4 ms·

> Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here I'm an anti-bus extremist. ( I've even considered regsitering BanTheBus.com and do

by eterm 2y ago

> Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here I'm an anti-bus extremist. ( I've even considered regsitering BanTheBus.com and doing an over-the-top static anti-bus website. ), so take what I'm about to say with a pinch of salt. Also note that my post applies to non-space-age. Space-age changes the gameplay fundamentally, so this really only applies to factorio 1.1 or 2.0 with space-age disabled. Gleba in particular breaks the JIT model. ( Fuck Gleba. ) Busses are the opposite of good factorio factories. They undo a lot of the benefits of a healthy just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing, by encouraging massive amounts of buffer (belt-buffer). They also encourage people to anti-learn fundamental principles. You often people do "starter-busses" with 4 lanes of iron plates, but only fed by one actual belt worth of smelting. Then people look for all kinds of "balancing" solutions to try to alchemize one belt into 4 belts. They encourage massive amounts of over-spend on expensive splitters to keep "balancing" the bus to make it look neat, over actually just focusing on what needs to be built. Spaghetti on the other hand is much better for actually getting to the end-goal. Start by placing what you want to build, then look for what it needs. Work out how to feed it by any means necessary. If you dont' have enough input, then build more of that input. Then repeat as necessary. There's no such thing as too much input. With short belts (even direct insert where possible), buffers are kept to a minimum, and any "overprodction" is stopped at source, because assemblers don't produce if they have nowhere to output into. The biggest classic beginner mistakes in factorio are: - Sticking things in chests. Even worse, trying to "maintain production" by picking up those chest contents. ( This comes from an RTS mindset where "idle" workers are a big sin. ) - Trying to increase throughput by replacing yellow belt with red belt when their yellow belt wasn't saturated. - Looking for guides and discovering "The Main Bus". That last point is so common, and not only does it take away some of the creativity of the game, but busses are inherently a bad solution that makes all bases look the same, and produces a mediocre result. Look at how speedrunners are able to complete the game on default settings in sub 2hr30. They're not producing oodles of red belts. They're not producing main busses. They're not even producing railways. They're hyper focused on what's actually needed, which is very little indeed.

noddybear 2y ago
While I agree that busses incentivise over-production, my only argument in their favour stems from SWE design best-practices of maximising cohesion and minimising coupling. The benefits of a bus is that it makes it easier to create factory districts that can be scaled independently of everything else. I suppose the question is how independent/integrated should these districts be? Should they only create ore? Or create utility-science-packs?
zelias 2y ago
I dunno, main bus strikes me as an efficient way to feed all the mall assemblers in the early game before I can scale up to a train based base. After the early game, totally agreed, ban the bus.
- eterm 2y ago
  Early game, I don't use trains either, I just spaghetti yellow belt around! I even run long belt lines to the first ring of mining outposts. It usually only costs ~500-1000 belt to do so, which sounds like a lot but really isn't much. Advantage of yellow belt: - Don't consume power - Don't produce pollution ( don't attract bugs ) - Are cheap. Rails themselves aren't too bad, costing only slighty more per tile than belts. But rails need stations, signals, chests, inserters for loading / unloading. Often combinators too. All add up to much higher investment, and critically in the early game, add up to more pollution produced before the pay-off of improved resources incoming. - Don't need lots of belt for the stations. A typical loading/unloading station can often have so much belt for "efficient" (fast) loading/unloading that you could have belt half your way to where you're going just laying that belt in a straight line. If you're going further than the first ring of extra resources, then trains are amazing, but there are more than enough resources several times over in the first ring of resources to get a rocket launched. The first expansion ring tends to have 500k-1Mil per patch, and have several patches, so there's no need to go miles out pre-rocket. It takes surprisingly little raw resources to actually launch a rocket. Someone did the maths once and calculated completing the game as needing a minimum of ~500k Iron ore. At 15/s, a single yellow belt can deliver that in under 10 hours, way below the time of a typical playthrough. This technically means a single smelting line is all you need to actually complete the game still in a reasonable time. Of course, trying to do so from a single lane would be extremely painful, and need a lot of attention to preventing over-production of intermediates, especially when it's much easier to make a few smelting lanes. I'm not recommending that, but I am recommending just slapping down new lanes and production wherever you feel like it and whenever you need, rather than pre-planning 4-lanes of plates that aren't actually useful of efficient. Unless you mean your "main bus" is just 1x copper and 2x iron lane, in which case fair enough, but when I attack the concept of the bus, that's not what I'm railing against. What I'm railing against is the design pattern where people put down 4 lots of 4-wide lanes to bus far more iron, copper and intermediates than will ever be needed to actually launch a rocket. Busses aren't efficient by any metric, other than minimising personality, creativity and thinking. With a bus you just follow the same template done before, it'll get you to the end, but it teaches bad habits and isn't efficient. It isn't quick either, you'll spend a long time putting down lanes and splitters and undergrounds. All of which need producing. For late-game (post-rocket), then either a bus design or train / city-block designs can work well. I prefer trains, but large busses have their place for mega-bases. But for pre-rocket, or anyone starting out, spaghetti is absolutely the way to go. It'll also better teach you via your own mistakes.

