Is there an endgame-balance for planets ?

[TheRailmaker]

First things first : I like all 3 planets.

I am at my third SpaceAge run now and the "testing and exploring basics phase" is over.

Turns out that vulcanus is the #1 planet for 95% of Production. You get stacked T2 belts with foundrys and single beacons on a completly new scale.
I had like 20 quality loops with ten assemblers eacht running Full time in just 4 hours...

How is gleba able to compete with that ? The setup time for a farmcrane-farm and ore bacteria loop is much bigger than the time you spend connecting a single calcite field at start and place some foundrys.

Even "planet dedicated items" like quality stack inserters are actually harder to setup on gleba.

I dont see any reason to go big scale there, if i can do it on vulcanus for a fraction of the work
(also the expanding enemies which arent hard to clear on gleba, but still require more attention than a one time onehit worm)

It wouldn't be that hard, if the factor was like 1 to 2...but its more like 1 to 10.

In my runs, gleba went to a "export green science + carbon fiber" planet. Did you experienced something else, later on ?

[Ranec1]

This may depend on your play style.

I found myself using Gleba as my main hub. It was so efficient turning fruit into iron and copper I did not need lava. Both are infinite. That way I never had to worry about spoilage of the packs.

After getting Fulgora automated heavily it was my #2. So many free resources made it easier to farm specific endgame items.

I never really went back to Nauvis after leaving. Picked up some uranium at one point for Aquilo. Not much else.

About the same with Vulcanus. I found the production chain for oil to be tedious so never used the place for general sciences. Mostly used it for basic on Aquilo like heat pipes, steel, concrete, etc.

I found it too time intensive to launch rockets to build up multiple platforms. And, asteroids are annoying anywhere but Nauvis. So made a few blueprint stages that farmed for the items to build them out, i.e. steel, copper into platform space.

[TheRailmaker]

This may depend on your play style.

I found myself using Gleba as my main hub. It was so efficient turning fruit into iron and copper I did not need lava. Both are infinite.

Can you send me a picture, of one gleba block of your production ( ~200 Iron Plates / sec )
For Vulcanus its ~8 foundrys ,the gleba furnaces alone are bigger than that.

That way I never had to worry about spoilage of the packs.

Even our first starter ships could run the Gleba-Nauvis-Gleba route in 6 min 24/7 . There is no problem with spoiling science at all.

[Rykuta]

This may depend on your play style.

I found myself using Gleba as my main hub. It was so efficient turning fruit into iron and copper I did not need lava. Both are infinite.

For Vulcanus its ~8 foundrys ,the gleba furnaces alone are bigger than that.

Even our first starter ships could run the Gleba-Nauvis-Gleba route in 6 min 24/7 . There is no problem with spoiling science at all.

8 Foundaries for 200 iron plates a second? What like base foundaries or did you rig them with legendary speed modules on legendary foundaries.
The default rate of plates per foundary is like 3.75/s per foundary. That's like 54 Foundaries to get the amount of iron you are talking about.

But also you can just use foundaries on Gleba too to do your ore refining since this is "endgame" afterall. So the amount of iron plates you make doesn't matter, it's basically the same number of machines to actually refine it and shipping calcite is braindead simple/easy.

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What matters is how you get the raw iron to refine into plates. On Vulcanis it is definitely easier; just shove some lava into a machine and done. For Gleba you have to set up a bunch of bacteria farms, they are basically self supporting and just "go" and get out of hand very very quickly if you aren't watching them but it is definitely more setup.

What isn't more setup is oil processing however. Lets say you want to produce enough space materials to be pumping out around 4.5/s of each (fuel, processors, etc). Iron and copper we covered so what that leaves is making plastic for the circuits/etc and rocket fuel.

In order to produce enough plastic and rocket fuel on Vulcanis to meet that theoretical demand, you need roughly 50 refineries and about 100ish chemical plants, 50 assembling machines. You could always try shipping in bioflux and using the gleba machines to cut back on your machine count a fair bit; but you still need roughly 100ish machines to get the job done and shipping bioflux to make nutrients means you're setting up a gleba production line on Vulcanis, so probably not preferable.

On gleba meanwhile you have simple recipes for making plastic and for making rocket fuel. The total number of machines you need to have this same setup is just 40 or so of those gleban crafters. You basically ignore dealing with oil entirely and just focus on your main materials.

