Limit in Rare Earth Metals?

[World Citizen]

Soo... great game ! Love it.

But I am seeing an end to my game. Am I correct in thinking the endgame is going to be balanced around Rare Earth Metals?

As far as I can see now there is going to be a point where I can only get Rare Metal from the molehole (max 32?). And beceaus I need to have Rare Metal for electronics, I am going to run into problems.

Sure I could keep researching the repeatable money things and buy electronics, but there is going to be a point where it takes to much time to research in relation to the amount of people it costs and the new buildings I need (which ask for electronics again)


Soooo... Is there no way to get more Rare Metals in the endgame then the Molehole?

If true, I need to change my plan and stop consuming electronics. I can only use electronics for maintenance and the 32 Rare Metals are limiting the amount of buildings.?

 

[JAMES187]

Hello,

The electronics factory will convert 0.3 units of rare earth metals into 1 unit of electronics, so a Mohole mine producing 32 REM will be enough to produce over 100 electronics per day, if you have enough electronics factories.

It is unlikely, unless you have a very large colony, that you will consume this amount per day (you can see your daily consumption if you hover over the electronics number in the top bar).

Also, you can reduce the maintenance costs for out dome buildings by researching and building tribiotic scrubbers. These require 1 electronic for maintenance, however if you place 2 overlapping, they will scrub each other, so you can quite easily build a colony with no out dome buildings that ever require maintenance.

There are also some other buildings that will generate REM if you have the right sponsor (e.g. corporate headquarters, rare metals refinery).

Finally, the space elevator reduces the cost of imports by 50%, further reducing your need for REM.

I've built some pretty big colonies with up to 2,000 colonists, and I've never had an issue late game with funding or REM/Electronics production using only the Mohole mine.

I hope this helps.

 

[World Citizen]

Thanks James!

Yes this helps. I also figured out the upgrade where empty deposists still give some resources. So I could just leave the extractors for Rare Metals to be, and let them gather small amounts.

 

[JAMES187]

Yes, that is an excellent breakthrough, if you have the manpower. Don't count on it for every playthru though, as breakthrough tech is different each game.

Also remember that you can build multiple REM extractors around a single REM deposit, which can be fun combined with this breakthrough, again, as long as you have the manpower.

There is another breakthrough that lets you automate the extractors, and they often show up in the same game, so if you get that one too, your REM problems are over.

 

[MacroNova]

There are two other sources of income that I can think of besides rare metals, that don't stop being viable late game: the repeatable research and tourists. With the money you can always ship electronics from Earth.

 

[SoftwareSamurai]

But even the repeatable research (patents and copyrights) get progressively more "expensive" to research. Unless you continue growing your colony with more and more scientists, there will come a point where those sources of income become out-of-reach.
As for rare metal consumption - as it was pointed out, you end up using all that you can get from a maxed-out mohole (good luck storing the excess metals!) to produce electronics, and if you're not careful, electronic stores can quickly consume all of that.

The end-game is tricky to balance, especially since we always want to have thousands of colonists. I've come to the conclusion that once you've tapped out all of the rare metal deposits and are now relying solely on the mohole, your colony/infrastructure really must be small.

 

[World Citizen]

Thanks for the answers people!

Ok I did a Excel calculation. This was a mistake because now I know how much I can build and how many peeps I can support on a Molehole. Without building electronics consumers and without building tribo scrubbers, I can get to a certain point at which I can not grow more in a sustainable way. Maintenance takes to much Electronics, which I can't sustainable do.

I don't like to leave REM extractors everywhere so for me the endgame is to maximize the use of the Molehole. I will end up with more and more extractors until the map is full.. so this is not sustainable growth anyways.

I simply need a second molehole.... to be honest.

The problem now is I can't challenge myself to build this map. I have calculated it, and doing it... doesn't seems interesting anymore.

So I switched to a map with as much disasters as possible to see how that is working out.

This is also my feedback. We need some sort of complex missions in the endgame. Otherwise I am just trying to manage the growth with more buildings until I reach the MoleHole limit.

I still really love the game, but when the balance calculation has been done... there is not much to do anymore. I mean, scanning a planetary anomaly isn't really fun to do and doesn't really take effort or risk.

Maybe you should have made it harder to build Wonders by gathering special thing or doing special assignments. Simply unlocking and building it... doesn't honor the fact it's a wonder.

Great work on the game Devs! Can't really remember when I did a calculation like this. Compliments!

 

[Captain Slide]

There is a mod that lets you build more Moholes (and other wonders too). I have a game with multiple wonders of each type.

Having done a game where I have over 10000 colonists I can tell you it just becomes a slog to keep building domes and creating jobs to keep them all busy. At rhe end the only thing you have to research are the repeatable money generating tech so you actually have more money than you know what to do with. The stock piles of money rare earths that you eneivitably end up with will keep you going for a long, long time before entropy and limited REM's get you. I think you will get bored long before that happens. But assuming you don't then yes there is an upper limit to the size of the colony you can sustain indefinitely, this size will depend on the techs you got in that particular play through.

As someone else said if you have the Mohole at max production then you are going to fill your map up with storage facilities for the metals too, sooner or later.

In fact I think metals are generally to common in game. I rarely if ever have to build metal mines before I get the Mohole and once you have that you need never worry about metals again.