X3AP Complex ideas

[Tibolt]

Hello,

I have recently been investigating the possibilities regarding complex building. After building some profitable self-sustainable complexes, I could finally buy an M2.

I plan to buy/build more M2s and especially M7Ms to allow boarding operations. I realize this will cost quite some cash and alot of missiles etc.

To couter this I came up with 2 complex ideas, one for profits, and one for equipment.

Mines of Fortune (Fast equipment for capitals and missiles)

TBD (Weed & Fuel): Will no cover this here anymore.

Id like to get some feedback about these complexes if they would, in your opinion, be profitable and self sustainable, but, more important, be effective at making my own equipment.[/url]

[Jimmy C]

Do not build that Spaceweed complex in Perpetual Sin unless you feeling like risking the Paranids blowing it up as an illegal station.

Whenever possible, use Boron factories. The Boron Food/Bio is the cheapest chain, other than Terran, and they have issues. Therefore, any factory that uses Boron food as a resource become comparatively cheaper than the alternatives.

Only pirate stations buy Spaceweed, and only the stations in sectors where Spaceweed is illegal buy it at max price. The ones in pirate and unclaimed sectors buy at average price only.

As for the weapons production, are you sure you're going to be using all those different types of guns? PPC and FAA are the most important among the ones that you are building. The rest have advantages in certain areas compared to those two, but offset by being worse than those two in other areas. You can drop IC production and replace it with an extra 2 FAA.

Guns build too slowly to sell regularly. Missiles are better to take advantage of the "infinite sink"

For Gauss Ammo, unless you plan on constantly firing GCs, even one factory will eventually produce a large enough stockpile for you. You can swap out 2 Ammo factories for 2 FAA fabs and keep the Teladi Food supply for them.

If you're going to be constantly capping ships (like me!) you should think about doubling or tripling your Flail and Hammer production capacity. At high enough Fight ranks, I find I can use up to 200 Flails and 50 Hammers per combat mission (for capturing up to 3 large ships) and I can get combat missions every hour or better.

Additionally, you should consider getting a Boron Equipment Dock for its capacity to dock an unlimited number of medium sized ships. Those ships can be bins to stockpile all the guns and missiles you want to keep. Keeps the complex hub from becoming overcrowded, with the bins there.

[Tibolt]

Thanks for your feedback

I have updated the complex design to not use Gauss and the IC, replaced them with 2 FAA and missiles. Also changed the food and mines to cost less.

The Space weed complex would be built in Mines of Fortune, which is a Teladi sector.

[pref]

Do you know which race(s) will you get your ships from?
Deciding that helps a lot with the weapon plex plans.
If you hate the terrans for ex, you should build PSP/SSC fabs in higher quantity, for boron ships you need ion weapons (except ISR).
Since capital grade weaponry takes a long time to produce (3-4 hours), its quite easy to board much more ships then you can equip.

For the drug plex you could add spacefuel or replace some of the weed fabs with it. Lets you trade more with pirates later which can be helpful for rep.

[Tibolt]

Do you know which race(s) will you get your ships from?
Deciding that helps a lot with the weapon plex plans.
If you hate the terrans for ex, you should build PSP/SSC fabs in higher quantity, for boron ships you need ion weapons (except ISR).
Since capital grade weaponry takes a long time to produce (3-4 hours), its quite easy to board much more ships then you can equip.

For the drug plex you could add spacefuel or replace some of the weed fabs with it. Lets you trade more with pirates later which can be helpful for rep.

I will mostly cap ships that cannot be obtained, with the Xenon I as a final trophy. After that I will cap ships that are costly to build once reverse engineered.

[Jimmy C]

I have updated the complex design

The new design is more sensible. I have a suggestion. If you remove one of the Crystal M fabs and it's associated food/bio/silicon stations, you'll free up energy for more production stations at the cost of a 20 crystal/hour deficit. Your Energy surplus should tide you over until more crystals are produced. However, this crystal deficit will grow as you add more SPP XLs until you get another surplus at 5 SPPs. If you choose to remove a Crystal M, you should think about choosing different Silicon rocks to mine too. See if you can find a way to supply all you fabs with fewer mines.
You should think about things like these.

Another suggestion, Firestorms are of dubious value. They're powerful but slow and vulnerable. It's almost impossible to use them against ships. I would suggest building Firestorms only if you had the spare energy capacity, after more useful factories.

