Legendary Skull of Death, and the case for Legend Science

[DeathToInterlopers]

Legendary Skull of Death.png (1000.23 KiB) Viewed 435 times

Greetings fellow engineers, and hopefully some WUBE staff!

I have been working on this project for several months now, and wanted to talk about my experience and what drove me to create this Megabase.

After completing the game on default settings and making a little progress on research productivity I decided to relocate my Nauvis base to am area with richer patches. Without legend trains I found myself preferring to do direct belt driven builds and so I moved everything to a peninsula near a large lake quite a ways from my original starting spot.

Legendary Skull of Death full zoom.png (791.2 KiB) Viewed 435 times

When I arrived at the peninsula the bay near it sort of resembled a skull shape and I was inspired to build my research base on a fabricated island since my plan was to do full pollution control with tree farms and biter zoos. I'm an artist and so I had to get creative with my Island design so I went with the theme, Legendary Skull of Death! The theme is a death island killing thousands of biters from legendary expired biter nests to control pollution. In addition, my goal was to produce only legendary science packs to feed my mega base. I am well aware that legendary science packs are just worse in almost every way, but I saw it as a difficult and unique challenge to put in front of myself for a major end game build. I have complete control over my biolab pollution and it does not leak into the environment at all. Little did I know just how hard this build was going to be when I started, but I'm glad that I did it.

My Megabase has 512 fully beaconed legendary Biolabs. Which means I need just shy of 315 legendary science packs per second to feed them all. Red science, no problem, green science, slightly more costly, but still very easy. I didn't really bother with Military science yet, since I don't need any more of those researches. I planned on circling back later after I made progress on other items so I went to Chemical science next. Unfortunately, I hit a major wall as soon as I got to this build. At first glance I thought I could use Biosulphur to produce enough legendary Sulphur, but it quickly started to spiral out of control. My first build netted me about 80 per minute, and in order to make enough chemical science I actually needed 84 legendary Sulphur per second. This number felt so approachable and innocuous after all of the large scale things I made in this game, but there just wasn't going to be a way for me to build a base 60 times larger on Gleba to make enough Biosulphur. So I tried a Cryogenics plant with recyclers to brute force to legend and got a similar result there. I could squeeze about 80 per minute out of a really solid quality cryo build and scaling it times 60 would have put in the problem of finding over 2 million petroleum per second pushed through almost 1000 Cryochambers along side about 4200 recyclers all running full time. Neither of these builds felt viable for the throughput I required.

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After doing the math and realizing I could get a slightly better deal on asteroids for Sulphur and the other large quantities of iron I was going to need. I had to finally relent and build my first space casino. In order to get enough Sulphur it was still as massive undertaking.

The CLAW final.png (382.84 KiB) Viewed 435 times

This ship isn't even enough for full throughput. I actually need two of these to meet throughput since I found I was limited by the number of inputs in my space platform hub. This casino has 3400 legendary asteroid crushers and I run it in the most dense patch of asteroids in the space between Aquilo and the solar system edge. I want to be really clear, that I actually am not a huge fan of casino ships, and while I don't disagree with them being removed in the next update I do have to raise at least one detracting point about building large scale legendary builds. There's no good way to get Legendary Sulphur without them.

After building this, I have to admit that thematically it actually started to feel kinda cool. I was gathering the infinite resources from the edge of the solar system, and refining them into the most valuable materials possible. Bringing them back to my home planet and using them in my fully legendary base with legendary science packs really did feel cool. Actually completing many steps of research with this base I felt very accomplished. End game challenge vibes full locked in. 1.8 million eSPM through my mega base and all the pollution was being fully contained.

I think what I would really like to highlight and suggest that the quality science packs get some attention to make them not only viable, but the actual end game primo Megabase solution. I think removing space casinos makes sense from a design perspective, and I would honestly love a terrestrial alternative on any of the planets. But there are currently no alternatives for Sulphur. Looking at the existing recipes I feel like jut allowing explosives to recycle into Coal and Sulphur constituents would make an upcycling build significantly more viable. Since I did wind up running very short on legendary coal as well. Recycling explosives to these items would at least make a large scale viable option for me to meet the major demands of a legendary science Megabase.

