I’m not sure why ppl think estaates are so “under powered”? How do you arrive at an “expected benefit” calculation of how much “power” an estaate should give you? Based on what? If there’s no value in building a lodge for you, don’t build one.
The original post was talking about the high cost for someone who wants to use a lodge to link a couple of humbles. A level 1 lodge costs 27ghst right now - that’s cheap (only 55ghst for lvl2!). By the time you’ve acquired 6 adjacent parcels and need to spend 1,000ghst on a level 6 lodge - you’re doin OK.
Owning a string of adjacent parcels should be a damn big flex in the gotchiverse, not something every humble owner deserves to have for free imo. I think it’s totally OK that not every humble parcel has a level 9 lodge.
The other benefit of an estaate that was not mentioned is that it allows you to enclose a much larger area of the map to collect a LOT more spill over - this is a significant advantage for relatively little cost (although waalls ain’t cheap! - waiting for someone to propose waalls get cheaper once ppl eventually realise how expensive they are…).
Some of the other suggestions around sharing installations seem to be over complicating things imo - sharing installations across multiple parcels sounds like a nice advantage but what happens when you split off and try to sell a parcel with haarvesters but no aaltar? Or no harvesters but half the alchemica has already been farmed by haarvesters on another parcel? -messy.
Once again, I suggest we keep things as originally planned and let’s wait to see if it’s a disaster before re-inventing mechanics that aren’t even deployed yet.