Building a Eco Corporation: Plans and Commentary

[Palmerdale]

After several basic attempts to learn the game mechanics, I wanted to explore the possibility of making a very narrow company. A recovering world needs food, so I wanted to operate a farming colony, focused mostly on producing food.

To achieve this, I had a few basic ground rules / goals.
Build only those building that worked directly in line with producing food.
Buy whatever Metal and Plastic I needed to support the first objective.
Hoard as much Reputation for all Corporations as possible, not spending Influence unless necessary.
Break even on SC by returning selling goods I produced. The goal would be returning to 50,000 SC (the starting amount).

Here's how I proceeded.

Initially, I knew I wanted to set up 2 ships to extract Organics to fuel a Seaweed farm. I start the game with an Explorer pack and an Energy pack (reducing my SC to 20,000). These packs provide me with some extra energy and a couple of shields to protect my ships.

On to my initial buildings. Two template 1 residences will be needed to staff up, and the fertilizer from capturing the Organic Waste will help feed my farming efforts. I build a template 2 Alpha Hanger, purchase another ship, and equip both ships with the shields. I build a template 2 Seaweed Farm, a nice big operation with 2 fattening and 2 drying lines. Finally, knowing that my ships won't be able to directly farm the raw seaweed my farm will need, I build two template 2 Recycling Centers to process the hauls of Organic Waste and extract the raw seaweed.

I assign staff to all the buildings. I need a Director and Sanitation worker for each of the Residences. A shame that one Director can't handle more than 15 residences. Cost of doing business, I guess. The 2 bay hanger needs 2 Pilots, but only a single Director. Better. The farm is the most efficient building I can manage, with 1 Director controlling 4 Farmers. Finally, the Recycling Plants require a Director and 2 Recyclers each. It would be even nicer if the Director position could control both of the Recycler lines. A bit more inefficiency built into the designs, I guess. 18 people on the payroll, with an Artisan in the freezer.

I start both ships and once some garbage begins to collect, I start up the recycling plants. I get a quick headstart on the farm operations by buying some Fertilizer and some Seaweed. Soon, I'm happy to see that all operations are busy, almost 100% of the time. Now, to wait for the crops to come in.

An extra Stockpile will bolster by food supplies until I can begin producing my own food. I put all the food and water into the larder. I notice a Mixed Blueprints bundle sitting in the market. A bit pricey, but the world doesn't live on Seaweed and Water alone; I have plans for expansion. The workers are well fed, with 2 portions each of Seaweed and Water a day. That should keep their morale up.

By day 5, I notice that the operation could be sped up considerably, if I learned the Organic Tracking technology from the Eco company. Hmmm. They want Green and White Documents for that. There's no way to buy those, so I need to make the first compromise to my all-Green strategy. I'll need to do my own research.

I build a template 2 Tech Lab, hire a Director and Scientist to research Green documents. First research cycle finishes, and no White document. There's only a 40% chance, but someone could get lucky. Not me. Not today. I build another Green document and get my first White document. I buy the Org Tracking tech, and am ready to contemplate a relatively major decision – since I will be able to harvest the raw seaweed directly with my ships, my Recycling Plants will be out of work. Do I get close the Recycling Plants or find something else for them to do?

I choose to repurpose the Recycling plants, another erosion to my all-Green strategy. I set up my ships from Organic Extraction to use queues. One ship will extract Seaweed and Plastics, while the other will extract Seaweed and Metals. Even with my farm running at almost full capacity since I started, I've built up quite a backlog of raw Seaweed to produce, almost 5000 units. I can afford to have both ships split time on this 'non-essential' stuff, it will keep the Recycling Staff somewhat busy. Better that than have them on the Unemployed roles; I'm running a farm, not some social welfare state!

I check on the stocks and larder. I bump the larder to around 2500 Seaweed Portions but need to buy some more Water to keep the morale. I sell the rest of the Seaweed Portions to the starving world, anticipating statues of me being erected all around the world.

I also notice that researching Green Documents has ground to a complete halt. I've used all the Green Innovation points. Good news, though, there's scads of Magenta and a good number of Blue Innovation points waiting to be used. Oddly, there's still less than a single Yellow Innovation point available. I don't have any Yellow Blueprints active to generate any Yellow Innovation points. There's a couple of very nice technologies available from Yellow that will help immensely – Inventory Stocks, and Maintenance Drones (for when things start falling apart). That's in the future, hopefully, but I might want to look into some way to start generating more Yellow Innovation points. For now, those other Innovation points aren't doing me any good as they are. Let get the lab boys on it, hoping for better success on the White Documents.

