After my initial Space Age playthrough I started optimising for a while to hit 10k eSPM (i.e. after production bonuses / biolab usage reduction). Hit that and stopped playing for a while. Now returned to push to 100k eSPM with 10k+ raw SPM this time.
I am focusing on sciences needed for Mining productivity - those are really used a lot more consistently and the mining productivity is actually very helpful. Everything else I can mostly just stockpile for a while to still hit some high infinite sciences. I think I am hitting a stage there though where I'll need to put some more effort into some other sciences
Thanks! It's actually not that crazy, for 10k effective SPM I didn't even build a larger base and still had 10 assemblers for red science, 12 for green, etc. - that all went with Beacons and quality and science productivity + improvements on the side of producing intermediates by using EM plants to make chips and furnaces to make gears/steel/etc.
Actually that part I was able to get a over 20k science and now I am building a larger science production bit with 4x of everything that I had before. Certainly larger in scope and I often have stacked green belts of stuff, but still hardly a megabase.
I saw people who are really pushing it are going way over 1million SPM in space age :O... but I'm also still quite casual and don't think about stuff like UPS and also don't copy build blueprints, so my builds won't be optimal at all.
Do yourself a favour and get to Aquilo. Without spoiling anything, it's a nice, relaxed experience after the busy-busy feeling of Gleba, and the planet's design constraints make building the base a surprisingly fun puzzle experience.
I thought I would hate it based on cursory descriptions I've read, but I'm having a lot of fun slowly building up, with (almost) no time pressure.