It took me five or six tries, but I got a small factory to the point where buying stuff won’t bankrupt me. So far I’ve only needed to use the main floor and the expansion to the south-west. Edit: This is an old factory. It may no longer be a viable build.
It is hard to see because of the importer’s overlay, but you can sort of make it out.
Much easier to understand what’s going on with this view of the main floor. That single line of Specialised Chassis Slots can produce one car chassis every eight seconds, which the eight basic Fit Body assemblers can keep up with. These assemblers work in pairs to feed a single array of Specialised Paint Slots each, which then feed off to a pair basic Fit Engine assemblers. These eight assemblers then all feed back into a single array of Specialised Accessories Slots, which is the choke for this system because of all the upgrades. Finally, two Quality Checkers proceed the Export conveyor to avoid becoming the choke-point. All in all, this part of the factory produces one car little over every eight seconds.
The next part of the factory is the expansion to the south-west. This facility produces the most upgraded car possible at the moment, and makes one almost every ten seconds. Figuring out the choke points for a single production line was much easier than trying to do a mega-factory all in one go, which was the point of this area.
At first I considered the Export conveyor to be the choke point, since it is the final limit on what your factory can produce.
But then I realised that these two facilities are the real choke point in this limited space. Splitting lines exponentially increases the amount of space you need, and you want to minimise line splitting and merging as much as possible. In this case, I decided to keep production to one line for every ten seconds of production, which fit very nicely in this space.
The only place that needed splitting was the painting area, where I split the Undercoat drying into two upgraded slots, and the Finish drying into three un-upgraded slots. This kept the production time down to ten seconds area that I wanted.