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There isn't actually an "obvious" clear winner; especially since you do technically have access to "everything" from "every planet" so you can just choose to mix and match things. Why not ship fruit from gleba to vulcanis? Or ship plastic/rocket fuel so you can mostly ignore oil processing on Vulcanis entirely.

Ultimately it comes down to preference and whatever you feel is the best way to handle a situation and I think that's pretty neat c:

[TheRailmaker]

It wasnt about the exact number, but a build like this gives you 100 plates / sec.

grafik.png (955.81 KiB) Viewed 2743 times

Double it for the lava processing if you want.

I placed this ~20 times in 4h, like i said.

Now try to get the same ammount of plates on gleba.

Sure, oil is harder to get on vulcanus, but still achiveable.

Oil however has a lower "value" in factorio than iron+copper+steel+stone+coal.
>90% of buildings depend on those more than oil.

[Jay_Raynor]

I found myself using Gleba as my main hub. It was so efficient turning fruit into iron and copper I did not need lava. Both are infinite. That way I never had to worry about spoilage of the packs.

Sorry this is so long in coming, but could you elaborate how? Advanced cultivation nets 3 ore per bioflux at a delay. With bioflux costing 7.5 yumako and 3 jellynut, this translates to 2.5 yumako and 1 jellynut per ore and this doesn't account for how bacteria production needs to spool up if/when it comes to a halt. My "rare foundries/EM plants" build capable of 8K green circuits runs on 225 copper wire (112 plates or 336 molten copper) per second.

Metal might be infinite on Gleba same as Vulcanus, but I'm failing to see "efficiency" in the amount of biotowers and biochambers needed to process that much fruit for metal when a standard foundry and a few calcite miners can provide so much more in the form of liquid metal.

[waterBear]

The answer is probably that the planets are not balanced in the way you're talking about. Vulcanus is intended to be the "easy" planet. Fulgora is next and then Gleba (IMHO). I believe you should view the planets in the expansion more like mini games. They each have a new puzzle for you to solve, then you scale it up to meet your needs, then move on with life. If you want to chill on Vulcc and produce billions of iron plate, that's totally cool.

[Cipherpunk]

I found myself using Gleba as my main hub. It was so efficient turning fruit into iron and copper I did not need lava. Both are infinite. That way I never had to worry about spoilage of the packs.

Sorry this is so long in coming, but could you elaborate how? Advanced cultivation nets 3 ore per bioflux at a delay. With bioflux costing 7.5 yumako and 3 jellynut, this translates to 2.5 yumako and 1 jellynut per ore and this doesn't account for how bacteria production needs to spool up if/when it comes to a halt. My "rare foundries/EM plants" build capable of 8K green circuits runs on 225 copper wire (112 plates or 336 molten copper) per second.

Metal might be infinite on Gleba same as Vulcanus, but I'm failing to see "efficiency" in the amount of biotowers and biochambers needed to process that much fruit for metal when a standard foundry and a few calcite miners can provide so much more in the form of liquid metal.

You're not accounting for the massive productivity bonus that's applied to biochambers at three stages for the ore production chain.

So all ore costs have to be multiplied by (1/1.5)^3 or ~0.296...
So it's actually ~0.74 yumako and ~0.296 jellynut per ore.

And that's before we start adding productivity modules to each biochamber. With four tier three modules at base quality the costs are roughly cut in half again.

[Jay_Raynor]

You're not accounting for the massive productivity bonus that's applied to biochambers at three stages for the ore production chain.

So all ore costs have to be multiplied by (1/1.5)^3 or ~0.296...
So it's actually ~0.74 yumako and ~0.296 jellynut per ore.

And that's before we start adding productivity modules to each biochamber. With four tier three modules at base quality the costs are roughly cut in half again.

Alright, I'll accept that I missed the production bonus calculations, but I still would like to know how that's more efficient for metals. Not even accounting for nutrients, a single biochamber with no modules can produce 150 ore/min or 2.5 ore/sec after harvesting, transport, both fruits processed, bioflux created, and seed bacteria created...which still requires ore processing after. A single lava-processing foundry with no mods can run three iron or copper plate foundries for 675 plates/min or 11.25 plates/sec. Modules just exacerbate the issue, since foundries can not only accept speed beacons as a practical matter but can also simply do more of them in total.

Don't get me wrong, I really do actually love making metal on Gleba from a process perspective and will do so for lower-volume stuff easy enough to produce on-site, but infinite metal and stone from Vulcanus seem a lot more efficient...

And then there's trying to make foundation...