after 500 hours, launched my first rocket - some tips

[VladK02]

First - I know. 500 hours, wtf.
I kept restarting islands mid-game. Did not like my terraforming.

Anyways, after finally finishing game and getting a self-sustaining island;

- some tips:

1. All your primary resources will be coming in from the sea, and all your trade goods will be going out to sea. So - dont build your industry based on mine locations - plan ahead, and build from the coast inland. Your ores, your coal, your sand, your water, your everything will be coming from ships, or from the sea.

So build your smelters near the coast. Eventually you will terraform yourself some docks, and will be importing ores, and if you plan ahead, you wont have to reroute belts and move industries.

2. In terms of space, Plan for 12-14 smelters per metal, plus crushers.... and for every little industry cluster, form electronics to glass, you will need comparable space at the end. You NEED space. A lot of space. Dont build close to each other - spread out. Way out. Like the bigger grid square, the one thats made of 4x4 squares? I would say, minimal plot size for industry cluster is like 5x5 of the larger grid.

3. You will need, for sustainable island, around 9-10,000 people. You can do with a lot less, but plan for that many people. Thats around 15 food farms. Allocate space accordingly. Farms need dirt surface. Each farm takes 50 water. Some less, but basically, 2 full large pipes of water.

4. Dont be afraid of contracts. Dont think its super-expensive or difficult. Your sand and lime needs - go into contracts for it right away, the cost in modules is nothing, and it saves you oh so much headache. Its not a super-huge chain of industry, all it takes is like 3-4 factories producing the item. Thats like 2 extra smelters, 4-6 extra factories, and you wont ever have to mine sand ever again. Or limestone. First sand (quartz) and lime, then coal, then gold, oil, and the rest of it.

5. technically, to finish the game, offshore mining platforms are more then sufficient. But they take a lot of unity and people to run. contracts are cheaper, both in manpower and unity. But you dont have to. In particular, sulphur and uranium, you can mine those forever from the offshore map points.

6. Go into nuclear reactors right away, and switch your economy from diesel to hydrogen ASAP. Use nukes to make hydrogen. You will need like 3-4 reactors. 2 for power, 1 for hydrogen and water, and one extra if you are power-hungry and did not build a million solar panels. Do it right, and you will save yourself so much troubles. Hydrogen is used in everything, from fertilizers to ship fuel, and is also a by-product from splitting trade ammonia, if you have too much sour water coming in. Bottom line - most useful gas.

7. Build that statue of maintenance! Build 4 or 5! The savings are phenomenal. You will always have excess of 2-4 gas from the waste water / incinerator loop recycling water and garbage from the settlement. But if you are not comfortable running tight setups, build a dedicated gas-making farm, and hook up the statues to it. It is the best thing since apple pie. ~10% reduction in maintenance??? Thats insane value.

8. Dont be afraid of covering the entire island in concrete. Build a dedicated concrete-making facility. It has to be a serious facility. 8 or so concrete mixers. (also uses hydrogen, by the way). And keep decking your industrial areas and travelled paths in concrete. You do notice maintenance reduction. Add statues, add edicts, and suddenly, you are paying half as much in materials for upkeep. It adds up.

9. Plan to have like 20 or so belts and pipes running along main logistics corridors. And plan accordingly. You need space, and leave some space for roads as well. Dont centralize the belts, run them along 2-3 corridors instead of one giant belt. But you will still have fat conduits, so leave space.

10. Industry loops are very interesting. Everything you make, all the by-products, are balanced to be used somewhere else. If you do it right, the system will be more or less balanced. So, dont dump brine water, for example. First, send it to a distribution node to forward to all the places that need salt! It's nickel and diming of course, but it adds up.

or a better example, excess water from sour water processing. Easiest to just dump it. But.... Once you start making gold in serious quantities, you will have a pile of slag. Slag you will sell for sour water. You will need 2 large ships by the way, if you dont crush slag into concrete. Thats a serious sour water facility. And 12 or whatever sour factories make 1 full pipe of water. By the way. Nothing to sneeze at. Thats in addition to pretty much supplying all your ammonia fertilizer needs.

Anyways, thats just some tips I had.

[Inductionist]

Great writeup.

