Rushing space

[J-H]

For my second run through Space Age, I decided to rush space. I built a launchpad and platform as early as possible, with just red, green, and blue science available... not even military science! Last time, I built a gigantic base before going to space, and never felt like I needed to or had the time to go back and swap out the thousands of assemblers, electric furnaces, etc.

With only assembler 2s and a few hand-made electric furnaces, I had a couple of platform failures before managing to reach Fulgora. I spent some time reading while the factory slowly worked to make platforms and launch them off of 2nd tier assemblers making my blue circuits.

Despite being lower tech, it went pretty well, although I had to spend quite a while searching for a good island since I didn't even have trains! Red underground belts weren't enough to connect between islands. After finding a good island, set-up went about as normal, and I was able to make a nice mall for assemblers, arms, splitters, and requester/provider chests (lesson learned: Always make those on every planet to support remote building). My science production setup is definitely better than in my first SA playthrough thanks to having a bigger island. However, blue circuit availability is the choke point, as I also have to split those to get red/green to split down to copper.

My base on Nauvis slowed to a crawl with nearly no science research. My one copper patch started to die off despite productivity at every step. My steam power plants (fueled by my small coal field and some petroleum->solid fuel) put out enough pollution that I got some attacks from a choke point I'd missed. With no lasers and no ammo production, I was able to use remote-build to make some four-way flame turrets to guard that side of the base.

After loading up some EM plants, I went direct to Vulcanus. Vulcanus is still my favorite planet. Everything flows and works in a reasonable progression; it's an interesting building puzzle but with less hassle. I wish I could spend more time there!

It took several tries before I could kill a small demolisher; with no military research, red ammo wasn't very powerful. I eventually managed it with about 60-80 turrets in a cluster. Until then, I had to just take big miners and guerrilla-mine into chests, packing up and running away like a carryall when Shai-Hulud approached.

By the time I got back to Nauvis, my entire copper patch could fit within the boundaries of a single Big Miner... so that's what I did. With a Big Miner and some calcite imported from Vulcanus, I'm actually able to support two foundries melting copper ore, and that in turn was enough to help restart production at the base. It was very, very satisfying to go through and upgrade my circuit production with EM plants and my metals with foundries. One big miner's output goes a long way!

I had to use flame turrets to push up to a new cargo patch. I'm running a train with 3 tanks and a car of calcite up there. Big Miner -50% depletion + foundry +50% productivity plus some modules (productivity and efficiency) means that's going to be my copper supply for a very, very long time.

Next step is to build a second moving platform to set up a regular shuttle to Fulgora, then work on building yellow and blue science production.

Steam plants only go so far with so many big buildings, even though I have most of them Efficiencied pretty heavily.

The early going was a slog, but being able to build my base out with the optimized tools is a lot of fun.

Whenever I go to Gleba I'll be sure to use foundries and EM plants right away, which will help my bacteria->ore pipeline be a lot more effective.