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Glazius posted:Are walls taller than turrets, or can turrets shoot over walls? Turrets (and you) can fire over just about anything. Trees are really they only thing in the game that can block your aim so it's often a good idea to prune them back a bit so your defenses have a clear line of fire.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:18
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Early Game: Establish basic productions to automate everything. Later game: Automate everything. Later on I tend to build double thick walls so I don't have to worry about accidentally putting things too close to them. And to make them a bit sturdier against the inevitable attacks. I also grossly overbuild, but that's part of the fun of Factorio!
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Sep 28, 2017 10:07
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Meanwhile I keep quitting games by the time I get to blue science because of the inevitable 'ok, my red and green science is way over here and my burgeoning advanced chip production is way on the opposite side of my spaghetti works because that's where the oil is. It's time to overhaul the whole thing ugghhhhhh.' Lets see if I do that again this time!
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Sep 28, 2017 20:39
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EponymousMrYar posted:Meanwhile I keep quitting games by the time I get to blue science because of the inevitable 'ok, my red and green science is way over here and my burgeoning advanced chip production is way on the opposite side of my spaghetti works because that's where the oil is. It's time to overhaul the whole thing ugghhhhhh.' Embrace the spaghetti-works. Just have a stupid long belt take blue science all the way across the factory. While before I'd say "with blue science you can eventually get logistics bots to fly the blue science over", that takes Hi-Tech (Orange) and maybe Production (Purple) science to do now. Also, make sure your science machines have enough room for like...8 kinds of science. 2 belts down the middle, 2 belts circling round the outside. In Factorio, the best kind of success is excess.
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Sep 29, 2017 03:13
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The other problem, one that I just realized now, is that because blue science is at the end of my main belt it tends to run out of iron. When your sole iron deposit is tapped out that's not something you can fix by adding more 
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Sep 29, 2017 05:39
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Of course you can -- just has to be done differently. Obviously the first question is, why only one iron deposit? Why haven't you completely eradicated all resistance from an area the size of a mid-sized nation for your personal use? Obviously if you haven't got enough raw materials of all kinds stored to last your factory if left running from now until the heat death of the physical universe ten thousand times over, you are thinking way too small. /sarcasm. Oh, and in actual news here, I have more done but it may or may not get put up before my brother's wedding on Saturday. Distractions.
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Sep 29, 2017 06:01
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EponymousMrYar posted:The other problem, one that I just realized now, is that because blue science is at the end of my main belt it tends to run out of iron. Sure it is. You justy go find another source of iron and ship it to your base.
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Oct 1, 2017 02:59
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 Another little thing I do here. This chest has random stuff in it I don't need at the moment and don't have a better place for. Burner mining drills, the pistol and light armor I'll never use again -- generally archaic stuff. I also threw the nearly 300 red science vials that didn't get used from the research area in there -- I'll grab them up again when needed. While more wall is made I took the first dive into expanding the factory proper thanks to new assemblers. Assembling machine 2s use two-thirds more energy than the first variant, craft 50% faster(now 75% as fast as the player), and most importantly they can make things requiring up to four ingredients instead of just two. A lot of things fall into that category. The majority of items, in fact. First item on the agenda is to get an area set up to build the key intermediate items, circuits and gear wheels. Electronic Circuits require 2.5 total metal plates to build, 2.0 for Iron Gear Wheels. That means by building them en masse and putting them on the bus, there will be a 60% and 50% space bonus respectively compared to moving all that iron and copper downstream. We also won't need a new production line for them every place we want them to be used for something. Back down south where the research area was, I've decided to turn the bus towards itself towards the west and get this going.  These are quite simple, divert some iron and send it back on in a different form.  This is probably one of the more well-known Factorio ratios: 3 copper cable to 2 electronic circuits. The fast and long-handed inserters are finding more and more use. The main goal with these is to make them expandable; there's room the south, and to the west if we want to bring another copper belt over there to complete the other 'half' for the circuits. Then it was time to finish the wall project. I actually come up short by four freaking poles while I was out there, but there's plenty of trees and I had the copper on me, forestalling a fit of profanity.  Ended up being even bigger than I intended, mostly to go around forests in the west and south. A total of 11 radar stations for those of you scoring at home. Just that one little blind spot in the west. To the northwest, by the lake, there are just three small bases that I will probably want to take out and move the wall up to the water before they grow too large. No imminent threats though.  Note that zoomed out as far as we can see so far -- knowledge expanding rapidly with all those radars -- you can't even see all of the wall. Parts of it just disappear due to the zoom level. That coal field in the southwest just below the lake is our big winner so far for largest resource field, coming in at 1.5 million units. There's another million coal in the east. Some of the larger biter bases, like the one in the northeast, would be rather suicidal to take on at this point. Our first major oil cluster appears to be coming into focus just north of due east. For the moment though the most important thing is the establishment of a clear border. If they get too close, I'll know about it -- even if it's not near a turret, an attack on the wall will result in a warning and give me a bit of time to react. That'll allow me to focus all my efforts on getting more stuff done in the factory again. A quick power check shows us peaking at a little over 5 MW, nearing three-quarters of capacity with a number of inactive drills. A bit too close for comfort, so I'll expand that again from four boilers to six. Ok, back to expanding the stuff we are building. You may want to consult a physician before the next shot.  