Concrete stacks way too low.

[roman566]

For some small patches of concrete or small paths, 100 items in a stack is fine. For placing concrete in a base like this?

yeah.jpg (163.41 KiB) Viewed 20374 times

Not so much. Running back and forth between production facility is not fun. Especially for distant outposts that I also like to fill with concrete. I would really prefer 1k stacks. Much less running that way.

[Kane]

Not sure... I mean sure you could change to 200 or 500 or even 1000. But if we are talking about balancing pretty or the ability for it to make you move faster. It's still considered cheap if someone can hold that much concrete.

I think things like Mods for either bigger inventory or bigger stacks would be fine but playing with the game using the tank or car to help move concrete around your base or trains for long distances would be a more legit option.

Just my own personal opinion.

[SHiRKiT]

If bots are allowed to place the tiles this should be trivial, but what is actually missing is the self-placing/expanding blueprints.

[bobucles]

If you think the stacks are small, just try placing patches of concrete with construction drones. A thousand drones isn't enough. If only they could place a handful of concrete each trip.

[roman566]

If bots are allowed to place the tiles this should be trivial, but what is actually missing is the self-placing/expanding blueprints.

Travel time. Bots are slower than player with PAMKII and can carry only ONE item. I tried them, then I quit. With 200 bots I would still make it faster by carrying 100 concretes at a time. Not several stacks, just one. So bots - nope.

@Kane

The point is that it's tiresome. Get 3k concrete. Place it. Takes 10-20 seconds. Run back to the factory. Take 3k concrete. Place it in another super long building spree that takes whole 30 seconds. Run back to the factory...
If stacks were 1k, then a single visit would be more than enough to do all that.

And tank/car? I STILL had to make several trips! Yes! With a full car I had to make three trips AFTER I already did half of the expansion I planned. And see that small spot not filled in the upper right corner? Yeah, THREE trips were NOT ENOUGH.

As for balance? Increasing stack size will only save player's time. Hardly a 'OP NERF NOW!' issue.

[Kane]

If bots are allowed to place the tiles this should be trivial, but what is actually missing is the self-placing/expanding blueprints.

Travel time. Bots are slower than player with PAMKII and can carry only ONE item. I tried them, then I quit. With 200 bots I would still make it faster by carrying 100 concretes at a time. Not several stacks, just one. So bots - nope.

@Kane

The point is that it's tiresome. Get 3k concrete. Place it. Takes 10-20 seconds. Run back to the factory. Take 3k concrete. Place it in another super long building spree that takes whole 30 seconds. Run back to the factory...
If stacks were 1k, then a single visit would be more than enough to do all that.

And tank/car? I STILL had to make several trips! Yes! With a full car I had to make three trips AFTER I already did half of the expansion I planned. And see that small spot not filled in the upper right corner? Yeah, THREE trips were NOT ENOUGH.

As for balance? Increasing stack size will only save player's time. Hardly a 'OP NERF NOW!' issue.

I can make you a mod when I wake up if you like.

[roman566]

@Kane
Thanks for the offer but I prefer to play without gameplay changing mods. That's why I am trying to convince people in charge to change the size of the stack.

[ssilk]

The way to go here is maybe a increase of the stacksize. But 1000? I think that's too big.

And the problem here is not the stacksize (because you have this problem not only with concrete/stone), the problem is the running back and forth.

You may take a look at https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =5&t=13200 Discussing the (missing?) 4th type of transport!
which discusses exactly this problem.

[SirRichie]

I feel pulled both ways here.

Yes, placing concrete tiles requires a significant amount of resources and thus, trips (@ssilk: the number of trips directly correlates (inversely) with the stack size).
However, I also think that it is ok for certain tasks to feel tiresome if you can sensibly automate that task. And here is the problem, I think.

Using blueprints to construct patterns of buildings is wonderful and feels like you automated another thing. However, the number of required bots per area is significantly higher with concrete than with any other building type.

Maybe a way out is to allow constructions bots to make use of the stack size bots can carry. This way, a bot could carry 5 concrete (with the highest tier of research) and thus make placing somewhat more feasible.

[bobingabout]

I agree, construction robots should be able to carry more that a single item.

Also, if you think robots are too slow.... you're doing it wrong. I think in my testing savegame (with my mods) I have around 5000+ logistic robots MK4 (They're like, 4 times the speed of normal ones) and just as many construction robots. the robots could probably place the grid of conctrete down as fast as I can place down the blueprints.

