Is it better to make stations which only requires raw minerals to operate or is it better to make stations which produce tier 1 materials separately?

[Ariki]

the first type is an all-in-one type where you only need to inject it with the raw material needed (ec. raw ore, silicon etc) and the station will do the rest automatically (so for example, a hull plates factory which incorporates stuff like graphene/refined metals/any other ingredients producing module itself into the factory), the next type is where you make separate stations for producing the first tier material and other tiered material separately (in my understanding, the first tier are wares like graphene, teladianium, refined metals. etc.) I want to make a new save and I'm not sure if I should keep making stations using my old all-in-one templates or if I should try to design new ones.

[McMuffin]

Hello there, already a topic running about big stations vs many stations and the questions is how much time do you have/want to waste on waiting?
If you have separate stations for intermediats you can expand the production faster. Want to increase hull parts? Just build the module and expand the other factory at the same time to keep up with supply. If you use only one station you have to queue all the necessary modules which takes far to long (my PHQ is after 80 hours still not finished...)

[Zloth]

True, only one builder can build a station. If you make 5 stations, you can have 5 builders working at the same time. Another advantage is that you can put the bottom tier stuff closer to the raw materials. You're not going to find any place in the game with a high supply of everything but, if you spread at least the first tier stations around, you can do the mining quicker.

On the minus side, you've got to track all those stations to make sure they are all running properly so it's going to be harder to manage. All those traders going from station to station can run into pirate/xenon trouble, too - nobody is going to intercept the microchips going from one module to another. And you've got to buy all those traders, too, so it's a bit more expensive.

(Edit: and, as mentioned in the other topic (https://steamcommunity.com/app/392160/discussions/0/2962796621655737171/), stations that are too big really hurt your framerate.)

[Ariki]

that's not my question at all. I'm questioning whether it is more efficient to have your station to be self sufficient, or whether I should divide them between tiers. supposedly I got a fixed amount of station modules that i want to build and are shared between two stations (18 Hull Parts, 4 energy cells, 2 graphene, 10 refined metals), is it better to make two stations which produce hull plates self sufficiently (9 hull parts, 2 energy cells, 1 graphene, and 5 refined metals for each station), versus two stations that have different tiers between them (one station composed of 18 hull parts and the other one using the rest).

[Pvt. Stash]

Originally posted by Ariki:

that's not my question at all. I'm questioning whether it is more efficient to have your station to be self sufficient, or whether I should divide them between tiers. supposedly I got a fixed amount of station modules that i want to build and are shared between two stations (18 Hull Parts, 4 energy cells, 2 graphene, 10 refined metals), is it better to make two stations which produce hull plates self sufficiently (9 hull parts, 2 energy cells, 1 graphene, and 5 refined metals for each station), versus two stations that have different tiers between them (one station composed of 18 hull parts and the other one using the rest).

This question isn't going to get you a definitive answer. There's a lot of debate in the x4 community on the topic.

Mega stations eliminate the need for transport ships to move resources, but they require a massive amount of resources to stand up and keep running. What you gain in travel time reduction you can quickly lose if you can't feed the station appropriately.

This happens a lot with the changes to mining in the latest build.

Having many mini stations stands up faster and spreads the startup cost over time, but now you have to move goods around the network. This does provide you granularity and flexibility to adjust the individual components of the supply chain as needed, but your transports can be destroyed and drag your economy to a halt.

You can mitigate the travel and supply issues in all scenarios with dedicated mining facilities and trading hubs that act as staging facilities for your faction.

Like I said, it's not a clear cut answer.

What I do is:
1. Terran stations are built as mega stations because the economy is simple.

2. Universal stations are granular and focus on 1-2 sellables that are key to the economy. I grow these up like weeds eventually working my way up to shipyard supply.

3. Trading hubs limited to my faction stockpile materials for my stations in the local economy. If a trade hub runs low on something I know to increase that material in the sector.

[Oddible]

There are several factors. This is an X game, it is seldom as simple as yes / no. Is it more efficient to put everything in one factory? Maybe. Kinda.

If you're ONLY making one high tier item in your entire company that consumes graphene or hull parts, then yes, it is more efficient. All your miners have one place to go, there are no transportation delays. Yes, megafactories eliminate lots of waste. However, this causes lots of potential issues for one, and as soon as your producing other high tier items it becomes less efficient.