Of more immediate concern, is the lack of water. Workers need water, and larger farms need water to grow anything beyond Seaweed. I can buy Water Desalination plans to run the factory from the VR Market without tapping into my stash of Green Blueprints (1) that I'm hoarding against some unforeseen disaster. So I deplete my SC reserves a bit more, and build a template 2 Water Desalination Plant, unfreeze a Director and 3 Operators and start operations. One thing I note, is that the Water Desalination lines produce a bit of Yellow Innovation points to address my future research needs. It's still a trickle, but marginally improved. Two avians, one micrometeorite, as they say.

A major milestone occurs around day 25 when I break down and purchase the Green Light technology from the Eco Corp. This will enable me to build a Botanic Center, when I can evolve beyond a simple
Seaweed producer and become a major player in the food industry.

But a quick study of the construction costs of the Botanic Center shows me some bad news. I can buy the 2000 Alpha prefabs from the VR market, but the 2000 Iron Ingots and Electronic System are sold by the Neo Industrialists (those blasted yellows). I could make the Electronic System myself if I had an Assembly line. There's no reasonable way to make the Iron myself without a more strenuous devotion to non-Green principles. I build a little and build an Assembly line, unfreeze a Director and notice the Artisan that was previously waiting is gone. Escaped, died, or gotten converted into Seaweed fertilizer, it doesn't matter. Another Artisan is quickly unfrozen and deployed, and the Assembly line starts churning out 5 runs of a complex queue: 7xDisassemble e-Waste; 5xControl Panels, 1xMemory Device and 1xElectronic System. I may give those miserable techocrats the money for the Iron, but I can build simple components myself. I'm getting a bit tired of buying Control Panels from the VR Market every time I want to expand. A small stock on hand might not be such a bad thing.

Finally, on Day 36, I have managed to sell enough (food, some water, and byproducts of my Recycling Centers) to bring my balance back to 50,000 SC. I could continue to run this way turning a minor profit, but alarmingly, much or most of my gains have come from selling e-Waste and unused raw Seaweed, and not from my agricultural dreams.

I break down and buy the Botanical Center. Nice. Shiny. New. I spent a Yellow Influence to gain access to the Neo Industrial Market so I could start expanding my operations. It was also time to upgrade the colony to level 2, another Influence point, this time White. Finally, to start the adventure of farming in the Botanic Garden, I had to spend a Green Influence on buying 100 Pineapple Seeds from the Eco Market.

This completely violates one of the basic goals I had set for myself, to hoard Reputation. Green Rep has slowly grown, but Yellow and white are both at 45, with no way to recover. I stopped here to produce this description and analysis.

Observations:
[listt]The Seaweed Farm cannot process raw Seaweed as fast as it is produced from either processing Organic Garbage or from direct harvesting. I suspect the problem is that the 2 Fattening plants and 2 Drying plants is a bit of a mismatch. I'd love to try a 3-to-1 to see if that keeps me from being overrun with raw inedible Seaweed.
Costs are a bit extreme. Raw materials appear to have the same basic cost as manufactured goods, at least at this level. Essentially, this devalues any processing work my colony does, as their work simply doesn't seem to add any value at all. As I see it, it would be far more profitable to simply run ships and Recycling Plants and sell the raw materials. For a manufacturing model, that's completely backwards.
Tearing down a building is a mess. When I finished my Assembly Plant operations to extract and build the components I wanted, I only got back 200 Alpha Polymers of the 400 it cost to build. This loss, plus the potential Unemployed staff, make the decision to 'leave it' or 'destroy it' tilt towards the 'leave it running' side. I feel there should be a bit more advantage to clearing out older, unneeded buildings. (Downsizing). Maybe that's a building by building thing.
It is odd that there isn't a template for a dual Recycling Plant operation. Even if there was a mechanism to link multiple buildings (of the same type) together to share a single Director, that would help. Even with a max staff of 27 people, I had 9 employed as Directors. A 33% management overhead is a bit steep.
The biggest issue I encountered (so far), is that the game forces a player to build or use influence from multiple companies to succeed. It constantly pushes a player towards 'doing everything' and relying on the market to buy materials to expand isn't possible without a) access to other markets, or b) building the necessary components yourself. This forces a 'wide' strategy on the player, and puts limits on a 'narrow' strategy.
Despite the quest to build an Eco Corp building, Beta Prefabs are only available from the VR market for White Influence points. Since the building needs 1600 of the Beta Prefabs, this requires 4 points. That uses 20 Reputation points (plus another 5 Reputation to upgrade the colony to level 2) of the 50 White Reputation. Perhaps I haven't gotten far enough into the game to see some way to generate my White Reputation, but that seems a bit excessive. Not to mention that a Corp building is needed to build Core Documents necessary for advanced research. Again, the game 'strongly encourages' a wide strategy as opposed to a narrower approach.
[/list]
Thanks very much for reading this mess. Maybe it will help someone. Maybe it will bring some issues to the developers.

