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DominusNovus

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Oct 2, 2007
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now that we can connect domes, what are people’s thoughts on how best to lay everything out? Right now, I’m working with a small agricultral dome (with a water reclamator), a factory dome (might stick some labs in there and add a network node, just cuz), and residential/service domes (with hanging gardens). I’ll probably build an education dome, soon, with a sanitarium.
 
My test layout is to have a mega dome surrounded by smaller domes. The mega dome is the only dome to have residences in the cluster, but that's basically all it has. One dome is dedicated entirely to farming, another is focused on industry, one is dedicated to science, a fourth is set aside for services and workshops, and the last dome is a combination education/park dome. So long as every dome is connected to the mega dome, everything functions as you'd expect.
 
Do you have one triangle dedicated to the passages or do you actually sacrifice one hexagon on triangles for it, therefore cutting some efficiency in building placements?
 
Do you have one triangle dedicated to the passages or do you actually sacrifice one hexagon on triangles for it, therefore cutting some efficiency in building placements?

How is usig one hex less efficient? You can still build three-hex buildings, which leave an extra hex anyway.
 
I try to keep domes that are on the same general side of the Mega Dome positioned so that their connections are in the same wedge or group of wedges, but every dome is only directly connected to the residential dome. With the residential "hub" I might put parks, Smart Houses, or small services in the wedges used for connectors to avoid unused space, but other than that I try to avoid "losing" multiple wedges to connectors where possible. Even with the above setup, it's possible to create a residential hub capable of housing something like 5-600 people, far more than you could possibly need in most cases. Also, try to keep your farm dome and service dome close to each other if you follow this setup since it means drones can take food from the farms to either put into storage or transfer directly to diners and grocers.

One interesting thing to note is that if you connect three domes together so there's only one dome connected to both the others and those two are close together, colonists that live in the "hub" dome will actually travel along the surface outside the domes and connectors between them, which can save resources if you're willing to deal with a sanity hit early on. They will, however, only travel to or from the hub by connectors, it seems.

Granted, there are situations where you want smaller clusters, either for space or other reasons. For instance, if you plan to set up a mining center and don't have the required breakthrough to keep extractors running after the depost is depleted, you'd really only want a residential dome and maybe a farm/services dome since it can be more cost-efficient to just have the resources used in factories elsewhere. If you want to set aside a cluster for workshops, just build any sized dome, fill it with residences until you have the population size you want, build a few domes for workshops, and then fill any remaining space (after connections) with services, perhaps add a farm dome to keep it more or less self-sufficient.
 
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All small domes is now a very efficient method. If you have the arcology (and especially if you have the hive mind breakthrough), then I think there's little reason to build anything else.

Your basic unit is a small dome with an arcology, 2-3 basic residences, and a service wedge (diner, grocer, and infirmary running 3 shifts) with 1 space for a passage. Your services will be full, but not so full as to significantly hurt comfort levels. The remaining wedges are free for in-dome factories that don't benefit from spires, extra services or extra housing/nurseries, if you aren't doing seniors/children's domes.

When your population is big enough to make it worthwhile, you can start to add on dedicated work domes for things where a spire is important (e.g. a farm dome or research dome), or a sanatorium dome.
 
All small domes is now a very efficient method. If you have the arcology (and especially if you have the hive mind breakthrough), then I think there's little reason to build anything else.

Your basic unit is a small dome with an arcology, 2-3 basic residences, and a service wedge (diner, grocer, and infirmary running 3 shifts) with 1 space for a passage. Your services will be full, but not so full as to significantly hurt comfort levels. The remaining wedges are free for in-dome factories that don't benefit from spires, extra services or extra housing/nurseries, if you aren't doing seniors/children's domes.

When your population is big enough to make it worthwhile, you can start to add on dedicated work domes for things where a spire is important (e.g. a farm dome or research dome), or a sanatorium dome.

Actually, I'm playing around with this, and I'm really finding basic domes to be quite useful. In particular, this set up is great for comfort:
Basic Dome
- Arcology Spire
- 4-5 farms
- 1-2 wedges left for services and passages.

Why is this great? Because Biome Engineering, the tech that improves residence comfort with farms, stacks. In other words, each farm increases comfort by 5. I didn't realize that until just recently, when I managed to outpace my agricultural network and started building what I intended to be temporary farms in every open spot, but now I have a bunch of small agriculture domes supporting my bigger domes, and everyone in them has amazing housing comfort.

I'm going to expand this out to my housing mega domes: 12 apartments (2 each on each outer wedge) and 6 farms. I was dedicating a lot of space to services in those domes, but I'm figuring its more efficient to make pure service domes, and just use the leftover gaps in the mega domes for the small services.

Added bonus: it'll be really damn hard to outgrow my farms. Oh, and with the basic domes that are almost purely dedicated to farming, I get the bonus from Dome Bioscaping as well.
 
