Week 11: Megabase Economics
Travel time and TPS as real design costs, expansion versus productivity growth, and speedrunning as a different optimisation target entirely.
12 October 2026
Outline#
- Megabases and travel time — once a base is minutes to walk across, travel time itself becomes a design cost.
- TPS basics — the game’s simulation tick rate as a real, finite resource: every entity updated each tick is a small cost.
- Expansion — growing outward with new outposts versus growing upward in productivity per tile.
- Speedrunning — minimising time to a fixed goal rather than maximising steady-state output, which changes which techniques matter.
- Designing blueprints for speed — how a blueprint optimised for minimum build time differs from one optimised for long-term throughput.
Teaching team
- Professor T. Trupen — convenor