I have yet to deploy drones at any time in either play through, but informed opinion is that they are great for transporting small consignments over long distances. What dawned on me last night is that also available at my planned, far distant, low volume Supercomputer factory is a surplus of crude oil from which I can make drone fuel.
The thing about trains is that they have 48 cargo slots per freight car. Different items are bundled in different amounts - screws come in lots of 500 while Supercomputers come in lots of 50 - so a freight car can take 48 lots of any given item. So when I’m making 5 Supercomputers per minute, it will take 8 hours to fill one freight car.
What this means is that trains moving low volume items end up running virtually empty. This isn’t a problem once the route is running, assuming you have your production volumes set correctly, but the first few runs will suck dry your entire stored production until the storage bin at the destination station is full. There is no way to control how much goes into the freight car.
This is ok if you only need the low volume item at one other location. Here, Supercomputers are going to be used in the manufacture of two other items, so when one train bogarts all the stored Supercomputers the other location is going to be dry. Now, you can solve this somewhat by making separate platforms with separate feeds from the same production lines, or…
A Drone has only 9 cargo slots, so will pull less than 1/5th of the production as a freight car. Much better for low-volume items. And set-up is easy: you jut need a drone port at each end, at least one of which has fuel available, and that’s it. The drones will navigate themselves to the destinations you set.
I love how this game gives you options that ramp up as you go:
Tractors: medium loads over medium distance. Quick to start as they need no infrastructure other than a loading dock at each end. They can run over the bare terrain, but a pain to set up as you have to drive the entire round trip manually to record it before the tractor can run the route autonomously. Need to be refueled somewhere along the route.
Trucks: large loads over medium distance. Same as Tractors but bigger. If you are upgrading from a Tractor route, you have to re-record it as the Trucks behave differently due to their size.
Trains: large loads over any distance. Huge infrastructure investment in time and materials to build the rail connections and stations. Sizable power requirements, but can be used as a conduit to take power across the map.
Drones: small loads over long distances. Minimal infrastructure and very easy to set up, just a port at each end, one with fuel, then set them free. The takeoff/landing process takes about 1 minute each end, which makes them inefficient over short distances.
This Supercomputer factory is going to be the death of me. Even though I have almost all the raw materials on site, it has been very time-consuming bringing those together for the factory. Similarly, one of the two off-site raw materials was not in a convenient spot to connect to a railway station, so that took some building genius on my part to achieve.
At this point, I have all the raw materials coming in, and I am making the items needed from crude oil and Caterium. The crude oil facility alone is 22 refineries plus a bunch of other stuff. Caterium items require 14 smelters and 18 constructors to make. Now I have to set up processing for the iron and copper elements…
The play through style may also be the death of my computer. I believe it’s more to do with using the skinny Windows app rather than my Mac, but the game has been getting more frequently laggy, and outright crashed for the first time ever last night. I’m guessing that it is having trouble processing the sheer volume of calculations to keep track of everything that is going on all over the map.
For my next play through, I may have to invest in a full Windows app. And maybe a new Mac mini on which to run it.
I have 2019 Mac Book Pro 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core I7.
Graphics are Intel Iris Plus 656 1536 MB.
Memory: 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3.
macOS is Sonoma, version 14.7.3
I’m in Steam. Civ 7. It’s in PLAY mode, 1 second, and then CANCEL, and then STOP, and then PLAY.
Monday: 30+ times.
Tuesday: 4 or 5 times.
Wednesday: 2 times.
Thursday: 3 tines.
Friday: 2 times, and then I called OWA video games “support” (it’s funny)
I am finally making Supercomputers and the ammo I wanted. The whole thing is insane. This shot doesn’t capture nearly half of it, as Caterium is being mined and processed way off to the left, while plastic and all the processing of crude oil to make ammo and TurboFuel is happening down at ground level.
Apologies for it not being property dressed with fake underpinnings, but…
Everything you can see and everything you cannot is being done to feed those three boxy-looking machine top-middle, which are producing 5 Supercomputers a minute. That’s all you get for all of this.
And, yes, that is a drone port right next to the Supercomputer machines.
Today has been clean up on aisle Limey. So much of my new stuff was just floating; notably the loooong track down to my Supercomputer factory, and my Supercomputer factory. That is no longer the case. I had the urge to get it all sorted, so I have. Not much game progress for a few hours’ effort, but it makes my mind better to see all these things with underpinning, railings, catwalks and staircases.
Oh, and remember that nifty bit of track laying I mentioned above? Here it is:
Hypertube junctions, steel cables, and a Great Glass Elevator are all new. As is, I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to know, the improved photo mode used to capture all this footage.