Oh my. This is me splitting materials off the larger bus now. Badly. I know it can be done better than this ... I know I've done it better than this myself! Main thing that matters though is undergrounds to keep the material moving, don't mix stuff together, etc. That was accomplished. Aesthetics weren't. I thought about redoing it, but then figured what the heck: it works, this isn't a sanitary everything-perfect run-through by any stretch.  That leads to this, heading back up north along the west side of one of the copper field towards our basics line. That's because this is just more basics really. All three of the inserters I expect to need a lot of -- I could add filter inserters in here if I want, but I rarely use them, and the long-handed ones are just below this shot. Assembling machines 1 and 2 ... here's the 'robots building robots' moment -- and electric mining drills. And at the top, splitters with the very bad-practice idea of just running down transport belts from the north. Ladies and gentlemen, spaghetti is served. I'll try to keep things like this under control. I do now have seven more important items being built here(one stack of 50 each limited right now). Then I check on the coal for our power plant, resupply -- all that's fine, but also I forgot to limit the steel chest. Currently at 693 plates. That just might be enough I think to keep me in steel axes and armor. Won't need any more of that for a while. That's up to pretty much everything I use regularly. But look at the iron line. Err, I mean, that empty transport belt with a bit of iron trickling down it occasionally. Yeah that'll need a bit of attention. Drills and both types of assembling machines suck up 9-10 plates each unit, and a healthy portion of gear wheels which dry up more. More product-intensive stuff, so this isn't a surprise. But before I go fix that, we've hit the three-hour mark here.  Holding pretty steady at about 7 MW now, two-thirds of capacity. As you can see by the breakdown below, it was quite a bit lower; the ramp-up in radar drain has been the biggest factor.  That's ... a lot of stone. Item Count: 32(25% down from 40) Total Production: 60.8k(-6% from 64.9k) That's definitely not the previous or normal trend; spent a lot of time on the wall which limited expansion. I daresay we won't be having this repeated though. Resources ** Iron: 471k ** Copper: 147k ** Stone: 401k ** Coal: 300k power, 370k factory Still looking fine on all of these.
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Oct 2, 2017 02:10
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As long as factories can't place factories, we're probably alright. What would a machine to do that even look like?
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Oct 2, 2017 21:55
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I don't suppose you're planning to run a too long conveyor belt loop of ammo around the inside of the wall for turrets to grab from?
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Oct 2, 2017 23:32
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Glazius posted:As long as factories can't place factories, we're probably alright. What would a machine to do that even look like? What is a man? A miserable pile of pollutants.
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Oct 2, 2017 23:35
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Poli posted:I don't suppose you're planning to run a too long conveyor belt loop of ammo around the inside of the wall for turrets to grab from? No but ... I actually did that the first time I played. But yeah, completely unnecessary given that they won't need nearly enough ammunition for that to be required. Pool Is Closed posted:What is a man? A valid argument.
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Oct 3, 2017 01:17
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Poil posted:I don't suppose you're planning to run a too long conveyor belt loop of ammo around the inside of the wall for turrets to grab from? it's a legitimate strategy! Especially since logistics bots got a rework last time I played so requesters are a lot further in.
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Oct 3, 2017 02:43
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What a novel idea, bussing Green Circuits. That would probably save a lot of organization space in my current factory...Veloxyll posted:it's a legitimate strategy! Especially since logistics bots got a rework last time I played so requesters are a lot further in. I finally hit logistics with my factory at this point and this is annoying as all get out.
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Oct 3, 2017 03:28
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Last couple updates have been pretty short, so I'll throw in another one today: Ok so on to the iron issue. 18 furnaces currently rolling ... let's try doubling that, see where it gets us. That of course meant a lot more drills. And then of course the coal started running low naturally, so a couple more over there -- we've been running with only two of them. A couple more boilers would definitely be needed to ensure we could handle all of this. Ah, the joys of expansion ... boosting one thing means boosting a whole bunch of others or the house of cards collapses. Factorio imprints itself on your brain sometimes. I wanted to go set up green research now just a bit to the west, but it was time for sleep at this point. And then the next day at work I was pondering things and realized that I really needed to make more room in there for new products we'd acquire. Then I noticed that we're soon going to get another vial type(new to 0.15) unlocked which is going to require steel, and I need to find a better place to smelt that anyway, and boy would it have been really stupid to put up the green research line only to just have to tear it down and add the new one soon, and boy this sentence has been really long and my brain just wanted to shut down at this point. The 'creative, hypnotic terror' of Factorio strikes again. Here's a bunch of badly drawn crap on a minimap showing what the factory looks like now, where everything is, and what I want to do with it.  