Belt speeds

[BlueTemplar]

Well, on Deathworld (Marathon), you'll probably have to clear the nearby nests anyway (see map), so you'll actually have plenty of space...
(This 4 => 12 belt weave thing I did there was more of a silly challenge than a real need !)
Also, as you can see, it doesn't last long, I have 2/3 of my iron going to steel, and that compresses A LOT.
I would have spaced things even more now, now that I know that trees don't even start to die until you reach 60 pollution !

(Admittedly, I haven't tried in 0.17 the alternative way of playing of investing in defences to the point of being able to ignore biter attacks and be able to spew as much pollution as you want... did that in 0.16 for non-marathon deathworld, and it was quite a challenge, though also because it was only my 2nd game of Factorio !)

[darkfrei]

And please not ultra boring ratios of 1:2:4:8.

But I like boring ratios!

[5thHorseman]

Belts faster than 45 item/s suck. You need uber inserters to cope, it's just an arms race of rainbow-tinted entities cluttering up the crafting menu.

I personally love the idea of a top-tier belt that you just can't use inserters on, and have to branch off to slower belts to do that.

[darkfrei]

Belts faster than 45 item/s suck. You need uber inserters to cope, it's just an arms race of rainbow-tinted entities cluttering up the crafting menu.
Belts faster than 60 item/s are just broken.

Don't use high speed belts with inserters, but between splitters to lower speed belts. If you use burner inserters, use only yellow belts, red and higher are not compatible with burner inserters.

[Hannu]

Isn't the extra space taken up a problem, especially in deathworld? Or are the resource costs really that much more a problem?

Resource cost of belts is problem only in very special conditions. I had once relatively large train & belt base (about 1 M iron per hour and hundreds of rockets). I investigated costs and all blue belts and crazy splitter balancers took a little less than 1 % of overall iron production. All other manufacturing entities was even more negligible. I do not remember numbers but level 3 modules was the most significant cost, not surprisingly.

The conditions in which cost of entities are significant may happen with very extreme, like deathworld settings, some mods or huge megabase constructions with too small beginning base. But in normal game occasions you have to wait entities are built are very rare and short.