[Deadweight]

1. Is a good suggestion, but might be difficult based on the map. Conveyoring stuff around isn't *too* bad.

2. 12-14 of each sounds far too high, I finished the game recently on armageddon with 8 copper, 4 iron, 8 steel, 4 glass and 4 silicon.

3. This feels far too high too. Unless you're running multiple FBRs and have an insanely large industry (not needed if your only goal is a rocket launch), 6k would be a more reasonable goal.

4.Agreed, contracts are the only way to an even semi sustainable island.

6. I would disagree here. 1 FBR is enough to provide like 250 MW of power as well as being water neutral and generating hydrogen. Moving to a fully hydrogen fleet is a great idea, especially as it lets you cut oil out of your island entirely, again if you're planning on launching a rocket 250 MW should be more than enough, but if you keep your previous reactors around, then you should be swimming in hydrogen, water and power.

7. Agreed, you feel massive benefits with even 2. the sulfur - > sludge trade lets you run a good number of them for almost free. That being said, there are diminishing returns and they do cost maintenance themselves, after 4 of them you stop seeing massive benefits and after 6 it's negligible.

8. reduced maintenance from surfaces only applies to vehicles. It's good advice to pave dedicated highways however, and block vehicles along this route as they tend to have a mind of their own. This combined with point 7, recycling edicts and maintenance reduction edicts means you only need a small trickle of ore to sustain the island.

9. Agreed, running tight belts looks great until you realise you need to cross over the middle bottom one to use it elsewhere.

10. This is what the game is built on, turning once waste products into a resource, as long as you're smart and understand how to use balancers to prioritise the right processes. It's why I love the game.

I'd add that unity is your greatest resource. You'll need it for contracts, quick building and edicts, edicts are very, very powerful and can massively reduce the amount of anything you need if used correctly, always keep a buffer.

[mas1701]

I just finished my first complete Captain of Industry run on Armageddon (started at location #1) in 702 in-game years by launching the rocket. By calculation, that is about 140 hrs. of regular speed gameplay.

Btw., I'm playing on Linux and two game freezes aside (cause unknown, might not even be Linux-related) it worked flawlessly with good performance in UHD.

I had only 2990 people (hard limit by housing). Played with CAPTAIN diffuculty and most Realism/Realism++ options enabled.


1. Imports from the Sea

I imported coal from two off-shore coal mines and oil from an oil rig (1x leveled up for more production). Later on, I also activated an off-shore sulfur mine (with low setting = low quantities). Last activated import was from an uranium ore mine for running a nuclear reactor. I'm not sure it was really neccessary, it worked well generating steam by solid and gas boilers. But I wanted to try nuclear, even though I don't like that tech in reality because of operational risk and radioactive waste. Aside from that, I only used Quick Trading on demand. Strictly speaking, it might be possible to manage without external mines, but may be not w/o an oil rig. Depending on the island and it's own oil, of course.

Iron ore came from one hill quite close to the coast. After 702 in-game years, the hill was gone and there was a dig hole, but still iron ore left. Not to mention other on-island locations. The first on-island coal location quickly dried out, a second location however was never completely exploited, not even close. Coal imports reduced local demand on that mine. Limestone came from a single on-land mine with a single excavator.


2. Space & Smelting

I agree that you'll need quite a lot of space and should keep a healthy distance between buildings for conveyors and for trucks still being able to reach most of them, should the need arise. This has however become somewhat less important with conveyor lifts, they can save some space where otherwise you would need a long, soft conveyor ramp. Still, two blocks of land tiles required for any height change. And you cannot build right above a lift.

As for blast furnaces, I had 8 for iron ore/scrap smelting (3 of them processed into steal). I never upgraded them, for that would required pre-crushing the iron ore. Call me lazy. But it worked. For increased speed, I upgraded the metal casters and gave the blast furnaces a boost when neccessary, but most of the time it wasn't. 2, later on 4 blast furnaces were dedicated to copper. Hell yeah, you really need them! Electronics production sucks your stockpile dry in minutes.

Other raw material like glass was kept as a double or quad production line scheme, depending on production timings of the production steps involved.