If I decide to do a Part 2, I'll try to keep it a bit shorter. (Probable chance of that: unlikely)

[BoogieBoX]

As you may have noticed, it is almost impossible to focus on a single thing. You need to set up production lines for more or less everything, even if it is "violates" your affinity.

About your observations:

Originally posted by Palmerdale:

The Seaweed Farm cannot process raw Seaweed as fast as it is produced from either processing Organic Garbage or from direct harvesting. I suspect the problem is that the 2 Fattening plants and 2 Drying plants is a bit of a mismatch. I'd love to try a 3-to-1 to see if that keeps me from being overrun with raw inedible Seaweed.

A 1/1 (Fattening/Drying) ratio is ok if you harvest organic garbage. For one ship dedicated to organic garbage, you need 1.5 fattening and drying. If you directly extract seaweed (which to be honest I don't really recommend at the beginning, unless somehow your recyclers are too busy doing other things), then you need a 3/2 ratio (one fattening doing only compost, and the other two doing, well, fattening), with approximately 2.25 fattening and 1.5 per ship. Numbers may vary because of colonist skill and directors, etc, but should give you more or less a good estimate.

Originally posted by Palmerdale:

Costs are a bit extreme. Raw materials appear to have the same basic cost as manufactured goods, at least at this level. Essentially, this devalues any processing work my colony does, as their work simply doesn't seem to add any value at all. As I see it, it would be far more profitable to simply run ships and Recycling Plants and sell the raw materials. For a manufacturing model, that's completely backwards.

Yes I agree... I think the prices don't increase enough. Some materials only gain something like 25% in price after being processed 5 times, when it should be somewhere between a 50% and 100% increase. It is much more profitable to directly sell the garbage version of most items than to process them into better versions, and then sell those.

Originally posted by Palmerdale:

Even if there was a mechanism to link multiple buildings (of the same type) together to share a single Director, that would help. Even with a max staff of 27 people, I had 9 employed as Directors. A 33% management overhead is a bit steep.

And... Yes. Too many Directors needed. Way too many. In a long post I made previously I explained in details why the amount of Directors you have (usually around 30%) does not make so much sense and slows the game a lot. Linking the buildings of the same type together could be a solution. I think the most obvious solution would be to have one Director per platform.

Originally posted by Palmerdale:

The biggest issue I encountered (so far), is that the game forces a player to build or use influence from multiple companies to succeed. It constantly pushes a player towards 'doing everything' and relying on the market to buy materials to expand isn't possible without a) access to other markets, or b) building the necessary components yourself. This forces a 'wide' strategy on the player, and puts limits on a 'narrow' strategy.
Despite the quest to build an Eco Corp building, Beta Prefabs are only available from the VR market for White Influence points. Since the building needs 1600 of the Beta Prefabs, this requires 4 points. That uses 20 Reputation points (plus another 5 Reputation to upgrade the colony to level 2) of the 50 White Reputation. Perhaps I haven't gotten far enough into the game to see some way to generate my White Reputation, but that seems a bit excessive. Not to mention that a Corp building is needed to build Core Documents necessary for advanced research. Again, the game 'strongly encourages' a wide strategy as opposed to a narrower approach.