by eterm 2y ago

noddybear 2y ago

While I agree that busses incentivise over-production, my only argument in their favour stems from SWE design best-practices of maximising cohesion and minimising coupling. The benefits of a bus is that it makes it easier to create factory districts that can be scaled independently of everything else. I suppose the question is how independent/integrated should these districts be? Should they only create ore? Or create utility-science-packs?

zelias 2y ago

I dunno, main bus strikes me as an efficient way to feed all the mall assemblers in the early game before I can scale up to a train based base. After the early game, totally agreed, ban the bus.

eterm 2y ago
Early game, I don't use trains either, I just spaghetti yellow belt around! I even run long belt lines to the first ring of mining outposts. It usually only costs ~500-1000 belt to do so, which sounds like a lot but really isn't much. Advantage of yellow belt: - Don't consume power - Don't produce pollution ( don't attract bugs ) - Are cheap. Rails themselves aren't too bad, costing only slighty more per tile than belts. But rails need stations, signals, chests, inserters for loading / unloading. Often combinators too. All add up to much higher investment, and critically in the early game, add up to more pollution produced before the pay-off of improved resources incoming. - Don't need lots of belt for the stations. A typical loading/unloading station can often have so much belt for "efficient" (fast) loading/unloading that you could have belt half your way to where you're going just laying that belt in a straight line. If you're going further than the first ring of extra resources, then trains are amazing, but there are more than enough resources several times over in the first ring of resources to get a rocket launched. The first expansion ring tends to have 500k-1Mil per patch, and have several patches, so there's no need to go miles out pre-rocket. It takes surprisingly little raw resources to actually launch a rocket. Someone did the maths once and calculated completing the game as needing a minimum of ~500k Iron ore. At 15/s, a single yellow belt can deliver that in under 10 hours, way below the time of a typical playthrough. This technically means a single smelting line is all you need to actually complete the game still in a reasonable time. Of course, trying to do so from a single lane would be extremely painful, and need a lot of attention to preventing over-production of intermediates, especially when it's much easier to make a few smelting lanes. I'm not recommending that, but I am recommending just slapping down new lanes and production wherever you feel like it and whenever you need, rather than pre-planning 4-lanes of plates that aren't actually useful of efficient. Unless you mean your "main bus" is just 1x copper and 2x iron lane, in which case fair enough, but when I attack the concept of the bus, that's not what I'm railing against. What I'm railing against is the design pattern where people put down 4 lots of 4-wide lanes to bus far more iron, copper and intermediates than will ever be needed to actually launch a rocket. Busses aren't efficient by any metric, other than minimising personality, creativity and thinking. With a bus you just follow the same template done before, it'll get you to the end, but it teaches bad habits and isn't efficient. It isn't quick either, you'll spend a long time putting down lanes and splitters and undergrounds. All of which need producing. For late-game (post-rocket), then either a bus design or train / city-block designs can work well. I prefer trains, but large busses have their place for mega-bases. But for pre-rocket, or anyone starting out, spaghetti is absolutely the way to go. It'll also better teach you via your own mistakes.