Roboport Spam

[blazespinnaker]

Hey fellow factorites(?), was wondering if anyone does roboport spam like I do and if so - how? Basically I have a 4 diamond config
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Radar is at the sides and top left. Each point of the diamond has a unique footprint (position of big pole, buffer chest, etc) so I can be careful to line it up. I thought about making each point the same, but that would mean I'd have to repeat a lot of redundant resources unecessarily.

I just lay out the diamonds everywhere and on the edges I fortify with mines/lasers/artillery which I clean up at a later point with deconstruction as my borders expand. Anything bigger than this and it gets unwieldy unless I cheat and set the zoom out in the console (is that cheating?) I pretty much grid the entire map. I like being able to send my robo buddies anywhere I please. Map zoom out is much faster than walking or even driving, right? Definitely much safer from homicidal locomotives.

The diamond is fully connected, logistically. I could be more efficient, but I like having logistic access as much as possible, and what's a few extra nuclear reactors? Haven't run into UPS issues yet, though probably will eventually I imagine. Plan is to start doing some creative destruction at that point, though, which I am definitely looking forward to.

[Koub]

A screenshot would help understand what your diamond config is

[blazespinnaker]

Sure, nothing to write home about though -

https://imgur.com/a/srlGKdr

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I'd like to add that range increase on robotports / electrical / radar as a technology research would be very cool. Those roboports and such do get in the way of blueprints.

[astroshak]

Roboport range increase tech would not be a good thing, IMO.

Bots work best in smaller, discrete networks. Yes, a factory-spanning network can work, it will not work very effectively, as bots spend more time traveling from one end to the other to accomplish jobs. Smaller networks force the bots to focus on the nearby jobs, since the ones further away are simply not in their network.

Increasing wire range or power range on power poles would be nice, but I thought that was the point of going from Small to Medium poles, to Substations. Large poles being used to “ship” power, rather than to broadcast it locally. There are mods out there that increase the range of the power poles too.

There is a mod that increases the scanning range (both active and periodic) on Radar. I’ve played with it a bit, and it makes getting just the right radar coverage grid a little more annoying to do. Also, the best (vanilla) way to know where to place a Radar is based on the minimap. You can see a blue tint where you have active radar coverage, and a blue tint where the currently held radar will actively cover. Those two tints stack into a more opaque, lighter color blue where the existing and held radar coverages overlap. However, that minimap is only a certain size. Expand radar coverage and you lose this ability. For this ... its not as solid a No as the increased roboport range tech idea, but its still a no.

[blazespinnaker]

I think the massive speedup on Robots dovetails with increased range quite nicely. Sort of like the range on artillery.

The problem right now is if you want to use robots for all building from map mode, and I'm not talking about logistic assembly btw.

I am a rail and belt assembler, all the way, though I do use logistics for artillery and the odd short cut until the final belt/rail solution is available. No, I use robots really for just basic building - but in order to do so, you have to lay down quite a few roboports and poles.

As you can see from this post, it gets a tad messy.

For example, laying a rail down from one side of the map to the other. I can tell you, it's quite a pleasure to use rail planner in map mode when you have the solution that I've presented, just shift click once and you've got 1000 tiles covered with rail. There are a zillion robot tasks like that, especially when you have a sprawling base.

Mega Mall makes everything available all the time. It's like being in creative mode, basically. Some delay of course, and minor irritants like you have to copy/paste in all properties on objects. And you have to keep the shift button pressed at all times. Gee, thanks for that guys, my wrists love ya!

Train run out of fuel? Whups! Just drop down a requester chest and fuel that bad boy up.

I can't recall the last time I had to move my avatar. I think it was because of a bug with ghost train placement. There really is no way I can go back to anything but map mode, which means - 'ports a hoy!

[blazespinnaker]

Here's a pic of my map on a new continent I'm playing around on after booting out the biteres (artillery on islands - all is fair in love and war!)

https://imgur.com/a/VtN8TI2

Anyways, I think they should add more infini-research items. Seems like a trivial coding task and It makes the after/late game a bit more fun. If there is some concern about perverting robots, I'm sure a basic logistic assembly penalty can come with higher range roboports, such as significantly higher energy costs.

I will say thought, however, that ship has sailed somewhat because of beacons / modules. They make logistic maps superior to belt based ones in many ways. But that is a different discussion.

Truly, map mode makes the game a pure creative pleasure. Give it a shot and you'll see what I mean.