Energy loss to inefficiency

[MoNoLitH]

AFAIK it isn't worth building bases too far from the capital as the energy loss will become unacceptable, particularly at high difficulty levels. When I conquer neighbors on other continents, I notice over half their energy is lost to inefficiency, and this isn't even at the maximum distance from my capital!

Any strategies to counteract this? I dislike being limited in my expansion options due to inefficiency boning my energy gains from distant bases.

[Petek]

Re: Energy loss to inefficiency

Originally posted by MoNoLitH
AFAIK it isn't worth building bases too far from the capital as the energy loss will become unacceptable, particularly at high difficulty levels. When I conquer neighbors on other continents, I notice over half their energy is lost to inefficiency, and this isn't even at the maximum distance from my capital!

Any strategies to counteract this? I dislike being limited in my expansion options due to inefficiency boning my energy gains from distant bases.

In distant bases, convert workers to specialists. The energy generated by specialists isn't subject to inefficiency.

[Hercules]

Also. you should build children's creches, when you can.This helps with +2 on growth and also +2 on efficiency scale, ie reduces reduce energy loss, especially in far from HQ bases.

[Petek]

Originally posted by Hercules
Also. you should build children's creches, when you can.This helps with +2 on growth and also +2 on efficiency scale, ie reduces reduce energy loss, especially in far from HQ bases.

Good point. Also consider adjusting your SE options. Democracy, Green, Knowledge and Cybernetic increase efficiency. Police State and Planned decrease it (unless playing as Yang). You also could play one of the factions (Gaians or Cybernetic Consciousness) that have a built-in efficiency bonus.

[Darrell01]

What I do to counter this is specialists. Typically this includes making 4 condenser farms and putting 4 crawlers on them sucking up food. That's either 12 pre soil enricher or 18 with soil enricher. That makes 6 or 9 citizens and half being engineers, empaths or technitions will give the city the energy it needs to run, and it will eliminate some Dronage by giving them something fulfilling in life to do besides picking fruit, harvesting timber, and running organic generators. I kinda do that with every city if I can though. Its a solid strategy till someone wants to blow up your crawlers.

I have addressed this in some other thread taking about working with inefficiency. You can just forget about the energy loss from your outer bases by running energy crawlers to your headquarters. If you run police state-planned, the idea is that your headquarters does not lose energy, but all your other bases will. So you build crawlers, send them to your headquarters and have them harvest energy. That will make sure your headquarters will be a super science and economic powerhouse. Also, your outer cities will not need the +% econ and +% labs facilities because your headquarters will take care of all that. This means you'll only need 1 energy bank, one fusion power plant and so on...