Author Topic: Use of Industry  (Read 2667 times)

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Offline nightlord84 (OP)

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Use of Industry
« on: September 22, 2011, 02:08:06 AM »
Hello, new player here!

My question is regarding production.  I feel that I know how I want to distribute ordinance and fighter factories to supply my fleets but I'm not sure what I should do with my construction factories.  I know that I'll want to start producing infrastructure, mines, automines, and maybe a PDC.  What I'm not sure about is how much I should be investing in more construction factories and research facilities.  If I could just have a rough idea of what percentage should continuously be invested in expanding my industry and research capabilities at then I should be able to allocate the remaining factories to build what I need.  Anyone have any pointers?
 

Offline orfeusz

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #1 on: September 22, 2011, 04:42:39 AM »
As all things in this huge game it depends. On Your start position, enemies, minerals etc.

For me, basic advice is that if You don't know what to build, build auto-mines.

Research facilities and factories are good, but having too much of them is not a good option, when overpowered research and production can get You bankrupt. They are draining my budget :( If You have strong economy and cash reserves - build them. But when/if You don't then hold for some time.

When i need something special, like PDC or Mass drivers for new colony i place it in the top of the list and make 100% capacity.
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Offline chuckles73

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #2 on: September 22, 2011, 09:38:51 AM »
I do 10-15% CF and 10-30% RL (usually 10 and 20, respectively)
30% automine (or a split between automines and turning mines into automines once minerals start running out on high-pop worlds)
Everything else usually pulls from a pool of the rest, as opposed to pulling any points out of the above percentages.

Your economy really starts kicking into high gear once you have more colonies with high populations and a civilian shipping industry. Get a large colony or two up quickly to get the cash boost and you shouldn't have money issues until you're -really- high on the factory/lab count.

My current game is taking a steady loss at about -60 wealth per 5 day increment, but I started around 60,000 wealth, so I'm not too concerned. If I don't have a balanced economy prior to the 10-15 years down the road where I run out, then I deserve an economic crash.
 

Offline Ashery

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #3 on: September 22, 2011, 09:58:43 AM »
One high priority early on is to expand your military academy so that you can acquire a decent selection of civilian admins and scientists as quickly as possible. A scientist with a 25% bonus will double research speeds in his specialty and an admin with a 20% bonus to factory production will greatly speed up economic expansion.

Another high priority item is the research and construction of the sector command building as that'll provide a fairly substantial boost to production across the board (If I'm recalling correctly, the sector commander provides 30% of their bonuses to every body in the sector).

Other than that, it really depends on your mineral setup. One thing you can do to help in that area is to avoid doing a geosurvey of Earth until you can commission a team with a decent starting skill level (At *least* 120).

Don't worry about producing much infrastructure for colonies as your population produces a significant amount on their own as a trade good. You mainly just need a small amount that you can manually place to trigger your civilians to start transporting it.

The mine/automine question depends heavily upon the success (or lack thereof) of your geosurvey ships. If a planet like Mars has a substantial amount of minerals (with fairly good accessibility), you may be able to get away with producing a substantially smaller number of automines than if you were in the situation that I found myself in in my current game: Mars and Mercury had nothing, Titan had a substantial amount of duranium with modest accessibility but not much else, and I ended up having an incredibly lucky geosurvey team on Venus that turned it into a pretty decent mining colony overall. Still, I ended up with fairly substantial (100 or so at peak) number of automines on asteroids simply because Venus, despite being the best of the smegty options I had, didn't provide me with the quantity of certain resources that I was in desperate need of (Corundium being the biggest).

Building a PDC on your capital is a fairly low priority, so don't worry about that early on. One option once you do, though, is to add a fairly large number of hangers so that you can "mothball" military ships, so to speak, and avoid paying their upkeep. As to how effective that ultimately is, I cannot say for certain, but it's one possibility. However, once you start colonizing, be sure to start construction of a prefab PDC early on (5mil might be a decent point to start) if you'll need the protection rating as it will go incredibly slowly with a single CF.

