How many worker hubs do I need?

[The CMART]

Does anyone know how to determine if the number of workers that I have in a given area are enough to support the needs of the industry in that area, or there are too many or too few workers there? I am having serious problems with my workers not supplying priorities buildings with their required raw materials, in spite of the fact that I have huge surpluses of said raw materials. I think I may not have enough workers. In the game Surviving Mars, the drone hubs will tell you if the workload that they have is larger than what their workforce of drones is capable of supporting. Is there something like that here as well?

[Jan]

There is an overlay for it but it is not very helpful. Click on the hubs and check the load there. Not every red sector in the traffic overlay is really overloaded. Better roads and chains of worker hubs will help.

[BobthenotsoGreat]

If it helps, think in triangles. Three mines / producers with one hub in between should work fine. But you also need like a transit line that passes by for forwarding the goods on.

If you level the building, then add more as needed. The busy the area the more you need but just put them closer together.

[mreed2]

There is no hard and fast rule -- as a very, very, general rule of thumb, 1 drone hub per other building seems to work reasonably well to me, but it isn't simply a matter of placing X drone hubs somewhere on the map: you need to put them where the bottlenecks are occurring, and identifying bottlenecks isn't an easy task in this game.

[Dai]

Originally posted by mreed2:

There is no hard and fast rule -- as a very, very, general rule of thumb, 1 drone hub per other building seems to work reasonably well to me, but it isn't simply a matter of placing X drone hubs somewhere on the map: you need to put them where the bottlenecks are occurring, and identifying bottlenecks isn't an easy task in this game.

After my third restart i went with mreed2's suggestion. It helped pretty well since it dramatically speed things up in comparison of my thumblestumbling earlier attempts....however it gets pretty cramped pretty fast in the heart of my colony. When I am finally able to plop down hyperloops I have to seriously consider what to raze in the centre to have space for two hyperloops and 2-ish additional worker hubs to support them. Also the ressource cost of that many hubs and drones is .... staggering....

What I would really REAALLY like is a mid-to-end-game tech where you can improve your hubs to have one more drone slot. Make it expensive in research and upgrade cost so it isn't viable to mass-spamming them but to put them down on your .... say 10 most important hubs so you can have a bit of decreased burden on your logistics. Not to get people lazy in colony planning but to at least partially take of the edge of serious bottlenecks...basically the same method you use with best roads. You don't build them everywhere but only where it matters....

[mreed2]

My recommendation for the Hyperloop era is to abandon the original base center altogether, and build new manufacturing centers (one per good) outside the center. Obviously, you can't do that immediately, but you can build the new factories and hyperloops first, wait for construction to complete, then scrap the old buildings.

Eventually, you can (if you wish) clear out all the extra drone hubs and junk left in the original base center, and perhaps build something new there (it would be a good place for space elevators, for example).

I'm very ambivalent about adding the option of a second (or more) worker drones to a single drone hub. My concern is that players would try to use this option to build far to build far fewer drone hubs than they currently are, and that's exactly the wrong message for the developers to be sending the player base. One drone hub with 2 drones will, at best, perform no worse than 2 drone hubs -- and, 90% of the time, will perform worse.

Its up to the developers, but if it were up to me, I'd reluctantly have to reject multiple drones per drone hub.

[BobthenotsoGreat]

@Dai - With hyperloops, move the production to them rather then the other way round.

Eventually you want loops connecting production with mines filtering in. Its your map.

I like the suggestion of adding spaceports in the abondoned (mined out) starter area but I put spaceports where the goods they will need are. So heavy on carbon, a spaceport for space elevator production etc. You can always use them for unlocks or colonists if you need them for a time.

[Bmorekareful]

im doing 1 worker hub for every 3 buildings

[The CMART]

Originally posted by mreed2:

There is no hard and fast rule -- as a very, very, general rule of thumb, 1 drone hub per other building seems to work reasonably well to me, but it isn't simply a matter of placing X drone hubs somewhere on the map: you need to put them where the bottlenecks are occurring, and identifying bottlenecks isn't an easy task in this game.

Wow, thanks for that information. That means I have built far too few worker hubs. I have maybe a 1 to 8 ratio for buildings to hubs. 1 to 1 means I am going to have to build a huge number of hubs very fast.

[The CMART]

Originally posted by Jan:

There is an overlay for it but it is not very helpful. Click on the hubs and check the load there. Not every red sector in the traffic overlay is really overloaded. Better roads and chains of worker hubs will help.

How do I check the load on a specific hub?

[The CMART]

Originally posted by BobthenotsoGreat:

If it helps, think in triangles. Three mines / producers with one hub in between should work fine. But you also need like a transit line that passes by for forwarding the goods on.

If you level the building, then add more as needed. The busy the area the more you need but just put them closer together.

That means I need a 3 to 1 ratio of buildings to hubs? I have about a 1 to 8 ratio right now. I will have to cancel many planned buildings and build many more worker hubs. My base is huge now, so I will probably have to start over. This was a huge oversight on the part of the game designers.

[BobthenotsoGreat]

1 to 3 should cope but it does depend what level. Both the level you play and the level of the buildings.

So easy output is 7 days. Medium it's 10 and aspera it's 11. Then you have building levels that double speeds so. Then consider what they service. A steel factory needs 3 inputs and an output but a mine only has an output. So adjust (using F1) for particular areas.

Also when placing hubs try to get good connectivity. So it has more routing options to help out. And avoid craters where you can. It's better to place 3 hubs that can weave through a canyon then place 2 that go straight up and down it.

[mreed2]

Originally posted by The CMART:

Originally posted by BobthenotsoGreat:

If it helps, think in triangles. Three mines / producers with one hub in between should work fine. But you also need like a transit line that passes by for forwarding the goods on.

If you level the building, then add more as needed. The busy the area the more you need but just put them closer together.

That means I need a 3 to 1 ratio of buildings to hubs? I have about a 1 to 8 ratio right now. I will have to cancel many planned buildings and build many more worker hubs. My base is huge now, so I will probably have to start over. This was a huge oversight on the part of the game designers.

You can probably get buy by just pausing (turning off) the non-drone hub production and / or placing the priority flag on the new drone hubs -- either method should allow you to recover.

As far as an oversight by the developers... Ehhh... Maybe? I agree that the tutorial should have put far, far, far more emphasis on building drone hubs -- after all, you can complete the tutorial without building even a single drone hub! However, I don't think the developers should have added an explicit "You need to have a 1:3 drone hub / other buildings ratio for your economy to work" message in the game.

Maybe a warning attached to the 8x and 16x speed, along the lines of "I should only use this speed when waiting for a terraforming stage to complete -- if I need to use these speeds to complete construction then something is wrong with the base"? The high speed multiplier allows you to mask inefficient logistics for quite some time, and that leads to the kind of problems that you are experiencing.