PI Power issues

[Big_Roke]

Hi,

I’m was creating some new P0-P1 setups and am having an issue with one planet. CCU is 5 on both characters and I’m trying to have 2x5 extractors and 2x4 P0-P1 factories. The issues seems to be the Power Grid on the link from the extractor. Below is the working setup:

and below is the setup where the links take are FAR more PG:

Any ideas why this may be the case?

Thanks

[Gerard_Amatin]

The second picture shows a gas planet, which are often much larger than the other planets.

With increased planet sizes, something that seems the same distance as on the other planet is in fact a much longer distance, which increases link power and CPU costs.

If you can choose between multiple gas planets in a system and they all have similar resources, I like to compare their radius and pick the smallest gas planets to build on, as it can change your link costs by a factor 3.

Another trick if you’re using a P2 setup is to set up your factories and other nodes in a single straight line between your two extractors to span distance between your extractors ‘for free’, because you will have to link those nodes anyway and this way those links help you span (part of) the distance between two different resouces.

[Io_Koval]

@Big_Roke

Any ideas why this may be the case?

Gerard mentioned why this the case, and I just wanted to add this is why you usually only see PI patterns where all the buildings are touching each other – in a line like Gerard mentioned, or a hexagonally-packed grid – because then all links are kept to a minimum distance, leaving the most PG possible for buildings and extractors. The hexagonally-packed grid has the added benefit of also tending to avoid having to upgrade links.

[Big_Roke]

Thanks for your reply, I was going to get a bit anal with the design for my factory planets but not so much for the P0/P1 extraction/production planets. I’ll tinker with my overall setup and try and ensure gas planets only produce a single P1 item. Very handy to know about the planet size issue though!

[Big_Roke]

Thank you for your reply, really useful information. I did do that to a certain extent with the extractor route to launchpad going through factories but wanted to spend time on the factory setups so these are a bit hit and miss!