OK, here’s some more analysis on why Kingdom Building is shit and nonfunctional. For reference I just finished Season of Bloom aka Part 2 or 3 depending on who you’re talking to.
TLDR: Building stuff does fuck all, the only important part is dealing with event cards. All those fancy adjacency bonuses / building bonuses are worthless to think about.
First of all, this is how the economy works
You have a subsidy of 30, and then an income based on trade deals from cards (3 here), and then direct income (17 here). Direct income = sum of kingdom stat ranks, with each stat capped at economy (so that one is the most important). Then your direct income gets halved. Apparently the subsidy and tax are removed later in the game.
You are able to rank up kingdom stats per 20 stats by spending 14 days of your and an advisor’s time. I am able to level up to Rank 5 for a few of those stats, but haven’t had the time due to murderous beasts running around the kingdom.
Thus we can assign a direct value to each stat increment - 1 stat = 0.05 BP/week.
Now let’s take a look at my capital, which initially had has been just been upgraded to a town (at the cost of 50BP)
It’s contributing 32 stats = 1.6 BP/week. Tallying up the cost of all those buildings, I think it comes out to 390 BP. This is a 243 week payoff time for this shit. Oh, and this isn’t considering the other sunken BP costs.
Go back up and look at my kingdom stats. If I tally up all my buildings across 5 territories, buildings are contributing 56 stats out of 445. Yeah. Building shit does nothing in comparison to successfully completing/savescumming kingdom card events.
Oh, how about some of the projects? Let’s take this trading project.
It’s a 125 week payoff. But wait! It’s the second part of a chain, the first which already gave +2 BP/week. So it’s actually only a +2 for a 250 week payoff. That 1500 BP trading project? Best case with 9 territories and 3 towns is an 88 week payoff. Right now if I manage to get another territory (250BP) and upgrade another village to a town (50 BP), I can get 5+2x2+2=13/week for a 115 week payoff (excluding other costs).
And don’t get me started on the timesink of curse research that leaves you unable to respond to events. Though funnily enough, those sometimes have a better BP payoff than spending on buildings since they reward stats. The problem is opportunity cost of not having an advisor available to handle other shit that will pop up in the 60 days it takes. Other times, the stat rewards are worse than the buildings.
I’m fairly convinced that you never make your total BP investment back over the course of the game. Despite having no idea how long the game lasts.
Given this the optimal strategy if you happen to be lawful is to plunk down 9 bulletin boards in every town for +18 to event resolution rolls. Talk about engaging.
@ FinnegansFather discussed this without numbers in Tom’s spin-off thread