SA: Combine wide construction network with isolated logistics

[OrangyTang]

Pre-space-age, I always had problems with bots (particularly latency and throughput) so my solution was to have small, isolated networks, so all bot paths were nice and short. For example a couple of roboports next to each other to make sattelites.

With Space Age, now I obviously need a big construction network that spans most of the base so I can alter things while physically on another planet. But that means linking up all the roboports so I end up with a single big network, and I can no longer keep the logistic bots 'penned in' to specific areas. I've tried putting the roboports down so only their construction areas touch, but that means that the construction robots are penned in, so they can't migrate around to build stuff.

Is there a way to keep logistic bots penned into an area but still allow construction robots to roam? At the moment I'm kinda working around it with isolated roboports and requster/provider chests to span the boundary, but that's tedious to set up, doesn't scale well and is ugly. Part of me is really missing the advanced roboports from Krastorio which could be configured to be construction/logistics only while still linking up.

Thanks.

[Tertius]

What you can do to keep robots distributed and avoid them accumulating in the area where they finished their last task, is to configure robot requests in the roboports. It works like a requester chest for robots - you're able to define how many bots of each kind should return to the corresponding roboport if there are idle robots.
This doesn't prevent single robots from flying all over your base from one end to the other, but it helps keeping a predefined distribution of robots.

[OrangyTang]

Hmm, that's an interesting new thing I hadn't noticed. Thanks. Would be interested if anyone else has solved this problem in any other ways.

[Stin]

I also struggled with this.
I rebuilt parts of my base many times to keep the paths smaller. Many times I built more roboports.
As already mentioned, I always request robos at the local locations.

Especially in the early days, it can make sense to perform large tasks using conveyor belts and to build production chains that do not require heavy use of robots.
Unfortunately, I don't have any tips beyond that

Unfortunately, it only got really good when I significantly increased the quality of the ports and robos and I had a lot of research to do.
In the meantime, I hardly have any problems

[kpreid]

Even before SA, I have always covered my base (except for mining outposts) with roboports so that I can perform construction anywhere. The way I avoid undesirably long bot flights is that I use belts or trains for all predictable, long-distance transport. I use logistic requests for items where the only production and the only consumption are close to each other but inconvenient to belt — usually “mall” items, but also the more unusual production chain items, like furnaces going into production (purple) science (before I really scale up to the point of needing dedicated furnace production for science). Let your robot network be big, but keep your logistic chests close together.

Another idea, if you really want to use isolated logistic robots to transport items within a specific factory: carefully place roboports to make it an island — keep the main construction network not connected to it — and, if you ever need to modify it from remote view, place a temporary roboport to connect it to the main network.