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The Locator posted:Does anyone else feel the desire to just turn the biters off at some point in the progression of the game when they are just a time-sink but don't really pose any threat at all? I bought this game almost 4 years ago and was tired of biters within the first 6 months. Back when you needed alien artifacts to make science I downloaded a mod to produce them in factories & never looked back. If I come back to do challenge runs then I sometimes turn them on because it can be fun trying to balance things, but generally I'm not interested in them. The Friday Facts about changing the tutorial back seems like an odd choice, but I never played the new tutorial so I don't know how well it handled onboarding new players.
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Dec 29, 2019 00:37
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Dr. Stab posted:Yes, your factory will be off half the time, but that's always goung to be true if you're not making enough input. You're just choosing between shorter and longer outage cycles. Why would this happen? Chakan posted:I bought this game almost 4 years ago and was tired of biters within the first 6 months. Back when you needed alien artifacts to make science I downloaded a mod to produce them in factories & never looked back. If I come back to do challenge runs then I sometimes turn them on because it can be fun trying to balance things, but generally I'm not interested in them. Yeah, since biters stopped dispensing artifacts, I've spayed or neutered them at map generation time and regret nothing.
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Dec 29, 2019 00:40
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Jabor posted:Infrastructure is pretty cheap, no? You'd definitely want to have a new patch set up and exploited by the time the old one starts running dry, but there's little sense in spending time and effort dismantling the old one until it's actually gone. (And trying to come up with a partial-downscaling to match the reduced ore output is a complete waste of time). That was sort of my thinking, but I was curious how others handled it. I also tend to buffer the hell out of everything, probably too much! I use a warehouse as a balancer between my ore and the furnaces, and then I use another warehouse as a balancer between the furnaces and my train loading station, which uses a warehouse for each car rather than feeding out of chests. The downside is that I can have a problem somewhere that my buffering does a fantastic job of masking until it has gone from a small problem to a huge problem! In other news I finally got around to setting up slow rocket launching for science. First rocket launch was over 104 hours into the game.. heh.. speed runner I am not. Chakan posted:I bought this game almost 4 years ago and was tired of biters within the first 6 months. Back when you needed alien artifacts to make science I downloaded a mod to produce them in factories & never looked back. If I come back to do challenge runs then I sometimes turn them on because it can be fun trying to balance things, but generally I'm not interested in them. I may end up turning the biters off if they keep annoying me too much and I don't find an elegant in-game solution. As for the tutorials, I never played the old one beyond the very first couple bits, and never played the new one at all. I didn't even know there was a new one!
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Dec 29, 2019 00:43
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Kinetica posted:Wouldn’t you end up with a big mess of trains running around mostly empty as the patch stops being able to support furnace loads, even with the warehouse buffer? I tried it once and ended up breaking my rail network from overload Wire your buffer chests together and then to your train station, tell it to disable unless it's got at least a train worth. Set all your trains to leave after a bit when loading to handle when multiple trains dispatch to an insufficient station. Chakan posted:The Friday Facts about changing the tutorial back seems like an odd choice, but I never played the new tutorial so I don't know how well it handled onboarding new players. It basically teaches you that you have to rush infrastructure as fast as possible or get run over by biters, which is exactly the opposite of how the actual game works. It's really goddamn bad.
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Dec 29, 2019 00:46
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For buffers that are designed to fill up, stay completely full most of the time, and then start emptying out at the end, you can set up a little circuit that sounds an alert when it goes over 95% and then back under 90%. That lets you know when the input is running out and you're working through your buffer.
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Dec 29, 2019 00:47
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Cocoa Crispies posted:Why would this happen? I was just preempting the response. Typically people want their trains to run more frequently because they see that the base is empty and there's a train half full sitting on the mine, so why shouldn't the train go back right now?
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Dec 29, 2019 01:02
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Dr. Stab posted:I was just preempting the response. Typically people want their trains to run more frequently because they see that the base is empty and there's a train half full sitting on the mine, so why shouldn't the train go back right now? The problem with this scenario can be reduced to 'not enough supply' which is remedied by more mining/smelting/production. If you're dealing with very low throughputs, simply adding 'OR wait 2 minutes' to train orders should suffice, assuming the issue of automatic fueling has been addressed.
