ratchetfreak wrote:

dood wrote: Okay.
But you can then, after doubling your bots and ports, half the distance for twice the throughput and that's something belts can't do.
Correct?

no becasue if you put the 2 sections of belt next to each other you have double the throughput

What.

apples to apples
https://i.imgur.com/1cvE9sU.jp

Eh, no Bots scale linearly to the distance,

A bot's travel time is linear with the distance, So to have the same throughput over twice the distance you need twice as many bots (and twice as many robotports). You need to adjust the requesters to ...

ratchetfreak wrote:apples to apples

Tekky wrote:Burning solid fuel creates the same amount of pollution as burning coal. I guess you are referring to solar and nuclear power.

I'm mostly referring to smelters.
Those things create tons of pollution with no way to reduce it.

1) How wide should it be? Most of the information I found seems to recommend 7-8 lanes of 4 tracks each, so my plan is for 8. Is that right, or should I reserve more?

2) Of those, I the consensus seems to be for a minimum of these tracks: 4 green circuits, 4 iron, 4 copper, 2 steel. But I see ...

For junctions, you only put chain signals at the start and throughout them so the train stops in front of it if whatever pathing chosen isn't free and not mid-junction, which is how deadlocks happen.
Regular signals mark the exit.
So:

https://i.imgur.com/N83aa7A.jpg
0eNqlnOtuFEkMRt ...

If you want to go that big, maybe excessively long trains rather than lots of unload stations are the answer, so that each train trip isn't just a drop in the ocean.
I use 8 cargo trains on a medium sized base map and one of those can't even sustain 6 belts of ore under ideal conditions.

It would ...

Train stations are a perfect place to use blueprints. Build the station once, copy it, and use it over again.

Loaders are basically "inserters but faster". They aren't very essential to the game. A loader with an inventory might be neat, but it's not very different than using a chest and inserters ...

Bots do have a frontloaded ability to move items and then collect on charging stations. I'm not accounting for that because you can't keep a base going on a burst of bots.
You can however make it as compact as possible. Which has a profound effect on the throughput of bots.
Yes that also goes for ...

They cost 5000 packs of everything to research.
By the time you got your hands on them, manually fighting biters at all has become obsolete thanks to artillery.

You can practically eliminate pollution by putting tier 1 efficiency modules into everything and stopping to burn coal.
That will almost put an end to biter attacks.

When a belt network grows, the exact same growth of complexity happens.
No it doesn't because it's linear.
You can't focus your 1 tile wide beltline to move things between 2 tiles especially fast. It'll always be 40 items a second over its entire length.
You can absolutely focus the entire bot ...

Like I said. Again.
One is constant, the other is exponential.
How is that apples to apples?

Like I said, the logistic power of bots isn't constant, it becomes exponentially less effective the larger the area they have to cover for a variety of reasons, which is a problem belts don't have.
That's why comparing "x tiles of belt" to "x tiles of robots" is silly.
You don't build bots the way ...

I've been using belt loaders to test beaconed setups, just make sure that the "belt" side is pointing at the belt, and the other side is pointing at the chest! To load into a chest you need to put it down the wrong way, then rotate it (like an Underground Belt).

Personally the problem for me isn't ...

Solar cells aren't totally obsolete. They are still a huge step up when combined with shields and batteries. A 5x5 suit with shields, batteries and solar is very lethal at the point that medium and some large biters hit the field.
Why would you fart around with a substandard shield if you can have ...

welcome to the forums! :)

why not enable the recipe via console, and decide for yourself?

/c game.player.force.recipes["loader"].enabled = true
/c game.player.force.recipes["fast-loader"].enabled = true
/c game.player.force.recipes["express-loader"].enabled = true
If those are the same things ...

I would shudder to leave "fixing bots" in the hands of people who don't even know how to actually optimize them with active providers (that's the only explanation I have as to why someone came up with the buffer chest).
That "throughput comparison" where they compared "X tiles of bots to X tiles of ...

They wanted to give some option for early construction bots so I still consider that to be pretty vital before it can go gold.
Someone also has to finally figure out how pipes work and then fix them because urgh. So that'll probably be around 0.30.

I wasn't around for loaders, considering the changes that went over the game in the meantime, would they still be considered "OP"?
What about them was "too strong"?
Producing a compressed belt with just 1 entity doesn't seem all that game changing to me just like the splitter filter and priority ...