Since large vehicles - basically all but pickups and trucks - cannot pass conveyors or pipes, even at height 2 or 3, reverse space for "roads" where they can all navigate along. Build bridges / ramps where conveyors and pipes need to cross. On each side of the "road" (later on indicated by surface tiles, from bricks for example), keep space free for a bus-like conveyor and pipe transportation network with on- and off-ramping. A good conveyor network can lift the immense load off your trucks quite a lot, even if they are very long and some work to build.


3. Population

As mentioned above, I had only 2990 people as a workforce. There were tight moments when I thought "too few", but that was quickly resolved when more and more assemblies then upgraded to Robotic Assembly tier 1. That reduces the workforce needed and makes room for new buildings with larger needs.

I like to plan in housing blocks of 3x3 with the center being a decoration tile like a fountain. Later on upgrading to a 5x3 block with space for a second decorational tile in the (right or left) center position.

Like this:

HHHHH
HDHDH
HHHHH

H Housing
D Decoration

Reserve space for this and around this in advance if you can.

I had 8 farms if I'm not mistaken. Over time, I upgraded to Greenhouses and GH tier 2.

Using conveyors for food can be tricky, especially when joing them all together and then filtering out by food type with sorters. Things can get stuck. Plan ahead with buffers and find a good balance of what is needed / wanted by the population and the amounts produced.

Additional storages right before arriving at the destination food market can act as a buffer and can have alerts enabled. It's bad to have people starving just because transports got stuck. May be a good idea to keep truck transports enabled and buildings reachable just in case something causing trouble needs some time to be sorted out. Since housing attachments like food markets and other types don't have an alarm feature, you could to this buffer-with-alert-feature for every housing attachment, water and waste facilities included.


4. Trade Contracts

I tried them before, but didn't find them that useful. Played Arma w/o any. May differ depending on island and starting location.


5. Offshore Mining and Unity Cost

Most of the time I had plenty of Unity, Quickbuilding a lot. Keep your folks happy, so you can afford fast research, off-shore mining and some edicts w/o any Unity trouble.


6. Fuel

I kept on running Diesel vehicles for a long time with a double refining production chain. Gradually switched about 70% to Hydrogen (including part of the cargo fleet, 4 cargo ships) when Hydrogen production tech became more efficient. Didn't really need nuclear power. But I wanted to try. Once it was running stable, I was able to reduced coal import, but that was all. Would have worked without. Price of Nuclear Reactor: High demand on water. Even if part of it can be recovered with cooling towers. Must be very reliable to keep reactor stable. I had 144 of 180 possible vehicles. More than enough, even with long ways to different dumping sites (used to connect different parts of the island).


7. Statue of Maintenance

Missed that. Will try next time. Guess I was concerned about the negativ impact in case it stopped working. But yes, that would indeed have been beneficial.


8. Concrete / "Roads"

I did build "roads" with surface tiles, but the vehicles don't prefer them (yet), so it is more for my visual eye comfort than for effect. But maintenance reduction edicts are fine.

I know I can set road blocks to force vehicles, but I doubt very much it pays off that well.


9. Conveyors and Pipes along "Roads"

Mentioned that above, agreeing. Using bus-like system (as in "data bus"). With on- / off-ramping, always a row of space free in between for that, keeping the actual "conveyor highway" up at height 3 where possible.


10. Production By-Products and overflow situations

Generally, I keep everything a production puts out, if there is ANY potential use for it later. At least I keep some of it (one storage per type). But I also try to keep overflow safeties in place, in case the storage runs full, so that the production doesn't get stuck. For example, for light oil (IF I happen to have too much, it's just an example), I would set up a pipe balancer right before the storage and set priority output to that storage, but a secondary output to a flare. That way, excessive amounts would be burned off instead of blocking further production of other good from the same production facility.


11. My Addition: Research

Do research as fast as you can SAFELY afford. I usually have two labs running non-stop.

The faster your research, the earlier you can get advanced tech and thereby save time and resources otherwise used by inefficient tech. For example, Copper Electrolysis is far more efficient when using Acid instead of Water. Water looses some Copper on the production output (3 per cycle AFAIR).

When planning, remember that some productions don't have a "boost" feature. Robotic Assemblies for example. Also required later on for Research Lab materials. One production chain cannot sustainably power two labs.


12. My Addition: Recipes

Upgrading an Assembler can change recipes and they may even become unavailable. Since there is no "undo" for an upgrade (you can just demolish and re-build), check ahead of upgrading if your recipe really benefits from that intended upgrade.