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Dec 29, 2019 03:56
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So I've finally worked up the courage to start my Mega Base. Is there a way in the base game to have multiple stops and the train stops at the first vacant one to unload then head back?
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Dec 29, 2019 05:53
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If you give multiple stops the exact same name, trains will just pick one to go to. The exact set of rules they use is pretty complicated, but for practical purposes, if you just put a bunch of same-name stations in the same place, with a chain signal guarding the section where the line actually splits, then trains will just pick whatever station is open.
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Dec 29, 2019 05:56
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Travic posted:So I've finally worked up the courage to start my Mega Base. Decide what you want each stop to do, and then make a circuit that turns the stop on/off depending on whether or not you want the train to stop there. For example, I have my oil patches labeled "Oil (%N)". I have my fluid trains scheduled to hit them in order and then return to the refinery. However, I also wired up the storage tanks at the oilfields to only turn the train stop on when there is a full train load of oil to be picked up.
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Dec 29, 2019 05:59
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Jabor posted:If you give multiple stops the exact same name, trains will just pick one to go to. What they do is they go to the closest enabled station with the given name. This is why automation is really handy for trains as is a staging area where they wait before a station. If you give them a place to wait and an exit to the main lines they'll do neat things. It kind of bogs down and doesn't work all that well for mega bases (for truly huge bases with trains you do end up needing LTN) but can do well for a while. So if you have six stations named IRON MINE you can enable or disable them as appropriate as they get filled or emptied. Then trains will only head for the enabled ones. Now, trains are stupid in the vanilla game and really do just head for the closest which can lead to them dogpiling particular stations. Same goes for inputs and what not. You can enable them if they need poo poo and trains will head for them. LTN adds complicated logistics stuff but lets you do things like set the maximum number of trains that will head for a station.
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Dec 29, 2019 06:11
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ToxicSlurpee posted:What they do is they go to the closest enabled station with the given name. This is why automation is really handy for trains as is a staging area where they wait before a station. If you give them a place to wait and an exit to the main lines they'll do neat things. It kind of bogs down and doesn't work all that well for mega bases (for truly huge bases with trains you do end up needing LTN) but can do well for a while. Yeah, the exact pathfinding rules are a bit complicated, but if you're just building a hub station with many platforms you can get away with just a chain signal where the track diverges - if the platform the train picked when it originally departed the mine is taken, it'll be held up at the chain signal and reroute to a currently-open platform. It gets slightly more complicated once you want more trains than can fit through that single-track bottleneck though.
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Dec 29, 2019 06:14
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My system is pretty simple so far so hopefully I can just get away with the single chain signal. I want trains from all the mines to converge at the smelter, drop their ore at whatever stop is open, then head back.
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Dec 29, 2019 06:44
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The green stuff must flow into the power lines! For full resolution remove 'Sm' from the image name in your browser. The two little dudes on the left were me just throwing stuff down (and then copy/pasting it) when I first got nuclear ability and needed the power. They only make 430MW, not 480. The two big 10 reactor setups are a design that I think I got from this thread a couple of years ago, and I really like how they look. They each turn out right at 1.4GW, which is very close to the theoretical 1440MW that the 10 reactors should be putting out. I refuse to bow to the efficiency gods and use a 2xN setup. Currently only pulling 1.6GW on my grid, but I like to be proactive on power since the fuel is basically limitless, and that 2nd 10 reactor setup is still warming up when I took the screenshot. Once it's warmed up I'll be good for about 3.6GW on the grid.
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Dec 29, 2019 09:21
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Teledahn posted:The problem with this scenario can be reduced to 'not enough supply' which is remedied by more mining/smelting/production. If you're dealing with very low throughputs, simply adding 'OR wait 2 minutes' to train orders should suffice, assuming the issue of automatic fueling has been addressed. That's sorta my point. If you don't have enough supply, adding a minimum wait time to trains doesn't change much except use up more train bandwidth than is needed. If the train for a particular mine runs every half hour, so be it.
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Dec 29, 2019 14:27
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For my Krastorio starter base, what should go on the bus? Red circuits is blowing my brain up. I'm trying to decide if I need to bus complex components like PCBs, or refined components like glass, silicone wafers, or just raw components like sand and rock, then smelt everything in place.
