A good example of this in Satisfactory (haven't played Factorio) is balancers vs. manifolds. The idea is that you have factory components that need to feed oth

A good example of this in Satisfactory (haven't played Factorio) is balancers vs. manifolds. The idea is that you have factory components that need to feed other factory components at a certain speed to get to 100% efficiency. One way to do that is to place the correct number of splitters and mergers to get the right ratios based on the output rate of the various components and the input rate of the others (the balancer way). The other way (the manifold way) is to just hook up one factory component that needs to feed another and let it run until it has filled up it's buffer. Then add a splitter to take the overflow and repeat until you are at 100%. Do this for all inputs. A complicated balancer looks like a drawing of a Christmas tree made of balancers and mergers and takes up a lot of space. A manifold is just a line of constructors or whatever with splitters in front of them going from one output to one input. You can put up a manifold without doing any math and just stop adding factory components when it can't feed the next building. You can sink hours into just designing the perfect balancer for your situation, let alone building it. I always go the manifold way.