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AngelBob or just Bob's mods seem to be a good second step, even though I've never completed a game with them. There's also Nullius, but if you don't like byproduct handling, you're gonna have a real bad time with that mod.
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Oct 1, 2022 14:43
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I feel like logistic bots offer an escape from the puzzle of "how do I belt these hundred machines up in a clean and efficient way?" It's just easier to plunk down a row of machines with an input and output box each and be done with it. Now if that is a good thing or not is up to you, but of course there's always the option of not using logistics if you feel it simplifies the puzzle too much.
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Oct 1, 2022 15:11
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Collateral Damage posted:I feel like logistic bots offer an escape from the puzzle of "how do I belt these hundred machines up in a clean and efficient way?" Logistic bots have pretty bad throughput though, so you need a mix, or 10000 bots.
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Oct 1, 2022 15:17
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Logistics bots serve only to keep my inventory topped up. All belts all the time.
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Oct 1, 2022 18:46
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Bots have better throughput scaling than belts if you have enough bots and you keep your networks compact. I usually build lots of specialized sub-factories that exchange materials by train. Each one has its own logistics network, and then I put in as many bots as it needs to function. With belts if you try to scale up beyond 1 spm you'll start to have problems with routing and area. At a high enough scale the area used by belts outpaces the area used by actual factory buildings. Of course land in Factorio is infinite, but your time and mental effort are not. The more spm you're aiming for the less viable belts become.
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Oct 1, 2022 19:31
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I’m doing a 2.7k SPM belt only base. Belts are great. Actually there is one roboport to move satellites to the rocket pads. The entire rest of it, though, is belts.
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Oct 1, 2022 20:03
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Belts are more fun because they are harder. I built a 2700 spm belt base once, though it was a distributed base with lots of trains. With bots only in the make everything base. Belting nuclear fuel to all the train is a terrible idea in the best possible way. Back-stuffing it is fine it just happens. But, deconstructing parts of the base become hilariously inventory heavy.
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Oct 1, 2022 20:10
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Yeah I guess I’m not counting the fueling for trains, nuclear power, my mall base, or the one I setup to crank out modules (which is now no longer needed). The goal of this one was only the science factory itself, which is all-in-one: just shipping in raw materials by train. I put the builds that need water need a lake that i landfilled so I don’t have to bother with water.
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Oct 1, 2022 22:03
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what was the really wild modpack where you're getting emblems out of portals and sending fish into some sort of economy?
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Oct 1, 2022 22:14
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Mailer posted:My first game I avoided logistics stuff. Had my 75 personal robots in the end and that was good enough for me. Second game in and, teething issues around how stuff works aside, this is the kind of scaling out I was missing in Satisfactory. Factorio Extended Plus might be worth a look. It adds multiple new tiers of everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oID_dsC3uNE old video about it, but I believe the mod is up to date for the current version of the game
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Oct 2, 2022 08:41
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I still haven’t made more than a few train lines in all my Factorio career, and never managed to organize a megabase. Comes back to haunt me now in late game Nullius.
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Oct 2, 2022 14:30
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ymgve posted:I still haven’t made more than a few train lines in all my Factorio career, and never managed to organize a megabase. Comes back to haunt me now in late game Nullius.  I've never spent more than 40 hours on a save before Nullius, or ever done trains more sophisticated than "Iron Mine #3 to Iron Smelter #2" before so it's been a learning experience now that I'm 260 hours deep. Here's my base, I've just got my Processor 2 (red chips) block off the ground and running.
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Oct 2, 2022 17:45
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Mr. Peepers posted:
That is a very neatly done factory.
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Oct 2, 2022 19:29
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All railroads all the time, I love the rail world map generator. Even more exciting with high water and the ships mod so you can make "tracks" on water too
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Oct 2, 2022 23:32
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I still hate grid bases. Simple, yes, but non-ideal pathfinding and extremely wasteful and ugly.
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Oct 3, 2022 05:10
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M_Gargantua posted:I still hate grid bases. Simple, yes, but non-ideal pathfinding and extremely wasteful and ugly. What about hex grid bases?
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Oct 3, 2022 05:12
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You can solve the pathfinding by not defining the grid by the rails, and just putting them where you need to. This is also more efficient on resources since you're not spamming rails over parts of the base that might only need a single rail path (like remote mining outposts). In my system I actually run the rails through the middle of the blocks, instead of the edges. Mk.1 of my grid base had the in-line stacker/station blocks as seen on the left, which turned out to be a nightmare when the rail volume got high enough. The Mk.2 blueprints (the blocks under construction and immediately to the left of those) took that into account and went with a strategy of GTFOing the trains out of the main lines as often as possible, and worked a lot better.  Whenever I get back to working on it and designing Mk.3, this is going to spread things out even more, separating the junction from the station blocks entirely so my main line rail blocks are only rail or junction. This has the advantage of giving even more space for efficient rail junctions, for example the T just to the top right of the toolbar is a more spacious design that has room for better signal block separation (compared to the T two blocks right of that). So for example instead of the junction being part of this blueprint, the blueprint will just have a pair of rails coming in from one side, and the T will not be part of the station/production block at all. 
