But the energy saved while researching faster? Labs consume 60kW. The energy savings of a faster lab competes against the cost of building 2 extra steam engines. It's a tiny benefit against an energy drain that is already very low. Labs are a tiny portion of any player's base. Lab research means th...

And the reason for that is, that you need to charge the bots Your math is attacking the wrong angle. The problem is not with bots covering large or short distances. Bots can be abstracted away as the "conveyor belt" part of the air network. More bots isn't very different from building mor...

Instead of trying to find an inserter that can compete with bots, how about addressing the reason bots are SO good? NO matter what you do with inserters, it takes a finite amount of time for any inserter to perform any single action. Bots don't have this limitation. It takes a bot 0 time to grab fro...

I alreadu never am able to use the outcomes of my research as I research them That's the main reason why research speed is one of the more pointless techs. With the streaming research system it doesn't serve any real purpose. It's cheaper to build more labs and more fun to have a bigger lab system ...

At that point you're talking about a whole new kind of logistic problem. With the concept of drones, you now have to supply outposts with useful player materials. More puzzles is definitely good.

At that point you're getting into a whole new kind of logistic problem: How to supply your drones to get the best use out of them. That sounds like a fun thing to figure out. One possibility is to put the drone in a train, fill the train with goodies, and ship it off. Another is to have special supp...

Power armor takes care of the vast majority of personal attributes a player might desire. Extra speed, extra defense, or extra firepower that may serve as idling defense. It's mostly there. The only reason to have separate droid types is to address specific developer desires. For example a dev may n...

That is not the same. It has not the players inventory. :) Sounds funny, but is a big difference! People tend to swap out their inventory depending on the task at hand anyway. You don't need 500 defender capsules to build some solar fields, for example. All in all the player isn't limited by their ...

The main reason for a teleporter is to cut down on player travel times, right? You can do the same thing with a remote control droid:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23273&p=146008

A remote droid allows a lot more pivot points for balance than a teleporter ever could.

I think barrelling fluids works... the big issue is that you don't get the empty barrel back in situations where the barrelled item is used like a fuel. That's not a problem if the player is getting unlimited ore in exchange. Water would be more plausible. It has more to do with tech placement. Lub...

Hmm. Needing a satellite to run droids would make sense. Droids wouldn't be very useful until players stretch into extreme long distance bases, and that's easily after a few sat launches. Of course this means the player has only one life to count on until they beat the game, for better or worse. One...

There already is a slight issue with the laboratory section of your base being so pitifully small. IMO lab research isn't needed in Factorio at all. If the player needs more research they should just like build more labs.

The first two items would collide and block the path, then the long line of stuff behind would push against it and once force exceeded gravity stuff would lift, pile, and fall over the sides off the conveyor. Wheeled belts have less traction, but they don't have this problem. Once items hit somethi...

There is a big desire to go fast. Players want to move across the map at legendary speeds to do their factorio stuff, rather than spending tons of time sitting in trains or riding a car half way across the map. That's okay. There are many ideas on the topic, such as giving the player a fast flying o...

There was talk from the devs about making mining installations a bit more permanent in the endgame. Maybe lubricated mines could be the ticket? For example an unlimited ore node might use such a mine where you provide oil (which IS unlimited, even at 0.1), and get some extra ore out of it.

The ringworld-teleporter can be used or not. It's on the player. This is never a real argument. All items in the game should be conducive to making a good game. If the teleporter doesn't do that, then so be it. Instantaneous travel is not meant for every game. That being said, I do think that there...

Get rid of the logistic cargo upgrades and watch the tears roll in.

A base that worked off of 2000 bots suddenly needs 10000.

That's actually a pretty clever method. The bulk of the download doesn't interrupt gameplay, and the player only needs a final update to connect.

TCP is 2-3 times slower than UDP on a good connection.

I don't know how you manage to get over 50% overhead on TCP. Clearly something else is screwing up.

Anyway it is much easier to reduce transfer time by running the map through a compression algorithm.

The devs mentioned a possible train buff a while back. The main reason for the limited train size is because train loading and unloading is automated. High capacity trains are more difficult to load and unload in a reasonable manner. Cars can't be automated (except a few weird belt tricks), so their...