A -- Current Iron Ore Field B -- Copper Ore Field C -- Factory Coal Field D -- Stone Field E -- Power Plant Coal Field Basics -- Two lines, one vertical and one horizontal, where the commonly used stuff is built. The other labels should be self-explanatory I think. New Steel is where I want to move steel production to. Idea here is to use the iron in that smaller field to the east for it. That'll leave the big field for our main flow of iron, and there's another 400k iron field to the west of this image once we need more. I really don't know if this smaller, sub-200k one will give us enough supply once we start ramping up. Answer is probably plenty at first, eventually not enough, like it is freaking everything. The coal would get drawn from that field in the forest to the west. Thing is, at this point I basically need to clear-cut most of that area anyway. I was tempted to make a video of me doing that. Just that. However long it took(a while would be the answer). But that wouldn't be particularly exciting. We've got the most space out west, and need to use it. Establishing mastery over the territory inside the walls, both in terms of cutting the forests and frankly just plain mining out all the resource fields so we can build stuff there to, is going to be more and more a theme I think. I'm also at the point where I don't really care as much about overbuilding now that we have a semi-secure perimeter. Anyway, setting up a steel column in this new area is good use of the space there I think, and it will allow adding that to the bus because we're going to need it. First a couple of research things to wrap up. I actually forgot to do one in the red-only category: Fluid Handling. I forget that one a lot because it makes me scratch my head. 100 red vials, and it gives you liquid storage tanks which you have absolutely no purpose for. The only thing I could put in them right now are water and steam. If I wanted a steam buffer for the power plant, and why I would given that the dynamics of that don't really justify it, I have no idea. But I could do that. First time you really want to use them is when you get to acquiring oil. That's coming up -- but it's in the 'green' zone. So you basically get to storing it before you have the ability to actually acquire any. Backwards. I've got 280-some red vial stored from the earlier research, so it's a small matter to slap down a few labs anywhere connected to the grid and throw those in there. The more pressing concern, alluded to above, is Military 2. This allows for grenades, which I rarely use -- most people seem to like them for blowing up trees. Others use their shotgun on them. A few are OCD enough like me to actually cut the darn things down and use the wood. Or if we can't use it, store it. It also brings us the Black(military) science vial. Getting this is quite inexpensive, just 20 red and 20 green vials. So all I really need to do here to avoid setting up any kind of chain is craft the green ones. Piece of cake, and it avoids setting up green research, then tearing it down and/or adjusting stuff so we can have black as well. Tearing down the current steel area took a bit of doing. Then I set up the drills on the smaller iron field to south, which brings up a point of philosophy  This is the way I see things done in most factorio videos. Drills side-by-side, as many packed in as possible for maximum production. Room only for belts to carry it away, everything else covered by a drill. The field here has 27 mining drills using this method.  This is what I do. It's not necessarily better, just fits my style more. While the production will be lower(17 drills only, 10 less), it will last a lot longer because they don't 'overlap'. I'm still mining the whole field.  This will mine anything within the greenish square. 5x5 area, and the drill is only 3x3. The first method has multiple drills extracting from a lot of the same territory. They'll have to be removed and placed again somewhere else a lot more often as they'll run out of product. Second way -- more of a slow-and-steady tortoise kind of deal. More sustainable, less initial surge of production. IMO, at least so far, this falls into a personal 'not wrong just different' kind of choice. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with what we are going to get at least initially. It's actually way more than what I plan on doing at first: 8 steel, 8 iron, nearly 1 steel plate every two seconds. I may well be wrong but I think this is more than enough for the time being. Then I went and murdered dozens, probably hundreds of innocent trees minding their own business. As I was carrying a bunch of extra crap as it is from taking down the old steel line, I soon ran out of inventory space. Time for the time-honored Factorio tradition of throwing a chest on the ground and dumping half my stash in it. That's perfectly fine if you know where it is and come back and get the stuff later. The pain of having done that and then having no clue where you put thousands of useful items is not a joyful experience though. Shortly after getting a clear path to the coal field and the field itself taken down, we got another notice:  One of a number of achievements relating to success in mass production. This one is not all that impressive, but well over 5 plates/second. Research had also finished recently. Steel was soon up and operational, and -- making sure to get my chest picked up and the stuff in it put away -- it was time to move on. While I'm not a big fan of the grenades, I'd be a fool not to get set up with the new-and-improved Piercing Rounds we now have as a result of Military 2. They do 60% more damage than the standard ones, while also requiring significantly more material including a bit of steel.  Before moving on, I just wanted to show this real quick. On the quickbar here, notice the blue background on the boxes on the left. These are 'filters', but probably better described as a 'lock' or something. What that basically does is keep that item in place; nothing else will get put there even if you mis-click on it with something different. It's a good way to keep the stuff you want where you want it, as mis-clicking is so very easy to do. I should use this more than I do. You can still accidentally remove stuff from the slot, but you'll get an error message if you try to put something else in.  Another kewl little badge for us, making a lot of electronics.  Further to the west, the bus makes it's turn northwards and will run along the west coast of the lake. There's a gap as you can see between steel and the rest. To see why, look at where the steel line splits and goes to the left. It has to go under the other products, and the underground belts can only go under a distance of 4. Having this gap in between allows that to happen, otherwhise you'd have to use a lot more undergrounds on the other lines and just have the steel run straight across on the surface. A 4th hour is in the books. The last 10+ minutes have been spent cutting a swath through the forest to move the bus northwards, on it's way to where I intend to put our new research section.  