What to do with first few epic buildings? (i.e. when do you upgrade your lines with quality machines?)

[Jeffreyac]

Hi folks,

I'm just a casual player, not a megabaser type - my little factory does like 120 science per minute, and I'm ok with that, I just like playing with my digital Lego...

I've been dabbling in quality for a bit to get things like rare personal equipment, and a few other things, and recently unlocked epic level. One of the things I was doing to generate a few extra epic holmium plates was using extra rare mats to make rare EM plants, then recycling in a max-quality-module recycler trying for epic parts.

I also threw quality modules in the EM plant making the rare EM plants, so I ended up with a handful of epic EM plants - and I find I'm kind of at a loss what to do with them.

So - smaller question, if you had just a few epic EM plants, is there a place to put them where they'd have the largest impact?

Bigger question - once you start getting just a few epic machines, is it worth trying to put them in to your lines, or do you wait until you can upgrade a whole line to a better quality level (to keep ratios, etc, intact)?

[Chindraba]

Wow. There's probably dozens of approaches.
I'm going to take a stab at one which might fit with your play style.
As you get an epic EM, or any improved quality of machine, just replace the first one in any line of them. Place it first so it gets first pick of the ingredients. Then, since it's producing more than the one which was there, deconstruct from the end of the line until the throughput of the line is back to 'normal'. Then the deconstructed stuff, machines, inserters, etc., can be returned to get their own round of upcycling. Or, just used to make the next part of the factory you're working on. You won't have to redesign any of the stuff built, just chop off the end.

Once you have reduced all the lines in one factory in this way, you could redesign that entire factory to use less space. If you're going to take quality all the way to legendary, however, you could keep things at the new level and just repeat the process as even better machines become available. Either way you're putting the new and improved things to work much sooner than waiting until you have enough to redesign the whole thing and replace it. Just make each little piece a little bit better in tiny bites.

[Bandit]

So if we were just to take the example of a better EM plant we know that a better quality only means that the crafting speed is faster. This can be achieved simply by building more normal quality EM plants as the more plants you have crafting then the more products per second you make without even having to bother with quality.

So really the only advantage is a smaller footprint where this especially shines is when designing a tight blueprint using beacons and machines. So take any product for arguments sake circuits we can look at how many wires we need per second. If you cannot reach the speed required with speed modules a higher quality machine will of course produce more wires per second thanks to the faster crafting speed.

[Liro Raériyo]

Well the other benefit is also reduced energy costs, since higher quality buildings run on the exact same power they get more done with the same power requirement, but if you only need a certain amount of something being made that can instead translate to reduced power needs.

Fulgora in particular has a bit more practical application of quality since you cant just place block after block of factory, space is a premium their, even after you get foundations unlocked those are fairly expensive and take time to manufacture at a volume that makes an impact.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Liro Raériyo:

Well the other benefit is also reduced energy costs, since higher quality buildings run on the exact same power they get more done with the same power requirement, but if you only need a certain amount of something being made that can instead translate to reduced power needs.

This is the main benefit actually. It allows you to indiscriminately stuff buildings like EM-plants that have high power draw, full of productivity modules. And you'll need less speed modules to compensate for the speed loss, allowing you to compensate the power consumption increase via efficiency beacons instead.

[Hurkyl]

If you're building a production line and you need two buildings making something but, darn it, you would need 2.1 to actually get full throughput... make one of them epic so that it runs faster.

This is one of the more convenient ways to take advantage of having a handful of buildings that are a little more quality than the rest.