If I start to build up my empire should I make specialized worlds to consolidate stuff?
What are the benefits of doing this and the trade offs
Also what types of specialized worlds are there
Fuel
Shipyards
Construction factories
Research
Military academy?
Ground force construction complex
Maintenance facility?
Financial center
Repair
Ordinance
Fighter?
Am I missing any?
Probably not for the super granular things like missiles and fighters - but you can theoretically do it as long as you have the minerals required to produce them.
So for a fuel refinery world you either need a LOT of sorium on the surface or have enough sources of the raw mineral nearby that you can ship to the refinery world. Note that this is the raw mineral version mined from planets. Sorium from a gas giant is automatically turned into fuel when harvested.
I’ve said on other posts that I am a fan of RP above all. If you arent having fun, who cares if this spreadsheet simulator is optimal or not.
I can say from my own experience I have never played a save long enough to really dive into super specialization, but I always dream of Military and Academy worlds ala Carida, Corelia, Corulag etc from Star Wars. I just never get around to it or have a real logistical need to.
I will say that a popular move from myself and others on the forum is to slap financial centers on any populations without major mining operations - like when Luna rolls barren. Gives the population something to do.
If you split up production, including financial centres, you can choose governors specifically for each type of industry, which will boost overall output.
Research output will be higher for colonies on planets with ancient constructs.
Maintenance/fuel/repair, etc., gives you forward operating bases and improves your fleet logistics.
More distributed population will result in a greater percentage of population in manufacturing and faster overall population growth.
The trade offs are that you create more targets that need defending, and you need logistics to move the requisite minerals around, those logistics probably need defending (depending on game settings).
Also you need to keep track of what minerals are needed where, and ensure they are topped up.
For many things, to be useful you need a fair amount of facilities (one construction facility takes forever to produce anything, even a second construction facility), so the related population and infrastructure requirements put a soft base on what you do at any given colony, Mars or Luna with 100 million pops can do something industrially significant, Omicron A IX 10 jumps away with only 10k cannot.
For specialisations, check out the governor bonuses mentioned by Steve.
Specialised military academies for different officer types is often overlooked.
And military academies do not care about colony cost. An easy trick to do early game is put one MA on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Luna and Ceres for good measure and then assign commanders with different specialities on them (in addition to the ones you have on Earth) to ensure you get a good variety of important skills in future commanders.
You can also have ground units with construction equipment be building infrastructure and construction factories.
On an ancient construct planet 25b+ km from Sol I started doing this while the xeno team were still working on translating. Minerals provided by salvage ships. 100 infrastructure built first to kick off civilian colony ships to start the long trip then some construction factories and a mine to have jobs waiting for them while a cargo fleet sent over some more joined by tugged terraforming stations.
Its population has been going strong and I am just about to finish building its first research lab for a sweet 70% bonus to Geo. Thinking about building ground units there for ship boarding replacements as I am at war with 1 NPC 2 jumps away that also had a second NPC in system when I first found it. Can you have 2 NPC home worlds in a binary system?
You can. It also used to be possible to have NPR and spoiler spawn in the same system which would always create a lot of fun, not sure if Steve changed that since I haven’t seen that happen in a while now.
I think I remember a change log item where Steve removed this because it kept causing bugs. Mostly due to Rakhas as usual.
I think you had an almost complete answer collating all posts, but one thing that was touched only on the surface was the minerals.
You may want to pull the construction table and check what minerals are required and for what. Worlds with native amounts of such minerals, may be good for the particular specialization, or at least this is what you have in mind: wrong!
If you want to specialize you have to chose worlds without minerals or part of the pops will be miners and you’ll have to produce and scatter all these mines around. Yes you can use Automines at double the price, but I would probably do that only for Class 1 worlds with all minerals or access to all minerals at more than 0.8 in the system. It’s like buying a house: Location Location Location!
Furthermore, you can always transport the minerals required to build the facilities using construction brigades (since you will be transporting minerals anyway for producing the interested goods), again limiting your pops effort to the given task.
In reality, you’ll find out soon that Aurora rewards massively the “tall” players as it is easier to handle the logistic, protect routes, systems and planets. And, to be honest, this happens to be true for many if not all SciFi settings out there. I would also expect, if space travels ever become reality, to be true in real life if we consider all we know about space today.
You can go wide, 100%, however, the investment in terms of resources may or may not really worth it, as it really depends of your RNG at system creation. Your most likely road soon will be 3 or 4 Earth like worlds with maybe only 2 having shipyards and most likely one of them you have “seized” from an NPR.
Finally, I think you may want to work on defining your colonies: Core, Outposts, Mines and then just split in 2 categories: Civilian/Commercial and Military. Once you do that then the only important size in terms of pops is to get to the 10M mark and unlock all potentials, goods, trade, and so on.