What I learned building a base capable of researching "Stronger explosives" @ 1M eSPM
I'd like to share what I learned so far building a base capable of researching "Stronger explosives" @ 1M eSPM, get some feedback, and, maybe get some inspiration for where to go next, since my ship reached Shattered Planet, and I no longer need explosives :(. Keep in mind, YMMV since i changed my settings from default ones - not sure if it changes the end game at all, but how do i know.
- UPS, at least so far, has not been a problem at all. (my 1.1 mega base was running at 20 fps on the same PC)
- Legendary setups completely change end game, both in terms of designs (i.e. how your BP for red science looks like), and in terms of what kind of logistic is viable (how you structure your base from a high level perspective)
- Foundry makes processing of basic materials trivial to such a degree that you no longer need special sub-areas for steel/iron/green/etc. I decided to produce all of those necessities in-situ where they are needed. In 1.1, it was unthinkable due to UPS. In SA, one foundry can give you a stacked green belt - so UPS is not impacted at all.
- The hardest bottleneck (to me) appears to be inter-planetary transportation, so I minimize it by producing all core science on Nauvis, and import one type of science from each other planet.
- Production on Nauvis is semi-structured into areas each producing one type of science. I positioned those areas on the map in such a way they were reasonably close to resource patches they require.
- For each science, I have a module capable of producing one green stacked belt of science. Those modules produce most intermediates within themselves, so I need to mostly provide raw inputs and get science as an output. I did try to match output of intermediates to needs so that I do not over-produce too badly.
- Science modules are copy-pastable, but require manual connections (connect a few lines here and there). It can take me maybe 30min to add another green belt of any science without affecting the rest of the base. This, I think, was one of the core megabase challenges in 1.1 where you add just one more "blue chip" block and then spend a week extending half of the base. In SA, legendary foundries, EMPs, modules and beacons completely remove this constraint if you organize your base into self-contained modules like this, making scaling up on Navuis almost trivial. Gleba, once i realized belts (for most things) were evil, became trivial too (at least up to 66k/m production rate).
- All interconnects within and between areas are done via stacked green belts. This is due to the fact 240/s throughput of a single belt is a lot, and I do not shuffle materials or intermediates between areas almost at all. I considered delivering science packs to research site by trains, but decided it was silly to use trains just for that, and connected everything by belts. Not aesthetically pleasing, but scales just fine.
- Research is done on Navuis using bio labs. When inputs are fully saturated, it maintains 1M eSPM, and can be extended to ~1.2M eSPM without breaking high-level structure of the base. At the moment, it consumes 6 belts of each sciences.
- I import blue chips/LDS to Gleba. Gleba is only responsible for green science and rocket fuel.
- As of now, the base maintains 1M eSMP when researching Stronger explosives (7 out of 12 science packs). This requires production of 66k/m of science packs.
It feels, just like where 1.1 had 2 phases (starter base and mega base), SA has three phases:
- "Starter" bases on all planets. You reach outer space at that time which marks the official end of game.
- Intermediate base - you build a base to produce legendary staff
- Legendary base - complete rebuild of everything.
Re: trains. I think there are two factors that play against trains in SA:
- I feel in SA space platforms kind of play the role of trains from 1.1 (connect disjointed areas via high-latency high-throughput mechanism). Bots are much more capable now, and so are belts, so I feel it squeezes out trains to play a marginal role if your priority is scale.
- In 1.1 mega base setups required lots of identical rows of machines to achieve throughput - and that played very well with trains, which are just a sequence of independent containers, so all you need to do was to design a BP to take content of an input wagon and put results into an output wagon - any multiple by however many wagons you had in a train. In SA, legendary setups are really tiny compared to 1.1, so this quality of trains being easy to work with if you need to parallelize everything is no longer needed.
Anyway, I am getting a bit of a burn out now. Reaching Shattered Planet was a nothing burger, and scaling all sciences to 1M eSPM doesn't even sound like a lot of fun, mostly due to Aquilo and promethium science. So, curious what goals you guys have once you reach outer space?
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