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Oct 3, 2022 17:08
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Phobeste posted:For positive suggestions, I went back and read through the K2 page again and... have no idea why I thought it was the one that had all the byproducts and whatnot. It makes bullets stop when they hit a surface, so I guess no more putting turrets behind walls, but outside of that I'm not sure where I got the idea that it had all the balance refactoring. I'm definitely used to the general modder's creed of "You only get <cool thing> if you also accept my many base game changes" at this point. Once I clean up the rest of the non-speedrun cheevos I'll probably fire up a new K2 game along with a ton of QoL mods. Edit: Also, thanks for all the suggestions! It's always good to know what mods stand up. Edit 2: Okay, I'm ready to play Factorio...  quote:- Don't use mods, make a megabase instead! Aside from just not being smart enough to do that sort of stuff (I haven't even tried circuits) my brain refuses to deliver the dopamine unless there's some sort of reward attached. I'll grind out a hundred hours to get an orbital cannon or a hat for Spidertron but unless there's a shiny bauble being dangled in front of me I just get bored and restart. This is purely a personal thing and not a shot at the game/any mod. Edit: Man I'm sort of watching an LP (from a while ago) to keep in step with my progress and why the hell am I not using modules everywhere. 
Mailer fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Oct 4, 2022 |
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Oct 4, 2022 04:40
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Mailer posted:I went back and read through the K2 page again and... have no idea why I thought it was the one that had all the byproducts and whatnot. It makes bullets stop when they hit a surface, so I guess no more putting turrets behind walls, but outside of that I'm not sure where I got the idea that it had all the balance refactoring. There are some recipes where you have to deal with byproducts - such as dirty water, and some liquid/gas recipes. However, you get a "cheap" building to burn off excess gas (probably best to use a pump on a circuit) so you don't have to deal with perfect ratios of Hydrogen/Oxygen/etc K2 Turrets/flamethrowers definitely still shoot over walls. However, rocks will block bullets. And yes you should use modules. Efficiency is amazing for remote mining bases, and combined with that K2 air recycler, I am producing net zero pollution! Which means the only time I'm dealing with biters is on expansion or when I decide to start laying down artillery fire. I even put a artillery wagon on my only train (so far) just for the excitement of shooting stuff at its remote destination. About to start on new resource patches - should I bring the raw back to my original base or smelt on site? Eventually I'll have to make a new base as there's no room for scaling up (spaghetti) but I'm definitely not at the point where I can do that yet. Not using perfect ratio blueprints.
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Oct 4, 2022 22:08
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PancakeTransmission posted:K2 Turrets/flamethrowers definitely still shoot over walls. However, rocks will block bullets. Only for a while! Bullets will destroy rocks (or at least they used to, haven't tested that in a while). PancakeTransmission posted:About to start on new resource patches - should I bring the raw back to my original base or smelt on site? Eventually I'll have to make a new base as there's no room for scaling up (spaghetti) but I'm definitely not at the point where I can do that yet. Not using perfect ratio blueprints. I've done it both ways, it's purely a design decision as it works whichever way you do it. Keep in mind that if you build a smelter next to a mine, eventually that smelter will slow down and stop getting ore as you mine the patch out, and then you have a whole lot more infrastructure to relocate than if you only had the miners and a loading station there. My personal tendency once I'm going to remote ore patches for any real volume is to bring the ore into a 'central smelter' area where ore trains drop off at one end, and plate trains pick up at the other. Of course I always tend to play with biters off so building large remote complexes to do specific tasks isn't as much of a hassle as when you need to defend against the natives.
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Oct 4, 2022 22:41
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The Locator posted:My personal tendency once I'm going to remote ore patches for any real volume is to bring the ore into a 'central smelter' area where ore trains drop off at one end, and plate trains pick up at the other. I like to do this as well. It can help to partition traffic on my rail network in a way, in that the ore fields are remote and the smelting arrays are between the mines and my crafting areas, so the ore traffic is mostly kept to the periphery of my network. Note that I'm weird and like to stick with steel furnaces cause the whole point is to pollute the planet.
