The thing I like the most about DSP is the scale of it all. Visually seeing a planet turn into a factory is absolutely amazing every single time. Scaling at that level is, for 90% of the game, a cut and paste affair with little math required. Sure, the start is relatively linear as you have power and throughput challenges, but once you lay down the first interstellar transport, you’ll have 60+ smelters in a chain in no time.

The cracks do start to show once you hit that point though. Resource mining becomes a bottleneck that becomes harder to manage, opening the door for smelting planets. A fully upgraded set of smelters and belts will need pilers to stack items effectively and quadruple throughput. Adding proliferators to the chain is a choice, one with a not insignificant cost.

Mathing it Out

Put plainly, DSP has too many items that have multiple purposes. There are only 3 that come to mind that have a singular purpose and therefore fit into a production line. A production planet will have 50 odd production lines for various items in need in other lines. Add another 30 or so for the PvE portion.

The net effect of this diversity is that late game production chains will break earlier production chains and there are limited options to manage this ahead of time. Quantum Chips are a shining example, where they have a lot of late game usage, require about 120 raw material, and close to a dozen sub-steps. It’s not really practical to design a single factory to create Quantum Chips, as you’d never be able to effectively scale it, so you’re instead going to leverage existing production lines and pull from them.

Generally, it’s easier to add a dozen more smelters to a iron plate line than to rebuild an entire quantum chip factory. The exception to this is sub-factory planets.

Massive Scale

I’ve talked a bit about the starting phase (Titanium), the middle phase (moving planets), and the end phase (building the Dyson Sphere). Late game is about SPM, or science per minute, specifically white science (Universe Matrix) for the infinite research. Building one of these requires 1 of each other type of science block + 1 antimatter (requiring a Dyson Sphere).

Given that each science block requires a set of materials that are the sum of all previous ones, this acts as a sort of cascade of material. Each white science takes about 250 raw material to make, but involves almost every production step in the game (weapons, buildings, and sphere related items are not required). It is exceptionally easy to make blue science (1 per 3s), it is inversely difficult to make green science (1 per 24s). You can saturate these ratios, but then at larger scales that serves little purpose than to block storage and waste material. The production rate is set at 1 per 15s for white, so we get interesting ratios from it.

1W : 1.6G : 0.6P: 0.53Y : 0.4R : 0.2B

These numbers don’t really line up well…making it better to over supply to some degree – notably Green (wide effect of being used for Warpers too). To that end, I prefer a 1: 2 : 0.75 : 0.75 : 0.5 : 0.25 ratio that can withstand scaling needs and math. 100 SPM can be done somewhat simply by the time you have the resources generated from a completed Dyson Sphere. That’s 25 buildings making white science.

1000 SPM… that is not something that can easily be done. 250 buildings for white = 500 for green, and each of those requires around 500 raw material per minute of items…so 250,000 material processed for a single step. At that point, you’re better off building dedicated planets to meet your demands – and specifically invest in vein utilization research in order to extract more items for longer durations, having already researched increase transport to max level (and a similar level of transport speed).

Interstellar Transport

By the late game you’ll have access to a couple hundred solar systems, each with different materials. At first you’ll just ship back the rarer material to simplify production lines from a half dozen. Eventually, you’ll need to build smelting planets for specific components. A solar system that has a high iron count likely will have a central planet that receives all iron and creates ingots from it in bulk. There is no transport efficiency here, but there is space efficiency as a planet that’s dedicated to building 1 thing can build tens of thousands of them quickly. Now, you won’t need a planet for Quantum Computers, but you will need a planet whose sole purpose is generating blue + green science, one for yellow + purple, and finally one for green.

While power won’t be an issue at this point, what will be is the specific fuel used to warp ships about. Travel in a system is just regular power, charged at a station. Travel between systems requires warpers, 2 per round trip. At 2000 items of storage, this starts going sideways when you reach massive scales and create some bottlenecks that are hard to diagnose. Since warpers can be constructed from green science, that’s one reason for overproducing above.

Overall Math

I really like DSP’s gradual shift towards exponential growth. There is a big difference between when you put down your first smelter and when you complete an actual Dyson Sphere. From the small corner of a planet to an empire that controls multiple star systems. This is quite a bit different than Factorio’s linear scale but increased logical complexity. I really appreciate that in both games, if you want to go all the way, that the games give you the tools to do so. You may get a ‘Game Won’ message, but if you want, there’s still enough there to sink 10x the time in and build massive production empires.

And all of it though logical mathematical design. Ooh that scratches an itch!