Thanks for all the replies. Real life (and
the research on Kha'ak Clusters) had me busy over the course of the week, finally I get some time to reply.
Red-Spot wrote: ↑Tue, 19. Mar 19, 09:26
Having a little trial and error with some factories you will quickly learn that for instance a Cahoona Bakery can be placed at 0.6*0.6*2.0km (Cattle Ranch 1,5*1,5*2 iirc, etc etc) distance from one an other and will make a nice tightly packed bunch of factories that you might still get into with a docking computer but becomes rather difficult to get out of alive again afterwards
I remember making an excel file where I wrote down the relative "safe" distances on X, Y and Z axis of many factories back in the day. I wonder where is that file now. . .
Altruist wrote: ↑Tue, 19. Mar 19, 10:53
If you can build complexes like this, I feel like every info I can give is completly superfluous...
This is not true, this thread has definitely had many good points haven't ever crossed my mind. Of course I already know a good part of the information mentioned, but don't get discouraged by that - if you feel something should be mentioned, then by all means... you never know when something most obvious to you might be an eye opening for another person
zazie wrote: ↑Tue, 19. Mar 19, 13:31
Profits! The player can't compete with EC sold at 12 cr. If you do your math about ROI of EC-production only, it is obvious that the player's EC-production can't compete with the crystal-less EC-production from NPC.
Hmm... I see where are you coming from. I agree player's production can't compete with NPC production, however, while it surely benefits that particular NPC station economically, I fail to see how this benefits player. If you plop a silicon mine L on a decent asteroid, along with a L-size crystal, food, bio and spp facs, within around 76 hours you would end up recovering your investment, matching the amount of energy cells you could have bought at 12 credits per unit using that sum of money. And from that point onwards, which is just over 3 days in, all the energy cells produced by that loop is free, forever. You can as well drop an L mine on a 0-yield asteroid, even at the production level as low as this, it will pay for itself in 3 days, and for costs of a M-size bio,food,crystal and spp fabs in 37 more days, even though the fabs will be idle 90% of the time. But that's why we merge several mines into one complex, so we don't need to pay for idle factories to this extent. This actually reminds me of something I wanted to discuss, but I'll make a separate reply for that...
If you build a huge complex within a sector without any unused silicon asteroids, buying cheap from NPC will certainly make sense if you wish to expand your complex beyond the maximum sector energy production, but as long as there are unused silicon asteroids in the safe sectors of the universe, there is a little point in doing this, in my opinion.
jlehtone wrote: ↑Tue, 19. Mar 19, 19:39
Case B:
Sell the Beef. You probably get a decent price for it. Then your company accounting assigns the credits to the Bakery and the Bakery buys Beef. Cheap Beef.
The Farm lost Beef and the Bakery got Beef, just like in case A, but in addition Beef was bought cheap and sold at higher price. There is the profits.
Hmm, this certainly made me think for a moment. Interesting approach. Looks like it can be arranged without too much complication. Still it looks like if you could track oh how much beef you get to sell/buy every hour, it would end up being a better deal to build a separate complex just to sell beef and avoid having to pay cheap at all. The NPC factories selling to you will probably be impacted to some extent, slowing their production and consuming less energy cells, but someone will end up consuming these energy cells anyway. Probably...
jlehtone wrote: ↑Tue, 19. Mar 19, 19:39
Yes, there are big credits per unit in the Guns, but there is only rather limited units per hour of them and in state of surplus the count is less. All the Energy, Minerals, Bio, and Food in the X-Universe are a huge amount of units per hour.
Certainly, seems like these should sell nicely. I definitely see how most of people responding here are having fun keeping all kinds of trades open with NPC production. It might be worth having a look for me too. If only
LordSuch's Sector Planner worked in TC...
I have more issues regarding economy / complex building I want to discuss, stay tuned for a later reply.
Regards,
nponoBegHuk