Most of them can be solved with various applications of patience, so the trickiest one was the Express Delivery - winning Space Age in less than 40 hours.
Some tips for others who want to try it:
You can not reduce biter base sizes without invalidating the achievement, but you can turn down pollution, biter evolution and biter expansion. Turning the starting area size up to max means you can get all the way to Aquilo without seeing a single biter.
Resource patches can be turned up high and cliffs can be turned down low.
The scale needed is absurd and the main strategy should be on being able to scale hard and fast. My Nauvis base had 20 rocket silos going constantly, two 4-reactor nuclear plants, and it still felt a bit underscaled when I got to Aquilo.
Nauvis was the easiest to get to bigscale in this timeframe, as it already had a head start by the time the other planets were operational. Don’t bother setting up blue chips on Vulcanus. Copy-paste the blue chip production on Nauvis and just ship them over with rockets.
What worked for me to scale:
- BOTS BOTS BOTS thousands of bots immediately and forever on all planets.
- Make sure to produce at least 2 per second of any science.
- Nauvis is the backbone. It can just ferry nuclear fuel, blue chips, rocket fuel, and low density structures to all other planets. (Fulgora gets trivially self-sufficient after a while though)
- Make production modular. Not necessary with perfectly symmetrical or cityblock, but enough that you can just zoom out, copy-and-paste “the area that turns iron ore, copper ore, and raw oil into blue chips”, and just connect it to some new miners or a new oilfield.
- Inefficiency and waste are better than starved belts or constant tuning problems. Need 20 red chips per minute? Copy the thing that makes 20 red chips per second. Give it a separate set of miners, and don’t care if it spends most of the game idling.
- On each planet, establish a bot network and stable power, then GTFO to the next one. Build the rest via remote.
My time was 36 hours, following these rough milestones:
- Logistic system before 10 hours
- Aquilo before 30 hours
How spaghetti are your bases?
They are unstructured any fugly, but not spaghetti. Spaghetti prevents rapid copy-pasting of meaningful sections.
This is the Nauvis industrial backbone. Very few things overlap or intertwine, but it’s a terrible mess.
Still looks good though. Nice work on the achevos. I only just for the 8h rocket this week and still need the 90m train
Nice! If you can play focused enough to rocket in 8h, the rest is just planning. :)