This one is trickier. The thing is, specialization is not viable in the current state of the game, and not before a potential complete rework of the market. I would really like to be able to completely focus on one corp (like you are trying to do with the eco) and buy or trade everything else I would need. But I don't think this is how the devs want us to play the game. As I said above, right now, it's more like "do everything, but a bit more of what you like". In the very specific example you are talking about there is indeed no way to obtain white influence (which are produced in corp buildings) without beta prefab (for the corp building), so you NEED to have at least one plastic production chain.

What you could do is having production chains that would help you solve bottlenecks (usually they are yellow), but in a small quantity, and then tons and tons of botanic gardens, water plants, etc, and focus on selling fruits and seeds. However doing this would probably slow your expansion by a huge margin, because you would have to spend a lot of white influences (and they are quite painful to get, at any stage of the game), and you will notice very fast that you have no choice but to have more plastic/metal/assembly etc plants.

[tabla_redonda]

Everything is needed, of course or you want an Amish colony?. BTW Cosmos should help to improve research docs via invention tech, supercomputers, etc.

and you will notice very fast that you have no choice but to have more plastic/metal/assembly etc plants.

Plenty of them is your goal is to build a super colony, but if your goal is to win the eco victory you don't need that much of them.

[Palmerdale]

Originally posted by TrickyToX:

As you may have noticed, it is almost impossible to focus on a single thing. You need to set up production lines for more or less everything, even if it is "violates" your affinity.

Snipped for brevity.

Thanks for the detailed response. As you probably guessed, I'm relatively new to this particular game, but a lover of production and queueing simulations.

I played around some more trying to isolate why I couldn't proceed with a single company strategy. Basically, there are two things that block any progress -- a lack of Aluminum Ingots for sale in any market, and the prohibitive White Influence cost of Beta Prefab. You will need both to build both a Corp Building and expand onto another platform. The combination of these two force every company to build a Plastics Prefab Factory *AND* an Electrorefining Factory.

Unless I'm missing something entirely obvious to everyone else, every company is required to collect metal garbage in the early game in order to even expand the colony beyond the starting core. It *might* even make a more early game strategy to be a) collect metals until you get about 30,000 Aluminum Scraps, b) convert these to Aluminum Ingots, c) buy Beta Polymers and convert to Beta Prefabs and d) build a few Electronic Systems.. Buy all Food/Water needed, Sell all Fertilizer and anything else to keep stay solvent. Sounds a bit screwy to me.

[Avendium]

Interestingly enough, they just removed the influence cost from prefabs and ingots in the market: https://steamcommunity.com/games/305940/announcements/detail/2828716324518911455

So your approach might be a lot more doable now

[tabla_redonda]

So your approach might be a lot more doable now

I would say the same. Hopefully Palmerdale will bring news on a new fresh attempt but the market is offer/demand based so I would be ware with prices going too high.

[Palmerdale]

A second attempt is in progress. Even with the ability to buy some items, there's still a lot of hurdles. Unless your colony builds Plastics factories, there are precious few Yellow Innovation points to be had, and the Inventory Stocks and Maintenance Drone techs are pretty much essential to any colony.

The strategy of switching from harvesting Organic Garbage and directly harvesting Seaweed seems to be a good one. 2xSeaweed Drying lines cannot keep up with 2xAlpha Ships running alternating Seaweed Extraction and another mission. The 2x Seaweed Fattening lines easily outpace the Drying lines, and end up being non-productive for a considerable percentage of the time. I've played with some making my own templates, just not with the Seaweed Farm.

The biggest detriment to a single corporation strategy is that there's nothing to sell. Crops aren't a cash crop in this game. There's nothing that you can produce in any arena to actually sell. If you make it, it is needed for something else. Eventually, the costs of buying plastics and metals to expand your operations becomes cost prohibitive. After 25 days, I'm out of money to unfreeze people to work in an expanded operation.

Other issues:

• Quests. Quests may require a dedicated colony to deviate from their single-minded goals in order to fulfill the quests. Many quests eat away at the Influence (on failure) or require technologies from other companies to deal with the request. Quests can force the single-corporation colony to expend too much money in order to expand fast enough to complete. Even the simple 'Grow the Colony' type quests require expending resources at a faster schedule than you may want (build extra housing, build Tidal Generators). Income occurs at a slower pace than that. I'll usually get the Growth quest before Day 20, and Build Corp HQ after that is completed.
  