First the issues. As mentioned, it will be very very slow to expand production because you can only have one builder working on your station. Late game I often am continuously upgrading all my stations, megastations will stunt your growth. Also megastations are CPU hogs, they will grind your game down to a sluggish muddy mess. The game handles them poorly. Lastly, auto traders don't handle mixed cargo very well in this game, they work better transporting single items.

Second, as soon as you add other items you lose efficiency. For instance, if you have one mega producing weapon components and another producing advanced electronics, now you have two sets of silicon miners, two sets of silicon refiners. Are you building all your megas in silicon rich areas? Well you also need methane, now you've got multiple sets of miners traveling all over to get raws. They need to travel many jumps which means you need higher star managers or pilots. All those different miners are now creating contention at your docks. But you can't build docks fast enough because you've only got one builder working.

Also, rather than have one pool of methane to keep full, now you have one for every megastation. Same with every other product. Your logistical overview just became spaghetti and a monitoring nightmare. You see you need more hull parts so you try to build more production but that takes forever so you start shipping it in from other mega factories and you're back to a distributed model.

Efficient in some ways yes, very. Flexible to supply and demand no. Easy to adjust? Definitely not. Quick to build? God no. Less fun and a bit more headachey? Yes.

BUT! Do it! This game is a sandbox and all about exploring. Try it! Have some fun then blow it up if you don't like it!

[Ariki]

Originally posted by Pvt. Stash:

Originally posted by Ariki:

that's not my question at all. I'm questioning whether it is more efficient to have your station to be self sufficient, or whether I should divide them between tiers. supposedly I got a fixed amount of station modules that i want to build and are shared between two stations (18 Hull Parts, 4 energy cells, 2 graphene, 10 refined metals), is it better to make two stations which produce hull plates self sufficiently (9 hull parts, 2 energy cells, 1 graphene, and 5 refined metals for each station), versus two stations that have different tiers between them (one station composed of 18 hull parts and the other one using the rest).

This question isn't going to get you a definitive answer. There's a lot of debate in the x4 community on the topic.

Mega stations eliminate the need for transport ships to move resources, but they require a massive amount of resources to stand up and keep running. What you gain in travel time reduction you can quickly lose if you can't feed the station appropriately.

This happens a lot with the changes to mining in the latest build.

Having many mini stations stands up faster and spreads the startup cost over time, but now you have to move goods around the network. This does provide you granularity and flexibility to adjust the individual components of the supply chain as needed, but your transports can be destroyed and drag your economy to a halt.

You can mitigate the travel and supply issues in all scenarios with dedicated mining facilities and trading hubs that act as staging facilities for your faction.

Like I said, it's not a clear cut answer.

What I do is:
1. Terran stations are built as mega stations because the economy is simple.

2. Universal stations are granular and focus on 1-2 sellables that are key to the economy. I grow these up like weeds eventually working my way up to shipyard supply.

3. Trading hubs limited to my faction stockpile materials for my stations in the local economy. If a trade hub runs low on something I know to increase that material in the sector.

Originally posted by Oddible:

There are several factors. This is an X game, it is seldom as simple as yes / no. Is it more efficient to put everything in one factory? Maybe. Kinda.

If you're ONLY making one high tier item in your entire company that consumes graphene or hull parts, then yes, it is more efficient. All your miners have one place to go, there are no transportation delays. Yes, megafactories eliminate lots of waste. However, this causes lots of potential issues for one, and as soon as your producing other high tier items it becomes less efficient.

First the issues. As mentioned, it will be very very slow to expand production because you can only have one builder working on your station. Late game I often am continuously upgrading all my stations, megastations will stunt your growth. Also megastations are CPU hogs, they will grind your game down to a sluggish muddy mess. The game handles them poorly. Lastly, auto traders don't handle mixed cargo very well in this game, they work better transporting single items.

Second, as soon as you add other items you lose efficiency. For instance, if you have one mega producing weapon components and another producing advanced electronics, now you have two sets of silicon miners, two sets of silicon refiners. Are you building all your megas in silicon rich areas? Well you also need methane, now you've got multiple sets of miners traveling all over to get raws. They need to travel many jumps which means you need higher star managers or pilots. All those different miners are now creating contention at your docks. But you can't build docks fast enough because you've only got one builder working.

Also, rather than have one pool of methane to keep full, now you have one for every megastation. Same with every other product. Your logistical overview just became spaghetti and a monitoring nightmare. You see you need more hull parts so you try to build more production but that takes forever so you start shipping it in from other mega factories and you're back to a distributed model.

Efficient in some ways yes, very. Flexible to supply and demand no. Easy to adjust? Definitely not. Quick to build? God no. Less fun and a bit more headachey? Yes.

