Are refineries actually useful in the late game?

[AlanC9]

Or ever, really?

At about 2400, I've reached a point where I'm just about mineral-capped since all the mines I'm ever going to have are in production, once the last couple of MoN districts come on line. SRs are being fully consumed. (I'm also over fleet cap and throwing away surplus alloys, so efficiency is just hypothetical.)

I've got plenty of un-upgraded factories, etc. To upgrade and use them would require building synthetic resource plants. But the only thing a synthetic resource does is let you pay minerals to pack more jobs into a building slot. I've already got more slots than I can put into production, and I'm going to get more as the game progresses.

If anything, I think I should be dismantling the synthetic plants I already have and building more base-level factories.

This makes me wonder if the whole design concept is just bad.

 

[eagletrekkie]

What I find especially ridiculous is that each refinery basically powers 1 upper tier building which adds, if I remember right, the equivalent of one basic buildings worth of jobs. The concept needs to be revisited for sure.

 

[Lady Lacroix]

It wouldn't be so bad if buildings didn't have such absurd strategic resource upkeeps.

 

[AlanC9]

Not quite that bad. Tier 1 gives 2 jobs, tier 2 and 3 add 3 jobs each. So you do gain more production jobs -- 2+2 < 5+0, 2+2+2 < 8+0+0. I suppose it also makes it easier to pack all the factories onto your forge worlds, etc. But it only works as long as you've got surplus minerals and a shortage of building slots.

 

[Dëzaël]

What I find especially ridiculous is that each refinery basically powers 1 upper tier building which adds, if I remember right, the equivalent of one basic buildings worth of jobs. The concept needs to be revisited for sure.

A refinery produces 2, a fully upgraded building consumes 2, however a fully upgraded building gives 8 jobs, corresponding to 4 basic buildings. So it saves you half the slots for one more specialist pop and 10 minerals upkeep.

There seem to be a bug with planets on galaxy generation ATM, maybe we don't have access to the minerals we should... Starting a game and doing a quick observe, I find mineral districts to be quite scarce.

 

[Aleriez]

If construction space (planets) are not a problem, then you dont need to upgrade the buildings. If construction space is limited and you want to make the best out of the planets you have, upgrading buildings is the way to go. Also with the right traits, late game, the refineries do produce more per job, maybe 1.5 instead of 1.

 

[208]

Refineries are actually space-efficient in the late game (but if you don't care about space, then who cares).

Let's take a look at the numbers:

We'll assume a 20% productivity boost (stability, worker/specialist efficiency - because for whatever reason some refineries use specialists and some use workers, other sources) which puts the yield of a single refinery at 2.4 strategic goods.

We'll also assume a 20% reduction in building upkeep: 10% from the Prosperity tree, and 10% from Functional Bureaucracy (because if you care about space *and* SR consumption, it's a no-brainer; you could just buy the extra SRs off the market otherwise).

Tier 1 buildings require no SR upkeep.

Tier 2 buildings require 1 per building, but with the bonuses we assume above, that becomes 0.8, and a single refinery produces 2.4, which is approximately 3 Tier 2 buildings supported per refinery. This makes a self-supporting block of 4 buildings.

Tier 3 buildings require 2 per building, so we need 2 refineries to support 3 buildings, and a self-supporting block is 5 buildings.

So let's look at 20 slots' worth of production, because that makes the numbers easy. With Tier 1 buildings only, 20 slots is 40* jobs. With Tier 2 buildings, each building has 5 jobs, but we also need one refinery per 3 buildings - so for 20 slots, that's 15 production buildings for 75 (!) jobs (plus 5 refinery jobs). With Tier 3 buildings, each building has 8 jobs, and requires refineries in a 2:3 ratio, so for 20 slots, that's 12 production buildings for 96 (!!) jobs plus 8 refinery jobs.

Clearly, if you've got limited space and a lot of pops, upgraded buildings supported by refineries will get you a lot of production, even when taking the extra slots for refineries into consideration.

Of course if your economy is booming and you have +500 energy/month, you can just buy the extra needed SRs off the market, and use all 20 slots for production... or anywhere in between as your economy allows.


*For alloys/research/consumer goods; other buildings may have a different tier scheme.

 

[208]

There seem to be a bug with planets on galaxy generation ATM, maybe we don't have access to the minerals we should... Starting a game and doing a quick observe, I find mineral districts to be quite scarce.

On the other hand, minerals in space are so abundant that I'm overflowing in minerals with zero mining districts built (I actively dismantle them to make room for other districts) - and so is everyone else, judging by the state of the minerals market, which consistently bottoms out at around 0.7/0.4 per mineral and stays there for decades. At least that's the case in the 2.2.4 beta.

 

[Retry]

If construction space (planets) are not a problem, then you dont need to upgrade the buildings. If construction space is limited and you want to make the best out of the planets you have, upgrading buildings is the way to go. Also with the right traits, late game, the refineries do produce more per job, maybe 1.5 instead of 1.