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Oct 4, 2022 22:50
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PancakeTransmission posted:*** If anything, K2 weaponry is stronger across the board (perhaps justified in that you need bitter poop to make science packs). And, if you don't like the normal combo of artillery/turrets, there is a whole suite of even-better anti-bitter weaponry. IMHO, K2 is great if you like creating assembly lines, as the recipe patterns are a bit different. My only complaint is that there are a lot of levels of everything, which gets a bit tedious eventually (I eventually gave in and created a drone-based mall). It's probably less of a logistics challenge ("more copper") than was vanilla.
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Oct 5, 2022 00:47
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Arrath posted:Note that I'm weird and like to stick with steel furnaces cause the whole point is to pollute the planet. It probably depends on the patches you're using. Big, rich patches will feed a huge smelter array forever and by the end of my last game they were mostly being bot-fed wood from all the trees I'd clearcut to build solar arrays to be more environmentally friendly. The one thing I've determined I'm doing differently next game is having an abstraction layer between the inputs and the bus. Like some sort of giant balancer I can just plug lines into so when I transition to trains I don't have to deal with the underground belt spaghetti I made plugging stuff in originally. gaj70 posted:IMHO, K2 is great if you like creating assembly lines, as the recipe patterns are a bit different. My only complaint is that there are a lot of levels of everything, which gets a bit tedious eventually (I eventually gave in and created a drone-based mall). It's probably less of a logistics challenge ("more copper") than was vanilla. Is having a mall and letting robots do everything a weird thing? I pretty much ran my entire last game without knowing where anything was because the robots would handle it. I really, really like robots. My sole reason for wanting to play past rocket launch is for more bot speed. Looking forward to more production lines and toys. Hopefully it's pretty aggressive with culling old resources because The Quest For Green Circuits again wouldn't be as fun.
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Oct 5, 2022 02:26
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Mailer posted:Is having a mall and letting robots do everything a weird thing? I pretty much ran my entire last game without knowing where anything was because the robots would handle it. I really, really like robots. My sole reason for wanting to play past rocket launch is for more bot speed. no, that's one of the big reasons people rush to bots once they get a hang of the game
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Oct 5, 2022 02:41
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A bot-based mall is pretty normal, yeah. Some people enjoy figuring out how to squeeze a belt-based mall into as compact a space as possible, but you're really just doing that for its own sake because it's not very effective compared to just using bots. (Except for an early bootstrapping mall that's designed to get you to bots, I guess. That's pretty good to have a design for.)
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Oct 5, 2022 02:43
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Building a belt based mall really sucks in modded games where everything takes 3-5 ingredients. Just getting belts+inserters+intermediates down is enough to get you to bots and let them sort it out.
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Oct 5, 2022 03:16
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The huge hidden advantage to a bot-based mall that I didn't think of immediately is that it's just so much easier to scale than a belt-based mall. It's very hard to scale your initial belt mall up, because you would have to waste tons of space and/or resources from the start of the game to have room to scale it up. By transitioning to a bot based mall, you can just plonk some assemblers down and go. Then you start building train stations near it and it just works faster without having to figure out how to route things. You don't need to pre-calculate how much X or Y you want to build because you can just slap more assemblers anywhere, at worst you're just needing a bit more bot effort to carry resources a touch further than an optimal design. Starved for resources? No worries about sufficient belt space or how/where to inject additional supplies into the bus, it just automatically works. Belt design is way more fun than bot design, though.
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Oct 5, 2022 03:38
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uPen posted:Building a belt based mall really sucks in modded games where everything takes 3-5 ingredients. Just getting belts+inserters+intermediates down is enough to get you to bots and let them sort it out. Ah, true. Hell having a dozen new materials for basic recipes would make even the starter mall suck. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a nightmare bus scenario.
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Oct 5, 2022 03:40
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Robots are significantly better than belts in basically every way, the only reason to use belts over bots once you've started mass producing bots is for aesthetics and challenge. The extremely boring ideal factory form is straight lines of roboports, assemblers & logistics chests.
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Oct 5, 2022 05:13
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I would have assumed (until you unlock lightning speed bots with unlimited speed boosts) that in the normal game the throughput of bots wouldn't be good enough to handle things like mining/smelting/long chains of production/etc. Granted, I never tried beltless but they didn't seem fast enough to handle huge throughput situations. First K2 trip report: Spawned so close to a biter spawn (even with cranking up the starting area one notch) that eight coal drills set them off before I'd even finished the first, bizarrely long, research project. My gun as well as the supplied miniturret seemed to weirdly do nothing to them at random intervals like the "bullets can be blocked" logic was randomly turning on even at point blank range. Crafted a machinegun, had the same weird bullet behavior, abandoned game. I'll need to check if there's a console command to turn off wackyguns.
