Laying pipe rarely is.
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The Modular Frame factory is built and, while it’s not a work of art, it’s easily my best so far. The trick? I now have the HoverPack and it’s a game changer.
If you’ve watched any YouTube clips of people showing how they build their shit (or just showing off their shit), you will see them just sitting in mid-air as they explain their stuff. That view makes it very easy to get a sense of space and positioning, so much better than being down on the ground trying to line up everything. Well they’re using the HoverPack and that’s what I now have.
It works as long as you are somewhere around electrical power. It draws energy from the grid so you can stay aloft indefinitely as long as you are close enough to an energy source. As soon as you move away too far, you drop like a stone. With it, you can move around in 3-D space with total freedom.
I also took a moment to add a cool 2,000 MW of new generating capacity. I now have a ton of headroom on my grid to build whatever I want.
Oh, and having resources being replenished in the cloud is amazing. I did run out of a component I needed that I don’t have uploading to the cloud - so I had to run back and get it - but I had just built my entire Modular Frame factory (a miner, 8 smelters, 17 constructors, 8 assemblers and all the accoutrements) and only ran out of one thing after adding 6 oil refineries and 8 fuel generators.
I can build better now. Better…stronger…faster.
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If anybody here plays FM, you’ll know how proud I am of what I’m about to write out. For those that don’t play FM, I’ll try to explain. This save started on FM23 but was transported to FM24. I don’t play it all the time but I always come back to it for over 2 years now.
I have completed 12 seasons at Athletic Bilbao in Spain. Bilbao is the most unique club in the world, you are extremely limited in the players you are allowed to use. By limited, I mean that you can only use players from, or with direct ties to, the Basque region. What this means in practice is that you mostly have to just make do with the players that come through your own academy. I have always considered my best skill in the game as player acquisition so this save was to challenge myself.
In those 12 years, I have
Won La Liga 5 times(26, 28, 29, 30, 34)
Won the Copa Del Ray 4 times(28, 31, 33, 34)
Finished top 3 in La Liga 11 straight years
Had 3 different players win the Golden Boy award(best young player in Europe)
And finally, in my 11th year, the crown jewel, I won the Champions League with a team that was a few old men from the original team and a bunch of guys that I brought through the system.
This has been my favorite FM save I’ve ever done. Part of what makes this such a sense of accomplishment is that both Valencia and Atletico Madrid had tycoon takeovers. So La Liga consisted of the two richest clubs in the world, 2 clubs now owned by billionaires and me, managing a club that is only allowed to use players from an area slightly smaller than Vermont.
The only thing I haven’t been able to get in this save is a treble, I’ve come close a few times. Winning La Liga and the Copa Del Ray in both 28 and 34, and winning the Champions League and Copa Del Ray in 33. In 28 we were not close in the UCL being knocked out in the round of 16. In 33 we finished a distant 2nd to Valencia in the league. 34(most recent season) is the closest I have come yet, winning the league and cup but losing in the UCL Semifinal to Hoffenheim(they went on to beat Man City in the final).
I love this save, I never tire of just going through the history of it, reminiscing about players that are no longer playing. I have 1 former player on my coaching staff and 3 more coaching the u19s. I love the story this game can become.
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Your factory builds modular frames? Like for pictures?
Basically, they’re cube-shaped iron frames.
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I have had a day of essentially working over my existing production; matching remote production to needs at the base and fixing a few errors/anomalies.
I also took a moment to work through the “MAM” (Molecular Analysis Machine) research trees, so now I have a rifle that fires with a very satisfying “brrrrt” (the sound design in this game is amazing). I also have researched “homing” ammo, so I can fire like Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg and every shot hits its target (very handy for the creepy, scuttling spider fuckers).
I have semi-automated the production of Smokless Powder, which is Gun Powder laced with Heavy Oil Residue that go boom. As a result - from further “MAM” research - I can make things like cluster grenades and explosive rebar shards. When I go out in the world now, I will be truly packing. I have figured a way to fully automate this, but that can wait as I have run out of Mercer Spheres to make cloud uploaders.
I need to get out there, explore and find some more spheres. Also, I need to clear all manner of “alpha” beasties to get to the Bauxite that I need for the next phase of the game. With all my new weaponry and other things I now have (like a hazmat suit which means I can get in amongst the uranium nodes) I am getting ready to kick on.
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If anyone is interested, this guy is at the same stage of the game that I am. He is insanely detailed and organized in his builds; my shit looks nothing like this.
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Pivotal day today. I took down some of my coal-fired power generation because (a) I didn’t need it and (2) I need the coal for something else. That something else being Aluminium. To wit, I fought the beasties and brought down Bauxite to ground level.
Now to plan the factory. The whole process needs Bauxite, Coal, Copper, Silica and Water. There is Coal, Copper and Silica to spare at my base, and there is a river that runs between my base and where the Bauxite comes down. That seems opportune.
