Science & Industry

I just started a tiny PI operation to pass the time. My skills are currently not fantastic, but I've been looking toward the future, and it seems to me that command centers offer far more than enough CPU but never enough PG. Does anyone else have this issue?

For example, if I wanted a very hands-off colony that produced robotics on a single planet, I would need to extract 4 different resources, process them several times, and launch the finished product. This would require 4 ECUs running at least 1 extractor head each, 4 basic industry facilities, 3 advanced industry facilities, a silo, a launch facility, and links. Without including the links, this facility would need 19,300 MW of power and 8440 tf CPU. A level 6 command center offers only 19,000 MW of power and 25145 tf CPU.

I can envision the above facility without a launch facility, opting instead to manually launch the finished product from the command center from time to time. That would put me just barely under the max power for a level 6 command center, meaning that I could ONLY run one extractor head per ECU.

Given the low income of a single colony compared to most any other endeavor, it seems hardly worthwhile if I'm going to have to build less (fewer extractors or factories) and constantly rearrange what's going on at the colony to arrive at the same finished product. Is this by design?

I"m doing it that way now due to my skill limitations. I only have enough PG to run one ECU, so I have to switch it from one resource to the other pretty regularly. When I first built the colony, however, I had no idea it would end up like this, so one resource is plentiful within extractor range, but the ECU isn't near a hotspot for the other, so I can only get a little of it.

If you want decent yield on anything, you've got to draw from a substantial hotspot, and that would mean ensuring your ECUs are in reach of hotspots of multiple materials (not always feasible) or having one ECU per material and running links as far as needed to the colony. Either way, the power output at every command center level seems grossly insufficient while the available CPU is excessive.

Most people doing PI, especially low end, are just harvesting things. Extraction takes a lot of PG, not much CPU. Factories, especially hi tech factories, are the opposite: lots of CPU, not as much grid.

For harvesting, grid is what will bottleneck you every time. The best tip I can offer is make sure you're placing your buildings as close together as possible. Links take more PG the longer they are, so by making them as short as possible, you reduce the resource need. Related to that is planet size. Bet you've never looked at that stat. Buildings take up the same amount of space on a planet regardless, but links still go by the planet's size. Meaning larger planets take longer links, even if building placement appears the same. If you have 2 or more options for a planet to use, check the size on all of them and go with the smallest one. This is most prevalent on gas planets, but it affects all of them. My last PI operation I had 4 barren planets in system. 3 were about the same, the 4th was about twice the size of the others.

Yes, I have the PWG issue on my mining planets since I have both skillz to only lvl 4, but once I get Consolidation to lvl5 I can have 2 extractors/planet with many heads while having a lot of factories making T1 stuff to cut down on size before being shipped off to my T4 production planet. On average (At least in null) I would be able to mine enough materials this way to make 1 theoretical T4 component every 4 hours.

Think about what you need for robotics: Consumer Electronics and Mechanical Parts. That's 4 different resources, so 4 x extractors and at least 7 factories. Obviously you could do it one resource at a time, storing the resource somewhere in the meantime, but that sounds like a pain in the butt to me. The worse problem you've got is the rarity of plasma planets, as that's what you need to get all 4 of the materials.

With 1 character I would do consumer electronics x 2 planets, mechanical parts x 2 planets and either squeeze on the advanced industry factory on one of those or add a 5th factory planet. With level 4 skills you should be able to put down 6 factories and two extractors with 3 or 4 heads for each resource (depending on planet size) to generate your T1. 2 x T1 factories feeding into each T2 factory.

When you get to 5000m3 of T1 on each planet, you haul it all to your factory planet.

slight counter to this

1 extractor 10 heads
add 2 storage facility
the rest can be the same though I do 2 basic for each p0
the storage can hold enough for multiple days for 2 so you have the one extractor go back and forth on what it is extracting once a day and route to correct storage.