u/Canye_NE

For those unaware, in 1.2 they made it so a capital on terrain reduces the proximity impact of that terrain by 20%. So, hills go from -25% to -20%, mountains from -50% to -40%, and flatland from -0% to -0%. Obviously, this is to make countries that play with a majority of non-flatland terrain less terrible.

However, you are ideally centralized around a whole area of flatlands, like France or Italy or similar, so you shouldn’t need the bonus. In addition, having a capital on hills or mountains or even a plateau hurts dev, and still hurts proximity a decent bit, as all your territory is -x% further. So is it worth it to try and find an otherwise-ideal capital with hills or something and use it to help spread through the rest of your country, or would it be more harmful than helpful?

Obviously it is for some all-hills terrain, but what about flatland to the east and hills to the west, with some isolated hill between? Would it be worth choosing the hill over some other (equally valuable otherwise) flatland capital, or would the reduction be helpful enough to generate more control/productivity in the long run?

I’m sure there’s cases, and I’d love to hear some if anyone’s found any.

(Some background: I have exclusively the DLC from before Machine Age. I wanted to try the new/reduced 4.3 economy, and ended up spinning up a technocratic Shattered Ring empire)

I have 8 ring world segments in 2085; 4 from Shattered Ring and 4 from the Cybrex (I have my eyes on another ruined one I’ve spotted, but that’s for 20 years in the future). I was lucky enough to stumble upon a good couple Gaia worlds (like 4 somehow) and Relic worlds (2), so I haven’t had much issue with ringworld preference, and went Synthetic to “free my people from their fallible flesh after the death of their greatest emperor” (roleplay, plus better habitability on non-ring worlds).

I now have a ton of massive planets I want to fill, since my economy is at a fraction of its operational capacity. How the hell do I do that? Since migration treaties won’t work without AI civilians, and raiding isn‘t an option, I wanted to look into using automated workforce, especially after pulling a few Fallen Empire buildings from minor relics. My energy proceeded to tank immediately, of course, not helped by the fact that robots need it too.

I remember one time I was using automation buildings and they made more energy than they consumed on energy districts, making them easy to make net positive, but that was with Cybernetic’s building upkeep reduction. Is there a trick to making automation work now, or is it not very useful in this situation? Because I really want to get these rings working, and my only other decent options are going after Fanatic Purifiers or the Great Horde and mass resettling (and I’m pretty sure you can’t abandon planets via resettlement for free still, right? So massive empire size).