4 ms·

maybe we are talking past each other, but I'd say clean interfaces and bots are very important even if you don't want to tear down the original factory. you wan

maybe we are talking past each other, but I'd say clean interfaces and bots are very important even if you don't want to tear down the original factory. you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. can't really do this if you have some gnarly IO setup. I agree clean layouts inside of functional units is unnecessary. land is cheap; just make something that works and cp it everywhere.

dragontamer 5y ago
> you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. In my experience, no. Any high-volume production needs to be built from the ground up from smelters (or even miners) on downwards. If you have 1-belts of iron feeding your factory and then want to expand, the easiest way to do so is to build a parallel +1 belt of iron (including the 70+ smelters and 50+ miners somewhere else) somewhere. The terrain and issues of that other area (ie: water, cliffs, trees, etc. etc.) will be different. You can only legitimately "copy/paste" designs if you have an advanced set of terrain modifiers: landfill to erase water, cliff-explosives to erase cliffs, and flamethrowers to erase trees. (Chopping by hand takes too long. Even bots take too long in many situations to erase trees, especially at low-bot speed levels). ----------------- If you try to "logically" add it to your factory (originally designed for only 1-belt), you end up with non-obvious starvation points everywhere. Its far easier to declare the entire "logical belt" region to be a cohesive design (from mines to smelter to assembly machines to science to labs: beginning to end of the entire process). There's an additional bonus to this: belting the "end-product sciences" is very easy and low-throughput. Instead of "moving your factory" around, it makes far more sense to "move your science belts" around. ------- Its very hard to turn a "1-belt of iron + 1-belt of copper" factory into a "2-belt of iron + 2-belt of copper". Very very difficult, you really shouldn't be trying to find space for the extra belt or smelters. Just "soft abandon" the base, and build your 2nd belt of iron + 2nd belt of copper elsewhere. Then build 2-belts of your red+green+blue+purple science (or whatever outputs your old base were doing) to lead to the new science center. "Abandon" the old science center as well (since the "old science" center won't have the extra science to advance forward). "Abandoning" the science center means that all that space opens up for you to move your science-belts to the necessary location towards the new science center. Maybe you need to plow through some old areas but it'd be easier to do this from an "abandonment" mindset rather than a "cleanup" mindset. --------- The only way you "cleanly" have room for that 2nd line of copper or iron, is if you magically remembered to leave room for the 70-smelters before you built the base. This is unreasonable. EDIT: I guess you use yellow/red belts in the early game. 24-smelters per yellow belt of production. 48-smelters per red belt of production. 72-smelters per blue belt of production. How do you grow 24-furnaces into 48? Doubling the size if you upgrade from yellow to red? (Or upgrading from 1x yellow to 2x yellow?). Its non-trivial to run that many lines through the middle of already-built factory areas. And unless you planned for it, 24-additional furnaces is a non-trivial amount of space.
- p_l 5y ago
  Usually we fix that with trains, and in some of our last games we started working on pull (or Toyota) model of resource management, with smelting blocks colocated with metal patches, and various sub-factories pulling resources in by signal-triggered trains
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    At train scale, the problem is solved by trains. I guess I'm talking about the earlier game, where I've seen many, many players 'get stuck at blue science'. A lot of players get stuck there because you need to advance to the 2nd iron patch around then, because the starter patch is too small to sustain red circuit production. Or I guess you can wait like 10 hours for that small patch to make enough red circuits. But yes, a well designed train network solves the problem. But that's a nonobvious step for many players. -------- Main bus style does work through that stage of the game, but requires preplanning. -------- If you wish to keep your old design (aka: no restarts), building a 2nd base and connecting the two bases up (either with trains or belts) really is the answer. In any case, the game's default settings force you to expand in the blue to purple science period, before all options of the tech tree are available.
- leetcrew 5y ago
  before I have bots, I usually put down a minimal production line that doesn't saturation a belt. I place them perpendicular to the main bus, so they can be 2x'd or 4x'd before saturating an output belt or fully consuming an input. in the early stages of having bots, I scale them a couple times as needed. but once I have a good number of bots and a couple speed upgrades for them, I try to switch to remote train-served factories for bulk items. so doubling steel really is as simple as copypasting the original smelters and train stops. with current train mechanics, you don't even have to rename the stops. from here you can either fully transition to block architecture (probably overkill for vanilla) or widen your original bus at the end by injecting materials via train. if you do it right, the only manual effort for scaling is adding new trains to prevent starvation.
  - 5y ago