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Dec 29, 2019 17:59
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Canuckistan posted:For my Krastorio starter base, what should go on the bus? Red circuits is blowing my brain up. I'm trying to decide if I need to bus complex components like PCBs, or refined components like glass, silicone wafers, or just raw components like sand and rock, then smelt everything in place. Everything goes on the bus!  Heh.. It's been a while since I played Krastorio, but one thing I do remember is that I wished I had not bussed sand, but instead had bussed the quartz (I think) and glass, as I ended up having to use way too many lanes for sand for all the on-site needs, most of which came down to those two items. Maybe have a single lane of sand for oddball things? I don't really remember if there are small needs for it anywhere. I made all my silicon wafers and PCB's on site for each need, but I imagine if you look at what goes into each of those you could figure out pretty quickly whether it would be more efficient to bus those instead of building them on site, as they are needed a lot in the mid-late game.
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Dec 29, 2019 20:51
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I refined the things that condensed and belted them down. I tend to make the components just for the immediate use, so each main product has a few assemblers making the products it needs. This is gonna change soon once I scale up better, but it’s good for getting things up and running.
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Dec 29, 2019 20:54
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The train setup is working nicely. I'm still building the factory that will build the parts for the Mega Factory though. I'm having good luck fortifying each resource outpost and putting an artillery cannon down as well to keep the area clear. Would it be easier to just clear the whole drat map and put up a wall? I could plop down new outposts faster with less logistics headaches (resupplying and repairing defenses), but drat that'd be a long wall.
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Dec 30, 2019 00:19
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Travic posted:The train setup is working nicely. I'm still building the factory that will build the parts for the Mega Factory though. I built walls with turrets (mix of uranium ammo + lasers) but the stupid spitters still slowly wear down a section that see's continuous attacks, and unless you've gotten many many levels of post-rocket artillery range, it's impossible to clear the biters beyond the cloud of pollution (unless of course your walls are WAY the hell out away from anything in your factory that generates pollution) so they just keep coming and I have to either go out and repair the walls eventually (usually when I get a 'something was destroyed' warning) or put in a robo-port network around the entire wall with repair packs available. After spending far too many hours exterminating nests ahead of my ever-widening pollution cloud, I said the hell with it and used the console commands to kill all the biters and prevent any new biters from spawning in newly generated chunks. Now my vast defensive arrays sit idle.. a monument to the destruction of an entire race for the betterment of my factory and peace of mind. Exhibit A - My uranium ammunition factory complex. Trains took the ammo from here to the three different wall sections for feeding into the giant ammo belts. 
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Dec 30, 2019 01:53
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The Locator posted:I built walls with turrets (mix of uranium ammo + lasers) but the stupid spitters still slowly wear down a section that see's continuous attacks, Add flame thrower turrets. They do a tremendous amount of damage once ramped up. My setup is two uranium turrets and a flame turret spaced out about an underground pipe apart and I rarely see any damage even with large attacks.
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Dec 30, 2019 02:09
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I wonder if you could set up rail-supplied bastions further out from the wall to take the brunt of any attacks, and then the megawall itself only needs to be lightly defended.
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Dec 30, 2019 03:33
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necrotic posted:Add flame thrower turrets. They do a tremendous amount of damage once ramped up. My setup is two uranium turrets and a flame turret spaced out about an underground pipe apart and I rarely see any damage even with large attacks. I've used flamethrower turrets in past games, and they do work well, but in those games I've also had robo-repair support on the wall too, as the base and wall was much smaller. It would be doable, but kind of a pain because of how much piping would be required with the size of the wall. Jabor posted:I wonder if you could set up rail-supplied bastions further out from the wall to take the brunt of any attacks, and then the megawall itself only needs to be lightly defended. Yeah, I could run long rail lines out to outposts with artillery to keep the area way outside the walls clear, and at the same time draw in all the attacks to those outposts and provide the repair bots support just in those locations. I even have a blueprint of just such an outpost designed earlier in this factory for my artillery train to park in that I made and used already when I was pushing north for more ore patches. In the end though, I just decided that for this game I was done dealing with the bugs, as with them at 98.x% evolution they were really just an annoyance, not any sort of real threat, so I just turned them off to focus on making a bigger base and ramp up my science with the near-term goal of 1000spm and then we'll see where it goes from there.
