Questions about Preparing for End game and supply and demand

[Cinder85]

I am on my latest save which has about 25+ hours so far. ive gotten almost all the tech tree researched.
The only problem is is Red, Green and Military science is being made enough to support the 60 labs.
Blue, Purple, and Yellow science isnt able to keep up so it take forever for any science including those to be done.
I have a difficult time wrapping my head around ratios and efficiency and i always get caught up on "I dont know what the ratio is and so its not good enough". What i keep telling myself is that i should stop worrying about the ratios but i am only ever making just enough or not enough to support my main bus.
Right now i have Power Armor MK2 and 2 Nuclear Reactors as well as 3 Roboport MK1's so my plan was to wait until i had atleast a few more roboports to re build my factory to be bigger and better.
As i said i am getting caught up on "It doesnt work if its not the right ratios or the most efficient setup" and i wish i wasnt so OCD about it because this has hampered my ability to play the game and enjoy it.
So in all of my ramblings, What i think im asking is how do i re build my base now that ive got a massive solar setup providing power, and enough tech researched to where i can use electric furnaces with my smelting setups, and do it right without getting to caught up in ratios and efficiency. As well as setup trains and setup rails in a good way to where i can have a semi modular train system.

Im sorry if this doesnt make sense. I am kind of overwhelmed with how much ive been playing and will be taking a break for a day or two. I guess all im asking is for a bit of guidance on what to do and how to do it as my base has gotten big enough to where im not doing the things i should be doing but i dont know what those things i should be doing are.

Thanks for reading and again i apologize for the anxious ramblings. Thank You.

[CDarklock]

Blue, Purple, and Yellow science isnt able to keep up so it take forever for any science including those to be done.

Sounds like me. What I tend to do here is start refitting the factory, going through each little production block and reorganising it somewhere else. I'll look at the amount of space I have, then go off into a clear area and build a new block producing the same thing. Once I do that, I'll blueprint it and pull it down, then head back to my main factory and build the new production line in its place. Ideally I can produce either the same stuff in less space, or more stuff in the same space.

I can burn a lot of hours doing this, so usually tech completes behind my back while I'm doing it. My biggest danger becomes missing the alert that research has finished, and leaving science packs to pile up while I mess around with stuff.

I have a difficult time wrapping my head around ratios and efficiency and i always get caught up on "I dont know what the ratio is and so its not good enough". What i keep telling myself is that i should stop worrying about the ratios but i am only ever making just enough or not enough to support my main bus.

I don't worry about ratios, I worry about whether I have enough. I don't want to crank out loads of stuff I don't need, but I do want to crank out enough of the stuff I do. It means absolutely nothing to have a system that flawlessly produces blue circuits with zero waste, if I do not have enough blue circuits.

As i said i am getting caught up on "It doesnt work if its not the right ratios or the most efficient setup" and i wish i wasnt so OCD about it because this has hampered my ability to play the game and enjoy it.

Premature optimisation is the root of all evil.

If I have perfect ratios, but I don't have enough, I have not solved the problem. And the only way to fix my ratios after I have enough is to produce more, which I don't need. The resources that go into fixing my ratios are resources I could be using elsewhere in the production chain, where I do not have enough. And that is a better place to use them.

Perfect ratios aren't just meaningless, they're actively harmful.

Im sorry if this doesnt make sense. I am kind of overwhelmed with how much ive been playing and will be taking a break for a day or two. I guess all im asking is for a bit of guidance on what to do and how to do it as my base has gotten big enough to where im not doing the things i should be doing but i dont know what those things i should be doing are.

There is a book by Eliyahu Goldratt, "The Goal." It introduces a concept called the "Theory of Constraints," and is fundamentally designed for actual working factories in the real world. It's only got five steps, which I'll oversimplify here. (Seriously, get and read the book.)

1. Identify the constraints. Find the bottleneck in the process. Where is the most important place in your production chain that not enough is coming out? Ideally, identify every place you don't have enough, and make a list. If you have trouble with priority, just start at the output and find the first place it's happening as you work toward the input end. Once you find a problem, just work on that one.

2. Exploit the constraints. Fill that bottleneck as full as you can. Pack the inputs. If your assembler isn't getting enough copper plates, pull another line off the bus. If you don't have another line on the bus, put another line on the bus. If your furnaces aren't smelting enough to fill another bus line, add more furnaces. If your furnaces don't have enough ore, add more mining drills. If you don't have enough space in your resource patch for more drills, find another resource patch.

3. Subordinate everything to this end. Seriously, don't do anything else. Pack the bottleneck. End of. Anything you improve on the other side of the bottleneck can't get better anyway, because of the bottleneck. Just ignore it for now. This is your one and only problem to work on.

4. Elevate the constraints. Now that you're shoving everything you have at the bottleneck, widen the bottleneck. Your bottleneck is producing as much as it can from what you're putting in, so scale it up and produce more.

5. When the constraint is broken, return to step 1. Once your bottleneck is producing enough, you're done and your problem is solved. So cross #1 off your list of problems, and hey presto you automatically promote #2.

And once you've sufficiently internalised the theory of constraints... why not study some behavioural economics? It's like having a superpower.