In the case of alloys and consumer goods, going with an Ecumenopolis is much better in terms of output per pop and output per space, as well as overall output in general, than outfitting a regular planet full of T3 alloy foundries.

 

[AlanC9]

@Aleriez :Yeah, but isn't that a wash? The production bonus would work for either a refinery or a production building.

 

[AlanC9]

On the other hand, minerals in space are so abundant that I'm overflowing in minerals with zero mining districts built (I actively dismantle them to make room for other districts) - and so is everyone else, judging by the state of the minerals market, which consistently bottoms out at around 0.7/0.4 per mineral and stays there for decades. At least that's the case in the 2.2.4 beta.

But why aren't you just building stuff to consume the minerals?

 

[AlanC9]

Of course if your economy is booming and you have +500 energy/month, you can just buy the extra needed SRs off the market, and use all 20 slots for production... or anywhere in between as your economy allows.

Whenever I try to think about this stuff, the market makes me wonder why I bother.

 

[208]

But why aren't you just building stuff to consume the minerals?

Lack of space for buildings to consume them. With the current galaxy generation, you can be netting +100 or more minerals/month before you even get a second foundry, so unless you just decide to stop expanding, your mineral income will easily outstrip your capacity to consume them.

Here's an example from my current game. If I had decided to claim only my local cluster and stopped at Mecura, for a grand total of 12 systems, I'd still have a raw minerals income from space of 128 (plus 20 extra base income!), which is still more than my current consumption. (The 150 in monthly trades are the extra minerals I'm dumping on the galactic market at a sale price of 0.33 per unit.)

 

[szmik]

late game I just buy all rares from the market and forget about producing them

 

[AlanC9]

Yow. I didn't get anything like that many space drops in my current game. Maybe half.

 

[Razor Feather]

Refineries are definitely worthwhile once your planets start to get filled up with pops and buildings, since they allow rural worlds that have lots of pops but very little spare housing to make better use of building slots, with the refineries only taking up 1 pop, and urban worlds are able to employ much more pops since they get 4x the jobs per building.
Additionally, while t3 building + refinery does add a 10 mineral upkeep compared to 4 t1 buildings, it also lowers energy use from 16 to 9, and the mineral upkeep can be effectively reduced by job output bonuses while the energy upkeep cannot, so the added mineral cost is fairly negligible.

 

[Less2]

If we're talking purely minerals, special resources sell for ridiculous amounts both on the market and to other AIs. You should easily be able to put x minerals -> y special resources -> x * 2 minerals through trade.

Lack of space for buildings to consume them. With the current galaxy generation, you can be netting +100 or more minerals/month before you even get a second foundry, so unless you just decide to stop expanding, your mineral income will easily outstrip your capacity to consume them.

Here's an example from my current game. If I had decided to claim only my local cluster and stopped at Mecura, for a grand total of 12 systems, I'd still have a raw minerals income from space of 128 (plus 20 extra base income!), which is still more than my current consumption. (The 150 in monthly trades are the extra minerals I'm dumping on the galactic market at a sale price of 0.33 per unit.)
View attachment 443740

If you ever think you have a mineral surplus then what you really have is a research or alloy deficit. You just haven't realized it yet.

 

[OfficerBrennan]

Whilst the above is a good mindset to have in principle, 2.2.4 will still have you drowning in a smorgasbord of minerals. Map generation is just that crazy at the moment.

As for the thread, the answer is yes. Unless the economy balance changes massively in the future, you will typically see building slots as the most limiting factor throughout any particular playthrough. In this case, increasing job density per building slot will be the way forward to maximise economic output and efficiency (of course it's very possible to create more building slots using habitats, ringworlds and conquest, but if you're ever at the point where building slots aren't the limiting factor, something weird has happened).

 

[dsteve3]

I do agree that there is a need for mid/late-game "sponge" buildings to absorb a certain amount of extra space/resources/pops. It would be nice if there were some buildings that produced more influence and unity, with more options to spend influence. Especially spending influence to buy diplomacy.

I find that some of the late-game building becomes tedious due to the fact that there isn't much demand for anything. There is so much compression in the early game due to the demand for virtually everything. Being successful should open up new challenges.

The naval cap works directly against this situation, though I see the reason for the need of such.

 

[dsteve3]

I do agree that there is a need for mid/late-game "sponge" buildings to absorb a certain amount of extra space/resources/pops. It would be nice if there were some buildings that produced more influence and unity, with more options to spend influence. Especially spending influence to buy diplomacy.

I find that some of the late-game building becomes tedious due to the fact that there isn't much demand for anything. There is so much compression in the early game due to the demand for virtually everything. Being successful should open up new challenges.

The naval cap works directly against this situation, though I see the reason for the need of such.