dragontamer 5y ago

> you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. In my experience, no. Any high-volume production needs to be built from the ground up from smelters (or even miners) on downwards. If you have 1-belts of iron feeding your factory and then want to expand, the easiest way to do so is to build a parallel +1 belt of iron (including the 70+ smelters and 50+ miners somewhere else) somewhere. The terrain and issues of that other area (ie: water, cliffs, trees, etc. etc.) will be different. You can only legitimately "copy/paste" designs if you have an advanced set of terrain modifiers: landfill to erase water, cliff-explosives to erase cliffs, and flamethrowers to erase trees. (Chopping by hand takes too long. Even bots take too long in many situations to erase trees, especially at low-bot speed levels). ----------------- If you try to "logically" add it to your factory (originally designed for only 1-belt), you end up with non-obvious starvation points everywhere. Its far easier to declare the entire "logical belt" region to be a cohesive design (from mines to smelter to assembly machines to science to labs: beginning to end of the entire process). There's an additional bonus to this: belting the "end-product sciences" is very easy and low-throughput. Instead of "moving your factory" around, it makes far more sense to "move your science belts" around. ------- Its very hard to turn a "1-belt of iron + 1-belt of copper" factory into a "2-belt of iron + 2-belt of copper". Very very difficult, you really shouldn't be trying to find space for the extra belt or smelters. Just "soft abandon" the base, and build your 2nd belt of iron + 2nd belt of copper elsewhere. Then build 2-belts of your red+green+blue+purple science (or whatever outputs your old base were doing) to lead to the new science center. "Abandon" the old science center as well (since the "old science" center won't have the extra science to advance forward). "Abandoning" the science center means that all that space opens up for you to move your science-belts to the necessary location towards the new science center. Maybe you need to plow through some old areas but it'd be easier to do this from an "abandonment" mindset rather than a "cleanup" mindset. --------- The only way you "cleanly" have room for that 2nd line of copper or iron, is if you magically remembered to leave room for the 70-smelters before you built the base. This is unreasonable. EDIT: I guess you use yellow/red belts in the early game. 24-smelters per yellow belt of production. 48-smelters per red belt of production. 72-smelters per blue belt of production. How do you grow 24-furnaces into 48? Doubling the size if you upgrade from yellow to red? (Or upgrading from 1x yellow to 2x yellow?). Its non-trivial to run that many lines through the middle of already-built factory areas. And unless you planned for it, 24-additional furnaces is a non-trivial amount of space.

p_l 5y ago
Usually we fix that with trains, and in some of our last games we started working on pull (or Toyota) model of resource management, with smelting blocks colocated with metal patches, and various sub-factories pulling resources in by signal-triggered trains
- dragontamer 5y ago
  At train scale, the problem is solved by trains. I guess I'm talking about the earlier game, where I've seen many, many players 'get stuck at blue science'. A lot of players get stuck there because you need to advance to the 2nd iron patch around then, because the starter patch is too small to sustain red circuit production. Or I guess you can wait like 10 hours for that small patch to make enough red circuits. But yes, a well designed train network solves the problem. But that's a nonobvious step for many players. -------- Main bus style does work through that stage of the game, but requires preplanning. -------- If you wish to keep your old design (aka: no restarts), building a 2nd base and connecting the two bases up (either with trains or belts) really is the answer. In any case, the game's default settings force you to expand in the blue to purple science period, before all options of the tech tree are available.
leetcrew 5y ago
before I have bots, I usually put down a minimal production line that doesn't saturation a belt. I place them perpendicular to the main bus, so they can be 2x'd or 4x'd before saturating an output belt or fully consuming an input. in the early stages of having bots, I scale them a couple times as needed. but once I have a good number of bots and a couple speed upgrades for them, I try to switch to remote train-served factories for bulk items. so doubling steel really is as simple as copypasting the original smelters and train stops. with current train mechanics, you don't even have to rename the stops. from here you can either fully transition to block architecture (probably overkill for vanilla) or widen your original bus at the end by injecting materials via train. if you do it right, the only manual effort for scaling is adding new trains to prevent starvation.
- 5y ago