Inserters and Fast Inserters

[Deadly-Bagel]

I've been thinking about my Bob's Mods game and I'm really impressed with some of the minor little tweaks Bob did that really affected the pace of the game.

The one I'm on about here is how Fast Inserters were a much more difficult technology to obtain. In vanilla I might have a dozen Inserters before never using them again, as it's pretty simple to just bolt on the extra assembler to upgrade them to Fast Inserters for which the research is available practically instantly. In Bob's Mods, I think the research is much further down the tree and they're much harder to make so you need to rely on regular Inserters for a good long while. He balanced this by making the first Inserter Stack Bonus research available much earlier.

As it stands I don't really like Inserters. In many cases (anything with a fast build time) they just can't keep up so you need Fast Inserters quite a bit in the early game, but there's no sense carrying around both types. Taking a leaf out of Bob's book would give definition to what otherwise feels like an uncomfortable wedge to increase complexity. They could even be made more attractive by increasing the power consumption gap between regular and fast Inserters so it's not worth upgrading say your smelting to fast inserters. The only downside to this is the lack of an "upgrade tool" would make it tedious for areas that are managing but could be faster, as on top of belts it's another thing you need to walk through replacing everything but hopefully that's in the works too.

The alternative would be to remove Fast Inserters altogether and boost the speed of Inserters, this has been suggested on numerous occasions and I'm not against the idea though it does mean Filter Inserters and Stack Inserters and the like would be a step simpler to build, not really a big deal.

[Yoyobuae]

As it stands I don't really like Inserters. In many cases (anything with a fast build time) they just can't keep up so you need Fast Inserters quite a bit in the early game, but there's no sense carrying around both types...

Use two Inserters where one is not enough. That still wastes some assembler capacity, but not very much. Once stack bonus is researched then they become more than enough.

I see things the other way around. I don't feel that much of a need for Fast Inserters as other people do. Maybe much later when switching to blue belts which are obviously too fast for Inserters, or for really early yellow belt train stations.

Only change I would make is to make them equally fast as the long handed inserter. That way throughput could be symmetric when combining long/short arm inserters.

[Deadly-Bagel]

There are certain areas that Fast Inserters excel at, mainly loading onto belts aiming for full compactness (for example, train unloading) where stack inserters aren't really necessary but the slow arm movement of an Inserter would really impact performance.

And a lot of the problem is stack bonuses aren't available until much later in the game, and for example most Electronic Circuit designs don't support two inserters between the Copper Wire and Electronic Circuit Assemblers.

If you're cutting one of them out there isn't anything for it to be relative to anyway so may as well make it as fast as the other electronic inserters for consistency and the few circumstances it provides a real benefit.

[Yoyobuae]

And a lot of the problem is stack bonuses aren't available until much later in the game, and for example most Electronic Circuit designs don't support two inserters between the Copper Wire and Electronic Circuit Assemblers.

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[Deadly-Bagel]

Hmmm yeah okay got that one messed up but there still isn't any argument for why it should be slower other than because it can and train unloading is still affected.

[dewiniaid]

I still extensively use regular inserters when inserter speed isn't the cause of any production delays -- they're cheaper and more power efficient. Before modules, they're useful for the outputs for anything that takes more than 1.5 seconds to produce and for the inputs to those same buildings (depending on number of inputs needed). In particular, smelters, science production and labs, engines, red circuit outputs (and inputs depending on configuration), batteries, and blue circuit outputs (NOT inputs, ingesting 20 green circuits would take too long) are all good candidates.

In a perfect world, you want inserters running at 100% uptime if they can do so without stalling anything else.

[Deadly-Bagel]

They're only more power efficient because that's how they're coded. Make the Fast Inserters consume the same energy as a regular Inserter, problem solved. There isn't any reason for them to both exist as they are now.

Though looking at the 0.1 version, I get the impression a lot has been added to the recipes in the game but the system on the whole has never been reviewed and cleaned up. Hopefully this will be one of their objectives in 0.16...