You'll find Hornets, Hurricanes, Typhoons and Thunderbolts to be much more useful. If you plan on building these factories, I suggest one Paranid Food/Bio L chain for 4 Hornets and 1 Hurricane, one Teladi L chain for 5 Typhoons (or maybe 4 and one other Teladi product, if there's something that interests you) and one Split M chain for 2 T-bolts (or an L chain to add 3 other Split factories if something interests you)

The Space weed complex would be built in Mines of Fortune, which is a Teladi sector.

Does that mean you plan to build the guns and missiles complex in Perpetual Sin? Mines is one of the richest sectors with the most rocks for complex building, and 150% sun. Sin only has 100% sun. Another rich sector is Tkr's Deprivation, my favourite, also 150% sun.

If you built the Weed complex in a Pirate or unclaimed/unknown sector (like Savage Spur) you can add Spacefuel Distilleries later with worrying about legalities.

for boron ships you need ion weapons

They don't need Ion weapons, they can use PPC, FAA and CIG like everyone else. And frankly, those are mostly better than their Ion equivalents.

[Tibolt]

Sin only has 100% sun.

Totally missed that. Would be better to place the missile complex to Mines of Fortune and the weed/fuel sector to a unknown sector as you mentioned.

I will finetune the designs a bit and post them once they are finished for others to use.

Thnx everyone for your advice.

[pref]

They don't need Ion weapons, they can use PPC, FAA and CIG like everyone else. And frankly, those are mostly better than their Ion equivalents.

Correct, they are compatible with lots of weapons, but their special ones are the ion guns. Perfect for boarding ops and bails. Incredible shield damage + the slow effect. Low hull damage helps to remove defenses.
With AP's hull levels its tiresome for killing ships, in TC it was ok-ish.
But ion cannons on attack shields and another ship(s) using gauss for ex for hull you will get a brutal (highest possible?) dps if you coordinate things well.

[ancienthighway]

I'm not a big fan of mega complexes. I'm not a big fan of building complexes to support capital ships either. Once you locate the forges making the lasers, missiles, and shields you want, all you need to do is make sure they have the resources to build your armaments. Do you actually have a need to build an armada of capital ships? If not, you may be able to get by with two or three. Definitely not worth the cost of a mega complex.

As far as the mega complex itself, if you can build in an area that has sufficient NPC resources to support your needs, why not take advantage of that rather than duplicating the support some place else? Using Argon Prime area as an example, I think there are far too many cattle ranches around. There may be too many bakeries as well. Rather than building your one to support a 1 Mj sjield/IRE complex (non-stop profit) why not use those NPC stations. For that matter, there is enough ore in the area to support your needs. I approach every complex I build in the same manner. I may have food production in sector A, mineral mines in sector B 7 sectors away, and final production in sector C midway between the two. And that food and mineral production may very well be NPC stations.

You are building well over 125 hammer torpedoes and flail missiles an hour. Unless you are planning a major offensive against anyone, that, imo, is too much. M7Ms, as well as M8s, as AI controlled ships are pretty worthless. They will attempt to close with the target rather than using their stand off range. Missiles will be fired piecemeal at the target. The only big boom happening will be your M7M when the enemy engages.

I'd reduce the number of complexes down to producing around 25 torpedoes and 50 flails per hour. If you don't plan on boarding operations, you could reduce output of both to 25.

Speaking of the torpedoes and flails, in your MoF complex you have double digit Boron stations producing each, and then a single Argon torpedo forge and a single Argon flail forge. No other consumers for meatsteaks. Change the Argon branch to Boron.

[Jimmy C]

Correct, they are compatible with lots of weapons, but their special ones are the ion guns. Perfect for boarding ops and bails.

I've never had a good record with using Ion weapons to force bails in my last game. This one isn't turning out much better.

You are building well over 125 hammer torpedoes and flail missiles an hour. Unless you are planning a major offensive against anyone, that, imo, is too much.

He's planning on boarding. If he's boarding mission-spawned ships like I do, it's possible to use up to 200 Flails per mission on the higher ranks, and get more than one mission in an hour.

While I would say the number of Flails is about right for intensive capture operations (you might end up turning many of them off until later in the game however) the number of Hammers is possibly excessive. A mere 15 would produce enough for dealing with 3 M1/M2s per hour.

In the end, it depends on your plan for capturing ships. I assume you plan to rain Flails and Hammers on your target to reduce their shields before launching pods?
In my last game, I used a few Flails and a lot of Hammers for quick shield reduction. But the AI is real good at shooting down Hammers in AP. In my current game, I'm using mostly Flails and hardly any Hammers. It seems a 10x barrage of Flails can better get through an M1/M2s defences than a 1x Hammer barrage.