As you can see on the right, our usage has dipped somewhat. We've been well within comfortable limits the whole time though. It becomes more difficult to gauge this as the factory expands, because you can multiply what you are using several times over once you set up a new resource-intensive area. All of sudden multiple supply lines that were idle now start operating again and ... brownouts are easy to come by if you aren't careful. It's probably time to do a little math. ** 16 Steam Engines @ 900 KW each produce 14.4 MW at maximum capacity. ** 12 Radar Stations @ 300 KW each = 3.6 MW. ** 58 Electric Mining Drills @ 90 KW each = 5.22 MW. ** 15 Assembling Machines 2 @ 150 KW each = 2.25 MW. ** 191 Inserters @ 13 KW each = 2.483 MW. ** 11 Assembling Machines 1 @ 90 KW each = 990 KW. ** 34 Long-handed Inserters @ 19 KW each = 646 KW. ** 17 Lamps @ 5 KW each = 85 KW. ** 7 Fast Inserters @ 46 KW each = 322 KW. Total Maximum Usage = 15.596 MW. 108.3% of capacity. Oops. Now, we haven't gotten above 10, but it's not at all out of the question that we might have everything or almost everything on at some point. And of course we are still going to build more stuff. No question we need more. Another 8 steam engines gets us to 24, and 21.6 MW. That's more like it. It also seems to me that we are needing a coal drill to keep 3-4 steam engines going at max. capacity, I've been eyeballing that the last couple hours here. We have 4 for 16 engines, and I want to keep that ratio at a minimum; going up to 6 drills keeps us there and should maintain supply.  Three discernible spikes in iron this hour; first is when we put up the second basics line and a bunch got sucked down for the assembling machines, drills, etc. Second one is when we put down the steel production area, and the third when I raided that second basics line for more supplies. Made almost as much iron as we made everything combined in the previous hour. Item Count: 35(+3 from 32) Total Production: 108k(+78% from 60.8k) A little of this will go away as our wall-section storage capacity is now at the desired capacity of two thousand sections. I could basically rebuild our entire wall right now if I chose to, so there's no need for more. That should be dwarfed by what we are going to add on though. Resources ** Iron: 448k(used 23k) for the factory field. The steel one is much smaller at 141k. We're now down to only another 20 hours on the big one though, and we'll need more supply up and running a while before it's completely gone. All of a sudden that doesn't look so safe anymore. ** Copper: 142k(5k used). A little more now but still over 28 hours worth. ** Stone: 388k(13k used). This should dry up to almost nothing for the time being. ** Coal: 293k power(7k used), 367k factory(3k used), 602k Steel. The factory field doesn't need to power the stone brick furnaces anymore, or the temporary steel line that isn't there anymore, so it's not seeing much activity relatively speaking. Almost 42 hours worth on the power end, while the bigger steel-supporting operation has only eight furnaces to support -- that's probably not much over a thousand an hour I would think. Definitely got our eyes mostly on the iron, esp. with plenty of close-by options for the other three. We'll want to move drilling out to that 400k-strong field to the west before this one starts to dry up.
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Oct 3, 2017 03:41
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I think I'm learning more about how to play Factorio from this Let's Play than I have from the "introductory" videos I've been watching on YouTube. Then again, I massively prefer SSLPs, so maybe it's just how my brain works. Thotimx posted:
I also do this, but in my case it's because of my visual OCD. ("Everything has to be the same shade!") Nice to know that this is just a preference thing. Thotimx posted:
To be quite honest, whenever I had to do this kind of math, I just reached for the nearest APL interpreter (dabbling in obscure programming languages is a hobby of mine) because it's very good at streamlining this kind of workload and doing it quickly. After playing Factorio for a while, I just lose the ability to not be lazy.
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Oct 3, 2017 04:38
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I'd say go spread miners. Possibly squish them together a little more to prevent one square side belts.
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Oct 3, 2017 07:25
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The ore patch has the same amount of ore in it regardless of how you space out the miners. There's some merit to spacing out the miners on your first patch, since that means you need fewer miners (and hence a smaller resource investment) to cover the whole thing and then you can forget about it. Once your factory is big enough that you're expanding to extra ore fields, though, getting twice as many miners on a field basically means you need to expand to half as many fields (or at least, you get to put it off until later). The big upside to dense miners, though, is that they're way less fiddly to place.
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Oct 3, 2017 07:54
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EponymousMrYar posted:What a novel idea, bussing Green Circuits. That would probably save a lot of organization space in my current factory... I usually have just built lines as I needed for them. Horribly inefficient, perhaps, but it means I just have to worry about whether I have enough Iron/Copper etc usually. (May have also had coal on the bus to make steel as needed at some stage too) I never said it was a GOOD change/. Just that it is a thing. I was going for Logistics network embargo so it didn't affect me. Now, if/when I go for lazy bastard (which is mostly just hard on setting up), missing logistics chests may be a little more problematic. MayOrMayNotBeACat posted:I think I'm learning more about how to play Factorio from this Let's Play than I have from the "introductory" videos I've been watching on YouTube. In text it's a bit easier to go into more depth/re-read bits you didn't get in text. #AlwaysSpreadMiners.
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Oct 3, 2017 09:52
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A person I learned to play the game from used a somewhat hybrid approach to miners, I guess you could say. They didn't jam them all together but they didn't spread them far apart to make sure everything was perfectly covered, either. Each drill was placed one tile apart in each direction to form a perfect square grid with some overlap since each miner can reach one tile out in addition to whatever is directly underneath. I find it's a fairly good compromise and allows you to mine resources at a good rate without having to figure out and hand place each one. Placing each drill next to each other just seems wasteful and I have no idea how you'd provide power to that. Especially in the early game when poles only provide enough coverage for drills immediately adjacent to them.
