Walls & Logistics Networks
Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2017 2:26 am
On my first game I made the mistake of building my borders quite tiny, plus made the assumption that 500k iron was fine. Spoiler: it wasn't.
So, after spending quite a bit of time expanding my borders, I came upon two issues.
The first is that removing walls is extremely tedious. I know robots can build my walls with ghost planning, but is there a way to automatically remove them without constructing something else? I'm not really clear about how that works.
The second is that logistics robots try to travel direct to a location, and then loop back if they run out of energy. Unlike literally the rest of the game, this is exceptionally unintuitive. A basic robot I made in high school was plenty able to defeat this simple loop. These bots are supposed to be able to construct entire buildings. I presume this is just an Alpha issue; it doesn't even make sense.
That said, I thought up a few ways to resolve the problem, the most obvious being to simply cover the base in networks. Buuut, I'm short on resources, so that won't be happening. The second is to ship the resources to the closest wall with individual trains for each network. This sounds good but then I run the risk of getting hit by a train; I traverse some of those paths regularly. Also, the base isn't built enough to make signals or other flow control. The third is to use one train to deliver tools to all the disparate networks. This seems like the easiest idea in the short run, at least 'til my border is stable and my soon-to-be-acquired mines are in operation, but I'm not sure how to keep them from dumping all the tools into the first network. I thought to make a condition to drop off exactly 100 at each station by using chests, but perhaps I am going about this the wrong way? I just get this niggle that I'm not "doing it right" or something. I'm not afraid of doing it wrong per se, but after removing probably 10,000 walls by hand, and then constructing a network that doesn't network, I'm hesitant to start yet another project that may be a massive waste of effort.
So, after spending quite a bit of time expanding my borders, I came upon two issues.
The first is that removing walls is extremely tedious. I know robots can build my walls with ghost planning, but is there a way to automatically remove them without constructing something else? I'm not really clear about how that works.
The second is that logistics robots try to travel direct to a location, and then loop back if they run out of energy. Unlike literally the rest of the game, this is exceptionally unintuitive. A basic robot I made in high school was plenty able to defeat this simple loop. These bots are supposed to be able to construct entire buildings. I presume this is just an Alpha issue; it doesn't even make sense.
That said, I thought up a few ways to resolve the problem, the most obvious being to simply cover the base in networks. Buuut, I'm short on resources, so that won't be happening. The second is to ship the resources to the closest wall with individual trains for each network. This sounds good but then I run the risk of getting hit by a train; I traverse some of those paths regularly. Also, the base isn't built enough to make signals or other flow control. The third is to use one train to deliver tools to all the disparate networks. This seems like the easiest idea in the short run, at least 'til my border is stable and my soon-to-be-acquired mines are in operation, but I'm not sure how to keep them from dumping all the tools into the first network. I thought to make a condition to drop off exactly 100 at each station by using chests, but perhaps I am going about this the wrong way? I just get this niggle that I'm not "doing it right" or something. I'm not afraid of doing it wrong per se, but after removing probably 10,000 walls by hand, and then constructing a network that doesn't network, I'm hesitant to start yet another project that may be a massive waste of effort.