I'm pretty sure I'm seeing two different items on the feeder belt from wagon #1. Coal and some cyan thing, presumably from a mod.

While true, I get the impression that the buffer bothered him. And arguably a buffer has an expense, in that you're producing stuff that you're not using right now , even if you might use it in the future. If the items in the buffer are relatively expensive and time consuming to produce, that's an a...

Yeah, my immediate reaction is that you're mixing the output of the train to no good purpose. Not that we can see the train - I gather it only has 4 fast inserters unloading per car? Or maybe 8, if it's double-sided. I've struggled with train unloading recently, but mostly my struggles were about tr...

In that case what you want to do, is put the buffer chest(s) before the belt to the labs. Then when the inserters detect that a suitable buffer size has been reached, they shut off production of science packs. That does the opposite of what he wants. If I understand him correctly, he's unhappy with...

Splitters can be really handy for making sure you distribute resources evenly, so if you have a shortage of something like copper, everything gets a share instead of one assembly line getting everything and assembly lines downstream getting nothing. However, that is not what you want within an assem...

I think you should post a screen shot of your current lab setup so we can see the details of your problem.

It's not too clear why you're even asking the question. Normally, if you have a backlog, that's not a big deal. It just means that the belt is full, and it will resume production when you use up the ones already on the belt. My best guess is that you have a problem because you're putting the science...

Vin is correct. I've determined in game that each small pump will drive 5 steam engines, and that if you put them in parallel, two pumps will drive 10 engines. It's actually not hard to test. If you have a steam engine setup running rather than idling, and a steam engine isn't getting 100% water, th...

I've had a working station with a waiting area. http://i.imgur.com/Q8Uu77f.jpg It's important to note that I discovered that sometimes trains will insist on pathing through locked blocks. It's a matter of path length - if pathing around a locked block adds enough length after the choice, the train w...

I just want to say that I'm an experienced player who's played over 250 hours but usually restart before ending, so I've only "finished" two worlds. In that case, what would you like the mods to change about the game? Not that I'm any expert. I've only played one modded game so far, using...

Also, I should add I didn't start with a multi-platform train platform even in my Marathon game. My first train station was a simple shuttle to pick up copper I desperately needed which was a long way away. And then I built an entirely separate line for my first long distance iron mine. I didn't bot...

You should play through to satellite launch with vanilla at least once. I did so something like 3-4 times before I decided to go to the next step with mods. Mods will change the balance, and I don't know of any that are an unalloyed improvement over vanilla. The Marathon mod, for example, hurts some...

In a side note, I was curious about the speed issue, so I ran my passenger train out to Copper E India N2, my most distant station, with and without the trailing locomotive. With no other traffic to introduce delays at signals, it was 45 seconds with the trailing locomotive vs. 34 seconds without it...

And minor savings in time ... and train length, and restricted station order if your train isn't homogeneous. Granted, only my oil train runs multiple car types, but I'd never run an oil train as double-headed because the drawback is too severe. Yes, I've switched from one to the other mid-game, an...

One very big downside of double headed trains and a no-loop design is that you'll be severely limiting train throughput in busy stations. You can make your busy stations one-way only. So this isn't really downside of double headed trains. ... but that still means providing a way for your double-hea...

Boogieman14 wrote:Marathon almost turns it into a new game this way

Yeah, it does! It felt remarkably fresh to me, despite a lot of time with the base game. I don't like what it does to the petroleum and module balance, but overall it was a quite positive experience.

Green research is difficult because you have to use electronics, and you have to re-learn electronics factories because the ratios are different than what you knew from before. You said this before, but when I eyeballed the ratios, they weren't that far off to still justify a 3:2 ratio for greens. ...

By the time I had oil up, the biters weren't getting through my defenses anymore - though I did have to drop everything to maintain them periodically. I ended up with banks of 8 turrets defending places they tended to assault. I couldn't afford that kind of turret density all along my wall, but the ...

Green research is difficult because you have to use electronics, and you have to re-learn electronics factories because the ratios are different than what you knew from before. It was a much bigger hurdle than I expected, and Blue never got easy. I think it's genuinely possible to get into a no-win ...

No, I didn't play in Peaceful mode. That's a relevant question, because I almost gave up on the early stages a couple of times. The biters came after me when I had nothing more than a pistol, because Marathon makes research expensive and slow. I ended up having to let biters attack my stuff several ...