I'm doing the incredibly stupid thing and doing reruns through making vertical launch pads and shooting rockets up en-masse. I'm aware there's a whole scale-up metagame tagging systems after that but I'm really interested in optimizing early game just because I feel this is going to be a game where playing through runs is going to be not uncommon so getting the hang of early game while thinking about strategy is fresh seems like it's the best option.
So far I've had:
- first run just doing whatever, clocked about 40h and got up to non-optimized green cubes
- second run with a 2GW dyson sphere, 2/s captain planet cubes, 40h.
- A run with just over 4M total iron on home system (lol) and no rares,
got to Interstellar in 4h45, 2/s purple in 15h and green cubes in ~22h, Vertical Launchers up but not starting Dyson
- current run where both other planets in home system are both 2.5AU away if I'm lucky and 4AU otherwise and takes
~3 minutes just to fly back and forth, dropped
Interstellar in 4h20 anyway.
My takeaways, very heavily influenced by my playstyle:
- Solar panels are incredible when set up but actually terrible from a time-invested perspective. They're a very, very strong option for taking it slow and laying them down across the equator takes literal 30min while everything else chugs along so you have a bunch of tech and parts when you're done, but for runs that want speed, it's about as much wasted time as spending 1/3 of total playtime laying down a ridiculous number of belts to make a main bus work.
- Early swarm is an option if there's plenty of rocks to throw, but does slow down mid-game since it's investment into getting it up and running. Past 6k active sails power worries on all planets in home system is a nonissue. That being said teching to Hydrogen rods, Orbital Collectors and having a bunch of thermal gens burning them is more effort-efficient, saving swarm sail production for parallel with rocket production. I feel that swarms a few patches ago (30kW/sail) was underpowered at the start and OK after upgrades, and now are OK at the start and scale up to being very good. On fast runs though it's harder to justify vs beelining for sphere
- Going with integer numbers, i feel the best configuration to tech fast vs managing power consumption has been 2/s blue, to 2:2, to
2:2:1 on unlocking yellow, to 2:2:2:2 for purple, to 1:1:1:1:1 on unlocking green (disconnect half of the existing others) then slowly back up to 2:2:2:2:2 again and beyond. The run with 2/s yellow when it unlocked simply just ate too much power while also burning through Titanium too fast (spending more time going back and forth handcarrying Titanium is really not a good use of time). By the time Interstellar is set up and power is good on all planets and it's time to scale up to 2 yellow, purple is also already done anyway.
- The home system sucks. It really does. The second run (first run after scouting out tech tree) I dedicated to being 'only home system' and it really, really blew. The game definitely has an interesting balance where it really pushes you to want to move to a better system ASAP and mall up there, while turning the home system into an outpost sending materials over, which poses a quandary abandoning all the infrastructure already in the home system. The only thing good about the home system is an unlimited supply of hydrogen.
- Rares are really, really, REALLY strong. It's not just easier to set up, it's less of a power draw from the simplified production chain. Needing about 5x as many Chemical Plants to produce Graphene (which also eats into the crude oil cap for the home planet) vs lucking into Fire Ice is massive. Organic Crystals are similar. I'm ambivalent on Unipolar Magnet and Spiniform. They directly make higher-tier parts, but are less versatile than Fireice, since Graphene is used for a lot more than Particle Containers or Nanotubes.
edit: reworded time efficient to effort efficient- the bottleneck for fast runs really is how fast you can build things