Official News page 2

ONE LAST TECHNOCRAT BUILD

by Hazed

There is now one more build for Technocrats to add to their planets. This was left until after the rank was opened up to players because it's a complicated build which needed a lot more work than the others. The build is floating cities.

The complication is not so much in the build's effects, but in its requirements - you need a heck of a lot of other things before you're ready to set a floating city up on your oceans.

To build your first floating city, you need - take a deep breath - 2 atmospheric control units, 6 pollution control units, 2 weather control units, 1 fusion power planet, 4 clinics, 2 police units, 4 ports, and a partridge in a pear tree. Well, you can do without the last one, but you have to have built all the rest. The only good thing is that by the time you get to Techno, you will probably already have most of those things anyway.

That's what you need for the first build. For future builds you need one more of everything - for example, the second city requires 3/7/3/2/5/3/5 and the third city 4/8/4/3/6/4/6 and so on.

You also need one central research lab before you can start building any floating cities, but only one lab is needed, regardless of the number of cities built.

So what do you get for all these complicated prerequisites? It would need to be a pretty impressive benefit to make it worth while - and it is. Each floating city you build boosts the efficiency of sea-based industries by 4%, up to a maximum of 40%. On the downside, once you build nine floating cities it's a real strain on your planet so you'll get a 5% increase is disaffection, and ten bump it up to 15%. More than ten and you're guaranteed to get damaging riots.

Still, you'd be safe to build eight of the things which will give you a massive 32% efficiency increase on the relevant commodities.

For all the details, see the floating city page in the Idiot's Guide.

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page