Hello (soon-to-be) world devourers,
today, I would like to add energy and manufacturing to the economic overview.
[Energy]
First of all, energy. All production buildings consume energy. Each mine consumes 1 energy, each extractor also consumes 1 energy, and upgrades consume even more. (Unless you use the energy branch, which allows you to generate energy.) Unlike resources, energy does not accumulate, but is an absolute parameter. First of all, it doesn't matter whether you have +5 or +30 energy, as long as you have positive energy. Then nothing happens and all buildings continue to operate undisturbed. However, if your energy falls into negative territory, you have to buy it at a high price to maintain production. You might think, “It's not so bad, what's the big deal about the 10 credits I have to pay each round when I have -10 energy?” Well, the money that players with negative energy pay is redistributed to those who have positive energy, i.e., those who can provide the additional energy. The more energy you lose each round, the more you strengthen your opponents. (As long as they have their energy management under control, of course...) There are three types of buildings for producing energy:
[Combustion Energy, Solar Cell, and Geothermal Reactor Level 1]
Combustion energy: Burns wood or fossil fuels and thus provides a lot of energy. Solar cells do not consume energy, but their production depends on the tile on which they are built. They are particularly effective in deserts or on stars, for example, but even there they produce less than combustion energy, so the land consumption is higher. Geothermal energy usually produces more than solar cells, but its use is limited to very specific planetary tiles, such as volcanoes.
Solar cells require 5 silicon to build, the geothermal reactor requires 5 titanium and 5 copper, and the combustion energy requires 5 steel to build.
[Steel]
Whereby steel is a good keyword to introduce processing. Many higher-quality resources that are needed for upgrades or later in the game cannot be obtained directly on the hexagonal tiles, but must be produced by further refining the resources, and one of these resources is steel. There are three processing buildings for processing. The Constructor for getting started with processing, such as steel and concrete. The Refinery – mainly for stretching wood and the particle accelerator, for maligon glass and neutron dust. To illustrate how all these processing buildings work, I will explain steel production as an example:
[Constructor, Refinery, and Particle Accelerator Level 1]
For steel, the constructor is used. This requires 10 iron and 5 copper to build. (Oops, and suddenly copper has become even more important.) Once such a constructor has been built, a recipe can be selected. For example: 3 iron + 5 fossil fuels → 4 steel with an energy consumption of 3 energy. Later, alternative recipes can be researched that are more efficient or enable other resource combinations, such as plasma steel: 2 iron + 8 fossil fuels + 2 plasma → 6 steel and a +25% production bonus for adjacent tiles. Upgrades are also available for processing buildings. The special feature here is that the output increases more than the input, making the recipes more effective.
Processing requires particularly careful management of resources, as large-scale steel production consumes a lot of iron, which is then sorely lacking when the economy expands. (Although steel can also be used for level 3 upgrades.) And what actually happens if processing consumes more fossil fuels than it produces? I will take a closer look at this in the next economic overview.
Keep an eye on your electricity consumption, and see you next time.
-an energetic Giratakel (Simon Alber)