Question on production buildings

[Mikey]

I have recently joined the game but am a long time X player so some of the basics I have down.

I have started to constuct a "self sufficient" engine part station. I went through the encyclopedia to figure out what I needed in terms of energy, antimatter and metals for it to run. I calculated everything out and started laying the ground work, construction has started and then I notice inside the planner that it actually tells you what each building needs and produces, however it is grossly different from what the encyclopedia says.

Ex.
Energy cell production
Encyclopedia: 200x energy cells
Planer: 12000x energy cells / h

Is this because the encyclopedia is wrong or because it uses per cycle rather than the planers hourly rate?

I need to rethink this base lol....

[eMYNOCK]

ency shows you the product per cycle.. 100% correct.

the module in the build plan shows you production and resource drain per hour, again 100% correct.

none of both are showing the impact wich an optimal amount of workforce on a station has...

[Mikey]

ok, so they for some reason opted out of displaying the hourly production rates in the encyclopedia. Got it.

Workforce?

[eMYNOCK]

Originally posted by Mikey:

ok, so they for some reason opted out of displaying the hourly production rates in the encyclopedia. Got it.

Workforce?

you can attach race specific habitations onto your stations that will "produce" Workers out of Medical Supplies and the race specific Food... those will add up to 20% Bonus to any of your Stations Productions when they hit the optimal Worker count.

also you will get an infinite source of Crews for Ships to assign as Pilots, Service Crews and Marines.

and if you are slightly shadier... to "borrow" them for a "fee" to other factions equipment docks and shipyards....

[Gregorovitch]

I use this, I find it helps

http://www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator

You do not need a workforce, stations run fine without them. It is definitely not worth using workforces at all if you buy the habitat blueprints legit (they cost 10m, 15m and 20m each and that money is vastly more profitably put to use building a new complex).

If you steal the habitat blueprints it's still arguable whether habs manage to give you a better RoI against simply investing in more production modules instead. Partly because of the cost of feeding and medicating the workforce, partly because the production bonuses from a workforce are so measly and partly because habitats take an age and a half to fill up.

A more important consideration is the extreme length of time it takes to build modules in X4. At 20m real time per module, and no way to double/triple up builders, it takes nearly three and a half hours to build a measly 10 modules.

Therefore there is a big incentive to build several complexes which enables you to build multiple new production modules in parallel. Otherwise you get stuck unable to reinvest your profits. In other words concentrating on making more complexes accelerates growth much faster than messing around with workforces.

Unfortunately there is no way to get raw/intermediate materials factories to directly supply end product factories automatically. No CLS software like in X3. There is a mod called I beleive Tater Trader that does provide limited capacity to make freighters ply one trade route from A to B repeatedly. So vertically integrated self-sufficient factories are definitely good.

[Mikey]

Ok, but you would need 1 habitat for a complex or 1 for each production module?

[eMYNOCK]

Originally posted by Mikey:

Ok, but you would need 1 habitat for a complex or 1 for each production module?

short answer, no.

only if you want your station filled with NPCs and if you want that few bonus %.

the habitations come in 3 sizes, from 250 to 1000 Housing Units for Crews... the mixture of production Modules suggests the optimal number of workers (or to be precise the pop cap)... for the mentioned bonus.

[Mikey]

ahh ok so each production facility has a built in number of pop that isn't the same as just another habitat, got it

[Gregorovitch]

IIRC from when I looked at this in a bit of detail back towards release date, I think it's one medium hab per 5 or 6 production units. Obviously you also got to have the right hab (and food) for the specific faction production modules you're using. Actually you buy in the food 'cos food production fabs make far too much for your needs. Unless of course you specifically want to go into the food business as well.

The habs fill up at around 100-120 workers per hour (this is automatic, you can't directly hire them. One medium hab holds about 500 workers IIRC. So it takes about 4 or 5 hours to fill up. I do not know whether if you build say four habs at once they will fill up @ 100 per hour each in parallel. Once you have "optimal" workforce in place I believe you get about a 1.2 multiplier bonus on production (it's supposed to go up to 1.5 bonus but I believe in practice it doesn't..

So it works out that if you want to make a complex with say 20 smart chip fabs you'll need about 4 medium habs (dunno exactly how many big ones). That will cost you about 4m Cr and take them somewhere between 10 and 15 hours to fill up, at least, to the point where you get an appreciable bonus out of them (I lost patience with therm so I can't say exactly how long).

Alternatively you can just build four extra smart chip fabs for that 4m Cr. They will all be up and running within about two hours and earning you hard cash immediately from then on out.

This doesn't even factor in the cost of the hab blueprints (or the time spent messing about stealing them).

My view is that life is too short for doing habitats in this game. You can probably tell I am not a big fan of them.

[eMYNOCK]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

You can probably tell I am not a big fan of them.

nothing wrong with your personal opinion...

one likes automated fabs, others like inhabited stations... everyone to its own needs.

[DrSuperGood]

Encyclopedia shows the data file listings. There production is in batches. The station planner and logical view show it normalised into hours.

[dabrownsrphat]

The workforce drop down in the logic screen will tell you the optimum amount of people only after the modules are built or as they are built (won't show optimum for plan build only completed modules)

[Mikey]

came up with another query.

When you say it adds a modifier of 1.2 to production. Does that mean it produces 20% more per cycle or it cycles through 20% faster?

Seeing as one doesn't require more input whereas the other does it seems a pertinent question
Also if it does add 1.2 to output per cycle then you would be better off having habitats on high tech self sustaining complexes since each iteration upwards adds another 20% to output

[eMYNOCK]

it produces 20% more out of the same resources...

[Mikey]

well in that case i see it as quite useful if you use longer production chains rather than just focusing on a single production level