Is there any benefit to more factory slots other than less micromanagement?

[becephalus]

Certainly the extra staff give you a higher rate of improvement, but this seems split over the slots, so the extra slots don't seem to mean much, other than less need to be switching things up. Or is it more complicated than that?

[morpheus]

in ERS where you are done developing and therefore needing improvements somewhere around half season its useless other than the unlocks for the buildings.

Right now im quite happy with my level 3 fab.
I can improve all 3 critical parts for both cars at, and, since the workers per slot is constant, even in, the same time as the level 1/2 with 2/4 parts.

Despite that fab they where busy nearly all year round till the last race last season....

[Fritz]

Although the number of staff per slot is the same (5 staff/slot) if you always fill every slot, it can be considerably faster if you have limited time to upgrade a couple things. For example, before race 1 you definitely want to get engines and gearbox out of that 40-50% range but it's nearly impossible to get all 4 parts (2 for each car) to 70% safe zone in 10-20 days. So instead of using every slot and fixing those 4 parts to 60%, you can fit 2 and get them to 75% or you can fit one and get it to 90%. In essence you have a lot more options compared to being limited to 2 slots with 10 staff.

[becephalus]

Originally posted by Fritz:

Although the number of staff per slot is the same (5 staff/slot) if you always fill every slot, it can be considerably faster if you have limited time to upgrade a couple things. For example, before race 1 you definitely want to get engines and gearbox out of that 40-50% range but it's nearly impossible to get all 4 parts (2 for each car) to 70% safe zone in 10-20 days. So instead of using every slot and fixing those 4 parts to 60%, you can fit 2 and get them to 75% or you can fit one and get it to 90%. In essence you have a lot more options compared to being limited to 2 slots with 10 staff.

Well maybe I will do some tests, but to my eye it looks like this is not actually true and there is no difference between two slots for 10 days or 4 slots for 20. If there really is some extra bonus PER SLOT, that would be huge and areason to always keep them all full.

[Person012345]

Originally posted by becephalus:

Originally posted by Fritz:

Although the number of staff per slot is the same (5 staff/slot) if you always fill every slot, it can be considerably faster if you have limited time to upgrade a couple things. For example, before race 1 you definitely want to get engines and gearbox out of that 40-50% range but it's nearly impossible to get all 4 parts (2 for each car) to 70% safe zone in 10-20 days. So instead of using every slot and fixing those 4 parts to 60%, you can fit 2 and get them to 75% or you can fit one and get it to 90%. In essence you have a lot more options compared to being limited to 2 slots with 10 staff.

Well maybe I will do some tests, but to my eye it looks like this is not actually true and there is no difference between two slots for 10 days or 4 slots for 20. If there really is some extra bonus PER SLOT, that would be huge and areason to always keep them all full.

What are you talking about. If you DON'T keep them full then each individual part will increase more quickly, and he's saying this gives you tactical options. If you keep them all full then you are improving more parts.

Getting more slots in and of itself doesn't "do" anything except reduce micro, but the extra staff that it gives you allows you to improve things more quickly overall, whether you spread the improvement out over more slot (and thus more parts for the same speed of improvement to each) or the same number of slots you were using before (so that each individual part improves more quickly).

[Fritz]

Essentially level 1 factory means you either have 10 staff/slot (only working on 1/2 thing) or 5 staff/slot (have both 2/2 slots filled). Level 2 factory gives you 10 more staff and 2 more slots. Now your options are 20 staff/slot (1/4 slots filled), 10 staff/slot (working on 2/4), 6.6 staff/slot (3/4 parts), and finally 5 staff/slot (4/4 parts).

It's more options. To make it even more clear just compare lvl 1 with lvl 4. The latter gives you 40 staff and 8 slots. So you can work at a rate of anywhere between 40 staff focused on 1 parts, or 20:1, 10:1, etc all the way to finally 5:1. What you're saying is partially correct though, if you're in no hurry then having less staff and less slots just means you have to manually switch parts in/out more frequently whereas with a large number of slots you can just fit 8 parts in and let them slowly tic up to 100%.

[becephalus]

So like I said the only difference with slots is the amount of micro.

That was the fundemental supposition, which he appeared to disagree with.

[Person012345]

Originally posted by becephalus:

So like I said the only difference with slots is the amount of micro.

That was the fundemental supposition, which he appeared to disagree with.

Nobody appeared to disagree. What you're missing is that unlocking slots inherently gives you more staff. More staff makes things faster. It's not the slots that are the draw, although they can be useful, it's the staff. The slots in and of themselves, you are correct, it technically wouldn't matter if you had 2 or 10 if you had the same number of staff and could be botheed to micro properly.

[becephalus]

Originally posted by Person012345:

Originally posted by becephalus:

So like I said the only difference with slots is the amount of micro.

That was the fundemental supposition, which he appeared to disagree with.

Nobody appeared to disagree. What you're missing is that unlocking slots inherently gives you more staff. More staff makes things faster. It's not the slots that are the draw, although they can be useful, it's the staff. The slots in and of themselves, you are correct, it technically wouldn't matter if you had 2 or 10 if you had the same number of staff and could be botheed to micro properly.

I am not missing that at all, read what I wrote.

[Fritz]

No you do seem to misunderstand as I quote your previous post

So like I said the only difference with slots is the amount of micro

This is only partially correct. Having more slots generally mean you can fit 8 parts in and come back a month later and everything is done instead of having to come back every week to swap them out 2 at a time. This is indeed less micro, but that is not the real advantage of a high level factory.

To compare, let's say there's 10 days between preseason testing and the first race. We know engine and gearbox take ages to repair in the pits and so want to avoid an incident with them by fixing their reliability to >70% before race 1. I have a lvl 4 factory and yours is lvl 1. Sure, I have more slots and could put 4 of the most important parts of each car (x2 for total of 8) and each individual part will have fared no better than you repairing 1 part (1x2 for each car) in your 2 slots. Even that is an advantage since I managed to repair total of 8 parts to your 2. But that may not be that helpful in this situation since having 8 parts with 60% reliability still leaves my cars in a risky zone. In this scenario what my real advantage is despite having 8 slots, I can fit just 2 engines in there and have 20 staff working on each individual engine. Meanwhile the best you can do is 10 staff working on 1 engine and leave the other driver out to dry, or 5 staff working on each engine. Come race day, my 2 engines will have gained 2-4x the reliability of your engines (depending if you only repaired 1 or 2 engines the entire time). In other words if 5 staff working on a part adds 1% per day, the best you can do is fix 1 engine +20% or fix both engines +10%. I however can get both engines +40% or if that's not necessary I can get 2 engines and 2 gearboxes +20%.

[Trixi]

the same counts also within the season when developing new parts.

If you have a level 2 factory you can bring a new part every race, with a valueable reliability. with a level 3 factory, you already have some time for improving performance. with a level 4 factory, you can literally try to max out performance on first usage of the part-


but its not really the number of slots, its the number of workers, what counts.

[Ohayoghurt]

The tl;dr answer is that more staff is always a good thing. You can get more stuff done in the same amount of time, and if you don't have every slot filled with a job, you'll speed up progress on the job slots you have filled.