Buildings

This page contain information about a feature that has two versions. To read about the old version, go to Buildings/OldVersion. For more information, go to the Building Update page.

File:ConstructionMenu.png

The construction menu, with Farm selected

Buildings are essential to getting your city up and running. Every building can be built using either logs, lumber, stones, metal, vulcium or magmium. Some buildings may even allow you to build additional levels depending on the material used. Logs will generally only allow you to build one or two levels, lumber will allow you to build up to four levels, stone up to 8 and so on, ending with vulcium which allows you to build up to 32 levels high.

To increase the amount of levels you wish to build, simply scroll the mouse wheel or + and - keys before placing the building and a number on your mouse pointer will show how many levels will be built. Should you choose to build only a single level of a building at first, it can be expanded later on up to the maximum allowed by the construction material chosen by simply placing another of the same type of building on top of it.

Before constructing a building, you are able to see what materials are required to construct it, as well as which commodity said building can produce. You may also choose which commodity the building should start producing, or if it should actually produce anything at all. Note that factories and other resource-gathering buildings set to do nothing are useless, and as such they should always be producing something.

Construction Rules

Buildings construction is governed by different build rules, depending on the role of the building. The building codes window shows the build rule for every building. The building codes window is accessed from the Construction window and from the Help menu while in the designer.

The term alien denotes any city that belongs to an empire that is not yours.

Civilian

Cannot be built on worlds claimed by an alien empire. Cannot be built in the police jurisdiction of an alien city.

Military Headquarters

Can only be built on worlds claimed by your empire.

Military

Can only be built on worlds with empire military headquarters.

Capitol

Cannot be built on worlds claimed by an alien empire. Cannot be built in the police jurisdiction of an existing city.

Police

Can be built in the police jurisdiction of an empire city. Can be built where an empire capitol building is in its jurisdiction.

City

Can only be built in the police jurisdiction of an empire city.

Inventory and Power Reserve

Each building maintains an inventory of all commodities stored within its storage. The size of the inventory depends upon the building design of the building. The Building tab of the City (F10) window contains information about the amount of storage in a particular building. The inventory size limit is applied to each commodity individually. A building with an inventory size of 100 can store up to 100 units of each commodity: 100 vegetables, 100 beans, and 100 mechanical parts for example.

A building's inventory may contain a mixture of qualities of the same commodity. The combined total may not exceed the inventory size. A building with an inventory size of 100 might have 30 beans of quality 200 and 45 beans of quality 125, leaving room for 25 more beans, but the total amount of beans in stock will not exceed 100.

Construction and manufacturing processes fetch materials from the building's inventory or any connected building's inventory as needed. The resulting quality of construction and manufacturing is the average quality of the components used to make the building or product. To produce the best products and buildings, a building supplies the best quality commodities from its inventory before the poorer quality commodities.

Cities strive to improve the quality of their inventories. When a city manufactures, imports, or buys commodities, the city replaces lower quality commodities if necessary to fit the new commodities into its inventory. A city will not buy, import, or manufacture commodities of lower quality if they will not fit into its inventory. This improves the quality of its inventory whenever possible, which improves the quality of the commodities it manufactures and the buildings it constructs.

Power reserve is treated much like the city's inventory. Electricity is stored in the power reserve when it is produced, not in the city's inventory. Electricity always has quality 255; there is no poor quality electricity. The size of the power reserve is based on the presence of certain buildings; the power reserve added by each building is shown on the table on the construction page. Buildings and roads use varying amounts of electricity from the power reserve depending upon the size of buildings, manufacturing processes, life support, and electric lighting. Spacecraft may purchase electricity from the power reserve to recharge their capacitors and cities will purchase electricity from spacecraft.

Ringworlds provide power as part of the ring hull infrastructure. Ringworld power is adequate to supply manufacturing processes and lighting. Defense bases require a great deal of power to be readily available in city capacitors. For this reason, power plants should be built in ringworld cities that have defense bases.

Building Destruction

Buildings can be damaged and destroyed. Military buildings have 10x the armor factors of civilian buildings made of the same building material. Hit points are based on primary construction material and the amount of that material used to construct the building. Other ancillary materials do not contribute to hit points. Spot a building to see its hit points. You must spot the actual building, not the ground at the building site.

Buildings that use no primary construction material are indestructible. i.e. Town Square, Military Flags, Mines, Logging Camps. These buildings will not report any hit points when spotted. Citizen population works to repair buildings when the city is no longer under attack. That is about 15 minutes after the last building was damaged or citizen was injured. Building repairs do not take materials, just time.

Buildings that are destroyed will appear as an imprint of the building outline on the ground, just like when it is first built, except the ground isn't textured like a construction zone.

Destroyed buildings retain information about their undestroyed condition, including all manufacturing processes. Citizens do not perform construction or manufacturing jobs at destroyed buildings. Destroyed buildings are not counted when tallying city facilities so they will not show up on the city report of buildings. Destroyed buildings do not contribute homes, jobs or fire fighting potential.

Citizens do perform construction and manufacturing jobs at damaged buildings. Buildings operate at their full potential until destroyed. The first bit of repairs conducted on a destroyed building causes it to no longer be destroyed, just heavily damaged. Damaged buildings cannot have additional levels constructed onto them. The damage must be repaired first. There is no way for a player to repair a damaged building. Damage is only repaired by citizens.

Fire

Buildings can catch fire when attacked. Probability of catching fire is based on the construction material, weapon effect, and damage inflicted in the hit. Heat/fire and electric weapon effects have a higher probability of lighting a fire. Hits have a higher probability of causing a fire as the amount of damage increases.

Once lit, a building will burn itself to the ground unless the fire is extinguished. All available Fire Stations attempt to extinguish fires. Every Fire Station level is counted. Up to 4 levels of Fire Station will be committed to fight each active fire. One citizen is needed to operate each Fire Station level to fight fires. This does not take people away from other jobs; it just limits the available Fire Station levels to the current population of the city.

Fire fighters fight fires even when the city is under attack.

Buildings continue to manufacture things and perform construction when burning.

Repairs are not performed on burning buildings. The fire must be extinguished first.

There is no way for a player to put out a burning building. Fires are only fought by citizens using Fire Stations.

List of Buildings

For a full list of all buildings. See the Category:Buildings page.