportation system.
The worst option in my opinion is the battery system or the ornaments. First case because I see it as a waste of space: the regular battery station requires just one small square of space, and you always have a lot of those in the corner of the cliff, where you can hardly build anything else. Second case because the beautiful city usually is not an efficient city; making it beautiful makes you loose a lot of resources at the long term.

By the time you finish your game, you're gonna have your walls full with either houses/filters/mounted wall defenses/straight farms/vineyards/salad farms.
Pretty sure others can attest I specialize my cliffs too, up to the point of making fully autonomous battery charger cliffs. lol.
At best, you have a different way to play the game, and it's not invalid, but it's not the only way.
At worst, you're playing in a very suboptimal way.

As for OP's question, just build what you need more on the walls. Generally, for me, it's filters at first, then houses, then farms ♥ Just develop slowly as your needs evolve.
Also, if you need topside space, you can start blasting farms and houses and put that on walls instead, if you have the budget. :)
Aesthetics is a bit useless up until end-game. ^^

Quick tip: I often build windmills even in non windy areas to use the wall slots for ground drones once you're honor 7+

[Foskifoski]

It is quite risky to play your way at the long term, because the events do get longer every time you get more honor points. Of course, I am not saying to not use the space, im telling him to build slowly. Your cities are gonna be messy and chaotic (with a really hard to manage balance of inputs/outputs) if you dont think carefully before building,
Yours is a fast way to do things, but building 3 universities and 2 research centres DO NOT speed up your research that fast enough to be a good option. At the end, with your way, you need to bulldoze half of what you have build because everything is wrong. But you should not do that, because if (for example) you delete +80 residential complex you are losing workers, and a lot of buildings gonna start producing less energy, less food, less water, less printed stuff... so then, you gonna delete some of those buildings for the numbers to match, but surprise! numbers wont match ever again.
I reached lvl 15 with a balanced setup of 3 cities, with a total of 2,400 population, and I felt frustrated half of the time, because after one storm i was losing 200 or even 300 people, and from there to bankruptcy it became just a matter of time.

[Mistfox]

Originally posted by Foskifoski:

At the end, with your way, you need to bulldoze half of what you have build because everything is wrong

You are going to have to do it anyway to replace the initial residences with modular buildings.
The trick to not tearing everything down is proper zoning. Lay out your city plan beforehand. Use Parks and Large Parks with paused construction to zone space for your planned layouts. Demolish them for free when you're finally ready to build on the space.

1800 pop per cliff is easy to achieve this way (5,400 max).

Though I have to ask, how the hell are you losing 200 people per storm? You don't use maintenance centers to put out fires?

[Veretragna]

I always transfer salad, food and vine to cliffsides so I can free the floor.
Wall houses are inefficient, cause they are expensive and in late game you'll build lots of modular houses, so you'll destroy wall houses eventually. I think it's suboptimal in context of optimizing resources.
Wall purifiers are decent, I build lots of them. On floor I use Uranium absorbents on cliffs lacking uranium, so I have the only option to clear the air efficiently: it's wall purifiers.
Wall Rocket launchers are mandatory, at least 12 spread on cliffsides.
Hope this helps. I finished 1 game on 30 honor and started a new one recently.

[This PC]

Originally posted by Foskifoski:

It is quite risky to play your way at the long term, because the events do get longer every time you get more honor points. Of course, I am not saying to not use the space, im telling him to build slowly. Your cities are gonna be messy and chaotic (with a really hard to manage balance of inputs/outputs) if you dont think carefully before building,
Yours is a fast way to do things, but building 3 universities and 2 research centres DO NOT speed up your research that fast enough to be a good option. At the end, with your way, you need to bulldoze half of what you have build because everything is wrong. But you should not do that, because if (for example) you delete +80 residential complex you are losing workers, and a lot of buildings gonna start producing less energy, less food, less water, less printed stuff... so then, you gonna delete some of those buildings for the numbers to match, but surprise! numbers wont match ever again.
I reached lvl 15 with a balanced setup of 3 cities, with a total of 2,400 population, and I felt frustrated half of the time, because after one storm i was losing 200 or even 300 people, and from there to bankruptcy it became just a matter of time.

If it's not sustainable long term, why do I have like 8 full playthroughs under my belt ? :p
Who said I build 3 universities and 2 research centers ? I only build one of each on each playthrough. ._. And yes, education is the only option you have to make research faster (up to 8x). You're also gonna need education for prestige medals, so what's the prob ? Just make medical colleges instead of anything else that gives edu/health.
And yes, this game is about bulldozing half, if not all of your cities, for more optimal buildings. It's how you build MASSIVE economies.
If you delete a +80 residential complex and build a +250 skyscraper instead, you'll lose max 15 citizens by the time it's built, and you will regain them next day. They are still in your city, even if they are homeless, they depart slowly. They still work.
I reached many level 30 games with populations of 8,000 about total, and yeah, the fact you feel frustrated at a storm and I don't fret at all for any disaster at any point should give you a slight idea of our experiences.
As Mistfox says, not sure how you lose 200+ people in a disaster, that's an instant quit game for me, I've obviously failed somewhere. Chances are I've spotted that fail and fixed it or quit even before I lose 200+ in a storm. No way I would ~ever~ drag this out across multiple occurences. :x

[Beric01]

Well, cliffside buildings are amazing! I had to boost matter production to build those expensive housing units but now I have all 3 cliffs at over 900 pop and almost no food production on top of the cliff. The cliffside air purifiers also free up a lot of space that was taken up by parks.

I just unlocked under the cliff buildings but these seem to take lots of support buildings on top of cliffs, so I'm thinking I should avoid building them until I can free up more space topside with modular buildings, correct?

[Mistfox]

Originally posted by Beric01:

Well, cliffside buildings are amazing! I had to boost matter production to build those expensive housing units but now I have all 3 cliffs at over 900 pop and almost no food production on top of the cliff. The cliffside air purifiers also free up a lot of space that was taken up by parks.

I just unlocked under the cliff buildings but these seem to take lots of support buildings on top of cliffs, so I'm thinking I should avoid building them until I can free up more space topside with modular buildings, correct?

Ah good point, I forgot they could take over parks!