Posted by: Thiosk
« on: January 17, 2012, 10:51:12 AM »I'm thinking you could use depot planets and lots of freighters / mass drivers to get around this. Assume all mineral inputs are routed to earth. Give it stockpile levels, so all spare resources are shunted to Luna via mass driver. So Luna represents excess minerals. You want to do sorium refining at Mars so you have a freighter running Sorium to Mars constantly. Mars also has stockpile levels set for Sorium, and shunts its excess to Phobos. Another freighter runs minerals from Phobos to Earth, so Mars excess is returned back into the distribution network at the top.
In my last game, I had 4 massive industrial worlds (1+ billion) after a couple conquests and extensive expansion. The main annoyance I had was that if I wanted to install a PDC, for instance, first I needed to remember to pick up the PDC and deliver it, but also route a piddingly small number of minerals there. The same thing happened with maitenence worlds-- unless the planet had 0.1 accessibility on every mineral, you must make supply runs or the maitenance world shuts down every couple years or so (unless you stock it with like tens of thousands of units, minerals that would be better used industrially). Lastly, lets say I started a new major construction project-- one of the planets might crash on Gallicite, so I have to rush deliver a bunch of units in short order. These things happened with increasing frequency at later stages, resulting in that this is all I ever did.
My current network setup is to dump every single mineral on earth and set reserve levels everywhere. A freighter fleet comes to earth and picks up say, 100,000 of everything. It then flies from planet to planet, dropping all minerals, then picking up all minerals-- picking up only to the reserve levels set at the world, then flying to the next world. In this way, to alter the abundance of minerals on many various planets, I need only change the reserve levels, and the system will sort it out after a few cycles. If I want to put up a financial world, i need only use civ industry to drop the factories, and set new reserve levels for the needed minerals.
Occasionally the network crashes-- its unable to drop of or pick up any minerals at its next stop, so the cycle crashes and the order list halts. Then you have to manually fix whatever the problem was. fly the fleet back to earth, then put the long list of orders back in to get your cycle running again. You can use short distribution runs, but that sort of defeats the purpose of the exercise in many ways.