Cortex Labs 3.0
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Continuing to have a lovely time in fits and starts with this goofy idle game.
http://factoryidle.com/
This an expansion and reworking of my R&D facility, into which I've managed to cram a bunch more research capacity by rearranging stuff significantly and embracing a little bit of willful waste to save space. I'm particularly happy with new 3-lane celtic braid of a supply conveyors in the center of the main facility, but there's also some pretty satisfying fractional distributions of gas resources between the main room and the two lower rooms to make things operate basically perfectly on a zero margin balance.
http://factoryidle.com/
This an expansion and reworking of my R&D facility, into which I've managed to cram a bunch more research capacity by rearranging stuff significantly and embracing a little bit of willful waste to save space. I'm particularly happy with new 3-lane celtic braid of a supply conveyors in the center of the main facility, but there's also some pretty satisfying fractional distributions of gas resources between the main room and the two lower rooms to make things operate basically perfectly on a zero margin balance.
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Each research cycle (so, every 20 game ticks I think), a Lab will generate a report. That gets conveyed off to a Research Center where it generates bonus research. So if you set up a Lab and and an RC and a conveyor between 'em, cool, you're getting a little bonus research done.
But if you feed, say, plastic into a Gas&Oil Lab, that Lab will now consume a piece of plastic each research cycle and generate an additional 10 reports to then ferry along to a Research Center. Huge boost, okay, this much is straightforward.
But that's true for gas and for oil as well: if a G&O Lab has some gas on hand, it'll consume one unit and produce 2 additional reports each cycle; if it has oil, it'll eat one of those and produce 3 additional.
The tricky/cool thing is that it can do all of those, so if you're feeding plastic, oil, and gas into a G&O Lab it'll produce 1 default + 10 + 2 + 3 bonus reports each cycle, for a total of 16, and attempt to ship those out. No loss of efficiency in terms of raw output when you feed it all three; it just all adds up.
The sticking point is that Research Centers have a maximum stock size of reports they can store between their own 20-tick research cycles during which they consume the entire stock of reports on hand. That stock size starts at 4 reports, and can be upgraded for increasingly large piles of cash.
My setup has RC stock size upgraded to the point where each RC can hold 16 reports. That's the magic number for me, as the exact number of reports a G&O Lab with gas, oil, and plastic feeders produces. So perfect 1:1 efficiency from both facilities; the Lab shovels 16 reports each cycle onto a conveyor, which tops off the RC's stock of reports which it then converts to research income at the same cycle speed.
If your RCs have a smaller stock size, you don't need to shove as many reports out of your Labs; you could either feed less material into the labs to produce fewer reports in the first place (might save some footprint and operating costs), or split lab output among multiple RCs to even out a weird ratio of Lab production vs. RC consumption.
It can be a weird balancing act.