Orfeusz makes an excellent point re:economy when it comes to overbuilding construction factories and research labs, but should you find yourself with economic room to spare, I'd put those two at a fairly high priority. CF expansion depends heavily on your current and near future mineral production, though. If you find yourself spamming a massive number of financial centers due to a duranium shortage, more CFs probably isn't a terribly wise investment.

I'll disagree with orfeusz re:mass drivers, though. If you're dealing with a mineral shortage, their ability to provide near immediate access to mined resources could be a life saver. Not only would you be better off using your first generation freighters to periodically collect the minerals and use the 300BP per driver for something else when you're not dealing with a shortage, but provided that you're actively expanding the mining colony, your freighter will likely be visiting frequently enough so as to eliminate the need for a mass driver even during shortages.

One advantage of mineral shortages, though, is that it's pretty easy to determine what to build. For the longest time I had a duranium, mercassium, and corundium shortage, so my CF designation was pretty straight forward: Just enough auto/mine and research construction to maintain a stable resource level with the scraps going to whatever pet project I had at the time if I had spare duranium or more financial centers if not.
 

Offline Thiosk

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #4 on: September 22, 2011, 03:51:48 PM »
I place an enormous emphasis on CF construction.  My early game focus consists of the following:

1. BUILD FACTORIES AND MINES
2. KEEP BUILDING FACTORIES AND MINES
3. HEY, ARE YOU DONE BUILDING FACTORIES AND MINES YET?  NO?  KEEP DOING IT

 A key target of my early game is getting one world to 50,000 build construction points (you can see that on the industry tab), and then on to 100k as soon as possible.  This requires a large population.  My early-game ship building generally suffers as a result, since I generally cannot afford to invest population in ships.  I run up about 1000 construction factories at a 50% rate, the rest being mines and "other," and the rest of the empire is devoted to supporting that expansion.

Money is a key thing, though.  Conquering two alien homeworlds in my current game enabled me to really keep the intensity on industrial expansion without worrying about wealth crashes.  Researching improved research and construction rates result in large increases in wealth consumption.  Two boosts to research rate and another tick up on construction rate (i'm in the 36 construction rate and 800ish research rate range) took my 3k  surpluses and wiped them out.  

One trick later on in the game, as you start to experience a crash, is after you've exhausted the minerals on a planet, move in a bunch of factories and just build up financial centers with imported minerals.  This is another advantage to having a lot of factories-- used in this way, otherwise useless worlds become financial powerhouses, and those citizens actually do something worth doing.
« Last Edit: September 22, 2011, 03:55:28 PM by Thiosk »
 

Offline andrea69

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #5 on: September 26, 2011, 09:58:33 PM »

 A key target of my early game is getting one world to 50,000 build construction points (you can see that on the industry tab), and then on to 100k as soon as possible.  This requires a large population.  My early-game ship building generally suffers as a result, since I generally cannot afford to invest population in ships.  I run up about 1000 construction factories at a 50% rate, the rest being mines and "other," and the rest of the empire is devoted to supporting that expansion.


I don't understand this. I am also building 1000 CF, and now reached 907, but my production rate is less than 15000, how can you reach 50000? And also, what kind of homeworld do you have, because I'm already running short of duranium, I mean my factories use duranium more quickly than my mines can support, and I have 500 mines. And corundium will be exhausted on Earth in just a few months.
 

Offline Ashery

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #6 on: September 26, 2011, 10:09:50 PM »
I don't understand this. I am also building 1000 CF, and now reached 907, but my production rate is less than 15000, how can you reach 50000? And also, what kind of homeworld do you have, because I'm already running short of duranium, I mean my factories use duranium more quickly than my mines can support, and I have 500 mines. And corundium will be exhausted on Earth in just a few months.

That's the major flaw to what Thiosk posted: You need to expand while keeping a keen eye on current and near future mineral production. A 50k build rate is useless without the minerals or wealth to utilize it fully.

You can increase your build rate quite dramatically by doing the following: Assigning a civilian admin with a high factory bonus to Earth (Do the same for the sector command as well. The sector commander only applies ~33% of his bonus, but that's still significant) and researching "Construction rate XX BP" under the "Construction/Production" category.

Hell, I won't be expanding past 750 CF's for another couple years and I'm a solid 32 years into a conventional start.
 

