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That's why I love it. I just went back to play last night and I got my Red and Green science built in a way with zero excess. All the miners lead straight into

That's why I love it. I just went back to play last night and I got my Red and Green science built in a way with zero excess. All the miners lead straight into a furnace which fed straight into an automation factory which fed straight into the Red and Green science. The only thing I used belts for was getting the sciences to the Labs. Then I unlocked the the next level of science and it all instantly became spaghetti and belts were backed up across the board. The thing that makes the game easier is understanding the ratios. There is a golden ratio for basically anything. And it's actually harder to get the right ratios at a smaller scale because you end up with a lot of decimals that throw everything off. If you can get clean whole numbers for a majority of your ratios, then you have a nearly perfect automation process even if it's all spaghetti belts. I need to learn how to use trains and the circuits because I have NEVER used them. IDK why I'd want things to turn off and on, or why I'd want to use a train to bring mats, but I assume these are critical things stopping my megafactory dreams.

pmoriarty 6y ago
"If you can get clean whole numbers for a majority of your ratios, then you have a nearly perfect automation process even if it's all spaghetti belts." Another way to go is to use robots for delivery. That way there's no spaghetti of belts because there are no belts.
- JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
  That also works, but you can't really do that until like midgame unless you use some mods. You need to have at least red and green science production and have researched a fair bit of technology before you get robots. Then you need the chests which is another tech. But yeah, normally once I get the robots I setup an automation factory just to create robots and put them in the roboport. Then I can start getting rid of belts by just having the robots do the work. Setup a hit load of worker bots on the perimeter to fight any of alien things and fix the damage automatically. The robots change the approach massively. But, I also enjoy the process of creating belts that get consumed near perfectly so that I create the exact same amount of each science. That's just my OCD side of things though.
- Arnavion 6y ago
  The only time I've ever completed a game is when I made giant 80x80 cells served only by trains. Each cell was dedicated to a single recipe, with vertical train stations on the left for inputs, vertical train stations on the right for output, and beaconed factories in the middle. Each cell focused on executing the recipe as fast as it needed to to fill up the output station faster than it could be drained by other cells' input trains. If something was being produced faster than other cells' trains were draining it, then it would back up and stop (and even shut off power via a switch logistic-connected to the output chest). If something was being produced slower, 80x80 is plenty of space to add more factories till it isn't. Near the end the bottleneck was actually how fast I could ship ore from the faraway mines to the smelter cells (I built it organically so all the smelter cells ended up near the center, while the ores were coming in from the outside), but at time I was launching one rocket every few seconds so it didn't really matter. Building it took multiple days because I only built out one or two cells a day, but the freedom from having to think about belts and ratios was worth it. I did not have to worry about prioritization because if one cell needed an output more than another cell, its trains would implicitly be coming to the output station more often. With belts you can end up with a situation where, say, the demand for green circuits is high but your iron plate bus only has two lines dedicated to the green circuits factory area, and there's no space to add more lines. With trains I would just add more factories to the green circuits cell, and its iron plate input train would automatically start running more often without me needing to do anything to it. Unfortunately that experience has spoiled the vanilla game for me. Every time I try to play I remember how easy it made things and don't want to play any other way, but I also remember how many days it took to build and I don't want to repeat it.

pmoriarty 6y ago

"If you can get clean whole numbers for a majority of your ratios, then you have a nearly perfect automation process even if it's all spaghetti belts." Another way to go is to use robots for delivery. That way there's no spaghetti of belts because there are no belts.

JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
That also works, but you can't really do that until like midgame unless you use some mods. You need to have at least red and green science production and have researched a fair bit of technology before you get robots. Then you need the chests which is another tech. But yeah, normally once I get the robots I setup an automation factory just to create robots and put them in the roboport. Then I can start getting rid of belts by just having the robots do the work. Setup a hit load of worker bots on the perimeter to fight any of alien things and fix the damage automatically. The robots change the approach massively. But, I also enjoy the process of creating belts that get consumed near perfectly so that I create the exact same amount of each science. That's just my OCD side of things though.
Arnavion 6y ago
The only time I've ever completed a game is when I made giant 80x80 cells served only by trains. Each cell was dedicated to a single recipe, with vertical train stations on the left for inputs, vertical train stations on the right for output, and beaconed factories in the middle. Each cell focused on executing the recipe as fast as it needed to to fill up the output station faster than it could be drained by other cells' input trains. If something was being produced faster than other cells' trains were draining it, then it would back up and stop (and even shut off power via a switch logistic-connected to the output chest). If something was being produced slower, 80x80 is plenty of space to add more factories till it isn't. Near the end the bottleneck was actually how fast I could ship ore from the faraway mines to the smelter cells (I built it organically so all the smelter cells ended up near the center, while the ores were coming in from the outside), but at time I was launching one rocket every few seconds so it didn't really matter. Building it took multiple days because I only built out one or two cells a day, but the freedom from having to think about belts and ratios was worth it. I did not have to worry about prioritization because if one cell needed an output more than another cell, its trains would implicitly be coming to the output station more often. With belts you can end up with a situation where, say, the demand for green circuits is high but your iron plate bus only has two lines dedicated to the green circuits factory area, and there's no space to add more lines. With trains I would just add more factories to the green circuits cell, and its iron plate input train would automatically start running more often without me needing to do anything to it. Unfortunately that experience has spoiled the vanilla game for me. Every time I try to play I remember how easy it made things and don't want to play any other way, but I also remember how many days it took to build and I don't want to repeat it.