Help with Space fuel complex and selling it!!!

[TheDeliveryMan]

what do you think about vast solar power plant complex? like 20x solar power plant XL with all other stations to make it self sufficient. (well beside silicon -.-)


http://image.prntscr.com/image/ae59e1da ... 15893f.png

That complex produces enough excess energy to fully supply 1382 S-sized factories. Do you think you can get that many customers?

[RAVEN.myst]

what do you think about vast solar power plant complex? like 20x solar power plant XL with all other stations to make it self sufficient.

That complex produces enough excess energy to fully supply 1382 S-sized factories. Do you think you can get that many customers?

Heheh - good point!

Incidentally, are you any relation to the Delivery Man in The Dreaming Void, by Peter Hamilton?

[TheDeliveryMan]

Incidentally, are you any relation to the Delivery Man in The Dreaming Void, by Peter Hamilton?

Yes, that's the book I got my nickname from.

[Zfast4y0u]

so are you telling me the universe cant handle 20 SPP XL? o_O

[jlehtone]

so are you telling me the universe cant handle 20 SPP XL?

That can be estimated.

Frankly, the universe does not care. Every station and energy hauler can be kept full of ECells all the time. The only one that "can't handle" is the player, who cannot sell ECells for profit.

* The universe has a (variable) number of SPP producing ECells.
* The universe has a (variable) number of ECell consumers.
* The universe has a (variable) number of Free Traders that haul ECells to consumers.

One could, with scripts, easily count all NPC stations that exist at any given time and answer exactly whether the universes ECell production capacity matches, exceeds, or is short of potential ECell consumption.

Even if we count the NPC stations, we only know the "worst case" of how much consumption there is, if the Free Traders work perfectly. (IIRC, a scripter did "fix" the Free Traders' brains as a test and proved that player has next to no chance of making profit, if the Free Traders actually do work.)


The universe can keep the consumers filled only to some extent. Your smart salesmen can probably beat the Free Traders and make good deals even if there is no overall shortage of ECells to begin with. The Free Traders are not the smartest of the lot (just watch the traffic in 472).

That, however, is not all. The ECells are a primary resource in Factories. Factories do not start a production cycle (and consume a batch of resources) unless they have enough all necessary resources and room for cycles products. Therefore, Factories stand often still, either being full of products or lacking primary resource other than ECells. (Again, the Free Traders ...)

What player can do, presumably:
* Consume surplus, because it tends to be cheap.
* Fill shortages, for at least temporarily they do pay off.
* Not simply flood the universe with SPP's but add about same amount of energy consumtion too.


Frankly, I don't care what the actual counts are. In my X3R game I had some stations, but didn't really trade. In X3TC and X3AP haven't bothered to build much; the universe has been quite ripe for harvesting by other means.

[RAVEN.myst]

The universe can keep the consumers filled only to some extent. Your smart salesmen can probably beat the Free Traders and make good deals even if there is no overall shortage of ECells to begin with. The Free Traders are not the smartest of the lot (just watch the traffic in 472).

This is very important. The issue is that the shortages are more about distribution than lack of abundance. This is why I don't bother manufacturing heavily, but focus on moving existing goods from oversupplied glut to starving demand - and all the while dodging the time factor of production cycles (for the most part). This principle applies most overtly to ore and ECells - I find that no matter how long into a game I am, no matter how much of these goods I'm already moving, I can still always find (or rather, my automated traders can still find) ECs for 12 each and Ore for 50 each, to resell at 17-19 and 150-200, respectively. As you tap these resources, the game's "GoD" engine will add in more producers if it finds that turnover of these resources is high. As an example: in Emperor Mines, there are 5 allocations for Ore Mines, but in the early game there are usually only 3 or 4, and after a while 1 or 2 of these may even be deleted if they sit idle for too long. But, start buying up all the cheap ore in the universe, and you will see that gradually those mines start reappearing, and may well reach that sector's maximum of 5 of them. Similar behaviour can be observed with SPPs: in Akeela's Beacon, for example, there are 4, but I've seen this drop to 1 on more than one occasion, because of low apparent demand (note: factories may be starving for energy, but if freighters aren't buying ECs from SPPs, then the SPPs perceive that as low/no demand) - start moving lots of ECs, and gradually you see those SPPs getting restored.