Offline andrea69

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #7 on: September 26, 2011, 10:32:07 PM »
Hell, I won't be expanding past 750 CF's for another couple years and I'm a solid 32 years into a conventional start.

I'm beginning to think that's wise. I'm 2114, started 2100, conventional. With 907 CF, I actually must use 10% to build financial centers. And will have a hard time increasing the rate of extraction, considering I have just finished corundium on earth, and it is rare in the whole solar system.
 

Offline Ashery

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #8 on: September 26, 2011, 10:40:37 PM »
Heh, I was periodically putting a majority of my build capacity towards financial centers during the peak of my duranium shortage. Which is not to say that they're useless, either, as my 90 centers provide nearly 3k wealth a year and I was recently running a massive deficit despite their contribution.

How's your scouting going outside of Sol?
 

Offline andrea69

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #9 on: September 27, 2011, 08:45:36 PM »
How's your scouting going outside of Sol?
Outside of Sol?
My research of gravitational survey sensors will end on december 2115, 16 months from now   ;D
Is it too late, for a conventional start?
 

Offline Ashery

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #10 on: September 27, 2011, 09:40:40 PM »
That depends on when you started.

22.5 years into my conventional start I had 29 surveyed systems and 88 known (I have a slightly inflated "known" value due to my technique). I was, however, exploring rather aggressively. That's the only value I can really provide for a baseline as that just happens to be the one screenshot I took of the galaxy map.

Actually, I do have a screenshot from earlier in the game, but the time was only being displayed in my taskbar, which only shows "2nd Janu..."

Really, though, there is no "too late" in this type of game due to the sandbox nature. Unless you're playing with invaders on from the very beginning, you shouldn't have to worry about playing as optimally as possible.
 

Offline andrea69

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #11 on: September 28, 2011, 09:51:06 PM »
That depends on when you started.
22.5 years into my conventional start I had 29 surveyed systems and 88 known
I started 2100, with invaders enabled, and 3 NPC.
I had no PP and SF scientists for a long time, so developing earlier a grav survey ship would have meant investing almost only on exploration.
Just discovering grav survey sensors means 10000 RP, which is a lot, at the beginning. And also developing the first engine was not so fast.
Also, I invested heavily on mines and CF in the first decade, not so much on labs, at least until I realized my industry was growing too much.
 
 

Offline Jacob/Lee

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #12 on: September 28, 2011, 10:14:36 PM »
When I start my game, I immediately throw my whole economy into construction factories, 10-20 academies, automines and research labs. I don't do much other than that, aside from building sector command eventually along with a few others. I've not a use for fighter factories nor more ordnance factories yet, so I just neglect those.
 

Offline Ashery

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #13 on: September 29, 2011, 09:00:33 AM »
I started 2100, with invaders enabled, and 3 NPC.
I had no PP and SF scientists for a long time, so developing earlier a grav survey ship would have meant investing almost only on exploration.
Just discovering grav survey sensors means 10000 RP, which is a lot, at the beginning. And also developing the first engine was not so fast.
Also, I invested heavily on mines and CF in the first decade, not so much on labs, at least until I realized my industry was growing too much.
 

Yea, that luck factor re:scientists can be a bitch. 33.5 years into my current game and my primary sensor scientist still has well under a third of the potential output of most of my other scientists.

Investing heavily in mines and CFs is exactly what you should be doing in a conventional start. Throw in a first level sector command and periodic academy upgrades (I'm still using only a level six academy 33.5 years in and I've only now begun to outgrow my officer base, and that's only because I'm doing a heavy fighter build). Once you get to the point where you can start researching the initial economic techs, your industrial output should jump up significantly and you can catch up on items like labs. That's not to say that you shouldn't build any labs early on, but your primary focus should be on building up your industrial base.

The only way you can really over-build your industry early on is if you have 800 mines on a nearly depleted Earth, no colonies to ship the mines to, and no corundium to convert to automines.
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: Use of Industry
« Reply #14 on: September 30, 2011, 06:47:56 PM »
I always make relative small quantities of anything and the assign 50% of CF to build that. Hence my list is relatively long but easy to manage, as there are always just 2 different items under production.