Hope it helps other Captains.

Mark

[danloveschrista]

Some of these are good all-around tips, some are REALLY dependent on map, play style, and settings. I've played about 7 times through to rocket launching, and never really imported all that much stuff. One playthrough, I was running out of dock space and ships, and I'm not sure why.

I go for upgraded furnaces, rather than more of them. The higher tiers have less pollution and more ore efficiency, at a cost of electricity, which is nearly free from a fast breeder reactor. One catch, you will suddenly need a surprising amount of graphite.

Yes on the space. Always assume your stuff is too close together, lol. I've made several blueprints for myself that are really compact, but that does limit connections and flexibility.

My pop target limit is ~6500, it's what my wastewater treatment setup can handle. Edicts can allow for more people on the system.

My biggest tip on the population aspect is, use the decorations and supply them with stuff. Especially with the new pollution effects, it's harder to keep health up and have a positive Unity flow.

Farms, water needs, highly variable in settings.

Contracts can be really difficult to start up. That initial stock of the dock buildings can strain the economy way more than the contract will in time. It can take a really long time to balance out, and find you overbuilt production. Not saying they're inefficient, but they can be tricky to start.

If you keep using diesel so you have sulfur from the sour water, and filtering exhaust, you will have lots of sulfur, no need to import it.

The first statue of maintenance is worthwhile, I'm not sure additional ones are much good. Personal preference, maybe, but with recycling efficiency of 70% or more, it's not like maintenance is very expensive. If you like to see the statues, by all means do it. :-)

I like the Factorio bus idea, but I can't pull it off. Mining and dumping being such a large part of this game (and one of my favorites), it's much harder to do any grid layout, or keep lines straight. Stuff is researched before I have room to set it up, and by the time I have space, I've been using it for a long time and it's stuck where it is. This is actually a main reason I keep restarting. I haven't found a good way to lay out a factory without long travel between something.

[SpeedDaemon]

Originally posted by danloveschrista:

The first statue of maintenance is worthwhile, I'm not sure additional ones are much good. Personal preference, maybe, but with recycling efficiency of 70% or more, it's not like maintenance is very expensive. If you like to see the statues, by all means do it. :-)

Depends on scale, really. In my 50k pop map, maintenance ended up using about 10% of my electronics I and II, 25% of my Electronics II, and about 30% of my steel. To make that stuff, you need to import primarily copper, gold, iron, and quartz. To get those, you export servers, consumer electronics, and household appliances - which also all use electronics, so you end up with a feedback loop where any increase or decrease can have a significant impact on how much you import, and also the space/power/manpower, etc. to process it.

Originally posted by danloveschrista:

This is actually a main reason I keep restarting. I haven't found a good way to lay out a factory without long travel between something.

I had to figure this out for the playthrough above... When you're outputting around 8 belts of copper, for example, it doesn't make sense to bus it.

Fortunately, if you look at the recipes, it will pretty much lead you to what I found to be the "best" layout for an island large enough to have most production down one side.
Gold is only used for microchips
Microchips are only used for electronics
Copper is only used for electronics/microchips
Rubber is only used for electronics (and vehicles, but that's such low volume it can be trucked to wherever you need it)
Quartz is only used to make sand
Sand is primarily used for glass and Si poly
Si poly is only used for electronics (notice a trend here? :)
Glass is about 50% used for electronics
All Iron, and about 50% of steel goes to construction parts, and settlement goods (household goods, appliances, consumer electronics)



So, starting in the northeast corner and going south:
Gold smelting/ore import/slag export
Microchip machines
Copper smelting/ore import
Electronics I/II/III production
Sand production/quartz import
Si poly smelting/slag export/si wafers
Glass smelting
Iron and steel smelting/ore import
Construction parts, vehicles
Household goods, household appliances, consumer electronics
The settlement itself

My refinery was on the north edge of the map next to the gold smelting.

This arrangement allowed belting most things to another production area adjacent, or nearly so, and cut the bus running next to it down to mostly just electronics, steel, plastic, glass, and sulfur. (The pipe bus was buried under a road running along the belt bus)

[ryan_]

Originally posted by VladK02:

Have you managed to fully automate production? Did you manage not to carry everything by trucks, but only by conveyors?