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Oct 3, 2017 13:18
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Psychotic Weasel posted:A person I learned to play the game from used a somewhat hybrid approach to miners, I guess you could say. They didn't jam them all together but they didn't spread them far apart to make sure everything was perfectly covered, either. Each drill was placed one tile apart in each direction to form a perfect square grid with some overlap since each miner can reach one tile out in addition to whatever is directly underneath. I find it's a fairly good compromise and allows you to mine resources at a good rate without having to figure out and hand place each one. Usually you don't place drills right next to each other, you leave a one-row gap in front (for the belt) and behind (for power poles), while having them butt up against each other on the sides. Having them butt up against each other makes it really easy to place down a bunch - just click and drag. Placing extra drills is only wasteful if you're not using them (and even then, you're only "wasting" the relatively tiny amount of resources it takes to make a drill, and a little bit of idle power drain) - if you're using X drills worth of iron ore per second, it's actually less wasteful to have them all on one patch than it is to go out and find other patches for the extra drills.
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Oct 3, 2017 13:25
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EponymousMrYar posted:What a novel idea, bussing Green Circuits. That would probably save a lot of organization space in my current factory... Veloxyll posted:I usually have just built lines as I needed for them. Horribly inefficient, perhaps, but it means I just have to worry about whether I have enough Iron/Copper etc usually. (May have also had coal on the bus to make steel as needed at some stage too) There are many ways to play. Almost as many as there are players. I like efficiency and having a single location to go to if I need to expand production or whatever. Others will have different priorities.
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Oct 3, 2017 17:51
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Veloxyll posted:I usually have just built lines as I needed for them. Horribly inefficient, perhaps, but it means I just have to worry about whether I have enough Iron/Copper etc usually. (May have also had coal on the bus to make steel as needed at some stage too) I smelt steel along with iron and put it alongside my bus (two tiles away so it doesn't get in the way of splitting off from the bus) since enough things need it to warrant that. I now realize that Green circuits are kind of the same although it's not worth completely redesigning my factory again for it. Looking over it my real issue is messing up advanced circuits. Right number of inputs, wrong number of output factories
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Oct 3, 2017 22:23
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Yeah, there's something about getting the gears of industry meshing that looks oddly compelling. How many tiers of science flask have you got to work through, anyway?
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Oct 5, 2017 04:01
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Glazius posted:Yeah, there's something about getting the gears of industry meshing that looks oddly compelling. How many tiers of science flask have you got to work through, anyway?
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Oct 5, 2017 04:18
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Fearless_Decoy posted:There are 6, plus a bonus 7th for end game stuff Red, Green, Blue, Military (Black), Production (Purple), Hi-Tech (Orange) and White (Space). I have the problem of procrastinating on my Lazy Bastard run. And wondering if I spent one too many crafts on refineries. (have refineries, 111 crafts used). Need to build plastics line, then batteries. And sciences. o god so much to make
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Oct 5, 2017 06:49
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Veloxyll posted:And wondering if I spent one too many crafts on refineries. (have refineries, 111 crafts used). Need to build plastics line, then batteries. And sciences. o god so much to make
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Oct 5, 2017 11:27
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MayOrMayNotBeACat posted:I think I'm learning more about how to play Factorio from this Let's Play than I have from the "introductory" videos I've been watching on YouTube. Excellent! I'd just echo what others have said about this medium being better to explain details of things, etc. quote:whenever I had to do this kind of math, I just reached for the nearest APL interpreter (dabbling in obscure programming languages is a hobby of mine) because it's very good at streamlining this kind of workload and doing it quickly. After playing Factorio for a while, I just lose the ability to not be lazy. I have some programming ability but I just enjoy numbers in general. Quantifying progress is just how I roll, esp. in games like this with lots of them. PsychoticWeasel posted:They didn't jam them all together but they didn't spread them far apart to make sure everything was perfectly covered, either. Each drill was placed one tile apart in each direction to form a perfect square grid with some overlap since each miner can reach one tile out in addition to whatever is directly underneath. That's how I did it at first.