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Dec 30, 2019 03:58
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Walls are fundamentally pretty pointless. You have to defend them, which means you're better off just dropping down walled-off defensive installations with gaps between them. As long as they're close enough that the biter AI won't walk through the gap without aggroing one installation or another, you have your wall without the annoyance of an actual wall.
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Dec 30, 2019 04:31
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K8.0 posted:Walls are fundamentally pretty pointless. You have to defend them, which means you're better off just dropping down walled-off defensive installations with gaps between them. As long as they're close enough that the biter AI won't walk through the gap without aggroing one installation or another, you have your wall without the annoyance of an actual wall. Walls are just to slow down the biters long enough for your turrets to kill them, nothing more. Once you have a bunch of damage and rate of fire upgrades you shouldn't have too much trouble doing that, but then walls can be a cheap insurance policy in case that doesn't work.
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Dec 30, 2019 05:05
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Walls are there to get munched on so turrets don't.
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Dec 30, 2019 05:09
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Yes, read the post again. You put walls around the defensive blobs. There's absolutely no point to building a solid wall that goes around your base, just little walled forts. As long as your setup forces biters to aggro on one fort or another, there is zero value to putting walls in between them. Negative value, actually, since it gets in your way.
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Dec 30, 2019 05:12
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K8.0 posted:Yes, read the post again. You put walls around the defensive blobs. There's absolutely no point to building a solid wall that goes around your base, just little walled forts. As long as your setup forces biters to aggro on one fort or another, there is zero value to putting walls in between them. Negative value, actually, since it gets in your way. I like my curtain wall though.
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Dec 30, 2019 05:19
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Jabor posted:I wonder if you could set up rail-supplied bastions further out from the wall to take the brunt of any attacks, and then the megawall itself only needs to be lightly defended. I set up a perimeter wall, a tileable defense wall that includes all flavors of turrets plus bots, ports, ammo delivery etc, that also has two train stations; one to re-up on ammo/bots/walls/repair kits, and a second for a 20-length artillery train. The Arty Party is set to go to each station in sequence and stay for 90 seconds, then return to a re-arming depot. This means that when I want to expand the wall, the area is already clear out to one arty length, it's also already scouted for the most part, and I get a nice predicable wave of bugs to watch wash up on my walls.
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Dec 30, 2019 07:09
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Got all my science's (except rocket launching) set up to produce 1k SPM now, and labs capable of about 1300, easily tileable to expand later as it's completely bot based. Sure found out in a hurry what my biggest material weakness was about 5 minutes after turning all that poo poo on, as my yellow science dried up quickly due to lack of steel. Was not expecting that, I was expecting to tank on red circuits, which were already being fed to most demands in spurts. Time move out along the rail line and set up more steel smelting arrays. Need to spend some time designing a better array than my current 'feed 8 red belts of ore into 48 furnaces per line feeding another 48 furnaces' to get out a pathetic dribble of two partial red belts. Mining bonus is up to 90% so I can feed a lot more lines even with that design, but I need to start getting creative with my miner layouts as the drills (even without modules) fill up the belts way before they get to the end of the line of drills. I could increase things a bit by using blue belts of course. but probably need to work on some sort of weird offset mining drill setup with undergrounds to just get more belts out of the patches.
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Dec 30, 2019 09:50
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The Locator posted:I've used flamethrower turrets in past games, and they do work well, but in those games I've also had robo-repair support on the wall too, as the base and wall was much smaller. It would be doable, but kind of a pain because of how much piping would be required with the size of the wall. Ah, my walls are in segments a few roboports wide with two maintenance stops: one for oil and the other for ammo, repair packs and replacement items (though I have never needed them). Some circuitry powers both to call a train when needed. I'm on vacation now, I'll post a screenshot when I get back.
