Factory ship module

[Platys51 (OP)]

In my recent games, I run into quite a lot of issues later on deploying habitats. Building mass of small habitats gets out of hand quite fast as you start building 4+ 5M capacity habitats per 5 day increment and ground forces takes a long time to start actually working on producing anything on location. It is great stopgap in times when producing larger habitat takes years using only ground forces, but once it gets to year or less, you spend much more time fortifying than producing habitats.

Unfortunately, given how large habitats get, tugging them ceases to be an option at certain point.

OH Eye of Sol 001  (Eye of Sol class Orbital Habitat)      1 250 394 879 tons       75 010 Crew       532 460.5 BP       TCS 25 007 898    TH 0    EM 0
1 km/s      No Armour       Shields 0-0     HTK 65228      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 1      PPV 0
MSP 0    Max Repair 200 MSP
Habitation Capacity 500 000 000   
Commander    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months   


This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Space Station for construction purposes

30Mt magnetofusion tug is going 268km/s tugging station of this type. Needless to say it ramps up costs quite a lot, especially as high engine % is needed to move it at all.

(the tug design)

30Mt Backbone class Tug      30 000 000 tons       275 220 Crew       1 895 842.9 BP       TCS 600 000    TH 6 880 000    EM 0
11466 km/s      Armour 1-8600       Shields 0-0       HTK 57508      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 1      PPV 0
MSP 39    Max Repair 500.0000 MSP
Tractor Beam     
Commander    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months   

Commercial Magnetic Fusion Drive  EP2000.00 (3440)    Power 6880000.0    Fuel Use 1.33%    Signature 2000.00    Explosion 5%
Fuel Capacity 1 656 856 000 Litres    Range 749.8 billion km (756 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

This leaves player with 3 options.

1, Build large habitats at central location and bite the bullet of high fuel bills and high cost infrastructure + long travel time
2, Use ground units, suffer micro of moving hundreds of them and wait years for them to finish fortifying on each world
3, Micro hundreds of habitats being moved yearly


My suggestion would be adding a ship module that adds a factory worth of production to a planet. If price was suitably high, lets say double or tripple the cost of factory for one, it would be mainly useful in later parts of the game when producing larger stations around sol ceases to be viable and mobile production needs to be set up.

My main wish of this type of thing would be reduction in extreme amount of time or micro alternatives take. Price and size could be suitably sarge to discourage use in early game, but option of mobile construction force that's easy to deploy in lategame would be more than enough incentive to use them.

[nuclearslurpee]

If you need a mobile factory, you can just use ground units with the Construction components. Each CON component is equivalent to 0.05 factories, so a formation of 10x VEH+2xCON would be equivalent to one factory. 30 of these will fit into a 10,000-ton troop transport giving you a nice, portable three "factories" in a box - plus both the transport and vehicles have other uses, so you get all of this while using two flexible units instead of one highly specialized one - all this, and no population needed! Win-win-win!

You do need to transport minerals of course so bring a freighter along to the party.

[Zap0]

...as you start building 4+ 5M capacity habitats per 5 day increment

You and me have quite different definitions of "small" O.o
All a matter of game scale I suppose.

I could see a construction factory component, but unlike maintenance facilities or terraformers they don't have much reason to be in a place without population already present. Also, it seems ground forces may already have them beat? 1 factory costs 127.2 Vendarite instead of 60 Duranium and 60 Neutronium and doesn't require pop. Moving tons of formations may be just as annoying as microing mass station tugging, however.

[nuclearslurpee]

Moving tons of formations may be just as annoying as microing mass station tugging, however.

You can build a formation (or combine formations in the OOB) of any size, so as long as you have a transport for them you can have a 500-factory ground unit formation that gets shuttled around if you want. Once you get out of the early game and start invading planets having 100,000-ton+ transports is pretty normal, and 100,000 tons of VEH+2xCON units is 31.4 factories.

[Platys51 (OP)]

Im using 100 factory equivalent formations of GU. 320kt each. But even those take 100 to move equivalent of 10k factory production. All ground units need to be selected one by one to be moved, then you wait years for them to finish fortifying...

As for when you need production on uninhabited worlds: Mostly in habitat production. Thats why I used it as example. There are few other uses, such as automated mine production or most other stations, really, but only one that's really needed is the habitat one as you often get worlds you cant even inhabit.

[nuclearslurpee]

Im using 100 factory equivalent formations of GU. 320kt each. But even those take 100 to move equivalent of 10k factory production. All ground units need to be selected one by one to be moved, then you wait years for them to finish fortifying...

As for when you need production on uninhabited worlds: Mostly in habitat production. Thats why I used it as example. There are few other uses, such as automated mine production or most other stations, really, but only one that's really needed is the habitat one as you often get worlds you cant even inhabit.