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Oct 6, 2017 02:16
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 Ahh, look at all that red. And we're not done scanning yet at some locations. Everything we've built so far is this small little thing in the middle. In the south-southwest area, by the big coal field south of the lake, there's a growing base of the bastards who think this planet belongs to them or something, and a little too close to our walls for comfort. We need to deal with that eventually, but I'd rather have some better toys first.  Here's something to reduce the amount of triggering in certain quarters. Behold the magnificient Underground Pipe of yore and legend. Much like the underground belt, only for liquids, this magnificent creation transports fluids underground, so that I may walk in between here without interrupting the operation of the steam power plant. Ain't technology grand?!? I soon discovered that I really needed, or at least wanted, more room for the new research area than was available at the spot intended, so I had to go further. This was very transport-belt intensive, and I had to wait for more to be made. Definitely going to up the storage on those from 400 to about a thousand. Of course there is nearly always something else that can be usefully done. In this case, delivering some of our spanking new piercing rounds to the turrets guarding the walls. Took nearly a Factorio day, almost 10 minutes by our reckoning, to do the circuit. When the biters decide to test the boundaries I've imposed upon them though, I'll probably be glad to have this.  I came back to discover this. Definitely got a copper issue. It'll eventually catch back up as it's just going for filling the circuit line on the bus and making the ammunition right now, but we're going to need more soon anyway. Not a surprise here as I've still got the same six furnaces I started with. Decided to do a bit more than double it, going to 14. Almost half the hour was already burnt. I was finally ready to get going on our new research line ... after I did the math, of course. Completed Research Projects: 12 Available: 17 Locked: 83 For those of you scoring at home, we're about a ninth of the way(10.7%) through those that we know about. Just nicely getting started, but we'll sink our teeth into things a bit more with this coming endeavor. A lot of the currently available projects cost 100 vials each(100 of multiple kinds, often 100 red and 100 green). The most expensive one is at 250. I think we'll want enough space here to start at 10 Labs, and ramp up to 20-25 eventually. Typical processing time is a bit higher now as well, at 30 seconds. To start with then, we want to be able to produce a vial of each type every 3 seconds(30 seconds divided by 10 Labs) or faster. ** Red is still going to be pretty basic. We'll need three assemblers there; two would almost be enough. Everything required is already on the bus. ** Three assemblers for green as well; eight seconds each for an assembling machine 2 to produce one. 1 Transport Belt and 1 Inserter are required for those; a single assembler of each will hilariously over-supply them. ** Black is a bit different. Our sparkling new assembling machine 2s will take almost 7 seconds each on these, so we'll build three of them. They need piercing magazines(no problem), gun turrets(a crapload of raw material for those, but we've got it all incoming), and grenades. Which require coal. So now we need a coal source. There may come a time when we need to put that on the bus as well, but we're plenty close to the main factory field to just split off a line from that and send it up here. Grenades and turrets will take almost 11 seconds each to build, so we're going to need a larger amount there to get enough going. At least 5 assemblers each to start with. It's definitely best to figure all this out at the start; it gives you a ballpark of much room you need to plan for. The addition of the military vials, though many projects don't require them, is definitely going to mean a LOT more raw material drain when we start those up. That's a big change to deal with compared to 0.14. It could be done faster by someone with more skill, of course, but it took about half an hour to get it set up. There's a bit of spaghetti, but not much. Biggest concern is getting enough product for any military-intensive stuff.  Too far out to see much, the bird's-eye view here.  A close-up of part of it. A lot going on here but this is red, green, and part of the black production. The latter is where I expect problems; these were running full steam as I anticipated they would. ** Landfill -- Our first automated 'green' project, but not all that exciting for our purposes. It allows you to use a lot of stone to fill in water and turn it into usable land. 50 green, 50 red vials. ** Gun Turret Damage -- Same price, and a 10% upgrade in the effectiveness of our turrets. Sure, I'll take that.  The peak right now has been a little over 11 MW, well within our capabilites. You can see a nice spike here in the energy usage of the assembling machine 2s with the new research ramping up. ** 24 Steam Engines = 21.6 MW max capacity ** 12 Radar Stations = 3.6 MW ** 65 Electric Mining Drills = 5.85 MW ** 36 Assembling Machine 2s = 5.4 MW ** 10 Labs = 900 KW ** 273 Inserters = 3.55 MW ** 13 Assembling Machine 1s = 1.17 MW ** 65 Long handed Inserters = 1.24 MW ** 17 Lamps = 85 KW ** 7 Fast Inserters = 322 KW Total Maximum Usage = 22.12 MW, 102.4% of capacity. Back to a situation where we almost certainly have enough, but still going to expand here to stay ahead of things. Another eight steam engines.  Item Count: 34(staying pretty stable there) Total Production: 105k(-3% from 108k) Reached a bit of a new plateau here. I'd expect another jump in the next hour with a steady dose of research activity. Resources ** Iron: 428k primary(20k used), 132k steel(9k used). 21 and 15 hours remaining here. I'm a little surprised we're going through that much on the steel one, though perhaps I shouldn't be. ** Copper: 131k(11k used). 12 hours left here now. This relatively smallish field doesn't have all that long left. ** Stone: 388k(no change). As expected. The only thing it's used for now are furnaces. ** Coal: 363k(4k used) factory, 286k(7k used) power, 601k steel(1k used). Over 40 hours even on the power plant's source.
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Oct 6, 2017 02:23
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Me, every time near the end of my latest attempts:: Welp, time to expand the main bus again. Anything gonna get in my way?: ... gently caress large biter nests, and gently caress the fact that biters can expand them. I can not wait to see how you handle them. Large biter nests were always either too much of a slog or just plain too much for me to handle in a timely and profitable manner. But then again, my natural Factorio pace could be compared to that of a snail. My play style in Factorio is... flawed to say the least.
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Oct 6, 2017 03:35
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Is water finite? Will that lake eventually go dry?
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Oct 6, 2017 08:42
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nah, water's infinite. You can find the tiniest pond and it'll forever provide water no matter how many pumps you have.
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Oct 6, 2017 10:02
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MayOrMayNotBeACat posted:gently caress large biter nests, and gently caress the fact that biters can expand them. Oh, you can plan on a slog pretty much for parts of it. Especially since some things have changed; one that I've already noticed is that you don't heal in combat, but only when the fighting has stopped for a while. That makes things harder all by itself. I'm sure there will be times when I do more fighting(and/or dying) than building. But yeah, all that is coming, slowly but surely. It's inevitable.
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Oct 7, 2017 00:29
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Well, it'll be interesting to see the steps you take to expand.
