Index:
1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally (you are here)
10. Selling your ships
This is the easy part. Build the components, then build the hulls. There are a few notes which can be made, though, mostly common sense stuff:
- Start the components you need the largest numbers of first. If you or the station run short of slots, this will increase efficiency.
- If you have duplicate component blueprints, you can either build half the components from a run with each blueprint, or use one blueprint for one run and the other for the next run. I recommend the latter: It's easier, and after the first run the efficiency is the same (though there may be corner cases where this isn't true).
- You'll want to track the status of each of your blueprints. See section 6 for a simple way to do this.
- You'll want to track which components and hulls from which runs you're working on. I track this on my spreadsheet just using a list of components and hulls in each run and some color coding, like so:
Given that the Rorqual takes longer to build than carriers/dreadnoughts, do you wait for the Rorqual to finish before starting the next batch of hulls (i.e. having the other blueprints sit idle unutilized) or do you start the next batch immediately and have the Rorqual blueprint sit idle until the start of the next batch?
ReplyDeleteWait, does this thing use threads now >_<
DeleteI try to minimize idle time.
When a hull finishes, I change the 'next run' box in the blueprint tracker (see part 6) to grey. When four ships have grey 'next run' boxes, I buy the minerals for them. After that, component runs are installed whenever the component blueprint is available, and hulls are installed whenever the components are available for them and the hull blueprint is available.
So, the hull blueprints aren't synchronized in any way beyond waiting for a few hulls to finish before I buy minerals for the build after next. In practice I've noticed that it's not uncommon to install the other hulls in a build several days before the rorqual blueprint finishes the previous run, but the way the process works is self-correcting; nothing can ever get ahead or behind by more than one build.