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PaperclipPerfector
6d ago
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Notes -
Album that I reference below: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fOO5Lneer9W4UiT9pn9bKf2dvob_rKjN?usp=sharing
(1) On Vulcanus, a space platform foundation literally costs about 1 calcite without any modules.
20 steel + 20 wire = 400 molten iron + 17 molten copper = 1.1 calcite
The build in the album could make my whole post game fleet of 2 freighters and high speed delivery ship, a personal cruiser and 2 legendary asteroid farms every 6 hours. If you want more than that it is tileable up to 8 times with no changes, a minor belt tweak would let you go to 16.
The rocket costs are about .2 calcite and 15 coal per platform delivered to orbit with no productivity on anything. It is a fair bit of processing sure, but not that much. To keep up with the platform build you need 1 lds foundry, 2 em plant for each circuit type and 5 rocket fuel assemblers. Without modules. Or beacons.
(2) The ice platform build generates 0.5 platform per second and takes a bit less than 180 platforms to make, so it takes about 9 minutes to self replicate. After an hour of that you'll already be getting 64 platforms per second and probably have trouble building the platform factory fast enough.
(3) I generated a Fulgora and dropped some 100x100 squares of belts. I think that is what Nailus (a popular factorio streamer) uses but I could be wrong. My train network is 64x64 tiles because I think 100 is way too large. Big square patches aren't incredibly common, but they definitely aren't rare. Fulgora does really force you to use a lot of bots or trains though.
(4) Next is a demo of a Gleba main bus style base. Produces 180spm at 98% freshness and can trivially scale until your mash fills a green belt with stack inserters (about 3600 spm). Obviously needs some more production sections for rocket parts if you don't want to import them. No circuits needed just inserter filters.
I think more could've been done to distinguish them from biters, but there is a a lot of little differences that again aren't very well communicated. Only farms produce spores, and the pentapods give no fucks about anything else you place, so your base can largely co-mingle with them while you heavily defend your farms. Also traditional pollution is free so power and production can be dirty; bring out those steel furnaces and oil refineries. Their expansion parties are always wrigglers and will only move to wetlands so you can wall with very light defenses or landfill them away from your agri towers (a lot of wetlands are entirely surrounded by highlands which don't even need that much landfill to give you free fruit forever with no defenses). Stompers will get lost if they have to travel far enough to reach artillery (strafers too but that is very late game), so artillery outposts need suprisingly little defenses once established. The enemy types are much more varied than the biters/spitters which makes the new turret prioritization much more impactful.
(5) Re Aquilo: I dunno. I guess direct insertion and beacons? I used fission which is probably about the same size as heating towers per watt, but only made like 40MW. If you have a place for things to buffer you can also babysit your other 4 bases or do some victory ship design while you wait for platforms to accumulate.
Re Quality I was more trying to communicate that I think such a system would necessarily be too complex to teach the player in a satisfying way. I agree it is kinda jank, but it also leads to some interesting decisions/math about where in the production chain to upgrade quality, which recipes to use, where to trash materials to simplify logistics and how many machines need to be processing each quality tier. I guess it is a particularly bad fit for main bus style bases because of the explosion of distinct items. Might be why you are feeling it particularly acutely.
Thanks for the pics, I think that they have clarified a couple of things that helped me realize where the difference in our experience is coming from.
I didn't realize you could just have inserters grab off the end of a belt to put into a heating tower like your build is. I figured you would need to split off spoilage so as to not starve the machines along the belt, but forgot that machines which come first on the belt will get served first so you don't need to worry about "what if the heating tower consumes too much".
Your Aquilo build makes a lot of use of modules and beacons, whereas I never plan a build using such. I do the math on how many buildings are needed without any additions, and only then start using modules or beacons to tweak results. That explains the vast difference in how much space we would need for two equivalent science factories.
As far as your points about Vulcanus and Fulgora go, I'll be honest I have never seen a Fulgora island as large as some of those which you were pointing out. Furthermore I build ships on Nauvis, not Vulcanus (cause Vulcanus has asteroids), so I definitely still don't think of ship size as being free. But it's true that if you use Vulcanus for parts the cost calculus changes significantly.
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