Important Understanding Resource Routing
Verfasst: Dienstag 9. Juni 2020, 13:22
It's not only crucial that you thoroughly understand resource routing in BotE for practical reasons,but for economic reasons, and so you don't paint yourself in a corner.
As a very young man, really an older teen, I volunteered to paint a porch on a work weekend at a beloved place that was operated by pure altruists. It was in a nature setting and struggled to get by on a miniscule budget, yet over time helped thousands of young people. The only way things got done was through volunteerism and even relatively poor people who volunteered...ended up opening their wallets and even buying the material needed to do projects.
Having never done an actual painting project, but there being no one else willing to do the work, meant the task fell to those few handful of altruists willing to sacrifice time, talent, and treasure to benefit other young people.
Well with zero guidance, I walked out on the screened in porch, and started painting, and was happy about my progress...until it was lunch time and I realized that I could NOT go get lunch, because doing so would ruin the still wet paint as I had painted from the doorways to the far side of the porch,thus there was no way to exit! Dumb, right?
Well BotE will similarly allow you to do an extremely foolish thing with resource routing, and it won't be clear that it's an issue until it happens to you. If you have a 40x40 maxed out galaxy, you likely will have this happen...many times.
The way BotE is written, there is a peculiar limitation on the maximum storage of food in whatever form at 25,000 regardless of technology. This badly needs to be changed as regardless of many farms or replicators or ocean filtration devices, it's the efficiency that improves NOT the total capacity.
So therefore you end up making some food generating buildings that improve morale, yet you are not strategically improving the food supply capacity. Now that generally is not an issue as large growth only occurs with multiple colony ships, and again BotE has a limit of 3 and sometime 4 allowed to colonize and won't generally allow more. Now those two things are major design flaws in my opinion, as sometimes the sector would allow tens of billions more to be added, but the programming won't allow more colony ships.
And that self-limiting is bad because sometimes the resources are spread out across many planets, and migration within a sector by growth does not always recognize these other planets have needed resources. Thus you can't sometime build a spaceport in a worse case scenario and or can't mine for those materials and all are needed. The very worst for resources would be detrium as then you can't build ships in that sector followed by iridium as iridium double hulls are vital to the game after turn 630+.
50-90% of hundreds of hours are spent just doing resource routing changes...so that is seriously significant in BotE.
If you have ever worked in any process based business, you understand how important inventory and raw material acquisitions are to generate products. Cut off the raw materials, and everything comes to a screeching halt.
There is an arbitrary and peculiar 125,000 limit on the generation of mined materials regardless of the level of the mines or the numbers of them. Higher tech and investment just increases the efficiency, not the capacity. The manager function will notice whatever mined materials are low and prioritizes generating them to a maximum of 125,000 units. Then halts.
Now when you do resource routing (which is really the science of logistics), you go to the empire screen and sort by resource amounts, and the natural inclination is to take note of which supply of say titanium is available, and contigent upon an available resource slot, and then considering how efficiently that is being generated. Most likely the player then chooses the ones making the maximum 125,000 amount and redeploys those on a resource route where they are required to do upgrades and or build troops and ships (except detrium).
This is faulty logic. Why?
What happens by sending 125,000 units of titanium to the new colony is this butt heads with the existing mining process generation of titanium at the new colony.
"Hey shut down the new mines because another colony is sending the maxium amount of 125,000, so we can all goof off and put up our boots and rest!"
That is wrong. You want the titanium miners to generate titanium locally in that sector, but the software seeing an influx of 125,000 then prioritizes other processes.
See the problem? What you should do is allow the titanium to build in value and sell from those caches of 125,000 to maximize your profits. And choose a lesser total amount like 80,000 or less...maybe even 60,000 to the new colony, thus you have some titanium to get their upgrades done, but still have the titanium miners working so eventually they have their own cache storage of 125,000.
Foreman "Hey, the managers only sent us 50%, so you miners need to get back to work!"
This artificial 125,000 for storage is a bad idea. Some limit is necessary as the program has to always know how much is being made and stored so the manager can make a judgement call on division of labor.
And the best initial sectors end up being powerhouses of industry and large suppliers of raw materials of resources.