To my point about quality science packs. It's actually rather disappointing that the ideal quality on science pack for Megabases is rare or uncommon. In order to make these a late game destination item I would like to suggest adding one more promethium level infinite science research that increases quality science output by a multiplicative factor of plus 10%. Every level of the quality science research would add 10% to the multiplier that quality science packs receive. So at the first level uncommon would give a 220% times 330% for rare 440% for epic, and 660% for legendary. So by the time you've researched this 20 times you'd be at uncommon science would give 400%, rare would give 600% times as much and epic would provide 800%, and legendary would provide 1200% as much research per pack. Make it on a similar curve to research productivity and give us another way to climb higher in a real end game manner. This allows for Megabases to operate without having to move prohibitively more and more science packs. The one benefit of running legend science I've seen is that you don't have to move as many science packs around and gives you some better options for running a lot of labs in a tight space. I hope we can get a way to make Legendary Science a real end game destination and it would mean a lot to me to be able to get some legend Sulphur to keep this base going. I've already made peace with the fact that I probably wont be able to keep playing this file after 2.1, so I am planning a new save with quality trains. I've made peace with only ever being able to play this file on 2.0, but thought sharing my experience and build might motivate another look at Legend quality science and sulphur upcycling. I have more pics to share of my base if y'all wanna see more just say so and I'll add them in the replies.

What do you think about making Legendary Science packs the final end game solution?

-Death

[andystrangelove]

Awesome looking megabase

I agree completely on legendary science, I wish the devs would have given it some more attention in their 2.1 quality rebalancing. And legendary sulphur is a perfect example of a bottleneck with no workable solutions. I really like the suggestion of changing the recyling recipie for explosives, that would solve the problem for both sulphur and coal (though coal at least has other options).

Also the possibility of increasing legendary science performance through research, although a straight rebalance would also do the trick. Just 6x reduced drain as the reward for multiple orders of magnitude crafting difficulty makes no sense.

[ichVII]

Your proposition does not yield the result you want. On high levels, the proposed bonus scaling makes legendary science 5 times as efficient as uncommon ones. However, for blue science, they will still be way more expensive then a factor 5. This propostion would make uncommon blue science your best bet, not legendary blue science. If you want to push higher qualities, you need to make the ratio between any two qualities grow to a sufficiently high number. With just direct upcycling, getting from epic to legendary already costs about 5 times the ressources (a bit hard to say as the 10% skipping chance is highly relevant here and makes this not a simple epic input to legendary output, since you get some legendary before either way. If you count epic input to legendary output, it is 13 times as expensive).

On the other hand, if direct upcycling would become worth it at some point, you could just upcycle the science packs themselves, instead of their ingredients. That is more expensive, but logistically simpler. So I am not even sure the modified scaling would actually yield interesting builds.

[DeathToInterlopers]

Awesome looking megabase

I agree completely on legendary science, I wish the devs would have given it some more attention in their 2.1 quality rebalancing. And legendary sulphur is a perfect example of a bottleneck with no workable solutions. I really like the suggestion of changing the recyling recipie for explosives, that would solve the problem for both sulphur and coal (though coal at least has other options).

Also the possibility of increasing legendary science performance through research, although a straight rebalance would also do the trick. Just 6x reduced drain as the reward for multiple orders of magnitude crafting difficulty makes no sense.

Thank you so much, friend! I appreciate your response a lot. I hope they will do something about legend science. Maybe I'll have to get into mod making for it, IDK how deep I wanna go, lol.

[DeathToInterlopers]

My friend, I straight up said I know legend science is worse in my post. I know. I want it to not be be worse.

Your proposition does not yield the result you want. On high levels, the proposed bonus scaling makes legendary science 5 times as efficient as uncommon ones. However, for blue science, they will still be way more expensive then a factor 5. This propostion would make uncommon blue science your best bet, not legendary blue science. If you want to push higher qualities, you need to make the ratio between any two qualities grow to a sufficiently high number. With just direct upcycling, getting from epic to legendary already costs about 5 times the ressources (a bit hard to say as the 10% skipping chance is highly relevant here and makes this not a simple epic input to legendary output, since you get some legendary before either way. If you count epic input to legendary output, it is 13 times as expensive).

On the other hand, if direct upcycling would become worth it at some point, you could just upcycle the science packs themselves, instead of their ingredients. That is more expensive, but logistically simpler. So I am not even sure the modified scaling would actually yield interesting builds.

