The greater community has researched these things. They didn't write the guide.
Colonization Mega Guide v1.0b Released
- Thread starter CMDR Mechan
- Start date
It's a general purpose guide for people who don't understand the details of ED station economies, for who "tldr, don't" is the correct advice in 99% of cases. Advanced players will be reading other stuff anyway, rather than a guide which also covers the case where the reader has never hauled cargo in bulk before.
Similarly there are advanced (and expensive!) system building techniques which allow players to safely divert weak links away from their key economic ports at the cost of making a number of compromises elsewhere in system design. And Mechan's guide outright says "do not do this" for a key step in setting that structure up, which is absolutely the right thing for a beginner's guide to do because doing it accidentally rather than as part of a complicated and deliberate plan will mess your system up. If you know enough to ignore that advice, you know enough not to get anything from reading this guide in the first place.
The basic rates of strong and weak links are described on pages 42-45 of Mechan's guide, but there's more detailed modelling available in forum posts.
That's not simply "true" or "false", which is why there is anecdotal evidence despite the main answer being "no"
- adding Extraction to a primarily Refinery economy will boost the output of Gold and Silver because they're common exports to both economies
- it will conversely reduce your exports of Explosives (and possibly even switch them to being imported) because Extraction imports those
- it won't directly affect the output of e.g. Steel because Extraction economies neither produce nor consume that, but ...
- ... Extraction facilities change your Wealth and Standard of Living, which will give you a quantities re-roll on some imports and exports, which might boost them or might decrease them (and might even give you a net decrease to Gold and Silver in certain situations!)
- if it's an Extraction Hub specifically, rather than a settlement, that boosts development level, which will give an across-the-board increase to all import and export volumes.
You can't precisely, as it depends on a lot of hidden variables and equations which we don't have any hope of precisely finding the answer to. https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/specialisation/hybrid will let you get an approximation of what the likely range of outcomes are (advanced tool primarily put together for my own research use, so it assumes you know certain things)
This is very commodity-dependent. Your basic equation is
(size of export economy * strength of export) - (size of import economy * strength of import) - but the key thing is that commodities do not have equal export and import strength, and do not have constant import and export strength, so actually solving that equation precisely is usually impossible, you can only get approximations.So Insulating Membrane, for example, has an import strength on average 20 times its export strength (though the possible range is at least 3x to 60x) which means that a High-Tech economy component 1/20th the size of your refinery component has about an even chance of taking out Insulating Membrane exports.
On the other side, Progenitor Cells have an export strength on average 25 times their import strength (with a massive possible range of 0.25x to 167x) so there's a good chance (though not a certainty!) that this single High-Tech weak link will stop your refinery port importing them and give it exports of them instead.
And then even if you get lucky on those rolls, the next time you build any structure that affects Wealth, Standard of Living or Development Level, you'll potentially re-roll those numbers and get a different result.
Advanced players who know exactly what they're doing and only want specific exports and imports from an economy might feel like gambling on it to be able to get some other outcome more efficiently in build time. But "tldr, don't" is always the correct advice for people who don't know how this works already, and Mechan is writing a guide to colonisation, not a guide to the obscure details of ED station economy construction.
You can download it from the link provided.
1. Click link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/...3STIV2-hE/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.673cr7x8xxn3
2. In the upper left corner, click File > Download > .PDF
3. Done.
Appreciate all suggestions as this is the first time I experiment with anything like an audiobook.
I thought given this was meant to be listened to in the background, showing the document while speaking to it wasn’t desireable …
Something to ponder.
I have built a couple of extraction installations and a refinery hub on the planet that my primary port is orbiting, and now the port in question is selling aluminum and steel, which is nice (because it makes it a lot handier to build more installations).
Quick question: Is it useful to build more extraction and refinery hubs, or should I go for something else?
Quick question: Is it useful to build more extraction and refinery hubs, or should I go for something else?
It depends what you want it to do.
Extraction and Refinery work against each other a bit - the Refinery component will import most of the Extraction component's exports - so it's not possible to answer this without knowing what you're trying to achieve both for this station and the system.
(It also depends what type your primary station is and possibly what sort of planet it orbits)
It's a coriolis station orbiting a high metal content world with pristine reserves. The planet has 7 slots to build, plus it has a moon with 2 more slots.
Okay, so you're getting a bunch of Extraction economy from that, and then a mix of Extraction and Refinery economy from the facilities you've already built.
So the question is, what do you want? More metals? More ores? Some other economy type? Something unrelated to market production?
So the question is, what do you want? More metals? More ores? Some other economy type? Something unrelated to market production?
Any biologicals and/or volcanism on that planet?
And to recapitulate, this is what I am asking. Is it useless to build more extraction and refinery hubs? Do the additional ones make any difference?
They'll make "a difference". Useful for what, though? What do you want this system / station / planet to do?
If you build more Extraction, you'll move the economy proportionally towards Extraction. This will increase the amount of ore exported (which may, depending on the Refinery fraction, show up on the actual market as a decrease in the amount imported).
If you build more Refinery, you move it proportionally towards Refinery. This will increase the amounts of metals exported and the amounts of ores imported (which may show up on the market as a decrease in the amount exported)
(Because Refinery consumes as imports almost all of Extraction's exports, if you add too much Refinery you can get to the point where it was a bit pointless building the Extraction in the first place. On the other hand, if you add too much Extraction, you potentially end up with a Refinery station which doesn't import most of the typical Refinery imports very much, reducing trade profits)
You also get the various global effects of the hub buildings - both boost Development Level, the Refinery Hub more so, which will increase import and export quantities in general. They also change other values but they tend to have more subtle effects that are unlikely to matter. And they also decrease Security, which might be helpful or harmful depending on whether you want a high-security or low-security system.
So, what do you want this station for?
- if you want it for cargo production, what commodity types are you interested in?
- is it already producing enough of those for your personal needs?
- do you anticipate it needing to produce enough to cover lots of other players' needs as well?
- are there cargo types you're missing and would like?
- are there cargo types you have exported at the moment that you'd be willing at least in theory to sacrifice to get them?
- what about imports, do you want to be able to sell cargo here?
- if so, just for yourself or are you wanting it to be able to support a bit more activity?
- what about missions? Do you like running missions? If so, what sort?
- does the station already have the station services you want? if not, what's missing?
- are you trying to get everything you want in this system or do you have space nearby to build other systems if you want?
- do you have any preference for system security level? if so, how strong a preference is this?
It's not possible to guess the answers to those - and therefore advise you on whether you should build more extraction/refinery hubs or whether something else might be more useful for your particular goal - just from seeing that you've so far built an Extraction/Refinery economy station.
In that case, assuming you're reasonably happy with the quantities and spread of items on the Coriolis, and don't mind doing a moderately large amount of hauling to build it, a T1 Surface Port (Colony economy) might be a good addition - it'll have a similar market to the Coriolis, but also produce the surface-only commodities CMM Composites and Ceramic Composites which show up in a lot of build recipes. With how large their population/economies are, that'll probably also boost overall production quite a bit more than adding a few more hubs would.
With the things you've already built spreading out a lot of weak refinery/extraction links into the system, if you wanted a supply of high-tech or industrial commodities as well that might be easiest to build in a different system. Similarly be careful with building things which have industrial/high-tech/military influence elsewhere in this system, as even weak links could prevent some of the production you've already got.
With the things you've already built spreading out a lot of weak refinery/extraction links into the system, if you wanted a supply of high-tech or industrial commodities as well that might be easiest to build in a different system. Similarly be careful with building things which have industrial/high-tech/military influence elsewhere in this system, as even weak links could prevent some of the production you've already got.