Mid-game layout tips

[djr5899]

I've got about 200 hours into the game to date. I stopped a month or so after Update 1 was released, as I had 2-3 games where I made it past midway of the tech tree, but quickly hit either a death spiral or constant chasing/avoiding the spiral that I was no longer advancing. Took a break for a few months and decided to wait for Update 2 to get back into it.

That leads me to my main question to those that "finished" the game or come very close to completing the tech tree research. How do you lay out your maps? Like, how many distinct sections of factories do you have? Do you have an area for your city, power, diesel/oil/plastic/liquids, ore specific lines, etc?

I saw a video on this today and they mentioned the concept. One of the bigger challenges in this game is, I've still never encountered probably half of the items, so I don't exactly know how they fit in. And when you build widgets next to your iron ore mines only to find out you'd be much more efficient if you built them closer to your diesel/oil/chemicals section...getting too many of those inefficiencies late in the game is what often leads to those death spirals beginning.

I almost wish the research tree had 3/5/7 main groupings or color codes to tell you "Hey, this resource best belongs with this collection of resources."

Anyways, looking for some general layout tips, really for mid to late game as that is the area I am trying to move past in my next couple of saves. Thanks!

[Kaery]

Most often it's quite obvious what goes where. One very big chunk is always a sophisticated oil refinery. Crude oil and water go in, and so, so many things come out. Plastics should normally be close to your refinery. You can also post-process intermediate products to get more of what you want, like turning excess ammonia into hydrogen or excess naphta into fuel gas.

Maybe share a few screenshots to show us what you did and we can give you a few tips?

[Darkaiser]

Following because I have the same issue. Right about the time I start messing with plastics and the more advanced petroleum items, I get SO lost!

[editbayrat]

We need some salty Captain to write up a guide.

[Lloyd_Marshall]

My central manufacturing district is based on construction parts 1-4. my oil refinery is generally where early power production and steam production sit. i also as much as possible use pipes and conveyors to reduce the work load on my trucks. my last main district is research which is one district that gets rebuilt rather than just added onto. To be honest, I play this for a casual experience and usually have it set to it's most lenient settings. I even made my own map with insane amount of resources just so I could mess around casually. I am not a micro manger but i do enjoy solving logistics puzzles.

[Name]

Originally posted by djr5899:

That leads me to my main question to those that "finished" the game or come very close to completing the tech tree research. How do you lay out your maps? Like, how many distinct sections of factories do you have? Do you have an area for your city, power, diesel/oil/plastic/liquids, ore specific lines, etc?

Ideally, I like for that to happen but problems come up. For example, I run out of build space on one section of island and it's time to move to the other section that I can easily start landscaping on. I create a fuel pipeline from my oil refinery storage silos over to that section of island, before you know it I'm now running out of fuel in that new district as the flow rate of fuel that can pass through a pipeline is limited to the demand of vehicles that are pulling from it. Lol. I think there might be a way to use cargo ships to move around your island transporting bulk resources to alleviate some of those logistical bottlenecks. Electrified conveyor belts work too.

Ultimately though, one district that say specializes in oil refinement will need further expansion to accomidate other oil factories and so designs will have to get modified, torn apart, or worse - deleted all together. It's best to teraform your map and try to have a layer of trash topped with one layer of soil or rock and try to use up as much of the ocean as you can. just keep in mind trash produces pollution and degrades slowly, certain materials affect vehicle speed. you also might need one specific resource later on in game as well. I made the mistake of teraforming my map and throwing gravel or rock down instead of soil and could not place farms down. Don't make that mistake. lol.

[Kaery]

Originally posted by cpu - easy:

I made the mistake of teraforming my map and throwing gravel or rock down instead of soil and could not place farms down. Don't make that mistake. lol.

Just terraform at one layer less than where you want to end up and cover it over with dirt. Done~