Tourism Buildings (Balance)

This thread is to take a look at tourism buildings from a balance perspective. I outline my the issues with each building in this post. Two posts below that I outline my general fixes.

Spice Market

This is a very special, one time only building (that you need a specific tech to research), so your expecting it to be pretty nice. It also requires an arnor spice, a rare resource. However, it is a pretty cheap building, only costing 75 manu.

• It gives +5% tourism, which is effectively +2.5% influence and +2.5% income. However, at 1% crime, unless crime is completely removed, that lowers the income bonus to +1.5%. Meanwhile a financial district gives 6% as a baseline (and often +9-12 with a little bit of synergy), and cultural district +10% (and cultural districts get major boosts for doing a triangle with their +2 level bonus, its quite easy to have +20-+30%). So tile for tile, the bonus on the Spice Market is very low.
  
  
• Activating the level bonus for a tourism building is hard. Tourism bonuses are rare, generally only granted by rare terrain, a few +1 all type buildings, and other tourism buildings. So you would expect the bonus to be pretty darn cool. However, this one is +1% gross income per level....financial districts give +3%!
  
  
• The last possible saving grace are the adjacency boosts (some buildings aren't that great themselves, but they are great boosters for other tiles). And here we are once again disappointed, a meer +1 level to wealth (which I can already get with the superior financial district), and +1 to tourism (which again isn't that great because tourism level bonuses arent very strong).

Conclusion: The spice market fails in every category. It is not a good building initially, not good when leveled up, and provides no strong adjacency incentive. There is, frankly, no reason to build this building.

Grand Casino

• The thulium cost doesn't sound like much, until you realize that I could sell that 5 on the Galactic Bazaar for say...100 credits (as a sanity check, Thulium is going on the market for 37 in my current game). Now take a 10 income planet (which is a pretty solid money maker), with the standard 33% tax rate, I need ~30% boost in income to generate 1 credit per turn. The Grand Casino gives me ~7% gross income if I'm being very generous (+2 tourism level, which is hard to find, and I'll assume I have enough crime reducers not to care). So at a very ballpark number, my casino is generating ~.25 credits per turn. So it will take a nice little 400 turns to pay off as compared to just selling the Thulium and calling it a day. Also remember, the stronger my planet's base income is...the more I'm incentivized to just put another financial district. So if I'm not making this guy for money, I guess its influence....but I can do that way easier with a cultural district.
  
  
• Similar to the Spice Market, very poor level bonuses and adjacency boosts, nothing here to get excited about.

Conclusion: Another dud.

Galactic Zoo

• At least before the buildings were cheap in manu cost, but 500!....yikes. Plus the thulium, and now two precious strategic resources (especially techapods, I use those every chance I can get on mining bases). And the bonus is no greater than the Grand Casino.
• Now our level bonus is a low boost to approval, again very mediocre. Our only boost here is the +2 to tourism, which could be good....if tourism level bonuses were worth anything.

Conclusion: While the others were bad, this is really really bad, just extremely expensive for what it offers.

Utopian Resort

• Hopefully we are seeing the pattern. Huge manu cost, mediocre base bonus, almost non-existent leveling bonus.

Restaurant of Eternity

• So sake of argument, lets say I made the "Tourism Triangle".  I put the Restaurant of Eternity, Utopian Resort, and Galactic Zoo together. Lets take stock.
• The Cost: 2300 manu (aka 57 financial districts), 3tiles, 15 thulium, 1 snuggler, 1 techapod, 1 E Pollen, 1 H Crystal, 1 A Viries, 1 Arnor Spice. (ballpark Galactic Bazaar Sell Price: 15x20 + 6x35 = ~510 credits (aka enough to dump a leader into the faction area and get a few global % bonuses that way, maybe even 2). About double that if I needed to buy the materials.
• Benefits: +15% income, +15% influence, +11% Approval, +5 food, +3 Individualism.

Conclusion: Now in terms of regular buildings, I can do all of that (except the ideology) with 7-8 tiles. So on tile efficiency, tourism seems alright at first glance (not great but alright). But when you consider the insane cost, I can have up regular buildings enormously quicker, and with just a little bit of adjacency extra the regular building bonuses skyrocket in comparison. 

 

So I think its clear that all of the tourism buildings need some work. This post is already long enough, so I will give my thoughts on solutions in Post 3 (two posts down) below.