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Oct 7, 2017 01:13
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** Grenade Damage is our next research, and first one to use the black military vials. 50 each of all three here, 20% damage upgrade to all grenades.  We've got a developing situation here with the spread of pollution in the northwest -- and it's nearing the edge of our radar detection in the southwest also. It's time for a little more fighting. Research will continue in the meantime of course. ** Advanced Material Processing(75 red, 75 green). This one is more significant, allowing for steel furnances which craft twice as fast as our stone ones, with the same fuel requirement. Effectively we'll get double the bang for our buck coal-wise. The biters in the northwest were a piece of cake. Only one spawner each for three different bases, a worm with a couple of them but not even as difficult as the one we took out initially that had two of each. Extending our wall to the lake will now bring a nice 700k+ iron ore field within our grasp. ** Circuit Network(100 red, 100 green). Now it's time to really complicate the heck out of things with combinators and circuit networks. I'll get to more of this when I'm done with our current wall expansion. ** Gates(100 red, 100 green). Pretty much what they sound like, they make going in and out of our factory easier by lowering when we approach them. ** Engine(same cost). Pumps and Engine Units can now be built. We don't have any practical use for either ... yet. ** Toolbelt(same). This basically doubles the size of the quickbar, a welcome addition since there is more I'd like to put down there by this point.  It takes longer to take down walls then it does to put them up. By using the lake as a boundary again though, we are actually going to save wall sections here compared to what we had before. Three new radars go up, including one on this peninsula I'm currently on. That gives us real-time coverage of what's going on across the lake, which is a nice thing as there is definitely some activity here. While I was doing all of this, we had our first attack on the wall in the southwest. A minor one, but there are three bases I want to take out down that way and two of them are larger than what we've dealt with so far. After some restocking, most importantly on ammunition, it's time to face them.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_NBZ0n6K_Q Ended up not being as difficult as I thought it might be. This is the second group, having already dealt with one during the night. Looked like an awful lot of biters for one spawner on the first part there -- I was actually close enough to the larger base that their initial rush had already been triggered. That can be a problem with dealing with multiple bases close together. Six spawners makes that the largest I've dealt with by far, but there was only one small worm. The more spawners there are, the more you are going to get periodically interrupted. These are still small enough though that all it really means is burning through more ammo in between destroying them. Eventually there's a tipping point though; enough of them and there's no time to kill the spawners; the biters just keep coming and coming as fast or faster than you can shoot them. That's when things get ... interesting. Extending our wall down the west coast of the lake further and throwing another radar up was enough to make us secure on this front again. Also worth noting is the state of my heavy armor; less than 10% worn out. It takes a lot of fighting before you need a new one. ** Lab Research Speed 1(same cost). This was already in by this point, allowing our Labs to work 10% faster. ** Oil Processing(same). This was already underway by the time I started heading back. It adds a number of possibilities relating to oil, and begins a whole new industry for us. There are a number of 100/100 cost military upgrades(bullet damage, shooting speed, another gun turret damage upgrade) that follow this. Five of them in all, so those can do their thing while I work on getting set up with oil.  Or, maybe I won't do that quite yet. Looking at our eastern border on the map here, pollution has gotten through the relatively thin borders out that way and is spreading. Quickly. I've got to deal with that first, especially since it's only going to get worse. Those purple dots are our initial oil supply, and it's a dirty operation.  Our fourth Achievement, specifically for getting oil processing. It is a rather important step, as many products will depend on it. It may say 'eco unfriendly', but there is no 'friendly' way to go -- without oil, you cannot win. ** Flammables(50 Red, 50 Green). A cheap gateway tech that doesn't actually do anything on it's own; it merely is a prereq for various explosives-related things. I haven't check on the research area in some time, but as things are whirling along fine with I'm otherwhise-occupied, it appears I didn't screw anything up too horrifically.  Our new border in the east, using a lake once again. There's lots of stuff to do now. ** Get a basic starting oil setup going. ** Replace stone furnances with the more efficient steel ones. ** Circuit networks and all their insanity. The most important of these seems to be the steel furnaces. Those require stone bricks, which we're already set up to produce, and steel, which we can easily divert to that area. It'll take a bit to get a significant amount of those built, so I head off to the oil patch in the meantime. Some trees have to go in order to get a clear look at it.  A bit dark so this isn't a great image, but you can see the details on the right. Mining hardness of 1 means it can't be mined by hand; the yield is quite important as well. Crude oil works a little differently than ores. The 98% number there will gradually diminish over time. At least before, it never would go below 10%, so you could always get something but eventually only in trickles. Higher the yield, the more you can get out of a single patch. There are two here(second one is not quite as good at 87%), which is not much but it's fine for right now as we just want to get a basic sense of how oil works. ** Pumpjacks at first, and they allow us to get the oil out of the ground. Fairly expensive(5 Steel Plates, 10 Gear Wheels, 5 Electronic Circuits, 10 Pipes). We'll eventually mass-produce these, but there is no need yet. One per oil patch, so we only need two. They pollute a lot, and take 90 KW of power to run. ** Pumpjacks won't do much without somewhere for the oil to go. For now, we'll run some piping and set up a storage tank. Finally we can use those.  