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Dec 30, 2019 18:44
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I guess I shouldn't have killed off all my biters.. I've gotten bored now because I've achieved everything except just endlessly expanding the factory now, and it's just a matter of adding enough circuit factories (and of course raw materials processing to feed them) to meet the demand. So I have abandoned this game for the moment and started a shiny new Krastorio game with the goal of using the lessons I learned in this game in the new Krastorio one. Resources are rich but spread out and only slightly 'larger'. Generated a nice map that looks like it should be extremely defensible allowing me to take my time with progression as a quick look makes me think that Krastorio has changed a lot since I last played it. I think I'll probably do a small bus-type starter base and then move into rails and expansion with a lot more planning based on the things I figured out with my rail layout and issues with LTN in that game. Still plan to go with the 1-2 trains, as I really liked the way they worked, although late-game I may do transfer stations where much larger trains drop off the raw materials for the smaller trains to distribute. Using my own simple blueprints for rails using circle intersections every where I need to branch, and avoiding 4-ways except for some entrances to individual modules and trying to remember to keep them spread out farther as I had some interesting traffic congestion where I had too many intersections close together. I still don't want to do a grid-based system, I would rather a more organic base that's built out as I need it rather than making a bunch of blocks and then trying to figure out how to fit my stuff inside of them. Mods will be: Krastorio LTN LTN Tracker Afraid of the Dark Inbuilt Lighting Long Reach (can't live without this) Tiny Start (also can't live without this - I hate that super early game) Side Inserters (First time trying this) Vehicle Snap (even with this I crash into just about everything there is to crash into) Longer Days and Nights Flow Control (first time with this one) Fluid Must Flow (also first time) Helmod Bottleneck Auto Deconstruct Closest First Even Distribution (this should be part of the base game IMO) LTN Tracker Noxy's Waterfill Squeak Through (also should be part of the base game) YARM Bob's Enemies Okay.. that list is a lot longer now that I've typed it than I thought it was.. haha.. Yes, I have gone from 'bugs are annoying get rid of them' to making bugs a lot harder. I have given myself the maximum sized starting area as a bug-free zone, and turned off expansion and slowed down evolution. I failed to remember to export the map string when I generated it or get the seed, so I can't do a nice picture of the starting area since it's all black now! Here is a map view of my game I just left. Off-screen in the upper left is a long rail reaching far to the north with a number of mines/refineries built along it - copper, iron and steel. 
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Dec 31, 2019 19:05
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The Locator posted:I failed to remember to export the map string when I generated it or get the seed You can get the map exchange string from the load screen, it's a small button at the top right of the preview.
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Dec 31, 2019 19:10
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necrotic posted:You can get the map exchange string from the load screen, it's a small button at the top right of the preview. Thanks, I did not know that! Here is my new map. Should be pretty easy to seal off the small crossings to the North and West, and then the somewhat narrow land to the South, and then do all my expansion down towards the South-East. Will allow me to expand slowly, at my own pace while I'm dealing with all the new recipes and processes of Krastorio while still having some tough bugs I need to fight to expand in the later game. The black line is an artifact of my incredible copy/paste skills when stitching together two screenshots to get the entire visible area from the loading screen preview.  Edit: Looking at this again, I might have missed one tiny detail... oil.. hahaha.. there is one very small patch of oil on that island north of my starting area, that's going to be quite an interesting challenge that will force me to expand to get oil much sooner than I thought I would be doing. The Locator fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Dec 31, 2019 |
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Dec 31, 2019 22:37
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The Locator posted:Side Inserters (First time trying this) A few points:
GotLag fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Jan 1, 2020 |
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Jan 1, 2020 00:23
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When I put down ghost imprints at the end of my bus, it takes my construction robots a long time to go to my mall, pick up inserters and belts and things, and travel to the construction site. Is there some combination of logistics chests I can lay down ahead of time that the robots will keep stocked and draw from during construction? I thought a simple requester chest would do it, and the robots do keep it stocked, but they ignore it when I construct things. I also tried an inserter that moves items from a requester chest into a storage chest, but then robots put the storage chest items right back in the requester chest.
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Jan 1, 2020 00:46
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What’s the rule of thumb on when to use a chain signal over a regular one? I just can’t remember
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Jan 1, 2020 01:04
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ConfusedUs posted:What’s the rule of thumb on when to use a chain signal over a regular one? I just can’t remember "If a train stops between this signal and the next one, will that cause a logjam that stops other trains from moving?" If the answer is yes then you use a chain signal.
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Jan 1, 2020 01:10
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Should a train ever wait at the next signal? Yes: Regular No: Chain
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Jan 1, 2020 01:42
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ConfusedUs posted:What’s the rule of thumb on when to use a chain signal over a regular one? I just can’t remember Alternately: Chain signals at the entrance and middle of intersections, regular signals after the intersection exits and on straight tracks.
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Jan 1, 2020 01:46
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