I need to think about this one, but it should be relatively easy to build a production line that ends up with the two aluminium products being output at my base. Hopefully it’s quiet at work next week so that I can do some maths.
The aluminium products are the key to the next phase of the game. I need them to make the items needed to complete my Tier 8 upgrades and also the Phase 4 order for the space elevator.
ETA: I was very pleased to see that my workover efforts yesterday have paid off, in that the line I have running to the sink has freed up dramatically. It was backed up through a storage container before, but now the line is running freely and the container is empty. That means that the debottlenecking and unit matching has worked.
Here’s why aluminium ups the ante so high in Satiscractory. This is all off one Bauxite node:
What’s mind-blowing is that I have obtained (through harvesting hard drives from crashed drop pods) the less complicated recipes for Alumina Solution and Aluminium Ingots, cutting out Silica entirely. Without these, I would have been producing 250 bags of Silica per minute in making the solution but needing 900 bags of Silica per minute to make the ingots.
Making and shipping the supplemental 650 bags of Silica per minute would’ve been a whole nother headache. To put this in perspective, I am currently making 37.5 bags of Silica per minute, meaning that I would’ve had to increase production of this one resource by 18x!!
Also, simplified here is the production of Fused Modular Frames. Taking 150 ingots per minute to make 3 frames is crazy enough, but the process also requires Heavy Modular Frames and Fuel (which I already make) and Nitric Acid, which I don’t. It’s only one machine, but it’s a ravenous beast and its feeds are widely dispersed.
The Nitric Acid will need to be piped in from God only knows where, or packaged into Fluid Tanks (see above) and shipped, creating a need for a loop whereby the empty tanks are returned to the acid source for re-use. In a game that is so anti-conservation, making me recycle seems like a cruel joke.
To add to the fun, a lot of things needed to make aluminium components require machines that use aluminium in their construction. And then there’s the power needs…fml.
I worked my way through school operating, repairing and coding CAD/CAM high tolerance industrial manufacturing systems. I went to a site that milled 3D titanium and aluminum into military aircraft parts. We were calibrating one of they systems and the plant floor manager told one of his guys to "go gram an aluminum ingot for us to test on. I immediately though of gold ingots (the size of a matchbox) or silver (the size of a cell phone) and around the corner comes a forklift with an ingot of 7075 aluminum the size of a sofa for us to use in our testing. I was nervous about tearing into it (it looked VERY expensive) but the manager told me not to worry. They vacuum it all up and back into the smelter it goes to be reused.
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Have you played this game?
Petition to rename “Video Games” to “www.limeythoughts.gov.www/limeythoughts”
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No. Two main reasons: 1) It seems too much like work. Would not be fun for me. And, 2) I know I have addictive tendencies. Runs in my family. I have to be VERY careful with video games. The answer to my internal dialogue question about should I or shouldn’t I is usually a strong no.
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Yeah, there’s a reason why I call it Satiscractory.
I was more obsessed early on, because progress is both incremental and rapid. Where I am now, there is much more set-up required for progress, and everything is so fucking convoluted that there are breakdowns and bottlenecks galore that can mushroom out of small changes.
But if you are obsessive at all, then this is one to avoid.
Yeah, it’s obvious that you’ve really started to scale back on this thing, started to take it easy.
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Reading my mind
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As if to prove your point…here’s my aluminium production line.
That narrow, square column at the back is the Bauxite coming down from one high. I got all fancy and enclosed it because the massively extended conveyor lift looked stupid. That did allow me to run a ladder all the way up to make getting to the miner up there easier if I need to tweak something.
Right in front of that is a bank of three refineries making Alumina Solution, which is piped up to the three refineries on the main platform. Those three are producing the Aluminium Scrap which is fed into the array of smelters in front of them which turn it into ingots. The produced water from the Alumina Solution refining is fed back down to be used in making more Alumina Solution.
In front of the smelters is an array of machines making the aluminium parts I need for the next phase of manufacture; being casing, sheets and fluid containers. Coming in from the left is the coal and copper needed for the various recipes. That is coming from my base in a nice, tight conveyor stack (honestly).
For now I am just storing the parts and, once those containers fill up, running the excess into a sink to make sure that the system keeps running.
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Sometimes my stupidity astounds even me. The solution to my logistics problem is already in the game, I’m just not using it: trains.
A (relatively) simple train line can be used to bring nitrogen up from the south. On the way it can pick up the plastics and rubber from my refinery site to bring it up to basecamp (they’re currently being trucked). Further, I can pickup fuel and Heavy Oil Residue which I need for other things.
Ironically, I was inspired by this disaster of a train network I saw on YouTube.
The player is obviously proud of his network, but the first thing it does is drive a train straight through a metal framework (known as “clipping” - the game has soft collision detection that allows this but it’s not very aesthetically pleasing…at least to me).
The point being that I still have a number of resources being moved by truck and, now that I am not moving my basecamp, I need to harden the supply lines with trains. As I like to pontificate on in other threads, trains are both efficient and expandable.
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