This is the mechanic we would most like every new player to know about, because it costs nothing and it is invisible until someone tells you. In the demo launch announcement of 15 June 2026 the developer wrote: “Buildings can be connected to each other and grant bonuses. In the GIF above, the factories are connected by a pipe, they receive a production discount if placed in a row like that. This helps a lot with macro gameplay.”
Read the condition carefully: “if placed in a row like that.” The bonus is not granted by proximity or by owning the buildings — it is granted by the arrangement. A base laid out for convenience gets nothing; a base laid out in lines gets a discount on everything it builds.
He gave a second example in the same passage, and it is a different bonus entirely: “this is the ’Complector’ — a macro building of the Fourth Industrial Empire. It produces free infantry called ’Brutes.’ In the image, a power plant is connected to it, which speeds up unit production.” So a link between a generator and a macro building buys speed, while a link between factories buys cost. These are not the same bonus wearing two names.
What this changes about base building is the order of your decisions. In most strategy games you place a structure where it is safe and where it fits. Here the placement is itself an economic choice, and it is one you cannot revisit cheaply: a factory costs 250 minerals and 150 energy, so tearing down a line to rebuild it straight is an expensive correction.
⛔ We told you this number did not exist, and we were wrong. The first version of this page said we could not tell you whether the discount was five per cent or thirty, because it was not in the data we had. ⭐ It was — in a part of the extraction we had never archived and never opened. The connection discount is 10 per cent, and it applies to at most 2 buildings. The component that carries it sits on the Machinery plant and on nothing else in the build: one connection component, two connection zones, one discount.
⭐ That changes the advice from a maxim into arithmetic. A Machinery plant costs 250 minerals; 10 per cent off production, on up to 2 neighbours, is what a straight line buys you — and it is why the developer called it something that “helps a lot with macro gameplay” rather than a flourish. ⛔ What we still cannot tell you is the size of the second bonus, the one a power plant grants a macro building: that link is described in the announcement and we have not found a figure for it anywhere in the extraction. ⚠️ We said that about this one too, so read it as what it is — an absence we have looked for, not an absence we have proved.
What we can say from the files is that the Empire is built for this. It is the faction with the macro buildings, the gear economy and the largest roster — eleven of the twelve entities in the demo that cost gears are Empire. Base layout is its lever, and connections are the cheapest part of pulling it.
Quotations from the announcement of 15 June 2026; costs read from build 23882143.
Values read from game files · version 23882143