BUT! Do it! This game is a sandbox and all about exploring. Try it! Have some fun then blow it up if you don't like it!

Thank you very kindly for the explanation, I really needed that, since I got this really bad habit of focusing too much on one thing and ignoring other. I've been too used to doing things my way so I need someone else to explain it to me why I should try doing something else. Unflexible, you might say. Also, I don't really want to do too many experiment myself since it takes a very long time to do anything substantial in this game so your explanation really helps out big time.

I'm not really worrying about megafactories and whatnot (Since now i limit my factories to have value lesser than 100-150mil if I can), only about tiered factories, though your explanation helped put some perspective in my brain. So maybe a more efficient strategy is to make a mixture of both depending the supply and demand on any nearby sector that the station can reach, and depending on the local raw material availability. So for example, if there is no source of methane nearby, I'd better not include graphene modules to my factory, instead I should make a separate graphene factory somewhere else that is nearby a sector rich in methane. I..... usually just leave it to my trade hubs to circulate wares around for me because I don't really want to have more headache....

Talking about supply chain, how do you guys usually set up your trade hubs? I tend to build like 3 kind of trade hubs in one sector (high tech trade hub, tier 1 trade hub and mineral hub), with factories built in the same sector as the hubs (The trade hub can only buy from my own factories and can sell to anyone. My factories are set to buy and sell only to my own faction), and I set these for every 3 sectors away so they can circulate wares between each other very easily. The reason for differing trade hub is that, when I just started making up a supply chain of trade hubs and constructed just one trade station that handles everything, the manager only had their focus on wares that had higher value so cheaper wares usually got stuck on one trade station and never gotten circulated around. on my every game so far supply chain haven't be that big of an issue by using these setup, but the amount of ship needed for my setup is ridiculously large that I'm curious if there is a more efficient way of doing it.

[Cowardly Camper]

I've always found the biggest problem to be the miners. I build 1 mining station per type of mineral the station needs, though you can probably get away with a station having one ore and one gas. This keep the miners from going full stupid and filling their hold with 3 different mineral types and delivering a tiny shipment each run. This also helps get minerals to a farther away station.

[Targaryen22]

I tend to pick one Ware I want a station to produce personally and then, depending on what it needs to produce that ware I tend to just build whatever it needs to produce that end ware on the station itself so it just needs raw materials. I've got a self sufficient Advanced Composites and Advanced Electronics factories in Grand Exchange and I'm in the middle of working on building a self sufficient food farm since there's apparently a food shortage in the area (advanced electronics farm having issues with workforce upkeep) and its worked pretty well for me so far. Assign a handful of miners to mine for the station, and then sit and watch it get up and running

[Pvt. Stash]

Originally posted by Ariki:

Originally posted by Pvt. Stash:

*SNIP*

I'm glad this helped. :)

Originally posted by Oddible:

*SNIP*

Also, rather than have one pool of methane to keep full, now you have one for every megastation. Same with every other product. Your logistical overview just became spaghetti and a monitoring nightmare. You see you need more hull parts so you try to build more production but that takes forever so you start shipping it in from other mega factories and you're back to a distributed model.

Efficient in some ways yes, very. Flexible to supply and demand no. Easy to adjust? Definitely not. Quick to build? God no. Less fun and a bit more headachey? Yes.

BUT! Do it! This game is a sandbox and all about exploring. Try it! Have some fun then blow it up if you don't like it!

Thank you very kindly for the explanation, I really needed that, since I got this really bad habit of focusing too much on one thing and ignoring other. I've been too used to doing things my way so I need someone else to explain it to me why I should try doing something else. Unflexible, you might say. Also, I don't really want to do too many experiment myself since it takes a very long time to do anything substantial in this game so your explanation really helps out big time.

I'm not really worrying about megafactories and whatnot (Since now i limit my factories to have value lesser than 100-150mil if I can), only about tiered factories, though your explanation helped put some perspective in my brain. So maybe a more efficient strategy is to make a mixture of both depending the supply and demand on any nearby sector that the station can reach, and depending on the local raw material availability. So for example, if there is no source of methane nearby, I'd better not include graphene modules to my factory, instead I should make a separate graphene factory somewhere else that is nearby a sector rich in methane. I..... usually just leave it to my trade hubs to circulate wares around for me because I don't really want to have more headache....

