Relative importance of space materials

[mk11]

Is there any guidance on the desirable rough ratio of production of the various space materials?

Obviously, it varies over the game and you can adapt by selecting different space ship components. You can see a bit by looking at the ratio of stockpile to production.

For example, I'm trying to build up to expanding the fleet and going total war. Current stockpiles are in the ratio:

10 water :: 5 volatile :: 4 metal :: 1 noble metal :: 1 fissile

Production is in the ratio

10 water :: 5 volatile :: 6 metal :: 1.5 noble metal :: 0.5 fissile.

I just lost a Mars water mine to bombardment but am thinking I really need a noble metal / metal asteroid instead.

[debott]

I don't think the game provides any guidance for that. A good rule of thumb for first time players is to get one mine for each resource: one good water, one good volatile, one good metals, and so on. The average resource abundance across Sol is the best indicator how much you'll need.

As you said, if you find yourself with an imbalance, there are many ways to adapt and increase/decrease spending.

Personally, I regularly under-estimate volatiles.

[Ericus1]

The resource bottlenecks typically follow this pattern: volatiles -> water -> metals -> nobles. You will hit the first bottleneck primarily from upgrading your T1 habits to T2 and building out modules but farms generally eliminate it, the second from fuel usage as your fleet expands and fighting increases but Ceres alone generally solves it assuming you are using good ship designs, the third from expanding to T3 habs and module costs and onto irradiated sites, and the last from late game ship building.

Focusing that little on nobles now is going to make your late game very painful. Metals should also be a much larger, if not the largest production resource given nanofactories are a primary source of money and the very high metal cost of later modules.

[alexander.julian.erhard]

Early on for T1-T2 habs, you´ll need mostly metal and a bit of volatiles for building, and enough water, volatile and fissile income to cover upkeep costs.

With T2 and especially T3, you should use agricultural modules to reduce the water and volatile upkeep costs of your habs.
Building T3 stuff, especially at radiation places like Mercury or inner Jupiter moons, is also once again going to cost a lot of Metals.

For ships, you need to watch out for two things imo:
Propellant costs, often mostly water (although there are also some decent metal or fissile drives)
Lategame ships, which tend to have a lot of radiators and armor, can cost several 1000s of noble metals depending on what drive and how much armor you want.

[LorDC]

If you are playing correctly the only real bottleneck is always nobles.
Sure, you can hit water shortage if you overuse bad drives. Or you can hit volatile shortage if you forget about farms.
So, more nobles is always good.
Couple of good fissile sites will set you up for life (unless you are doing weird things).
Water/Volatiles/Metals a roughly equally important. Early on you may want to lean more on metals because those are main construction material. Later on lean more on Water because it is fuel for your fleets.

[mk11]

Publicado originalmente por LorDC:

If you are playing correctly the only real bottleneck is always nobles.
Sure, you can hit water shortage if you overuse bad drives. Or you can hit volatile shortage if you forget about farms.
So, more nobles is always good.
Couple of good fissile sites will set you up for life (unless you are doing weird things).
Water/Volatiles/Metals a roughly equally important. Early on you may want to lean more on metals because those are main construction material. Later on lean more on Water because it is fuel for your fleets.

How unhelpful. I ask for recommended ratios and you suggest "if you are playing correctly" without giving a clue what that means. What is a "couple of good fissile sites". In my current game there is only one site inside Jupiter with over 6 fissiles. Are the three providing about 5 each plus a few little bits enough?

You recommend 1 Water :: 1 Volatiles :: 1 Metals?

One thing I have seen mentioned is that you can build more mines than the soft cap and then shutdown some of them so you can vary the yields a bit.

[Kunming]

I have no idea about ratios, this is how I do it: over the course of space industrialisation I watch the resources and try to bolster the ones that run thin. Taking over other factions' habs isnt that much of a difficult mission. Sometimes they get blown up as well, by aliens or other factions, so keep a keen eye on the news feed.

I have another story though. On an early game I played I didnt pay attention to the fuel costs that much and was exited about Orion Drives until I had to refuel. Big fail. If you were lucky to grab the gold mines of fissile materials, those drives become useful in the beginning, if not, they stay niche. You dont always get all the resource sites you want, so learning to play with what you got is part of the challenge I would claim.

[LorDC]

Publicado originalmente por mk11:

How unhelpful. I ask for recommended ratios and you suggest "if you are playing correctly" without giving a clue what that means.

I literally told you what mistakes lead to shortages in other resources in the next two sentences.

Publicado originalmente por mk11:

What is a "couple of good fissile sites". In my current game there is only one site inside Jupiter with over 6 fissiles. Are the three providing about 5 each plus a few little bits enough?

Unless you are fielding a lot of NFT/NFD/Dusty Plasma/Fission Frag drives 20 fissile income is more than you will ever need. Once you swap to fusion you need even less than that.

Publicado originalmente por mk11:

You recommend 1 Water :: 1 Volatiles :: 1 Metals?

I recommend not worrying about exact ratios. You will be fine unless you ignore some of the resources on purpose. Basically, if you are getting bottle-necked by water/volatiles/metals the actual root cause almost certainly lies elsewhere and not in not following exact optimal ratios.