I'm not sure why the fortification matters. As far as I know, if a CON unit is present on a planet, you get their factory-equivalent production added directly to the rest of your factory production (if any) automatically. No need to wait years before you can build anything.

Instead of using 100 single-factory-equivalent formations it's probably easier to use larger formations, e.g. ten 10-factory-equivalent. There's not really any downside to the larger formations, they're easier to manage, and you can break them down or combine them into other sizes as needed so it's not a permanent arrangement. It's not like VB6 where an Engineering Brigade was exactly the same size now and forever, in C# you can break down and reassign elements to formations as much as you want.

[Platys51 (OP)]

I'm not sure why the fortification matters. As far as I know, if a CON unit is present on a planet, you get their factory-equivalent production added directly to the rest of your factory production (if any) automatically. No need to wait years before you can build anything.

They wait until fortifying is finished to start producing anything. They display as if they worked right away, but you notice that nothing gets built until everything is fortified and you reset the game. Not producing while fortifying is intended behaviour, needing to reset and production display being wrong probably not.

nstead of using 100 single-factory-equivalent formations it's probably easier to use larger formations, e.g. ten 10-factory-equivalent. There's not really any downside to the larger formations, they're easier to manage, and you can break them down or combine them into other sizes as needed so it's not a permanent arrangement. It's not like VB6 where an Engineering Brigade was exactly the same size now and forever, in C# you can break down and reassign elements to formations as much as you want.

I use 1000 medium construction vehicles per unit. They need HQ to work, so 320 000t HQ is assigned to each. Of I wanted say, ten times bigger HQ to only transport 10 units to get 10k factory equivalent, I would need 3.2 Mt HQ which would cost me 60k research give or take, as well as making all my 320kt troop transport crafts obsolete and massively reducing number of generals capable of manning these.

[Garfunkel]

Dude, you play such megalomaniacal games! It's funny because your problems are on a completely different level to almost everyone else.

[Droll]

I'm not sure why the fortification matters. As far as I know, if a CON unit is present on a planet, you get their factory-equivalent production added directly to the rest of your factory production (if any) automatically. No need to wait years before you can build anything.

They wait until fortifying is finished to start producing anything. They display as if they worked right away, but you notice that nothing gets built until everything is fortified and you reset the game. Not producing while fortifying is intended behaviour, needing to reset and production display being wrong probably not.

nstead of using 100 single-factory-equivalent formations it's probably easier to use larger formations, e.g. ten 10-factory-equivalent. There's not really any downside to the larger formations, they're easier to manage, and you can break them down or combine them into other sizes as needed so it's not a permanent arrangement. It's not like VB6 where an Engineering Brigade was exactly the same size now and forever, in C# you can break down and reassign elements to formations as much as you want.

I use 1000 medium construction vehicles per unit. They need HQ to work, so 320 000t HQ is assigned to each. Of I wanted say, ten times bigger HQ to only transport 10 units to get 10k factory equivalent, I would need 3.2 Mt HQ which would cost me 60k research give or take, as well as making all my 320kt troop transport crafts obsolete and massively reducing number of generals capable of manning these.

How many years does it take to build one formation of these?

[Gabrote42]

I'm not sure why the fortification matters. As far as I know, if a CON unit is present on a planet, you get their factory-equivalent production added directly to the rest of your factory production (if any) automatically. No need to wait years before you can build anything.

They wait until fortifying is finished to start producing anything. They display as if they worked right away, but you notice that nothing gets built until everything is fortified and you reset the game. Not producing while fortifying is intended behaviour, needing to reset and production display being wrong probably not.

nstead of using 100 single-factory-equivalent formations it's probably easier to use larger formations, e.g. ten 10-factory-equivalent. There's not really any downside to the larger formations, they're easier to manage, and you can break them down or combine them into other sizes as needed so it's not a permanent arrangement. It's not like VB6 where an Engineering Brigade was exactly the same size now and forever, in C# you can break down and reassign elements to formations as much as you want.

I use 1000 medium construction vehicles per unit. They need HQ to work, so 320 000t HQ is assigned to each. Of I wanted say, ten times bigger HQ to only transport 10 units to get 10k factory equivalent, I would need 3.2 Mt HQ which would cost me 60k research give or take, as well as making all my 320kt troop transport crafts obsolete and massively reducing number of generals capable of manning these.

How many years does it take to build one formation of these?

Due to the "4+ 5M tons per C-Cycle" segment I would guess not many.

[Platys51 (OP)]

How many years does it take to build one formation of these?

3 years. Tho its not how ground units work. They build at fixed rate, just more at once the more facilities you have.

I just build 100 smaller 200 vehicle groups and then combine them to 20 finished formations.

My mars is dedicated to producing them.