Talking about supply chain, how do you guys usually set up your trade hubs? I tend to build like 3 kind of trade hubs in one sector (high tech trade hub, tier 1 trade hub and mineral hub), with factories built in the same sector as the hubs (The trade hub can only buy from my own factories and can sell to anyone. My factories are set to buy and sell only to my own faction), and I set these for every 3 sectors away so they can circulate wares between each other very easily. The reason for differing trade hub is that, when I just started making up a supply chain of trade hubs and constructed just one trade station that handles everything, the manager only had their focus on wares that had higher value so cheaper wares usually got stuck on one trade station and never gotten circulated around. on my every game so far supply chain haven't be that big of an issue by using these setup, but the amount of ship needed for my setup is ridiculously large that I'm curious if there is a more efficient way of doing it.

Oddible is right. This is a sandbox game and there's really no wrong way if you're having fun and it works for you. I learned one way of making things happen and then 4.1 was released and I had to learn it all over again. No biggie.

To answer your trade hub question...

--MINING HUBS--
I never run miners as actual miners on my manufacturing stations. Managers get to 5 stars quickly and the new AI has miners flying all over the stinking universe. It's not efficient at all.

For high demand raw mats like ore I build a mining station just for that resource. if there's 100% sunlight or above I build energy cells on the same station for guaranteed profit. It will make sense in a moment.

I build:
1. A station for ore
2. A station for ice
3. A station for silicon
4. A station for all 3 gasses

Gas fills quickly and ores tend to be in higher demand which explains the split above. I don't recommend putting multiple solids in the same station. The AI tends to choke on it even after v4.1.

Each station has its own dedicated fleet of miners to keep the station full. Each station has its own fleet of traders as well. Once my economy is established I prefer large ships for trading and a combination of medium and large ships for mining.

Mining is a fantastic income early game so set stations to buy only from you and sell to anyone.

Set your manufacturing hubs to only buy raws from your faction.

If your local economy is draining one of the resources from the mining hub do one or more of the following:
1. Add more miners
2. Add another station in a new mining area to increase supply
3. Create a rule for your station to only sell to your faction

#3 will reduce short-term income from selling raws, but will increase income from selling higher tier goods over time.

If local stations are starving but your mining hub has plenty of resources do one of the following:
1. Add traders to the mining hub
2. Add traders to the starving station(s)

Each option has benefits and pitfalls. That's the efficiency you were asking about. You're always rebalancing your network as your game progresses, but this makes it very granular.


--TRADING HUBS--
Trading hubs should never manufacture anything except maybe energy cells. Adding manufacturing to a trade hub tends to muck things up. Give each trading hub an army of traders and select the wares you want.

I tend to put everything I manufacture in the trade list for the hub. Raws, mid-level refined goods, and top tier goods. All of it. Buy only from your faction.

This creates a guaranteed market in case one of my production stations gets full. It creates an elastic trade economy which levels out over time and increases your 'stockpile' because local markets pay attention to prices.

You have an option at this point.

a. Stimulate your own economy

Use this if you suddenly need a mass influx of certain materials. Turn this back off when you're ready to focus on profit again.

Set desired manufacturing stations to only purchase and sell from your own faction. This eliminates all profits and costs for individual stations but guarantees your faction first priority direct from the manufacturer. Your trade hubs become profit centers, but also middle-men for other factions meaning trade hubs will sell materials at a much higher margin without direct interaction from you.

If you REALLY need to stockpile then sent trade hubs to only sell to your faction as well. Sacrifice profit for internal growth. This should be done on an item-by-item basis.


b. Expansion of your trade network

Use this to grow and diversify your empire. You'll need to expand internally to make this viable.

Drop new trade hubs 2-3 sectors out from your current space and trade the same materials as the original trade hub. This will extend your economic reach, but it will put strain on your manufacturing at the same time.

With a strong enough core manufacturing hub you can start dropping additional economy building stations near the new hub. Now your hubs will supplement each other and reduce the chance of materials running dry.

Build shipyards. Conquer sectors. Profit.



Example of Item B:
I have mining and manufacturing hubs set up in Segaris, Asteroid Belt, and Black Hole Sun.

A single trade hub in The Void connects the entire network to flatten the economy from the 3 main sectors. Dozens of large traders make it happen.

Trade hubs spaced every 2 sectors around the highway ring distribute goods to all factions. I'm friendly to all and they all pay me a premium to kill each other.

$$$$$

Pick someone to steamroll and crush them. Then steal their sectors and $$$$ again.

