patent lab, engineering lab, and endgame

I like it the way it is now, you have to make an investment in for your long term by making the office or lab and they can be sabotaged. I don't think research should be a default possibility.

I also agree, their fine the way they are. The only problem I see, is that it maybe feels like for many players, that they don't want to test those buildings, but I've used them successfully and relevantly quite often. Especially engineering lab, I know some players who use patent lab very good.

Cool ideas!

I do find that many players don't use the engineering lab. I think it's great.

Thanks for sharing.

-Scott-

A minor update, Patent lab has become relatively hot lately, especially in the meta I play in. The reason being that nanotech being the best ****ing patent in our games, since all the prices are being messed around with hacker array and market shinanigans, there are now quite many people going for a fast level 2 patent lab. Teleportation, while still being very good, is just too expensive, and in the good/price ratio falls just so behind. Other hot items are smart machines and carbon scrubbing , also+100% energy adjacency is some situations, but mostly early game. Teleportation is still grabbed as a luxury patent at some point, but usually you just want to play smart with placing your claims and buildings.

One combo I've also seen is +100% efficiency of pleasure domes along with -50% power consumption.

Engineering lab is however quite less used, and very often when I even produce it, it just doesn't feel impactful enough as upgrading anything to high levels takes so long that by then the situation has changed completely, and upgrading only one levell makes you wonder why you just don't use it for another building(getting nanotech beats engineering lab quite a lot) The only reasons I've seen is upgrading water in a water light map, and upgrading oxygen since it is really hard to produce.

I know I said before that I had used engineering lab successfully, but the meta just changes, and in the current games I play all markets are being consumed so fast for the engineering lab to be of much use. However it is still useful if you are able to predict shifts or are controlling them yourself, also an upgraded 3 cluster attracts much less aggro than a none upgraded 4 cluster.

And one of the key aspects is, that if you got away with patent lab or engineering lab and moved them to HQ, then you couldn't sabotage them, which I think can be a bad idea... it basically makes expansive the best researcher as they upgrade their HQ the fastest so they could easily grab the best patents without a way for others to stop them.

I think engineering lab is great for robo players who go heavy steel

Engineering lab for me takes too long and too little. The exponential cost of chemicals is too great for me to want to divert my economy from life support and other consumables which are always necessary, always increase in price and are easy to manipulate to astronomical prices with hacker arrays, black market sabotage and buying out of companies that are producing consumables. The amount of profit you can make from a market is limited by how much is consumed and not just by how much is produced, which makes engineering labs not that great because they do not increase demand.

The only patent I almost always get is Nanotech because switching out your buildings (farms in particular, which need glass which is expensive) for free is priceless. Additionally you can use it sell off offworlds from companies you buy out. (The reason that I'm not saying that I sell my own offworlds is because I hardly ever build them any more, because they are a "kick me" structure that attracts sabotage like nuts and because the value of their ingredients is often in the order of 50k to 150k.) With nanotech you can often get a 100k to 400k boost in funds depending on how many expensive HQ addons, farms and offworlds you can sell off to buy out the last player.

I think the Engineering/patent buildings are great for scavenger. Scavenger needs carbon anyway so going chemicals is a very viable option. Sometimes chemicals have a really good offworld price too so its just that much better. If that is the case I invest heavy into chemicals. That includes getting chemical upgrades from the engineering plant first so that other upgrades are easier to acquire. From there you just upgrade whatever has the best offworld price or what has the best price on world. Engineering labs are also great for when the market changes and some fundamental resource is high in demand but you can't change your buildings to accommodate the change. (Water is high, but you have no more claims which makes oxygen, fuel, and food go high). Just upgrade water collection and you should be able to make it.

Nanotech is almost always the first upgrade I get. It is so useful to be able to switch markets cheaply. I also go for the -50% energy upgrade if power is expensive (this can save power claims and you have less black market targets). The black market reduction patent is also very good, especially when you have offworlds or big clusters of profitable buildings. Teleportation can be good, and many people stop going for it because it is relatively expensive, but if you are producing a lot of chemicals you might as well pick it up.

With that said, I think both buildings are great and should stay as they are. Assuming you get the right patents and upgrades, you don't even need an offworld to win (depending on the map and specific situation of course).

I also don't understand why scientific gets black market reduction, but that is for a different post.

Never bother with the lab.  Often by the time you've invested (heavily) in a thing it's no longer a thing by the time your investment should've started paying off, and you sometimes don't even get back the value of the chems you sank into it.  Nah.  Eng lab offers far too little, far too slowly when considered alongside the other special buildings. 

Eng lab can work for you in the long term but with things like the double Hacker-Jacker trick effectively winning you the game before you've even hit HQ lvl 5, most games are done long before the Eng Lab's benefits have a chance of taking hold.

I think maybe the engineering lab should give an instant production buff for the cost of chemicals that lasts for 30-60 sec and has a 30-60 sec cooldown. That may make it more viable.

I regularly use the engineering lab. I typically go with the patent lab, and then once I get the few patents that I want, I scrap and switch to the engineering lab and do double upgrades on thing I want to produce a lot of. It doesnt take long to payback the investment when resource prices are high. Even if you spend 20k on upgrades for something, thats only 100 extra units at $200 to pay, which doesn't take long if you are running 3+ buildings. The scaling can become very nice! It's worth it IMO since you can produce resources faster which means you sell more before other players help drive the price down. Also, the upgrades are permanent. I use upgrades since sometimes I'd rather just maximize output than worry about messing with the markets and risking buying/selling large quantities of resources to profit. 

The patent lab gets an awful lot of use, to the point where its actually annoying since its not uncommon for 3-4 people in an 8 person game to throw up a patent lab at level 2-3.

What risk?  With two Hacker arrays and a fair lump sum to start off with you can pick a resource, almost any resource, kick off a few rounds of shortage on it and jack the price up on that resource to the point that no-one else can get a finger in the oncoming pie, then sell it all when the shorts kick in for nigh-on game-winning profit.  There is almost no risk because none of the opposition can take the resources away from you once you've bought them and no-one else can jump onto the bandwagon because you've already jacked the price way up, and that's before the shorts take hold.  Everyone else is in effect merely a paying passenger on this money train, watching you about to make more money than God.  Sure, you can get chain EMP'd and wotnot, because this Hacker-Jacker trick is very easy to spot, but they're only really delaying the inevitable.  Once you've got your hugely expensive stock they can blow up every building you own and that still won't stop what's about to happen.  Almost no risk at all; well worth the cost of two Hacker Arrays and not getting an Eng Lab.

There is most certainly risk. I've lost 100k buying into coming shortages when someone happened dumped their entire stock of resources during a Laggy moment since theirs sales apparently processed first once the game caught up.

Its not hard to do properly but the process isn't infallible.

That is a risk that is only being caused by the lag, and this will certainly be fixed in the (hopefully very) near future.

What he said.

It won't be long before everyone uses this Hacker-Jacker trick, if they're not already.  Aside from the obvious tell that there's two Hacker Arrays, by the time you start the process it's already too late for anyone else to do anything about it.  Almost no risk at all.  No amount of Eng Labs will rake in the kind of near-instant profit that Hacker-Jacking will.