  
• Maintenance. Gads! Is there some way for a settlement to deal with maintenance issues? A farming corporation should have some mechanism to deal with general repair without having to rely on the Neo Corp for technology and infrastructure. Not to mention that there are no drones available for purchase, even if a colony opens all corporation markets.
  
  
• Seeds. While the removal of Influence costs for some items helps somewhat, the only seeds available from any market still require Influence to purchase. Maybe an oversight?
  
  
• Entropy. The colony falls apart entirely too fast. Faster than a reasonable multi-corporation colony can build and expand to deal with. Lack of maintenance leads to infection and desertion starting by day 20. Even the wide colonies I've tried have had this problem. A colony needs Maintenance and Repair drones and some means to create pharmacuticals long before they can reasonably grow to that size. Acid rain will damage the dome requiring Weather drones and Chemistry plants to be researched and built. I'm sure there are other events/factors that require Spy and Police drones long before the colony can build them.
  
  
• Growth. Even expansion is costly. Each level a colony achieves increases the cost to revive a settler. It restricts the population without regard to the available housing, which also limits the population size. It also appears to affact some prices in the markets, making it more expensive to buy items (especially ships). This further encourages artificial self-sufficiency and a multi-corporation strategy. The increased costs alone encourages a strategy of buying all new ships and material and unfreezing all needed population before upgrading the colony level.

I'm still working on this second attempt, and while the recent patch has helped some things, it still doesn't make a single corporation colony ultimately viable.

[tabla_redonda]

Originally posted by Palmerdale:

I'm still working on this second attempt, and while the recent patch has helped some things, it still doesn't make a single corporation colony ultimately viable.

I would say it refers to the Corp buildings, so you can go with a single corp building in your colony.

[Palmerdale]

Originally posted by tabla_redonda:

Originally posted by Palmerdale:

I'm still working on this second attempt, and while the recent patch has helped some things, it still doesn't make a single corporation colony ultimately viable.

I would say it refers to the Corp buildings, so you can go with a single corp building in your colony.

More a single purpose colony, specialized in farming, plastics or metals. The game forces a colony to engage in all activities in order to proceed. Artifical limitation on the play style more than anything.

[Palmerdale]

Addendum: Bronze ingots are not purchasable with all markets open. This prevents the 'buy-to-build' strategy from building the template 3 (Apartment building) residential building.

Additionally, Bronze requires Copper and Tin scrap. After 77 days, I have collected 1700 copper, but only 400 Tin from Metal Garbage. There doesn't seem to be a Tin Extraction technology to allow ships to directly mine Tin, and the basic Electro Refinery doesn't allow making Bronze Ingots, an alloy that mankind has known how to make for almost 6000 years. Instead, the colony needs to invest in an Assembly Tunnel in order to make Bronze ingots. More Yellow technology mandatory with both an Electro Refinery and an Assembly Tunnel needed just to build an Apartment Building.

[tabla_redonda]

More a single purpose colony, specialized in farming, plastics or metals. The game forces a colony to engage in all activities in order to proceed. Artifical limitation on the play style more than anything.

Yes, what I mean is that you can go with just one diplomacy tech developed (so you build only 1 type of Corp. building).

[BoogieBoX]

Originally posted by Palmerdale:

Additionally, Bronze requires Copper and Tin scrap. After 77 days, I have collected 1700 copper, but only 400 Tin from Metal Garbage. There doesn't seem to be a Tin Extraction technology to allow ships to directly mine Tin, and the basic Electro Refinery doesn't allow making Bronze Ingots, an alloy that mankind has known how to make for almost 6000 years. Instead, the colony needs to invest in an Assembly Tunnel in order to make Bronze ingots.

You get tin by dissassembling gadgets, and the last patch increased the probability. Usually, by the time you need bronze (2000 for an entertainment building), you should have the amount of tin you need (you just need 10 tin and 90 copper per 100 bronze). Tin is indeed the only metal in the game that does not have a dedicated extraction option, but if you keep extracting metals/gadgets, you should have more than needed. In your example (400/1700) you actually have too much tin.

About producing bronze, while I more or less agree with you (even though the process is slightly more complicated than just melting the metals together), allowing bronze production in the electro-refinery would make things way more easy in the early game as you would be able to easily rush one or two entertainment buildings for a +1 morale each. Actually I am okay with the assembly tunnel bottleneck.