How to make sexier complexes [Updated, again!]

[NavyAICS]

jlehtone - thanks for the help. I'm in the process of buying my first TL to move my dumb station closer to my complex to connect it. My "weedbooze" complex is cranking out some serious credits. I look forward to making my next complex. Thanks for the tips.

[synctrance]

deathman20, i see u got some flower farms if im not mistaken.
I was wondering where the heck are the connecting nodes, cant seem to identify them.

[deathman20]

Flower farms.... Which one are those?

[deathman20]

Oh BTW I don't have any flower farms in my complex. You might be thinking of the Dream Farm if not mistaken.

[Unkillable Cat]

One interesting side effect to laying out your stations according to a specific pattern is that extra tubes that seem to appear, making the structure look more like its a single entity rather than a mess of crap hobbled together, heres my row of 3 fuel distileries so you can see what i mean:



Notice the criss cross sections?
Almost forgot, the easiest way to lay out a station thats this compact is to lay down an advanced satalite and press K so long as you have the stations at a similar altitude it seems to automaticly line them up for you so you dont end up with a crumpled row.

[NavyAICS]

stereophobia - was that criss cross section on purpose or did that happen as a result of what you were trying to do?

If it was on purpose, I think it actually looks kind of cool.

If not, well... it still looks cool.

[Unkillable Cat]

It was a complete accident, I just tried to squeeze them as close together as I could using the satalite view (press home a few times to get really tight in) Im guessing the game couldnt figure out the closest node so just joined them all

[jlehtone]

They are too close and wrong orientation. The tube leaves directly outward from the node and cannot bend at all. Same for the next station. Since the tubes are on the same plane and close, they do cross each other. Then, the joining tube connects the free ends.

It is possible (occasionally) to orient the nodes so that one tube segment can join them. But I found that usually they are a bit offset, and I get three tubes almost parallel in same space. If you had placed them (stations) 1.4 km apart (IIRC) the free ends would have been close to each other and the result would look different.

[Graxster]

The layout on the original post's pictures looks nice, but I have a problem and question regarding what's shown there. Ideally you'd want it as shown, with a bunch of factories connected by tunnels, then a hub out in front. What I'm experiencing in-game is that once you connect the first 2 factories and place the hub, your only choice when connecting the additional factories is to connect them to the hub itself, not to other factories.

ie, random example:

SPP, BioGas, C-fab, Bofu, Silicon mine.

You drop all your facs, then connect BioGas to C-fab. This gives you 2 connected factories and a hub. If you now choose "connect SPP and BoFu", you'll get a second hub, which is not a good thing. So, you have to choose "connect SPP to Complex Hub", "connect Bofu to complex hub", etc... so everything spiders out from the hub, and you can't simply have tunnels connecting each factory as shown in the OP.

I've seen photos, so how the heck do you connect factories with tunnels w/o having to add a hub every time and get it to look like the diagram? Thanks.

Edit: Never mind, I layed down a bunch of facs haphazardly and connected them. I see what happens now. Darned if I read that explained anywhere though...

[Incubi]

I am still struggling with this.

3 things mainly.

First, no matter how I try, I cannot get the factories to be 2.5 tune length apart, and I cannot get straight tubes. I have managed to avoid the uber ugly speghetti, but that is about it. Are there any more hotkeyes or tips for alignment? Ideal map zoom etc... would be very helpfull. Also what exactly does the 5 on the key pad do?

Second, the complex hub, even with makign sure that all tubes are from the same race, the hub more often than not just jumps to where the heck it wants to be .

Finaly.

For a L factory, it takes about 75 ecells a minute. So let me see if I get this right.

1 L BioGas fab, takes 75 ecells a minute and makes 5 BoGas every minute and 50 seconds.

if this fab is buying ecells for 13 max and selling BoGas for 395 min. IN one hour it spends no more than 58,500 on ecells, and making 200 BoGas an hour. so selling BoGas would be a minimum of 79,000 leaving a profit of at least 20,500 an hour ( non seta ) taking 36 hours to break even... not including the cost of the ships? That kind of suck even on a self sufficient fab thios fab would only make 79,000 an hour

So much for the concept of bogas being a good money maker.

[pjknibbs]

If you think of it that way then you'd never build a single station. Factories and complexes only work well for making money when you have a LOT of them--keep putting the profits into building new factories and you'd be surprised how quickly things snowball.

[bob hope]

personally i use a single bogas station to get my paranid rating up, drop it 1 or 2 south of emperors ridge set the energy buying to 18 and set 1 transporter delivering set to about 4 or 5 jumps and set every race barring paranid to enemy (i doubt yaki would bring you ecells or any other pirate for that matter)

may not make much money but it makes race relations hand over fist

[ryeeson]

-Edited

got the answer

[GH0ST274]

is ther no script that will make this for you its so hard and takes weeks im still noob at this game but yer complex looks so nice i just got to try

[apricotslice]

Version updated in the X3 handbook.

The 3rd pic doesnt seem to be there, so I;ve had to leave it out.