Technopoly: Industrial Empire is an idle supply-chain management strategy game from RSGapps. While the gameplay itself is simple to pick up and understand, it’ll tickle the optimization-hungry player’s brain into figuring out how to make as much money as inhumanly possible.
Especially since the gigantic numbers you make become truly insane just a couple of hours into the game: You’ll be making enough money to make the GDPs of Europe, Asia and America (The entire pair of continents, not just the USA!) put together look like chump change!
The gameplay of Technopoly: Industrial Empire is simple, considering its premise is about something very, very complicated in real life: the construction of a supply chain to make an end product. You have some land to build on, and you must put buildings on it in such a way that you make the most money per second possible. You connect islands together with roads and bridges, which in turn connect buildings to their main hubs which give them upkeep boosts.
Each building generates resources that other, more advanced and profitable buildings use to work, much like how Power Plants work in Command and Conquer games except you have many different types for many different structures. Easy to pick up, but you’ll be spending lots of time trying to get everything just perfect.
All this paints a relatively (because it’s STILL complicated!) simplified picture on how supply lines work in real life. All the structures you build, the many resources you gather, the pipeline in which these resources travel, all eventually lead to one final destination once you’re in the endgame: The construction of electric cars! And now, you have an appreciation for just how much effort it takes to get that smartphone you play the game with into your hands.
Now, that we gave you a brief description of the game, let’s delve into our Technopoly: Industrial Empire beginner’s guide for tips, tricks and strategies to become a top industrial area tycoon!
ROADS: THE BLOODLINE OF LOGISTICS
Just as in real life, roads provide the primary way with which supplies, people and products go from place to place. Each building must be within a certain distance (usually 2 tiles, unless it’s a Wind Turbine which has a road detection range of 3 tiles) of a road tile connected to the islands’ central structure to work depending on the type of structure, but a road tile generates no profit or supplies in and of itself.
Also, the large Headquarters structure on every island you unlock must be connected to each other with roads so they can bring their upkeep bonuses out of their own initial islands. Keeping these facts in mind, here are some tips to manage roads.
As Little Road For As Much Terrain
Place your roads and structures in such a way that you use minimal road space for maximum profit, keeping in mind that most structures can only detect roads 2 tiles away from them.
Also, take into account the types of terrain you want to get: A path may seem efficient for the amount of tiles it frees up, but you might want specific kinds of tiles which that shortest path might obstruct, especially for certain structures that require specific tiles such as Lumber mills, which need to be built on Forest tiles, and Iron Mines, which require brown Rock tiles.
Coins For Bridges
The primary use for Gold Coins in this game is the construction of Bridges. Connecting bridges between the main islands allows all the stat boosts of the newly connected island to benefit whatever other islands are connected to them. You get coins for doing quests, and it is cheaper to buy a 10-pack of Bridge tiles than it is to buy them a piece at a time.
Most of the other things you can buy for coins can be bought with ads more quickly, but you only get a free bridge tile every 7 hours, or every six ads you watch at the Lighthouse, which you can thankfully spam if you have the patience for it. Just keep in mind that the more Bridge Tiles you own, the more expensive Bridge Tiles get in general.
You can also use Gold Coins to buy Science, but you’re better off doing that later since the price is always 10 gold, but the reward you get for it is based on your Science income I.e. the number of Schools you have placed down.
Check For Bridge Inefficiencies
You should be glad to know, you can safely sell bridges! They return to your inventory once you do so. This includes any bridges pre-built on the map once buying a new island. Early on, if you see a smaller gap between islands than what the pre-constructed bridge covers, you can destroy the bridge and realign your roads to cross through that smaller gap.
This way, you can use the freed-up bridge tiles elsewhere. You’ll normally do this early on whenever you unlock a new island that happens to have pre-placed bridge tiles on it. Later though, once you’ve got spare bridge tiles lying around in your inventory, you can do the next tip on this list.
Sub-Island Bridge Shenanigans
While most (Some also suffer from this problem) main islands have a clear, efficient, shortest path to take with bridges, sub-islands are a different story: Often, they’re designed in such a way that if you take the shortest bridge path to them, you’re gonna end up having to place more road on that sub-island than you would like if you want the entire sub-island to be within building range, or in the case of main islands suffering from this, to reach their Headquarters.
Keep this in mind when you place bridge tiles. If you’ve got bridge tiles to spare, that one extra bridge tile might be worth spending for an extra 3 free land tiles, especially if they happen to be tiles you need.
Keep A Close Eye On HQ Roads
Have you noticed that even after upgrading and placing down structures as efficiently as you can, everything just feels a bit too slow? If so, check your roads: Make absolutely sure ALL the Headquarters buildings are chained to each other where possible. It can be easy to miss because buildings won’t warn you if their islands are disconnected, only if they’re too far away from roads.
