My 80 hour hardmode game

[Enderbsd]

2nd playthrough, i was inspired by some of the "hardmode" posts on /r/factorio

After spending weeks trying to get a good map on random to start my hard mode quest, i decided to just edit my own map. I know everyone else loves water but i actually hate water because it always gets in my way. So i took a random map, and just removed all the water but 1 tiny spot. I didnt edit anything else at all.

Game Setup

Zoomed out overview of worldmap

Fun shots of Biter density

Overview of main base

The most enjoyable part of the game for me if when i transition from belts to mostly robots. If you do it too fast production grinds to a crawl, but its nice to clean up some of the more complicated material inputs for producing things around the time you get oil going.

Robots

Here is the cornerstone of what allowed me to expand in the early game out to where iron and copper was. Turrets and roboport !

Turrets

I developed this in my first game, its a sorting / storage system. I love it because it allows me to just dump anything into trains and not care.

Sorter

Oil production and buffer layout

Oil 1

Oil 2

Power

Full Album

http://imgur.com/a/x278H


Historical highlights

1) Moving from my first base to my final base. The way i played this i pretty much built a tiny / fast base as quick as i could at the start of the game, then once i got production going started building my final base where you see it. The final base expanded several times over the course of gameplay. Then once the final base was finished, i started expanding "outside" it with the roboport / turret blueprint.

2) Moving from gun turrets to lasers was pretty hard and fun.

3) Moving towards cleaning up belts and replacing the entire system with robots is always a joy.

4) Expanding towards my first major Iron depo outside of the starting area. I knew this was going to make or break the game so i pushed hard on it. Around the 20 hour mark was critical because i was running out of my initial iron and was still pretty far from the iron depo i was aiming for. It was also difficult to push forward against the biters due to lower technology on laser damage / combat robots.

I uploaded my save file before i placed my rocket defense.
Save File
One bug here is my rocket defense never seems to start its countdown in this game Which kinda sucks because i was hoping for the all out biter rush to put my base to the test.

I want to give a shoutout to my friend Kadaan who i stole both his solar panel blueprint as well as his double engine train design.

[DerivePi]

I've been working on a sorter layout and have run into all sorts of problems and was wondering how you handled them. In particular, how do you prevent one resource from jamming up the works. For instance, lets say copper ore is overproduced and deposited into the sorter. Normally the furnaces will take all of the copper off of the belt, but at some point, if the imbalance is significant, the copper line will back up into the sorter and prevent other material (iron ore to make circuits) from reaching the furnaces. In my preliminary design, I have an overflow chest that signals the upstream outpost to stop loading any ore that exceeds a certain amount in the overflow chest.

[Enderbsd]

While no means a solution, the 24 chests always had enough buffer for me that if i started to see say copper getting pretty full, i would just slowly migrate more electric drills from copper to iron instead as they finished.

[oliverpowerboy]

How many Bots?

[Arch666Angel]

necroed!