Publicado originalmente por mk11:

One thing I have seen mentioned is that you can build more mines than the soft cap and then shutdown some of them so you can vary the yields a bit.

That is rarely a necessity unless you are doing some kind of hyper-optimized rush. Having spare mines is mostly about having a buffer to recover after getting some of them trashed by ayys.

[36ggz]

Depends on the game seed and on the gameplay.

Water: When you rely on pulse drives and construct early heavy ships for Earth Def (BB, BC, CA). Too much delta V eats water. It comes back later, when you move to fusion drives and start to do interplanetary warfare, especially on earlier fusion drives.

Volatiles: Case 1: Relying on missles for too long, they burn through volatiles like hell even on smaller ships. Case 2: Armoring early wave of heavy ships with too much adamantine armor. It eats a lot of volatiles. (anything more than 10 on sides on a ship with an inefficient drive is a bad investment, early stage system defence ships will run up their lifetime sooner than later).

Volatiles never cease to be important, as adamantine armor always stays relevant. Exotic armor or hybrid armor is almost never a wide-fleet option.

Metals: In my playthroughs it usually happened when I modernized the fleet (scrap / rebuild, not refit) for better drives and weapons. Also big waves of upgrades of stations.

Always relevant.

Nobles: Very specific on the seed, happened to me only occassionaly only on the resource poor maps. Mostly connected with volatiles for armor and sophisticated heaters / drives / reactors.

Fissles: Like nobles, almost limited to end-game, specific for the choice of end-drives

My rough approx. will be for production:

1 : 2 : 1,5 : 0,3 : 0,5

I really recommend pumping up volatiles, adamantine armor is the standard armor for the whole game for your fleet. It eats a lot of volatiles. If you want a 3rd tier station that produces reasonably armored 5xBB synchronously without hickups you should aim in volatiles production above 30 daily, ideally around 50-60. Of course this is unattainable with Mars and asteroids only, so one has to fight around Jupiter and further.

In my last 5 playthroughs (all of them ended around Jupiter-Saturn kerfufles) volatiles were limiting factor, seconded by metals. In one of them water came close to be limiting, due to experiments with drives.

[dallasm15]

If you go with lightly armored ships like 1 1 5 then nobles will be the limiting factor. Armor is only 3% effective against violet lasers at 200km so I don't rate it that highly. I think the trick is to balance armor so you don't have a big surplus of either nobles or volatiles.

[Ericus1]

If you are letting the ayys get within 200km of your ships, you are fighting space combat very, very wrong.

Nose armor is INCREDIBLY important. For your earliest ships you want around 10 on your nose so you can survive a hit or two from max distance before your missiles distract their beams/destroy them.

As you move to mid game and advanced fission ships, you'll want that to increase to ~30. By the time you get to late game floating bricks you want 150+ armor. And I like a ratio of about 2:1:10 rear/side/nose on my ships.

[mk11]

@36ggz. Thank-you for the detailed response.

[Ericus1]

Publicado originalmente por mk11:

@36ggz. Thank-you for the detailed response.

Considering they haven't actually beaten the game and lost around Jupiter 5 times, perhaps they aren't giving very good advice? Their ratio is actually very, very bad and is going to result in severe metals and ESPECIALLY nobles shortages as you progress from mid to late game. Once you have farms, volatiles cease being any kind of impediment entirely. And there is almost zero need to carry that much fissiles. Fissiles being a larger amount than nobles is - I'm sorry to say it this way, but it's true - simply absurd. You can literally get by with less than 20 fissiles a month the entire game, and that's only if you go heavy on the fission station modules before shifting to fusion.

As I told you originally, volatiles initially can be the first bottleneck, and you shouldn't ignore them, but as the game progresses that rapidly shifts to metals and nobles.

[DarthVishis]

Metal >> Water > Volatiles. These are bulk resources. You basically want to always be producing them in excess and stockpiling. There are also generally lots of sites to mine them, so its easy to compensate.

Metals! Metals! Metals! Once you get into mid-game, shipbuilding and space conflict, you burn through metal like crazy. Dreads, Titans and battlestations chow metal. Mercury chows metal. Rebuilding blown up space stations chows metal. However, you can solve this by taking over or building metal mines everywhere you can protect them. There are usually lots of good metal sites.

Mid-Game Production targets.
Water: +500 to +1k per month. Easy to achieve.
Volatiles: +500 to +1k per month, Easy to achieve. (Farms are your friend)
Metals: +1000 per month or better. Tricky, as you can blow your MC or over-invest in nanofactories.
Rares: +250 per month or better. Easy to achieve.
Fissiles: +10 to +30 per month, easy to achieve.

Late Gamer Production targets. Economy dependent.
Metals, Rare and Fissile production will need to be accelerated. Fissiles get consumed to produce antimatter, so if you have a heavy antimatter economy, you can walk yourself into a corner. Pay careful attention to the resource cost of ships. A badly designed ship can require tons of metal/rare/exotics to build and kill your economy in short order.

The traps are nanofactories, supercolliders, antimatter drives, and exotic armor or radiators. Over investing in any of these will kill your economy. Late game, you have to balance your use of these carefully.