If you plan on capturing like this, I would suggest 35 Flails and 15 Hammers to cover your needs. Even then, you might find that you won't need 20 of those Flails until later in the game.

and then a single Argon torpedo forge and a single Argon flail forge. No other consumers for meatsteaks. Change the Argon branch to Boron.

He actually has an Argon 2GJ shield facility as well. I agree with removing the Argon chain, though. One additional Argon Flail/Hammer fab is of marginal importance and shields are easy enough to source if you don't anger everyone. So I would recommend dumping the 1 GJ shield fab as well for something more useful. You can capture so many M7s on missions, you hardly need any other source of 1 GJ shields.

Tibolt, Looking over your complex, I see you have 3 Crystal M fabs for some reason. Usually, it would be better to replace 2 of them with another L fab.

Also, please consider putting the urls behind some text, like this, it will make this thread much easier to read. Hover your pointer over the url button on the posting reply window for the proper format.

You can consider the 5 SPP complex to be the "final" configuration of your complex. When you actually start building, plan out what the complex should contain at 2, 3 and 4 SPP. It doesn't matter if there's some deficit along the way, you know the final complex will come out right.
Also, this allows you to build just part of your complex, see how well it suits your needs, then decide how you plan to build the rest of the complex.

Me? I built a 6 SPP complex with 34 Flails and 26 Hammers, along with all the other missiles I frequently used. Then turned off 15 of the Flails and Hammers each along 1 SPP when I realized I didn't need that many yet!

Edit: Your link to the weed/fuel plex goes to a missile/gun plex instead.

[pref]

The lowish hull damage helps to have more chance - you don't blow up the ship before the bail checks can even happen, and possibly get more of those checks.
Afaik ship condition, type, fight rank also matters.

[Tibolt]

I have once again updated the design. Added the Ion Cannon and Gauss cannon once more, because the combination is quite to my liking.

If you plan on capturing like this, I would suggest 35 Flails and 15 Hammers to cover your needs. Even then, you might find that you won't need 20 of those Flails until later in the game.

Is it a possibilty to swap some for tempest missiles to enhance my M2's?

[MarvinTheMartian]

you can easily lose some Hammer fabs in favour of Tempest, I like Tempests but prefer Typhoons for capitals against M6 and up (and even some of the newer TS/TP with 200MJ+ shielding). You could swap Hammer fabs and their respective Boron food loop for Teladi food loops and Typhoons.

I'd go further than Jimmy C's recommendation and remove the hammers altogether. The NPC are so good at shooting down non-swarm missiles in AP that for boarding I use only Flails now, which is sad really as you could use both in TC which added a level of skill to boarding and didn't kill your framerate!

Thanks for updating those URLs to links btw and welcome to the forum too

[Tibolt]

you can easily lose some Hammer fabs in favour of Tempest, I like Tempests but prefer Typhoons for capitals against M6 and up (and even some of the newer TS/TP with 200MJ+ shielding). You could swap Hammer fabs and their respective Boron food loop for Teladi food loops and Typhoons.

I'd go further than Jimmy C's recommendation and remove the hammers altogether. The NPC are so good at shooting down non-swarm missiles in AP that for boarding I use only Flails now, which is sad really as you could use both in TC which added a level of skill to boarding and didn't kill your framerate!

Thanks for updating those URLs to links btw and welcome to the forum too

How about 45 flails and 15 typhoons, 0 hammers. Will probably overproduce a lot, but when I need them it will easily generate a sufficient amount of missiles and in the meantime make a nice profit.

[Jimmy C]

I have once again updated the design.

It's up to you, if you feel the IC and GC will be of use. However, I would like to know why you still have 3 Crystal M fabs instead of a more efficient 1L and 1M?

Is it a possibilty to swap some for tempest missiles to enhance my M2's?

How do you think the Tempest will enhance your M2s? As Marvin mentioned, anything that can equip it is better off using Typhoons.
Anything that can't is better of using the Thunderbolt. It has nearly the same stats and costs way less. Don't let the auto-retargeting feature of the Tempest fool you, you'll hardly ever see it of use. I would put it in the same category as the Firestorm. Build only when you can spare the capacity.

