Mid to late game transition

[Syrchalis]

You set up your 5-10 oil refineries, you handled your red circuits and the blue science is rolling in. Slowly you get the most essential blue science upgrades, like advanced oil processing.

Well, this is the point where I kind of start struggling. I know how to proceed, but problems start to appear. Usually it's either the lack of copper/iron or lack of oil products. The latter is usually resolved rather easily for me, but the former seems just tedious.

The moment I get blue circuits going or even just 32 red circuit machines it just draws so much copper and sometimes iron too that I feel like you need ridiculous amounts. I mean, I generally build two rows of 72 furnaces for EACH, so I get two compressed blue belts of copper and iron respectively - how can that be so little?

One of the things that felt like they helped a ton is producing green circuits where they are needed. I would never ban them from my main bus, too many things need them, especially in the midgame, but for red and especially blue circuits it just seems like a bad solution.

In my current game I have two blue belts transporting green circuits and around 20 green circuit machines. The belts are pretty full, not compressed though. Still it doesn't seem like it's enough.

How do you guys play from the point of blue circuits onward? How do you set things up? Because I feel a bit lost.

[Deadly-Bagel]

My first few games I just struggled through with 2 belts of copper, but it takes a long time. Upgrading to blue belts does help if you haven't already.

A green circuit requires 1.5 copper and 1 iron, therefore a green circuit belt requires 1.5 copper belts and 1 iron belt. I usually aim for 2 green circuit belts so you need 2 iron belts and 3 copper belts dedicated to producing circuits. Of course you want stuff for the rest of your factory as well so I now tend to build for 4 iron belts and 4 copper belts. I send the third iron belt off to be smelted into steel, so further down I end up with 1/5 of a Steel belt, 1 iron belt and 1 copper belt. I still haven't fully tested the effectiveness of this, you may need to add half of the fourth and maybe a fifth iron belt to steel processing which should get you half a belt.

This scale isn't entirely necessary but it does do the job.

[SyncViews]

I think 2, even blue belts for copper or iron is not really so much

For steel I just have dedicated iron furnaces as well separate from plain iron (I split the iron ore immediately at my ore unloading depot). It means I can build the whole steel setup seperate from the iron and have more space for expansion and ore routing (e.g. try 8 input ore belts ).

For red circuits I tend to do pretty much the same thing, so I have a "module" that takes iron, copper and plastic as inputs.
For purple circuits, as well so I have iron, copper and red circuits as inputs (they dont use too many red, but need a vast number of green factories).

These will all be just after the smelting area and consume entire belt lines rather than try and fit all the iron and copper onto the main bus.

Green circuits on the main bus are then just for everything else that needs them directly, since one circuit is still less than the 2.5 copper/iron, and almost nothing else wants 2 full circuit assemblers. I still tend to leave space for at least 4 iron and 4 circuit belts on the bus though, although for most of the bus the width means they are just red or yellow belts, which are also a lot cheaper/faster to mass produce (especially early game when first building the bus).


A major thing I think is leaving enough space right from the start (I normally fail with oil personally in an attempt to not run a really long pipe initially), so that you can expand (and upgrade belts or assemblers) without having to rebuild everything. e.g. if you run out of space between the train lines and main assembly areas to add more smelters. Although at least by then with construction bots rebuilding/moving factory areas entirely is practical.

[DerivePi]

Its balancing questions like this that drove me to develop my "Max Design" thread here - viewtopic.php?f=202&t=12588

A full belt of circuits sucks up 1 1/2 belts of copper plate and 1 belt of iron plate. If you have 2 belts of iron plate leading up to this part of your factory, you only need one leaving it. Or, more to your point, if you need 2 belts of iron plate after the circuit fabrication, you need 3 "Full" belts prior to it along with three full 70 furnace iron smelters. For this reason, I set up my factory with gears (2 full belts of iron plate) and circuit production (1 1/2 and 1 belts of iron/copper plate respectively) right after my smelters. My bus at this point includes one belt of steel, one belt of circuits, one belt of gears, 2 belts of iron plate, 2 belts of copper plate, and coal. If fully loaded, these 7 belts requires 9 full furnaces of iron plate and 3 1/2 of copper plate. If you are thinking bigger, two full basic circuits can easily be justified as well for 7 copper plate smelters and 10 iron plate smelters.

Now back to your initial question - How do you guys play from this point onward? After blue science and processing units, I usually focus on trains to bring in massive amounts of resources and to keep things fun. My current run is a spoon run though, so I won't be running into these problems.

For the most part (exception: I produce copper cable for advanced circuits separately), I like to produce all of one type in one spot and place that item on the bus. If I start having a shortage, the bus will show it and I know where in the factory to go to fix the shortage.

[reallyLost]

Personally, I always consider my starting base a "bootstrap" base and don't bother trying to scale it too far. I tend to build no more that 24 of each type of smelter, and for circuits I usually build around 12 green, 12 red, and only 4 blue. I don't worry about the ratios too much or if the production for some things is a bit slow. After that I start to build "megabase" style production outposts. When each megabase outpost it up and running I replace the production in my bootstrap base with a train supply from the outpost.

[Mr. Tact]

I thought the default/standard for any large base short of a "mega-base" was four full blue belts of iron, four copper, 2 steel, 2 green circuits.

That's certainly been enough for me to get through most of the "Late Upgrades" research...