City block enjoyers, at what point do you city block?

[Chuck]

Im wanting to start a new factory, before making it to aquilo. My other planet factories are pretty bad and i would have to go to each of them and fix them up and do more work there, and its pretty tedious and i guess im kinda just burning out of it. I want to try to make a city block factory.

I am a main bus enjoyer, and I think I have about figured out all there is to know about the main bus, and ive also made a few main bus factories before and i kind of want to try the city block design.

So that leads to my question. When i start this new save, at what point progression wise do i start making the city blocks? With a main bus its easy, as soon as you automate your conveyor belts you can start getting ridiculous, but I know with city block I would need rails and rail signals, but would i wait to get drones too? And how would i handle progressing to that point, main bus starter base or just spaghetti it until it works?

[Red]

I play grid bases. The only two things that really align to blocks in my base are solar panels and perimeter defenses, everything else is just kinda stamped in the middle of a block.

If you align your roboport BP to absolute coordinates, you can start a grid base as soon as you launch the game.

Put the block blueprint down, put your smelting line in the middle. Remove the BP (or leave it) This approach makes removing and rearranging things much easier later.

In terms of actually switching to localized blocks - after a rocket silo, when I start scaling up, because I do not want to keep adding more belts, or build buses.
Need more smelting - Add a smelting train station, and a few stackers. Need more chips - Add a chip making train station, and a few stackers, and then it works much like Dyson Sphere. Just add more stations, when you need them.

EDIT: Space age has changed this approach a bit, since rocket silo is an early tech. What I meant to say is probably after all the Nauvis science packs are taken care of, you have a mall, and can just leave the jank starter factory in place, until new specialized blocks are built somewhere else, and you can delete the entire starter base.

[DaMatth]

i use a 100x100 city block from nilaus. with full power, circuit and bot coverage. i use a blueprint right when i begin a new game so that i can "orient" myself where i'll be going from that. more like giving me a "boundary" or "grid" to know where i will start the "big factory" (when i'm in the early stage like "starter base"). then i delete my entire starter base with bots and move to the city block one.

[brian_va]

I don't do city blocks but I do train based megabases, so there's enough overlap that hopefully you'll get something out of this.

I would hold off until you get bots, and really a spidertron building army would be better. Obviously you'll need a ton of rails, so you'll probably want to start production of those and signals and all the other stuff early and build up a bit of a stockpile. Obviously you can do it all by hand, but bots make it much easier.

From there the build out would be basically like starting a new factory, just with the tech and materials needed at hand. Maybe start with a couple mining and smelting setups, then maybe move to circuit production, oil refinement and then towards your science and it's intermediaries. That's my general progression for a megabases anyways.

[Anomoly2012]

city block just lets you keep things ordered... there is no wrong or right way to play it..

Normally when i start a fresh map i place a 3x3 box around where i want my starting area to be.. (around the crashed ship) and then slowly build out from there.. keep the ghosts down as they are usually large poles / train tracks / robo ports or any combination of such..

then its just a slow growth... If you want you can add me and we can get together for assistance... as there may be questions as you go that waiting for a reply may not be worth it..

I have books i can share as well as a couple different city block style maps i can show you that are at various stages.. most are mid game maps but i may have 1 that is late game..

[Ghevd]

Going by Nilaus' masterclass on the subject I'd say you can start planning as early as you get large power poles.

Obviously you're going want the help of bots to build a base of such magnitude but you need some sort of way to measure each block and the large power poles are probably the best way to go as everything needs power.

Something to take into consideration is no cliff explosives on Navius so that is a hurdle that needs to be overcome as well.

I want to try it one of these runs myself. Good luck and have fun.

[Maltar Draco]

I do not start city blocks until I have concrete and space to build such. You are better setting up a temporary starter base and switching to city blocks when you meet the following criteria.

1) You have enough space.
2) You have enough tiles to or other infrastructure to mark your base (roboports, rails etc)
3) You have required research for the city blocks to work, this is necessary if you use a mod like Transport Drones by Klonan which was made with this play-style in mind.

A properly planned spaghetti base shall always be more space-efficient, the reason to use city blocks is for expandability which is helpful if you play on an unfamiliar modpack.

[MrGergoth]

Oh, I'm just now rebuilding the entire base into city blocks (no-drones-concept), its semi-functional atm and still have main base but will be deleted later, some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ screenshotes for inspiration
https://imgur.com/a/f2QbM1i
1) You really need construction bots to be able to remove no needed buildings to make a complete replacement of your base. This is not necessary, but it will help a lot when it comes time to demolish your base.
2) If you are on a new game - you can mark territory or blocks since start with concrete to prevent building on city block borders, that will help on rebuilding (you won't have to run rails (or borders, whatever you use) over all your buildings)
3) Clear as much territory as possible before building and block every paths to ur base from biters. Naivis is pack of islands, there always a lot of weak points that easy to defence.
4) If you are playing with quality mod, and your blocks are independent (i.e. drones do not overlap or are not used at all) - i recommend not to start building blocks until you get the blue mech armor (fulgora). Copying and pasting blocks requires a lot of drone energy, and before this you may need a lot of planning.
5) Never connect your blocks to the system immediately after installing the last block element. Save and double check the block's functionality. Maybe I'm stupid, but personally, i constantly made mistakes when planning - wrong ratios, wrong number of factories, wrong resource output paths (although, i don't use drones, so mistakes are easer here with 250 factories per block that need different outputs and may have quality output items).
6) Leave space for design. Production is good, but adding concrete and simple decorations make it beauty also. As example, i always keep space between train stations. Simple concrete line between two refined concrete space makes train stations not looks so simple.

[captainamaziiing]

The MOST important thing when starting your layout is making sure the rail is centered, as it is 2 blocks wide and if you plop your layout on the 2nd tile it will never line up.

I prefer to base my grid on the size of the roboport grid, (64 tiles?), not the 100 tile Nilaus grid. I have a blueprint called 'starter with rail', which is just stone block floor tiles at the corners, and in the center, with two bits of rail so it plops correctly.

So to answer your question, I plop it as soon as I have a quick look around and I try to get my water and resource nodes somewhat aligned. It doesn't require the stone blocks, just the ghost on the ground is enough to keep everything in order until I can get some real concrete production going.

I have another blueprint, 'starter, no rail', that is just the floor tiles. Once the first one is plopped, I just line up the corners and spam the map everywhere I go. Easy peasy.