Still, it does look like you can spare the capacity to build other missile types. So go ahead and replace some Flail/Hammer production with some Hornet, Hurricane, Typhoon and Thunderbolt production.

I'd go further than Jimmy C's recommendation and remove the hammers altogether.

Now, now, I doubt Tibolt has finished the plot, so Hammer production will be useful. Just not so much.

[pref]

I'd also suggest more Typhoons then tempest missiles. Those are the best heavy fighter/M6 missiles in practical use imo.

Regarding Flails&Hammers:
I mainly use flails for missile defence for ex - for covering the pods and managing shields i find it better to use my personal ship, i just send a few hammer/shadow barrages to remove target shields more quickly. This way its much more easy to defend the M7Ms as well - i can intercept almost everything that tries to reach them.
Sometimes i just IBL the target shields away if there is no rush.

This way a 5x fab for both plus a similar amount of shadow fabs handle my boarding needs in current game. Though im not boarding continuously - have about 6 boarding ops / day if i exclude the initial preparation time.

Since i started producing shadows in bigger quantity i hardly use any hammers though. Flails i usually only touch when an M8 tries to spoil the party, or i need an emergency removal of fighters (attacking my JB or M7Ms).
Sometimes if im lazy i flail the M7 escorts a bit so they break formation and become an easy target for my marines.

I just send a single shadow barrage on each M1/M2 to get rid of some shields, then do the rest with my lasers. Meaning 16 shadows per ship, plus a few flails on average to get rid of the M8s that show up every hour or a half.

[Tibolt]

I would like to know why you still have 3 Crystal M fabs instead of a more efficient 1L and 1M?

When I change this in the calculator, the BoFu consumption goes up, and the Silicon Wafers production goes down, leading to a not self-sustainable complex.

Still, it does look like you can spare the capacity to build other missile types. So go ahead and replace some Flail/Hammer production with some Hornet, Hurricane, Typhoon and Thunderbolt production.

Thnx for the tip, I will invest in some Hurricane and Typhoon missile facilities to gain some additional offensive power for fighters and destroyers.

Now, now, I doubt Tibolt has finished the plot, so Hammer production will be useful. Just not so much.

I have

[pref]

When I change this in the calculator, the BoFu consumption goes up, and the Silicon Wafers production goes down, leading to a not self-sustainable complex.

The multiplier is 2.5 for L fabs afaik.
2xL or 5xM is the same (except M fabs cost more credit and FPS wise).

[Jimmy C]

When I change this in the calculator, the BoFu consumption goes up, and the Silicon Wafers production goes down, leading to a not self-sustainable complex.

You need to take out one Boron S fab along with the 2 Ms. I suggest the 1GJ Shield fab. Change the Sil Mine on the Yield 16 rock to one on a Yield 21 rock. Personally, I recommend using only Yield 20 or better rocks for mines.

You should also remove one GC Ammo fab and then replace the 3 Teladi M-size Food/Bio chains with a single L-size chain. It's more efficient that way, and you're not likely to need that much GC ammo production.

If you did that, you'll have quite an Ore surplus. If you replaced all the under Yield 40 rocks with a 27 and 4x25, you'll reduce the surplus to just 3 Ore.

An L mine on a Yield 25 rock (both Ore or Sil) perfectly feeds 5 S fabs, and those 5 fabs perfectly consume the output of a Food/Bio L-chain. I call this arrangement the 5-plex. It is the basic building block of a production complex. You can't go wrong adding and removing entire 5-plexes from your complex.

When building complexes, I go for yield 25 and 50 rocks over others as much as possible. Yield 25 and 50 ores are common in rock-rich sectors, but the same can't be said for Silicon, pity.

The tricky part is, an SPP XL best feeds 12 or 13 factories in addition to the ones that sustain it. The fact that you need 2 Crystal L fabs per SPP but only 1 M fab for the whole complex makes it vary over the number of SPPs you have.
If you use some tricks, like use an L-size Food/bio chain to feed the Crystal M fab and 3 other factories, look for a yield 40 rock that can feed 8 factories perfectly, for example, you can squeeze more production out of the same number of SPPs. That's important, because each SPP exponentially increases the amount of labour needed to assemble the complex.

I have

Good for you. You won't need that much Hammer production or stockpiling then.

[MarvinTheMartian]

I have

Good for you. You won't need that much Hammer production or stockpiling then.

I've finished the plot and don't recall needing/using hammer torps. Is that because I opted to steal a certain, otherwise unobtainable, TL from a bunch of guys who will never forgive me?