BlueTemplar wrote:osric_athanasius wrote: In my last no spoon run, I had bots up within 3:45mins. Now this can be done even faster as my Bot facility was 4 roboports away from my basic mall (caused by some inconvenient ore patches that I need in between).
You won't always have oil nearby...
The no oil nearby is a huge fallacy. Even assuming that you did not use the preview and don't already know where it is, unless you use some extreme ore generation setting/mod or biters settings, in which case you asked for it, there's always oil close enough.
In the run I talked about :
4xel wrote:I just got mine in a new game in 3h30 without try harding.
Which was beeline to the first robot port and robot assembly line, there was no oil nearby. I lost 5 to 10 minutes top runing around with science going in background to search for it, as well as to know where the nearest biters are.
When I still found no oil, I just plopped down a radar (IIRC I put it about 1h30, but with a bit more foresight, you can easily put it at 30min-1h without it being taxing on your ressources or time) and got ready to build a car (possible under 1h30, realistically 2h-3h if you wan to build what you can build in the base beforhand). The radar was virtually free time wise, and had found an oil depot well withtin its scanning range.
Had it failed, I would have spent 20 minutes top to go around my base in a coal powered car until I find oil. That time could barely even be said to be lost because driving is fun and because exploring is necessary at some later point anyway, and coal car is not that suboptimal of a way to explore.
If anything, you eventually have to explore because your ores run out ; but it can even be said that a map with no oil nearby suck regardless of whether you have access to construction bot or not without oil, because construction bots do not help exploring (real robotport + radar might though).