Material balancing

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TL;DR: The system the materials and their recipes are balanced seems to use the area the productions use and thats it. It seems to ignore logistics and up front costs completely.

Simple example: FE vs AL

  • On paper it looks good for FE: The FEO deposits have +50% or more yield compared to ALO. The SME recipe are the same.
    => FE should be a fair bit cheaper than ALO

Actually usable base area

  • You can run a ALO extraction base with 15 EXT pretty comfortably as a ALO base only produces <1000t/d which means over 3d buffer with a STA + you can put stuff in the WAR. Meanwhile a FEO base produces with 15 EXT produces ~6000t/d which is a bit over half a day with a STA, and WAR is pretty much useless in these sizes. Even with 14 EXT and two STW (16.500t/6.500m³) only has only space for <3d of produced ore and WAR is pretty much useless.
    => base only runs 93% the EXT and is way more inconvenient to run (or 86% in the case of 13 EXT)
  • Same goes for SME: FE and FEO are very heavy so they need more storage. A FE SME base needs over 2100t/d in inputs and produces 1700t/d of FE (214 FE/d). A ALO SME base needs 640t/d in inputs and produces 580t/d of AL (214 AL/d). This means that in a FE base you can at best store 5d of inputs or 7d with STW compared to over 17d on a AL base with STO. Once again WAR isn’t very helpful for FEO.

Shipping

  • A FEO extraction base needs about two WCBs per day while a ALO extraction base only needs a LCB every 2d or a HCB every 5d (which is even cheaper to run per unit moved). This means that FEO has 10-15% of its market price (~20 NCC) just for shipping it from the planet to the CX compared to <3% for ALO (~5 NCC). Which as a side effect means that trading FEO over the CX is suboptimal as it adds a fair bit to the price
  • Same goes for SME: over 3x the logistics needed for FE compared to AL
  • You can run a vertical base to skip the shipping of FEO but the effectivity of the base will go down to 87% or less compared to seperate bases and the amount of FEO that will be extracted per base cut down to ~20% which means that 5x the bases are needed to get the same amount of FEO. The bases on planets with lower extraction rates are even worse. (output per base <140 FE/d).
    And the storage needed is still worth noting even though the FEO need a lot less storage in this kind of base.
  • note: shipping only gets more expensive currently as the fuel costs are now not capped by the MM any more

Set up costs

  • Buildings: The advanced storages add a fair bit to the base (~500k for a STW)
  • Ships: a WCB/LCB costs ~6M while a HCB costs ~10M. So a FEO base needs about 12M in ships compared to a ALO base with ~2-3M. FE needs ~4M compared to ~2M of AL

=> FE is treated as “cheaper than AL” in the recipes but moving FEO and FE and the weight itself add so much to the price that at the FE stage is about even with AL. There is also the fact how inconvenient handling FE(O) has which also influences the price. (FE and FEO is currently overproduced by new players)

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Example: BBH and BSE

(16 PP1 + 2 STO/STW + STA vs 15 PP2 + 2 STO, building upkeep (repairs + consumable) per base is about the same, FE and AL are treated with a equal buy price)

  • PP1 produces 77,82 BBH/d with ~1500t/d imports
  • PP2 produces 96,30 BBH/d with ~800t/d imports
  • PP1 produces 102,72 BSE/d with ~1400t/d imports
  • PP2 produces 109,43 BSE/d with ~900t/d imports

=> PP1 is producing less per day with the same costs and thus being less profitable than PP2 while also having extremely high logistics for a starter profession. (Only FE production is higher)

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Another example: RE cargo bays

On paper the recipes are equal or even slightly better than the standard recipes, but only if one ignores:

  • RE has extremely high up front costs with a colony ship (50M+) or a gate pair (800M + shipping the parts over)
  • Colony ships are very expensive to run
  • Long logistics routes from the mining/refining place to the core
  • REO is a extremely heavy ore with 12,8t which has the the same problems as FEO just in worse
  • RE cargo bays need a lot of W which is a advanced material and thus way more sensitive to market fluctuations.

All these factors make them worse than the standard recipes, especially after the new TI recipe.

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These are only really problems for recipes that are in direct competition with each other, so PP1/PP2 and RE alloys / advanced alloys.
(Competition in linear systems leading to the same result have a clear winner most of the time, same with POPI but that is a different topic)

As the main problem with BSE and BBH is that they are recipes in similar buildings but still different so that it can’t be switched easily. One solution to that would be to have both the AL and FE recipe (with same production time) in the PP1 so that they can simply switch according to logistics and market situation, similar to RAT or C.

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And this is a problem… how? To me this just sounds like making the game interesting and diverse. Not everything has to be the perfect recipe, and I like that some of it is actually really inefficient. It means you have to think further than just bottom line or efficiency to justify making it, breaking the recipes into individual niches.

=> FE is treated as “cheaper than AL” in the recipes but moving FEO and FE and the weight itself add so much to the price that at the FE stage is about even with AL. There is also the fact how inconvenient handling FE(O) has which also influences the price. (FE and FEO is currently overproduced by new players)

This I would agree on, and maybe bears some thought. On the other hand, this may be a uniquely MOR problem (especially the latter part); I know a lot of the metallurgy on Prom’s starter, Berthier, is Aluminium.

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I think you misunderstood what I am trying to say here. I am not complaining about the FE price but the recipes themself: mainly BBH/BSE and the RE cargo bays.

PP1 is “the” bfab building but it is worse in every point except that it doesn’t need SET (can be a problem early universe) so aside from BTA and BDE it is basically obsolete in late universe unless people are dumping a lot of FE on the market (which is the case in MOR because of new players). But in that case you need to rebuild a whole base just to use that FE and once that is used up you go back to PP2. (And with the current logistical footprint BBH and BSE in PP1 isn’t suited for new players)

And RE cargo bays … basically it doesn’t matter if they are in the game or not. :grimacing:
They have a longer and more complex production line while also being worse profit wise.

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And RE cargo bays … basically it doesn’t matter if they are in the game or not. :grimacing:
They have a longer and more complex production line while also being worse profit wise.

When RE cargo bays were released, I was quite interested as one of the main things it did was unify all your metals into the RE backbone. This meant switching between recipes was very easy (except for the WCB need ALR). Logistically, this would have been a win.

Then the NA rework hit and TI became so much cheaper it’s not worth looking at RE. Even with the benefits that unification (if it worked out as I expected) would have brought.

I already pointed out previous issues with the PP1 vs PP2, and this further solidifies my thoughts. FE is very weighty and you combine that with LST?
1 LST (2.73 t) + 2 FE (15.748t) = 1 BBH (.5 t)
2 LST (5.46 t) + 1 FE (7.874 t) = 1 BSE (.3 t)

I’m sorry, but that kind of material wastage would get one investigated and fired. We were already making iron in a bloomery (not even a blast furnace, nevermind an open-heath or electric-arc). We really should have a more efficient process than pouring LST/FE slag into sandpits to cast them into bfabs.

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