[ichVII]

Yes, and your proposition of buffing all quality science equally does not fix that. Thats what I said.

In order to make these a late game destination item I would like to suggest adding one more promethium level infinite science research that increases quality science output by a multiplicative factor of plus 10%. Every level of the quality science research would add 10% to the multiplier that quality science packs receive. So at the first level uncommon would give a 220% times 330% for rare 440% for epic, and 660% for legendary. So by the time you've researched this 20 times you'd be at uncommon science would give 400%, rare would give 600% times as much and epic would provide 800%, and legendary would provide 1200% as much research per pack.

What do you think about making Legendary Science packs the final end game solution?

-Death

This proposition boosts uncommon science so much, that it is not worth it to go beyond uncommon (possibly rare). So you would need a bigger buff to the higher quality levels to make that helpful.

[DeathToInterlopers]

Yes, and your proposition of buffing all quality science equally does not fix that. Thats what I said.

This proposition boosts uncommon science so much, that it is not worth it to go beyond uncommon (possibly rare). So you would need a bigger buff to the higher quality levels to make that helpful.

If the research scaling has a repeatable curve like the other late game researches. There would be a point in which legend science would cross the threshold to be the most efficient and best solution. By fact of it getting 6 times the benefit from a repeatable research.

[ichVII]

No. Your suggestion scales uncommon science with 10%*lvl and legendary science with 10%*lvl. At level 10, an uncomm science pack is worth 3 normal ones and the legendary one 11. The ratio between those is 11/3 =3.6666. On level 100, you have 11 for uncommon and 51 for legendary. That gives a ratio of 51/11<5. At lvl 1000, it is 501/101. This converges to 5 and thus, the legendary science pack will never be worth more then 5 uncommon ones, while being way cheaper.

I think I got the numbers slightly wrong as i misunderstood your suggestion. It does not change the point. Your suggestion does not change the ratio of how many legendary science are equivalent to one uncommon one and so it does not make legendary science the best choice.

[DeathToInterlopers]

No. Your suggestion scales uncommon science with 10%*lvl and legendary science with 10%*lvl. At level 10, an uncomm science pack is worth 3 normal ones and the legendary one 11. The ratio between those is 11/3 =3.6666. On level 100, you have 11 for uncommon and 51 for legendary. That gives a ratio of 51/11<5. At lvl 1000, it is 501/101. This converges to 5 and thus, the legendary science pack will never be worth more then 5 uncommon ones, while being way cheaper.

I think I got the numbers slightly wrong as i misunderstood your suggestion. It does not change the point. Your suggestion does not change the ratio of how many legendary science are equivalent to one uncommon one and so it does not make legendary science the best choice.

I think I see what you are saying. Since it would also scale the uncommon researches versus their resource cost. Thank you for pointing out that math, but it doesn't change the larger point of my post. The research should scale higher for legend and epic until it eventually passes the lower quality tiers for the best value. Or just flat out make it better from the start. Every other item you build in the game with a legendary multiplier is significantly better than it's lower quality items. I would like the same mechanic to apply to science packs, one way or the other.

[Nidan]

The issue with your suggestion is that you're applying the same multiplier to all qualities, possibly excluding normal. That means their relative value to each other remains constant. Yes, the absolute value for legendary increases faster, but one legendary will still have the same science output of three uncommons. (Or 5, when taking ichVII's numbers; you should write down your intended scaling as a formula.) You need more that linear scaling if you want better qualities to improve faster.

I would like the same mechanic to apply to science packs, one way or the other.

Isn't that technically already the case? You even get a +100% boost per quality level, instead of the typical +30%.

[DeathToInterlopers]

Isn't that technically already the case? You even get a +100% boost per quality level, instead of the typical +30%.

The multiplier does not align with the cost. So cost wise it is inferior by a significant margin. Building a legendary factory, for example, is better enough to justify the cost so it is superior. Legendary items in the game are all superior except for science packs, due to their consumable nature. Therefore, they should have a higher benefit to compensate. I know it's a really hard concept to understand. I hope you can get there some day.

[h.q.droid]

Since items are quality-tiered, I suggested once to have (some) tech quality-tiered too. Quality tech has scaled bonus values, have separated levels, and can only be researched with bottles of the corresponding quality. Like having Legendary Mining Productivity give +25% productivity.

Could keep it simple with only legendary and common tiers.