Local production VS HUB line

[RTiger32]

Trying to figure out what is better. Making self contained factories that only need ores, having the ability to be placed without support, or a HUB line, chaining together several factories making different parts to have less overstock.

Personally, still early game so leaning into the first option, which also ensures that the only supply issue you will have is not enough incoming ore.

Midgame, I tend to switch to local refining, smelting the ores before putting them into the logistics system. Titanium and silicon for example I smelt at the vein before shipping off.
Same with oil, making a refinery for every oil node and using refined and hydrogen as the inputs.

May as well make an example with something moderately complicated. Interstellar logistics vessel.

Would it be better to:

Input EM Turbine, Titanium alloy, and processor, relying on other factories to make those parts

or

Input iron/copper/silicon/titanium ore, oil, water, stone, making everything on the spot in a closed loop (And finding a way to deal with the extra hydrogen, like throwing it in a thermal power plant). Excess processors or engines are not shared with the rest of the factory.

[josmith7]

Mater of personal preference.

My current late game designs lean towards the local production methods because it simplifies massive production scaling. Each of my rocket factories takes in ores and proliferator -- so if one signals that its under-producing it's pretty quick to find out where the ultimate bottleneck is.

(Whereas if I went with a hub design I could see, for example, I'm not getting enough Dyson Sphere components it -- but I might have to work my way back through several factories to discover the ultimate shortage is insufficient spiniform 3 subcomponents down.)

And my white science builds even make their own proliferator - so all they need is ores (and power - they don't make their own fuel; though the latest version using the new dark fog buildings does includes its own artificial suns)


But earlier in the game, especially on the planet where I'm making most of my buildings, it's more of a hub or just a logistics mess making components and letting whatever factory that needs it grab it -- because I'm not worried about making most of the buildings at ratio or at high speed; it's enough that there's a stack of them ready when I eventually need them.

[Kyrros]

In the early and mid-game, power is your primary bottleneck. Being able to create small (but reapeatable/scalable) blueprints/clusters for individual or families of similar products is likely the most efficient path to White jello and unlocking the end game. In the early game, there's simply not the extracted resources (or unlocked tech) enough to just rubberstamp your entire home planet in one go.

The game starts with belt spaghetti, then the entire paradigm shifts with the unlocking of the PLS - the game was MADE with decentralized production clusters in mind. No need to fight it, unnecessarily, or to reinvent the wheel gameplaywise. In the endgame, the only real limiters are IRL time and the physical processing limits of our indiviidual computers - by that point, real-estate is abundant, as is the resources/ability to crank out all of the materials needed for a planetwide all-in-one prefab in a short amount of time.

For the early and mid game, I have created self-contained blueprints for each of the science Jellos, but I rarely use them, since the footprint for those tend to be larger than what is available on the starter planet and its highly irregular land/ocean patterns - and I REALLY DISLIKE paving over planets at larger scales. Sticking, rather, with modular per-Jello blueprints that merely take the immediate tier or two of components prior (and proliferator) to produce cubes. I will occasionally need to expand a small section of coastline, or fill in an annoyingly specific no-logical-reason-to-exist inland lake. For the most part, though, I try to preserve as much of the natural 'form' of planets that I inhabit, even going so far as to preserve as much of the trees as possible (in as much as some planets actually have trees).

Rocks and bushes though are usually fair game as far as I'm concerned. With the changes introduced in the Dark Fog update, larger rocks now have even more of the rare resources in them than they used to and so make for a good source of things like Si and Ti early on before I've actually gone to another planet. (Different planets have different compositions of materials mixed in to the larger rocks). I was able to unlock several yellow tier technologies in my first DF-enabled game without ever leaving the starter planet, and I didn't even harvest 1/8th of the ground rocks available, only where I was building. If I DO end up placing buildings/belts down over wooded areas, I clear the trees out by hand (getting wood/leaves in return which can then jumpstart my organic crystal production later) as opposed to the game just wrecking and deleting the terrain items when building without my getting anything for it. It can be a bit tedious at times, but being able to queue 20 manual harvests at once (via standard RTS shift click) do help keep things moving smoothly as the Icarus marches from point to point continuously harvesting.

In the early and mid-game, I would stick with the small, scalable, or even modular clusters of production connected via PLS (I have a couple of blueprints that specifically get expanded by placing new blueprint over top of the old one as new technologies unlock); save the planetwide factory rubberstamps for the endgame when you actually need to expand to much larger scales and additionally HAVE the industrial capacity to actually support such an expansion.

When it comes to ILS usage and the endgame, what gets made on a planet by me for shipping out depends almost entirely on what resources exists on the local planet. At bare minimum, I try to make sure every planet extracts its own supply of Fe/Cu/Stone if/when needed, as those are trivial to setup and can produce a bunch locally via small footprint high output prefabs, saving on setting up additional logistics just for those when the resources already exists in place. After that, it's mostly the rares that call the shots. I usually don't settle planets unless there's a rare I need there, except in cases where I just need the space, in which case I choose a planet with 100% land and NO rares, specifically for that expansion purpose.