[ssilk]

The idea was about outposts. Where you don't have a connected logistic network.

The problem with placing the stones/concrete is also a different: In my opinion in the beginning it's nice and I think people will do it a lot. But it gets a little bit boring after some time.

What I would like would be, that the computer places the concrete for me. I make the borders and a "device" looks for empty space and places the concrete inside of it.

@bobbingabout: With the speed it is so: The bots are not thought for this and even with the double speed they will not be much better for this job. Even with five times more stacksize: Not thought for that!
The problem are the long distances they need to travel around. That immediately locks all the bots for this one job. As said: Not thought for that.

[Klonan]

I think balance wise, it makes sense for concrete to stack to 200

Lets see:

Stone = 50
Stone Brick = 100
Concrete = 100

But for instance, for another production chain:

Copper ore = 50
Copper plate = 100
Copper wire = 200

or even

Iron ore = 50
Iron plate = 100
Electronic circuit = 200

[bobucles]

I have around 5000+ logistic robots MK4 (They're like, 4 times the speed of normal ones) and just as many construction robots.

It's a bit telling that you need to have an order of magnitude extra construction power to handle concrete, compared to trying to place factory blueprints.

[lancar]

200 should be fine, I think. 100 is too low, I agree. Same goes for Bricks (for consistency, since they're used for pavement too).

[keyboardhack]

We are still talking about enough concrete to fill an entire tile which is quite a lot. You don't need a lot of robots to place concrete in a short amount of time. 50 robots can lay a quite large field of concrete in a very short time. This is factorio and if something becomes repetitive then there is ways to automate it.

[hitzu]

We are still talking about enough concrete to fill an entire tile which is quite a lot. You don't need a lot of robots to place concrete in a short amount of time. 50 robots can lay a quite large field of concrete in a very short time. This is factorio and if something becomes repetitive then there is ways to automate it.

Ok, let's do some rough math.
Imagine we have one roboport that construction area covers 100x100 tiles. I will not bother with circles and will calculate "radius" for sqares. We have 4 tiles at a distance 1 sqare from the center, 12 tiles at the distance 2, 20 tiles at the distance 3 ... 396 tiles at the distance 50. Let's multiply all 10k tiles by their distances from the center and then multiply by 2, because robots must return to pick up new piece of material. We got a magic number 676600 - the total number of squares that bots should travel back and forth. Divide it by 50 robots and by 3.6 tiles/sec (this is fully upgraded robot speed according to wiki). We've got 3759 seconds or 63 minutes.

Sounds quite confusing even for me. I shrank angular distances, assuming that they are just one tile lenght, but in reality they should be longer and I didn't count the time when robots recharge so the total construction time should be even greater...
I am a bad mathematician

[SirRichie]

Thank you for that estimate using real grounded data!

As it is now, that obviously is too much. You might of coures increase your construction bots to 200, which would bring down the time to about 63/4 = 16 minutes, which is still a lot and usually longer than ghosts live.

If you were to be able to utilize the stack size of robots (as I suggested) this would now become 16/5 = 3.2 which is an ok number I think.

[Melfish]

The problem i had with construction robots was the robotport, as it just cant handle the amount of robots.
A 10x10 area requires 100 robots...
I tried to add extra ports (almost tripled them) but just ended up placing everything myself.

[ssilk]

We've got 3759 seconds or 63 minutes.
Sounds quite confusing even for me. I shrank angular distances, assuming that they are just one tile lenght, but in reality they should be longer and I didn't count the time when robots recharge so the total construction time should be even greater...
I am a bad mathematician

Even if the mathematics would not be super-correct, that matches with my experiences: it is impossible to built large areas of plates by bots, even if you have gigantic amounts of bots.

As I said: The better way would be to have a device which looks,

- are enough construction bots available and if so
- it marks a small area (5x5 or 10x10?) for construction of stone/concrete.
- Then it repeats until the whole area is filled.

Which means also: I need to mark only the boundaries. Like in MS-Paint: Make an closed area and then select the "fill"-tool. All withing this area is filled with the wanted stuff. So I suggest a "fill"-tool for Factorio.

[lancar]

The most straightforward solution for the deployment speed would just be to add research for construction robots to carry more than one item, just like Logistics.