[Ariki]

Originally posted by Cowardly Camper:

I've always found the biggest problem to be the miners. I build 1 mining station per type of mineral the station needs, though you can probably get away with a station having one ore and one gas. This keep the miners from going full stupid and filling their hold with 3 different mineral types and delivering a tiny shipment each run. This also helps get minerals to a farther away station.

Originally posted by Pvt. Stash:

--MINING HUBS--
I never run miners as actual miners on my manufacturing stations. Managers get to 5 stars quickly and the new AI has miners flying all over the stinking universe. It's not efficient at all.

For high demand raw mats like ore I build a mining station just for that resource. if there's 100% sunlight or above I build energy cells on the same station for guaranteed profit. It will make sense in a moment.

I build:
1. A station for ore
2. A station for ice
3. A station for silicon
4. A station for all 3 gasses

Gas fills quickly and ores tend to be in higher demand which explains the split above. I don't recommend putting multiple solids in the same station. The AI tends to choke on it even after v4.1.

Each station has its own dedicated fleet of miners to keep the station full. Each station has its own fleet of traders as well. Once my economy is established I prefer large ships for trading and a combination of medium and large ships for mining.

I will try your suggestion and make some mini-mining station over the resource point. it seems to be more efficient than my current setup.

Originally posted by Pvt. Stash:

Trading hubs should never manufacture anything except maybe energy cells. Adding manufacturing to a trade hub tends to muck things up. Give each trading hub an army of traders and select the wares you want.

I tend to put everything I manufacture in the trade list for the hub. Raws, mid-level refined goods, and top tier goods. All of it. Buy only from your faction.

This creates a guaranteed market in case one of my production stations gets full. It creates an elastic trade economy which levels out over time and increases your 'stockpile' because local markets pay attention to prices.

You have an option at this point.

a. Stimulate your own economy

Use this if you suddenly need a mass influx of certain materials. Turn this back off when you're ready to focus on profit again.

Set desired manufacturing stations to only purchase and sell from your own faction. This eliminates all profits and costs for individual stations but guarantees your faction first priority direct from the manufacturer. Your trade hubs become profit centers, but also middle-men for other factions meaning trade hubs will sell materials at a much higher margin without direct interaction from you.

If you REALLY need to stockpile then sent trade hubs to only sell to your faction as well. Sacrifice profit for internal growth. This should be done on an item-by-item basis.


b. Expansion of your trade network

Use this to grow and diversify your empire. You'll need to expand internally to make this viable.

Drop new trade hubs 2-3 sectors out from your current space and trade the same materials as the original trade hub. This will extend your economic reach, but it will put strain on your manufacturing at the same time.

1 trade hub for each and every wares? Won't the manager muck things up and only prioritize wares which has high value and ignore everything else? I had the frustration on my early game that my manager seems to ignore certain cheap wares until the storage of said wares became full and the circulation of it screeches into a halt... and he just seemed to be content to not do the exact things I told him to do and ignore it completely? Perhaps I was doing it wrong..? How big do you usually make your trade hub to be? Mine usually asks me to provide it with a pretty big sum of cash amounted between 150m to 250m... Which is a little bit ridiculous now that I think about it. It also bleeds me dry because I got like more than 20 trade hubs going in my current game at the time. also a trade hub for every 2 sectors? damn, you're even more hardcore than me, here I thought spacing it every 3 sectors is just too much. I thought I shoulda do it every 4 to 5 sectors or something.. I'll stick with three. thanks

[Pvt. Stash]

Originally posted by Ariki:

*snip*

1 trade hub for each and every wares? Won't the manager muck things up and only prioritize wares which has high value and ignore everything else? I had the frustration on my early game that my manager seems to ignore certain cheap wares until the storage of said wares became full and the circulation of it screeches into a halt... and he just seemed to be content to not do the exact things I told him to do and ignore it completely? Perhaps I was doing it wrong..? How big do you usually make your trade hub to be? Mine usually asks me to provide it with a pretty big sum of cash amounted between 150m to 250m... Which is a little bit ridiculous now that I think about it. It also bleeds me dry because I got like more than 20 trade hubs going in my current game at the time. also a trade hub for every 2 sectors? damn, you're even more hardcore than me, here I thought spacing it every 3 sectors is just too much. I thought I shoulda do it every 4 to 5 sectors or something.. I'll stick with three. thanks

Nope. Do one big trade hub for everything you want to stockpile and / or sell. Then assign it a bunch of traders, set only to buy from your faction, and that's it. The manager will do the rest of the work for you.

The operating costs of a station are directly tied to the amount of storage capacity on the station itself. If you build a ton of large storage containers the manager will have a huge operating budget.