This is a little smaller than I'd like, but you can see the two green pumpjacks on the left, piping out to the right, and of course the storage tank. It'll take a while for that thing to fill. Also notice the spaced underground pipes: at this point we want quite a bit of those. In fact, I'm going to want to add regular and underground pipes to our list of basics to get production of going and carry around. ** We've got a supply of crude going, meager though it might be. The next thing we need is the oil refinery, which we need to grab some stone bricks for(it also requires steel, gear wheels, pipe, and circuits. In general oil-related stuff is more expensive and time-consuming to make than what we've used so far). At five ingredients, I couldn't automate these even if I wanted to.  You want to be a little careful when you set this stuff up, because oil isn't as easy to move later as the solid materials we've worked with so far. You can't store the liquids in your inventory -- pick up something with liquid inside it, and the liquid disappears, lost forever. That means leaving plenty of space is a really good idea. This is only going to be a starter oil-related line and I'm sure I'll build a permanent one somewhere else later, but I still don't want to crowd it. I've run a small ways east of the storage tank for this. Anyway, a couple things about our first Refinery. The power usage jumps out right away; almost half a megawatt each. There is only one recipe(Basic Oil Processing) that these things can use. Every 5 seconds, they can turn 100 crude into 30 Heavy Oil, 30 Light Oil, and 40 Petroleum Gas. We'll need to get some basic storage up for each of those as well. This is still only a starter setup, but it's already getting a little complicated. Once I've got a storage tank for each of those three products, the refinery can run nonstop. Now I want to see if I've got enough refining capacity here. I need to restock anyway, so I note that there is 5.1k crude(still only a fraction of capacity) in the first tank. It's down just a hair when I get back, 5k on the button. Well, that almost never happens, but this is perfect. Producing almost enough to keep this one refinery busy. Now it's time to get to know the Chemical Plant. These aren't quite as expensive or power-hungry as the refineries, but they still draw their share of resources. These can do a couple of things right now: ** Any of the three oil products(light, heavy, petroleum gas) can be turned into solid fuel. Solid fuel is rated at 25 MJ, just over 3x the energy of an equal amount of coal, and provides a 20% acceleration boost for any vehicles that use it. ** We can also turn the Heavy Oil into Lubricant. We have no use for any of those at the moment, so I'm going to pass on getting them set up. We'll continue pumping the oil and refining it: I'll need to come back here regularly and ensure that we've got enough storage tank capacity to keep that going. For now though, we'll need more research to progress further. A full run of 50 steel furnaces is ready, plenty for my current purposes. Before we put them in place, it's a good time to do a little more math; our iron line is close to full capacity. Each belt can transport 13.33 items per second. At 3.5 seconds/plate, that means it can support 46.7 furnaces. 23 on each side. Right now we've got 36 iron smelting ones in place, so that's close. With the faster steel furnaces, the maximum we can use in a column is cut in half to 23.33, or less than 12 on a side. For now, we'll have 11 and basically be up to a full belt of iron.  Quite quickly the new iron line is set up, shown here. We've eliminated the overhead from 28 inserters that are no longer needed for the extra furnaces, and elsewhere stone, copper, and steel can be built at twice the rate they were before. I'll have to watch the ore supply because that'll eventually run low on those, but this will work a lot better.  Peak usage is now up a bit over 12 MW, continuing to creep upwards. Max. Capacity = 28.8 MW 19 Radar Stations = 5.7 MW 66 Electric Mining Drills = 5.94 MW 36 Assembling Machine 2s = 5.4 MW 10 Labs = 900 KW 1 Oil Refinery = 420 KW 247 Inserters = 3.21 MW 2 Pumpjacks = 180 KW 13 Assembling Machine 1s = 1.17 MW 65 Long handed Inserters = 1.24 MW 7 Fast Inserters = 322 KW 17 Lamps = 85 KW Maximum Usage = 24.57 MW The list of consumers continues to grow, but it looks like we've got enough capacity to stick with the way things are for now.  We haven't been nearly as busy the last 20-30 minutes here, and that's mostly due to some of the bullet and turret upgrades having longer processing times for the vials. I could just add more Labs to make it go faster, but I've still got other things to work on so there's no need. Item Count: 39(+5) Total Production: 144k(+37% from 105k) Onward and upwards. Resources ** Iron: 400k primary(28k used), 124k steel(8k used). 14 and 16 hours now. Tick tock. ** Copper: 121k(10k used). Still at 12 hours left. ** Stone: 380k(8k used). Mostly for the steel furnaces. ** Coal: 276k power(10k used), 356k factory(7k used), 600k steel(1k used). Looking more and more like the power-supply field in the west will be the first to go, but there are plenty of options. Factory usage was also up, partly because it's sending some north to the research area for the military vials. ** Crude Oil: 18/second. For this, it's the combined extraction rate of all our current oil patches. 97% translates to 9.7/second, for example. They've already depleted a bit in the brief time it's been running.
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Oct 7, 2017 01:29
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I'd argue that if you're going to refine oil at all you might as well make use of it since it stores better as crude (it's a 1-1 crude to heavy/light/petro refinement but you need 3x the storage because it's 3x the product ) Even if you don't need solid fuel or lubricant you might as well make some for use later since that's what Basic refinement is really good for.
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Oct 7, 2017 02:45
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Let me tell you about Biter problems: I need something bigger than an assault rifle.
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Oct 7, 2017 09:36
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Can you build static artillery? It seems like it'd fit the 'war as industry' this game has going on.
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Oct 7, 2017 10:51
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The Lone Badger posted:Can you build static artillery? It seems like it'd fit the 'war as industry' this game has going on.
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Oct 7, 2017 13:08
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 22:08 |
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Fearless_Decoy posted:Without spoiling too much, the answer is 'not really'. Mobile artillery, however...
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Oct 7, 2017 13:14
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