And then 90% of sectors have an artificial limit of 3 resource routes too. So then you get into situations, far too often...where you desperately want to have more resource route slots, but only a few sectors have that capacity through special projects like the Kanorr and Maladan.
As a very young man, really an older teen, I volunteered to paint a porch on a work weekend at a beloved place that was operated by pure altruists. It was in a nature setting and struggled to get by on a miniscule budget, yet over time helped thousands of young people. The only way things got done was through volunteerism and even relatively poor people who volunteered...ended up opening their wallets and even buying the material needed to do projects.
Having never done an actual painting project, but there being no one else willing to do the work, meant the task fell to those few handful of altruists willing to sacrifice time, talent, and treasure to benefit other young people.
Well with zero guidance, I walked out on the screened in porch, and started painting, and was happy about my progress...until it was lunch time and I realized that I could NOT go get lunch, because doing so would ruin the still wet paint as I had painted from the doorways to the far side of the porch,thus there was no way to exit! Dumb, right?
Well BotE will similarly allow you to do an extremely foolish thing with resource routing, and it won't be clear that it's an issue until it happens to you. If you have a 40x40 maxed out galaxy, you likely will have this happen...many times.
The way BotE is written, there is a peculiar limitation on the maximum storage of food in whatever form at 25,000 regardless of technology. This badly needs to be changed as regardless of many farms or replicators or ocean filtration devices, it's the efficiency that improves NOT the total capacity.
So therefore you end up making some food generating buildings that improve morale, yet you are not strategically improving the food supply capacity. Now that generally is not an issue as large growth only occurs with multiple colony ships, and again BotE has a limit of 3 and sometime 4 allowed to colonize and won't generally allow more. Now those two things are major design flaws in my opinion, as sometimes the sector would allow tens of billions more to be added, but the programming won't allow more colony ships.
And that self-limiting is bad because sometimes the resources are spread out across many planets, and migration within a sector by growth does not always recognize these other planets have needed resources. Thus you can't sometime build a spaceport in a worse case scenario and or can't mine for those materials and all are needed. The very worst for resources would be detrium as then you can't build ships in that sector followed by iridium as iridium double hulls are vital to the game after turn 630+.
50-90% of hundreds of hours are spent just doing resource routing changes...so that is seriously significant in BotE.
If you have ever worked in any process based business, you understand how important inventory and raw material acquisitions are to generate products. Cut off the raw materials, and everything comes to a screeching halt.
There is an arbitrary and peculiar 125,000 limit on the generation of mined materials regardless of the level of the mines or the numbers of them. Higher tech and investment just increases the efficiency, not the capacity. The manager function will notice whatever mined materials are low and prioritizes generating them to a maximum of 125,000 units. Then halts.
Now when you do resource routing (which is really the science of logistics), you go to the empire screen and sort by resource amounts, and the natural inclination is to take note of which supply of say titanium is available, and contigent upon an available resource slot, and then considering how efficiently that is being generated. Most likely the player then chooses the ones making the maximum 125,000 amount and redeploys those on a resource route where they are required to do upgrades and or build troops and ships (except detrium).
This is faulty logic. Why?
What happens by sending 125,000 units of titanium to the new colony is this butt heads with the existing mining process generation of titanium at the new colony.
"Hey shut down the new mines because another colony is sending the maxium amount of 125,000, so we can all goof off and put up our boots and rest!"
That is wrong. You want the titanium miners to generate titanium locally in that sector, but the software seeing an influx of 125,000 then prioritizes other processes.
See the problem? What you should do is allow the titanium to build in value and sell from those caches of 125,000 to maximize your profits. And choose a lesser total amount like 80,000 or less...maybe even 60,000 to the new colony, thus you have some titanium to get their upgrades done, but still have the titanium miners working so eventually they have their own cache storage of 125,000.
Foreman "Hey, the managers only sent us 50%, so you miners need to get back to work!"
This artificial 125,000 for storage is a bad idea. Some limit is necessary as the program has to always know how much is being made and stored so the manager can make a judgement call on division of labor.
And the best initial sectors end up being powerhouses of industry and large suppliers of raw materials of resources.
And then 90% of sectors have an artificial limit of 3 resource routes too. So then you get into situations, far too often...where you desperately want to have more resource route slots, but only a few sectors have that capacity through special projects like the Kanorr and Maladan.