I try to keep domes that are on the same general side of the Mega Dome positioned so that their connections are in the same wedge or group of wedges, but every dome is only directly connected to the residential dome. With the residential "hub" I might put parks, Smart Houses, or small services in the wedges used for connectors to avoid unused space, but other than that I try to avoid "losing" multiple wedges to connectors where possible. Even with the above setup, it's possible to create a residential hub capable of housing something like 5-600 people, far more than you could possibly need in most cases. Also, try to keep your farm dome and service dome close to each other if you follow this setup since it means drones can take food from the farms to either put into storage or transfer directly to diners and grocers.

One interesting thing to note is that if you connect three domes together so there's only one dome connected to both the others and those two are close together, colonists that live in the "hub" dome will actually travel along the surface outside the domes and connectors between them, which can save resources if you're willing to deal with a sanity hit early on. They will, however, only travel to or from the hub by connectors, it seems.

Granted, there are situations where you want smaller clusters, either for space or other reasons. For instance, if you plan to set up a mining center and don't have the required breakthrough to keep extractors running after the depost is depleted, you'd really only want a residential dome and maybe a farm/services dome since it can be more cost-efficient to just have the resources used in factories elsewhere. If you want to set aside a cluster for workshops, just build any sized dome, fill it with residences until you have the population size you want, build a few domes for workshops, and then fill any remaining space (after connections) with services, perhaps add a farm dome to keep it more or less self-sufficient.
How does it work that each satellite dome, 6 total, is "only directly connected to the residential dome"? Did Haemimont change the limitation that any dome can only have passages connected to TWO other domes?
 
No, it's just that I'm going off the statement that colonists will only work or use services in "adjacent" (directly connected) domes, so there's no reason to connect the "statellite" domes or have a population in them; only the domes "adjacent" to the service dome would be able to satisfy their needs, for instance, unless I built more services into that dome or had another connected to it solely for services. It's a better use of space and resources to only connect each dome to the residential "hub" dome since each dome only loses a single hex in one wedge this way, which can be filled with services or parks to help boost comfort, rather than multiple to houses and either servicies or connections to domes to provide services.

The alternative setup, however, is to have the central dome contain everything needed to keep the colony running (food, services, schools, universities, etc) and have each dome still specialized towards a specific task with its own population, but this makes it difficult to keep specialists in their respective domes. The result is a central Mega Dome for population with satellite domes for work and services is generally better than a central park/school/service dome surrounded by mixed residential/specialized production domes.
 
I believe the best benefit of connecting domes is to make a much more efficient use of your spire slot for each dome, especially noticeable for network nodes and water reclamation system. Hanging Gardens isn't that useful because after research you can stack multiple farms for improved comfort on your homes (honestly seems way too OP and they forgot to put a cap on that). It's important to note though, that there is a -10 work efficiency penalty for working on another dome so I've been avoiding that on early/mid stages of the colony. Usage of service buildings from another dome doesn't seem to be penalized, even considering it shows "another dome" on the logs.
 
I just connect every domes I can on one plane and give each basic dome two diners and one infirmary, four and two on medium, and more on mega. Medium has one wedge for farm, Mega has three wedges for farms. The rests of the wedges are for apartments and workplaces.
I am running a huge colony, over 6000 people. Now I stop all births except from clones since I keep on having homeless people. And there are still spots to place 5-7 more domes. Won't stop until everything is dome-sticated :D
 
The biggest gains from passages manifest in my kiddy and senior domes. Passages let us set them up to be fed and get some services without having to house productive workers in the dome itself. Its important to pull children and seniors from other domes because if you don't have open slots people won't migrate. Also I have found that people choose to starve for a few hours rather than travel to a neighbor to eat. Its annoying so I just build a grocer and diner in every dome and let people commute in to the specialized domes.

Kiddy dome blocks entry to everybody but children whom are encouraged to enter (thumbs down and up respectively). You can teach 15 kids per school. Nursery houses 8 kids each and are a 3 hex triangle so 3 per dome wedge. As a rule I prefer to keep all my kids in school so they get the traits. You can force kids to move to a different dome (with empty schools) by right clicking housing slots to block access. Also kids mostly go for the "playing" interest which is best met with the playground structure. Fill extra space with such.

Senior dome blocks entry to everybody but seniors whom are encouraged to enter. All the slots in the dome filled with apartments and an Arcology. A small dome can absorb around 150 seniors this way.
 
Also I have found that people choose to starve for a few hours rather than travel to a neighbor to eat. Its annoying so I just build a grocer and diner in every dome and let people commute in to the specialized domes.
Interestingly, I noticed a similar issue, which seems to occur if the food depots are in a spot that they can't get to from the housing dome and there's not enough diners/grocers for them, at least for me.