Every vanilla playthrough of mine follows a rough progression: get to blue science with spaghetti, organize a bit, and then get bots all with my initial ore deposits (maybe a few trains to the closest other ones if needed). After that, I build a larger, more organized base with a comprehensive train network from scratch in another location and then work to finish the game.
I assumed this was the norm—or close to it—but I’ve seen people just progressively expand their initial base at spawn until they beat the game. I feel like I could do it differently just because I have less experience and hence less foresight into what I’ll need as I go, but I’m not sure.
What do you guys do? How come?
Haven’t played the expansion, so I’m talking about the original game experience.
I tend to build three bases:
a small serving of spaghetti that gets some initial science and enough materials for a couple furnace stacks and some assemblers.
That gets torn down and replaced by some stone furnace stacks and a semi-organized base that automates electric drills, assmeblers, pump jacks, red belts, rails, the stuff I need to expand to other fields. That basically runs on the starter patches while I go afield, find more resources, go in alien bases and kill thur doods, etc, and then build a rail system and plunk down remote mines.
That base gets pulled down again so I can use the land it sits on. It’s usually well within my territory on flat ground that doesn’t need a lot of cliffs blasted or water filled in. Acres of electric furnaces, a multi-lane main bus that, once finished, will end in the rocket silo. Usually the refinery/chemical plant area will end up elsewhere as will the nuclear power plant.