The QI Game seems really unbalanced, the costs of everything is just too high
It is not high nor unbalance if the mini city is expanded and bootstrapped from tiny to highly productive with appropriate amount of euphoria to support population, I spent 4 days upgrading and expanding city. Current 24 hour production totals: 422,500 coin, 550,000 supplies. This is after wasting the first day with no euphoria and realizing the 1.5x boost from 200% euphoria is a huge boost on a larger city. Balancing population to euphoria is crucial. Supplies are easier to get than coin. The number of houses is limited by the amount of euphoria you have. Example 2 houses with 200% euphoria is equal to 3 houses at 100% euphoria. Thus, it doesn't always make sense to build another house and crash the euphoria below 1.5x multiplier. Supply buildings have no effect on the multiplier, they just consume population.
I don't have the optimum city figured out yet but it seems for the first days, build the city and use the starting goods/troops for map encounters, then only after city can be productive start building troops and goods for map. Higher level maps are far more difficult than the beginning ones and require a city more capable than just a starter one. A city capable of producing 20 troops and 20 goods every 12 hours needs to produce 100K coin and supplies per collection.
City efficiency: higher level buildings are much more efficient in terms of city space usage. IE: For output of 100K coins per collection, can use any combination of cottages and villa:
All combinations create the same amount of population and the same 10 hour coin output but 4 villas use half the space of 8 cottages.
Start-up costs for city "seem" to be more than requirements for map participation at this point but that may change as we get to higher difficulty maps.
Other notes:
I've spent a ton of time on city construction, will be less on future cities as a proper scheme is developed.
Construction of level 3 buildings takes 10 hours then 10 hours for output, basically 1 day to get output from level 3 resource buildings.
Barracks & goods buildings don't need road connection full time. Since production takes a few minutes they can sit unconnected for the majority of the time. When needed, swap them out with other connected buildings, do the production, then swap them back to unconnected location.
It would be nice if the game provided way to select quantity of 20 goods production. The 3rd expansion is 150 goods and takes 8- 20 goods productions. It is a repetitive task that could be simplified. I assume the next expansion is 200 goods, then 250 goods so this repetitive task continues to increase.
Example of my balanced city. Swapping out a cottage for the roof tile house Decreases overall output: Coins 309375>255000 because Euphoria goes from 1.5 to 1.2