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Oct 5, 2022 06:31
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Mailer posted:I would have assumed (until you unlock lightning speed bots with unlimited speed boosts) that in the normal game the throughput of bots wouldn't be good enough to handle things like mining/smelting/long chains of production/etc. Granted, I never tried beltless but they didn't seem fast enough to handle huge throughput situations. Yeah it's pretty much this. Belts to produce large quantities of intermediates, which are then shipped by bots to mall production of all the end products is a generally good way to handle the midgame. Once you've leveled up bots enough that you can just go full bots and ignore belts entirely you're well into the endgame/megabase stage.
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Oct 5, 2022 06:36
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Belts are the heart and soul of Factorio and I will stop using them over my dead body, even in heavily modded games. 
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Oct 5, 2022 06:52
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Mailer posted:I would have assumed (until you unlock lightning speed bots with unlimited speed boosts) that in the normal game the throughput of bots wouldn't be good enough to handle things like mining/smelting/long chains of production/etc. Granted, I never tried beltless but they didn't seem fast enough to handle huge throughput situations. Unless it's changed, the K2 mod has a zillion settings and one of them was the alternate bullet/aiming behavior if I remember correctly.
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Oct 5, 2022 06:52
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Mailer posted:I would have assumed (until you unlock lightning speed bots with unlimited speed boosts) that in the normal game the throughput of bots wouldn't be good enough to handle things like mining/smelting/long chains of production/etc. Granted, I never tried beltless but they didn't seem fast enough to handle huge throughput situations. Over short distances, the limitations of low-tech bots don't matter that much because bot networks are way more space-efficient than belts are. Even if each individual bot is slow, it's really easy to just add more bots and brute-force it. As the bots tech up, you can expand their range and use them for longer-distance hauling. I don't use logistic bots much myself, though. They pretty much blow away the logistics challenge, so I feel like using them is admitting defeat.
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Oct 5, 2022 07:18
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I will never not be an entitled rear end who demands my bots manage all my construction and inventory. They will bring me those 50 cogs from a box ten feet away and remove the lint from my pockets. I will demand they fly for miles on flagging batteries to bring me a single conveyor track. Someday this will be used as training propaganda by the robot uprising.
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Oct 5, 2022 07:25
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Vizuyos posted:Over short distances, the limitations of low-tech bots don't matter that much because bot networks are way more space-efficient than belts are. Even if each individual bot is slow, it's really easy to just add more bots and brute-force it. As the bots tech up, you can expand their range and use them for longer-distance hauling. Yeah it's this. Bots seem like they have low throughput and can't handle bulk production because when people unlock them they typically just stick a small number in roboports and have them gather supplies spread all over a sprawling belt base. When you start building bot-based systems and flood the system with loads of bots they quickly surpass anything belts can do, and absolutely destroy any production line creativity or design.
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Oct 5, 2022 07:41
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Vizuyos posted:Over short distances, the limitations of low-tech bots don't matter that much because bot networks are way more space-efficient than belts are. Even if each individual bot is slow, it's really easy to just add more bots and brute-force it. As the bots tech up, you can expand their range and use them for longer-distance hauling. They do actually matter because bots are very expensive compared to belts. A red belt tile moves 30 items/second by one tile. That's 30 item-tiles per second. An unupgraded logistics bot moves one item three tiles per second (so, 3 item-tiles per second), plus spends a lot of time dead-legging, plus some amount of time recharging. And costs 25 iron instead of 11.5, plus a similar amount of copper and petroleum products. Plus the roboports and energy needed to charge them! Being able to halve or even quarter the distance traveled (which is questionable, since it's not like you're making the assemblers or beacons any smaller) doesn't offset the increased capital you're spending on just moving stuff around (which is resources you're not spending on more assemblers and furnaces and beacons and modules).
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Oct 5, 2022 07:46
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Bots do tend to save you money on beacons iirc, but it’s not the bots’ fault beacons are boring, bad and the one black spot on factorio’s design
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Oct 5, 2022 08:00
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once you have upgraded bots and a well designed network you can literally move several thousand items per second. If you prefer belts for style that's fine, but past early bots there is no contest in throughput, as long as you don't design your base really badly. In my lategame 5ksmp K2 save bots move items so fast that it would literally require hundreds of belt lanes to compete with it. And yeah, beacon setups become massively more efficient with bot builds vs belts.
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Oct 5, 2022 09:07
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| # ? May 19, 2024 17:12 |
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nrook posted:Bots do tend to save you money on beacons iirc, but it’s not the bots’ fault beacons are boring, bad and the one black spot on factorio’s design The way Space Exploration handles beacons is one of the low-key nicest things. Beacons have a lower individual cost and can hold much more modules, but an assembler can only be boosted by a single beacon. Building assembly blocks around each beacon instead of cramming a dozen beacons around an assembler is much nicer, especially with belts.
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Oct 5, 2022 09:26
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