How have you not fixed this yet?

[Tinytim]

I've played this game on and off for almost 2 years, and I'm pretty sure I made a post during my first playthrough about this one thing: WHY ARE THE SMELTER AND ASSEMBLER UPGRADES UTTER TRASH?

Let's start with smelter, okay, it doubles the speed. Sounds good....... except it takes 4x the energy, and requires extremely expensive materials. What is supposed to be the advantage here? Until you hit dyson sphere completion, energy isn't a resource you just waste on nonsense unless you wanna deplete a lot of resources, and when you've hit dyson sphere completion, you probably have 20 planets you can just cover from start to finish with production sites, meaning the space you save is completely worthless. And 2x isn't worth the additional logistics of producing them. Especially since I have encountered that rare material once so far. It's insane how hard it is to get anyway. Maybe I've just been unlucky.

But, the upgraded smelter is a godsend compared to the upgraded assembler. Upgrade one: from 0.75 to 1.0 in speed, at the cost of 2x energy (meaning, if you were to scale this to a 2x speedup, it would be a 6x energy cost increase, contrasted with the 4x energy cost in the smelter). Then you can upgrade it once more, another 2x energy increase, but this time a 50% speed increase. Netting a total doubling of speed at the cost of 4x energy.

But, this means that the logistics of making mk3 assemblers is even worse than that of the upgraded smelters, since you need two steps of resources.

So, here's how you fix this issue: Increase both energy consumption and production speed significantly . If I am to make a smelter that requires exotic materials from 1 solar system out of 20, that smelter damn well better be amazing. The upgraded smelter should at least operate at 6x speed of a normal smelter. If it takes 40x the energy, so what. That's kind of the point of a dyson sphere, infinite energy allows for insane production optimization. The point is that I'm trading expensive materials to build it, and cheap energy, for the saving of space needed for production.

Oh, and also, why is the energy throughput on the ray receivers so different when getting supercritical photons and just getting energy? You can actually save space by making an antimatter fuel rod production setup instead of using the energy directly. That's completely backwards from how it should be, direct usage of energy should always be preferable to processing it.

I just don't get it really, because when you actually get to build a dyson sphere, it's the most underwhelming, tedious part of the game. The build speed is atrocious, and the gain you get from it needs severe processing unless you want to cover half your planet with ray receivers, not that you need to because there's no reason to build any power hungry production facilities anyway. The cool part of the game as it is now, is to see the insane amount of interstellar logistics feeding into a megamassive industrial complex spanning several planets. The Dyson sphere is just a sidenote almost, only needed to create the antimatter needed for the final research type.

[josmith7]

FWIW they did provide even faster buildings, back in December as part of the Dark Fog update.

You can now get a:
* 3rd tier Negentropy Smelter (3x the speed and 8x the power consumption of the Arc Smelter),
* 4th tier Re-composing Assembler (4x the speed and and 10x the power consumption of the Assembler Mk.I).
(and while they were at it)
* 2nd tier Self-evolution Lab (3x the speed and 4x the power consumption of the Matrix Lab)

(But the resources to make them are, in some ways, even harder to come by than those for the Plane Smelter; plus of course making the top tier building consumes on of the previous tier -- so you need those materials too)

[nevryn]

Dark Fog resources are a piece of cake to get..you just farm the DF.

[dhitch89]

Originally posted by Tinytim:

The Dyson sphere is just a sidenote almost, only needed to create the antimatter needed for the final research type.

Lore-wise, it's heavily implied most of the energy we create is sent to the Centrebrain, which is why our PC was sent to create a star-spanning factory in the first place. We only keep a fraction of that energy to keep things running smoothly, and we can easily make antimatter from Swarms as much as a Sphere.

So yeah, it's not necessary; merely meant to be a capstone of our development journey. Which personally, I'm completely fine with even if it is a bit of a story/gameplay disconnect, but your mileage may vary.

[josmith7]

Originally posted by nevryn:

Dark Fog resources are a piece of cake to get..you just farm the DF.

Sure. If you're playing with Dark Fog on. And while it may be easy, it isn't quick.

It takes quite a while for the Dark Fog base(s) being farmed to level up enough to start dropping the resources you need to build those advanced buildings. Longer than it takes to unlock warp and go harvest some unipolar magnets for plane smelters. (And of course Assembler Mk.III can be build with resources from your starting system -- though it's easier with access to rare resourceS)

[RobynTheDevil]

I want more high power building actually.
Power is a non issue. If you need more power, spam deut cells and nuclear generators or setup battery chargers on a magma planet.