SUPPLY MANAGEMENT
Each structure in the game requires resources for upkeep. At first you start with Wind Turbines to generate electricity, then water towers, then solar panels, then farms, and it goes on and on until you reach the final ultimate goal of the game, making a shiny new electric car! Here are some tips for managing your supplies.
Wind Turbines Out, Solar And Water In
Soon enough, you’ll want to replace your Wind Turbines with Water Towers because your primary source of electricity will become Solar Panels, which require water, and Water Towers are the only other structures in the game other than Wind Turbines that do not have an upkeep cost. Towers for a lot of other structures later on anyway.
A Solar Panel and Water Tower combo also generates a lot more power per tile used than Wind Turbines: A Solar Panel generates 10 Electricity but requires 2 Water to operate, so it’s 2 tiles, adding up to 5 Electricity per tile.
A Wind Turbine only generates 1 Electricity, so to match that combo, you need 10 Wind Turbine tiles, or 5 Turbines per tile eaten up by a Solar-Water combo. And that’s before upgrades!
Offshore Wind Turbines
One thing Wind Turbines are really good at though? Saving Bridge tiles. Some islands have smaller islands just outside of them, which normally cannot be reached by any building unless you build a bridge to them. That is, buildings that aren’t Wind Turbines.
The way roads work, you don’t actually need to connect a small sub-island directly to the main island for them to be reached by other structures. For most structures with 2-tile to road requirements, you’ll need bridges to reach them, but for Wind Turbines with their 3-tile to road requirement, this allows them to just reach an outer sub-island if there is a road tile at the shore of the island they’re next to.
You’ll find yourself building Wind Turbines at these outer sub-islands when it comes time to bridge a new main island to the primary island chain, unless you decide the shore tiles are worth more being used for other structures than for reaching the outer islands with a few wind turbines.
Logistical Upgrades
You see the huge Headquarters structure on every new island you unlock? They do two things: Act as hubs for your roads, and allow you to upgrade whatever resource generation the island is focused on. You can pay for these upgrades in Money, and the boosts are hefty enough that you should not ignore them.
You can either increase their production of a certain resource, or reduce the amount of that resource every other structure uses, but the result is the same either way: More resources to spare so you can construct and maintain new buildings, while demolishing old excess ones to make space. Always keep up with your upgrades, especially if you’ve used up most of the tiles in an area and are looking to expand.
This is especially important with Electricity and Water: The high efficiency of Solar Panels when generating electricity means every upgrade gives electrical generation a bigger boost than what you would see in other resources, and this allows you to use fewer Solar Panels, freeing up your Water supply to be used for other structures and allowing space for more profitable or badly needed structures.
Use Up Your Resources!
There is a saying in Real Time Strategy war games. Paraphrased, it means every piece of ore, Tiberium, Mineral, or tankard of Vespene Gas not spent, is a soldier not fighting. It applies here too, if you’ve got too much Timber, Water or whatever lying around, that junk’s not making money.
If you notice you have a huge surplus of a certain resource, specifically an old one like say Timber when you’re already making Semiconductors and Integrated Circuits, don’t hesitate to delete some of the structures generating that resource. Afterwards, replace it with either whatever set of structures makes you the most money at the moment, or some Schools to generate Science, which is a rather scarce resource later on.
Make sure that while you use up as much island space as possible, you keep your resources down to the single digits (usually below 5 unless it’s Electricity), except for the one or two newest ones you just unlocked, since those are your main moneymakers. You’ll usually find yourself doing this after upgrading one of the hub buildings once or twice, since these upgrades give a powerful, almost alarming boost to resource productivity of whatever that hub handles.
Just be careful with replacing Solar Panels though: They generate so much electricity later on that the large surplus you’re getting might be coming from just one Solar Panel!
Unused Bridge Tiles? Make Temporary Bridges
Unused bridge tiles are not exempt from the previous rule of using up as much as possible: Instead of storing them in your inventory, you can use them to try and extend the reach you have to sub-islands for the moment, so you can use those sub-islands for stuff other than Wind Turbines.
Do it even if you won’t technically reach the sub-island with them, since all you want is to put some of the sub-island tiles within 2-tiles of a bridge or road tile, your employees can just swim across the rest of the way. You can just demolish those bridges and bridge stubs later once you get a new island and decide it’s more important to connect that new island instead of keeping those sub-islands.
Or, at least, if you gather enough bridge stubs to connect to a particularly large sub-island! Of course, you always have the option of sitting through a ton of Lighthouse ads since every 6 ads you watch from the Lighthouse gives you a free Bridge tile.
NOTES ON SPACE USAGE
Using space efficiently is one of the eternal brain-juicers you’ll be dealing with in this game. Certain structures require different kinds of tiles to be constructed, like Timber plants needing Forests, Gravel Pits needing Sand and Iron Mines needing Ore. It’s always a balance between getting acces to as many tiles as possible, or perhaps making a longer road over tiles you don’t want, so you don’t have to lay roads on the tiles you do want.