The manager will still trade as long as they have a few million in the bank. They may not feed out profits to you until they're above the operating budget, though. A single large container of each type should be fine in early game. That should manage cost for you.

My economy is pretty well established at the moment, so my default trading hub station template is this:
- 2 Terran Hex Piers
- 4 4x10 Terran Docks
- 3 of each type of large storage

You could start with:
- 1 E-Pier
- 1 3x6 or 4x10 Dock (depending on your faction)
- 1 of each large storage

[Deverydoo]

Granted this is personal preference and not caring about time optimization.

I've been spending my time scanning (stealing) blueprints and just adding one of each to my PHQ. I need to make 10 L Habitats (500 workers each) now to support the 5,000 worker pool needed.

I'm having enough trouble managing my fleets and the billion alerts that pop through. I only have 3-4 traders yet they alert me to what feels like every 45 seconds.

There was a really convenient button "rearrange station" that reorganized my disastrous station build. This also forces ALL modules to be rebuilt and could in itself take hours to complete. use with caution.

You will also need to worry about docking bays. 3 large and a series of s/m just won't cut it anymore.

The unintended bonus was suddenly I had 40 million credits in my station account without even realizing I was making money. I was scraping to get 3-4 million to keep the traders operational. I'm perpetually poor because I don't focus on money making tasks unless it is Xenon cap ship wrecking. So I let traders and stations make the cash for me.

[Oddible]

The one thing I build in every station is solar panels. No sense in transporting them unless you're in Terran space. As far as trade stations or warehouse stations, I have them all about 4 jumps from each other so experienced managers can move stuff between them.

[Auto]

Originally posted by Ariki:

that's not my question at all. I'm questioning whether it is more efficient to have your station to be self sufficient, or whether I should divide them between tiers. supposedly I got a fixed amount of station modules that i want to build and are shared between two stations (18 Hull Parts, 4 energy cells, 2 graphene, 10 refined metals), is it better to make two stations which produce hull plates self sufficiently (9 hull parts, 2 energy cells, 1 graphene, and 5 refined metals for each station), versus two stations that have different tiers between them (one station composed of 18 hull parts and the other one using the rest).

Without sounding obnoxious, I have 14 billion in cash and over 40 billion in assets. I have about a dozen stations, all my stations are self sufficient. I have 4 Ship building stations which are massive and entirely self sufficient except for requiring the base resources such as silicon, ore etc. Its these stations I can make a fortune from. In fact most of the time I don't even sell ships from these now. I have the cash and if I open them up to other races my resources get depleted so i cant produce ships I want. I just open them up to which ever faction I want to strengthen and then close it off again. yes it takes a long time to build them, but that's what SETA is for. Once you have one in place there's no looking back.

Edit, The only resources I buy in on most of my stations are the medical supplies and food for station residents. Some of my other stations though are dedicated to mass producing food and medical supplies and with traders to distribute. I still don't seem to get enough distributed though.

[Ariki]

Originally posted by AutoMATTic:

Without sounding obnoxious, I have 14 billion in cash and over 40 billion in assets. I have about a dozen stations, all my stations are self sufficient. I have 4 Ship building stations which are massive and entirely self sufficient except for requiring the base resources such as silicon, ore etc. Its these stations I can make a fortune from. In fact most of the time I don't even sell ships from these now. I have the cash and if I open them up to other races my resources get depleted so i cant produce ships I want. I just open them up to which ever faction I want to strengthen and then close it off again. yes it takes a long time to build them, but that's what SETA is for. Once you have one in place there's no looking back.

I am 100% against using SETA for personal reason. in fact, I only ever used it twice and that was because I got no other choice If I want to play the game at all. I've read that all-in-one megastations bleeds your CPU power dry, that's why I am choosing to not use it for my game if at all... In fact, with 23 billion assets I am already lagging too much already (my laptop is not exactly a potato, but not beefy either. Maybe closer to sausage roll a or a fried chicken, and that's with me being generous), reason why I'm looking for efficiency for my game. Currently I'm scrapping some stations that I deem to big and constructing some newer but smaller ones, also I've only just beginning to expand to the terran space (Never got the time to play when the new DLC is out. also terran shipyards too Op, I've just ordered 40 L miner twice in a row and they still can still construct more ships without breaking even a single sweat), Also I'm gonna try to cut down the number of trade hubs I've owned around the map. I swear, I've made so many mistakes that I'm not sure if I should scrap my current save and do a new one from scratch or if I should just try to salvage it however I can.