Though usually, just using as few roads as possible is good enough considering you can always save up for Upkeep upgrades. If you’re having trouble with space management, here’s a couple of safe bets to do.
Interim Education Effort
One potential tactic upon unlocking a new island is to spam it with Schools. You usually want to try for the Manager upgrades as early as possible. Those require the Science resource, which Schools generate. When that’s currently the upgrade you’re gunning for, you can temporarily fill a new Island with Schools, and boost your Science production with it.
Once the upgrade is ready, you can tear down the schools and replace them with those fancy new production buildings you just unlocked and bought the Manager for. You can also use this to gauge the efficiency of your roads: Most structures can be built two tiles away from Roads, and Schools are no exception. If you fill an island with Schools and all of them start generating Science, that means your roads are in good order, especially if you didn’t use a lot of them.
Another reason we specifically advise School spam be done on NEW islands? Because once you unlock a new structure, it may be best to build them on the older islands first before moving to the new island, to minimize upkeep costs.
A new island without a bridge to the old ones will eat up much more resources because the upkeep upgrades from the other islands can’t reach it. Schools on the other hand only have to worry about their Electrical upkeep, so you may as well put them there, take the blow to your power supply and set up some Solar Panels (which by the time you have to worry about this will also be fed with numerous upgrades) on one of the old islands to feed them.
Leave No (Reachable) Tile Unused
Speaking of spamming schools, try to use every inch of space you have access to, provided you can reach it with roads and bridges. Every piece of space not being used makes neither money, science, or upkeep resources. Always remember that when you sell a structure, you get a full refund, so you aren’t losing anything by replacing old structures with new ones.
As we discussed, the safest bet for space filling is school spam, since they only require electricity to upkeep. After some time, you can replace these structures to make more money, but if you’re stuck waiting for the next Science upgrade, you might as well fill them up rather than leave them empty.
The only time you’ll find yourself not using space is if you’re saving bridge tiles by disconnecting sub-islands, so you can connect main islands together to make sure everything gets their upkeep reduction bonuses. You might not have the reach to use some sub-island tiles even with Wind Turbines.
GENERAL TIPS
Away from managing resources, roadways and proper use of tiles, there are a few things to keep in mind when playing Technopoly: Industrial Empire. How ads work, a certain upgrade to avoid, among other things. Here they are.
Ad Math
How treasure chests with ads, loot bottles, and the trading ships work, they calculate their rewards based on your current income. This includes whatever income boost you may have, such as the Lighthouse income doubler you get for tapping the Lighthouse and watching an ad. Knowing this, always watch the Lighthouse ad before collecting treasures, to make the most out of every ad you watch.
A Waste Of An Upgrade In Money Island HQ
Eventually, likely after you unlock Integrated Circuit labs, the dollar-shaped Money Island will be within reach. For some reason, they left an upgrade option available to that island’s Headquarters to reduce upkeep costs for anything that uses money for upkeep.
There is no structure that uses money for upkeep, as evidenced by the fact there is no option to pay gold coins for such an upgrade, even though the option to pay for it with money exists. Don’t buy it, just buy the income upgrade instead.
Speaking of Money Island…
You can either use it for that, or connect that bridge elsewhere. It also contains lots of space for structures, even after you take into account how much road you need to use it. The upgrades for Money Island’s Income Bonus are likely the only ones worth spending Gold Coins on too.
Leave No Unmanaged Buildings Standing Before Logging Off
Sometimes, you might have unlocked a new structure, but not its Manager upgrade. Such a structure, while generating lots and lots of money (The newest structure you unlock always makes several times more money than the last one), must be tapped every now and then to make said money.
Normally, this is a mild annoyance, but nothing too bad. This becomes a problem though if you log off: Every structure you have that lacks its Manager upgrade will provide no profit when you log off! Knowing this (along with the fact that buildings are refunded for their full price when demolished), if you’re about to log off, consider knocking down all your manager-less buildings and replacing them with Schools.
That way, when you log back in and get your offline rewards, you’re very likely to unlock that new Manager upgrade for said structure, especially if you watch the double rewards ad. The reason we pick Schools is because money is easy to come by while online, but Science is not.
After all, most chests, loot bottles, and trading ships give money, but Science bonuses are just as rare as Coins and free Bridge tiles! The most reliable Science bonus you’ll get is the login ad-based 2x reward bonus. Also, Schools are cheap space fillers.
And this is the end of our Technopoly: Industrial Empire guide. Have fun making enough money to solve world hunger several times over per second! If you have additional tips you wish to share with us, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!
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Thursday 2nd of June 2022
Most of these app guides are meh. But this one is well written and useful for well into the late game. Glad to find out I can erase bridges.