Friday Facts #222 - Christmas avalanche

[Panderturtle]

Bugfixes are going well, nice to hear.
And, oh dear, bring back the belt-compression!

Take your time, deserve it!
Merry christmas and a happy new year!

[zombieroboninja]

Please make sideloading fully compress as before.

[Matthias_Wlkp]

I don't understand. Fluid wagon's mass is 2 times higher than normal wagon, and it already transports less fluid than wagon with barrells. Why reduce it's capactiy?

It is 3x heavier than the cargo wagon, so we would definitely reduce the weight to compensate for reduced capacity

This makes perfect sense to me. I wish you could make fluid wagons smaller, but I guess that would be a stretch...

[TheRaph]

Please make sideloading fully compress as before.

Yes please!

And here I've explained why.

[Trblz]

these updates of this week remind me of:



the devs are doing a great thing but it won't ever be 100% satisfactory for everybody.

I don't like the fast replace of splitters with belts - however there's already a mod to stop this.
The fluid wagons i've never used as 3 separated tanks but the recent discussion made me go towards barrels because I can/never done it before.

With alpha games, things can go either way, that's part of the game.

So happy gaming everybody, happy holidays and best wishes for 2018

[Alice3173]

Don't use trains if you don't want to - you can use pipes, pumps, storage tanks and circuit logics instead of trains to transport fluids.

Of course it would be a pain in the ass. But same goes to transport great amounts of other ressources with belts...

Greetings, Ronny

Or... We could just keep barrels in the game so people can continue to use them if they want. If you think fluid wagons are superior then you should use that. Why remove things already in the game that others commonly use just because you don't find it useful? I have no interest in trains in Factorio, you don't see me calling for their removal. Instead I just don't use them because I'm well aware others like to make use of them instead of the large scale logistics networks I use.

[bobingabout]

wait, you said the fluid wagon has too much capacity?

if you actually compare it to storing barrels in a cargo wagon, the fluid wagon is too small! you can transport more fluid in the cargo wagon.

[Kingdud]

Fluid wagons are too large? What? I can move 100,000 units of fluid with a barrel train and only 75k with a fluid train. The overhead of barrels is NOT that hard, once you setup combinators and other such things to make your ~1200 (for 1 one train, +400 for each additional train) barrel setup flow. Is that the real point? you want people to choose between convenience and volume? What is your rationale that fluid wagons are too big? If anything, they are too small.

And no, I didn't use the split-volume thing. I just can't see where you are coming from with them being too big.

[TheRaph]

I use barrels for a reason in vanilla game... I use them to jump start coal liquefaction.

When I create an outpost in vanilla, I prefer to create fuel for my trains locally if possible. Oil is generally not as common as Coal, and I can use coal liquefaction and convert/process the results to rocket fuel. It is much easier to just bring two barrels of heavy oil with me to jump start the process than it is to actually bring a fluid train.

I mostly do the same.

I agree that fluid wagons should stay in the vanilla game, but so should barrels. Both have their uses. I personally do not see the need to nerf the capacity of fluid wagons, but I will be accepting of it, if needed. However, I do think that barrel capacity or barrel stack size be changed appropriately to make fluid wagons more efficient. As heavy as train cars are, the product they ship is the big factor in weight as well. (I expect even heavily armored train cars in factorio to have more mass in the shipped product than the mass of the train wagon.) It boggles the mind to have more liquid be shipped in barrels, as well as be lighter, then possible with a more efficient fluid wagon.

In regards to changing from 3 separate tanks in a wagon to a single large tank in the wagon. If this is due to the interface issues only, perhaps I have an alternate solution... Allow for two different types of fluid wagons to be built. One that is permanently set to 3 separate tanks, and one that is set permanently to a single tank. Let people assemble the one they want to use in each particular situation.

Fully agree to that.
I would like if they let the current liquid wagon with 3 chambers and add a second liquid wagon with one big chamber.
The size of wagons doesn't matter for me but should as you scribes be in correlation with barrel size (or barrel stack size).

[rldml]

wait, you said the fluid wagon has too much capacity?

if you actually compare it to storing barrels in a cargo wagon, the fluid wagon is too small! you can transport more fluid in the cargo wagon.

It's only a matter of time until they fix that - either they change the amount of fluid per barrel or simply removes them.

[Engimage]

About logistic buffer problem.
I am not sure tuning requester chest is enough.

I had some idea before about finetuning logistic network.

In any kind of providing logistic chest you could have checkboxes for allowing provision to:

• Player requests
• Build requests
• Logistic requests (requester chests)
• Logistic requests (Buffer chests)

By default all checkboxes are turned on

This would allow pretty precise finetuning of logistic network.
However this will make logistic chest interface pretty complex.

[Linosaurus]

There are bug reports about inconsistent behavior when side loading a full yellow belt onto the side of an empty red belt. This should definitely result in full compression I think.

For side loading to combine belts, I'm fine either way.
I'd prefer if inserters did not compress perfectly.

The quickest way to empty a fluid wagon is to pump directly into tanks. The station design would be a lot neater if two tanks was enough, ie 50k. I wouldn't mind if barrels where reduced to the same amount per wagon.

[Avezo]

I think people undersetimate ANNOYANCE costs while talking barrels vs tank wagon.

[stretch611]

I think people undersetimate ANNOYANCE costs while talking barrels vs tank wagon.

While I prefer to use fluid wagons instead of barrels, (with the exception I noted earlier in this thread), annoyance is minimized when you have blueprints to facilitate barreling and unbarreling. While the cost of steel barrels is not insignificant when talking quantities, they can be easily recycled and shipped back empty to pick up more fluid.

[Gully]

75k per fluid train vs. 100k per barrel train, that looks like good balance to me. You can take the extra effort of barreling/unbarreling and transporting the empty barrels back for an extra 33% transport capacity, or just use standard fluid wagons. Maybe it could even be nerfed to 50k per fluid wagon.

[Shokubai]

I've often felt like all items should have a volume and cargo wagons should fill based on volume and not by arbitrary squares. This would bring everything in line with fluid wagons and allow for a more appropriate balancing.

[keldor]

What about nerfing standard train car storage too? It always struck me as odd that most trains in Factorio only have 1 or maybe 2 cars. Real life trains can have 100+ cars easily! Making the player have longer trains matches better what a train should be, IMO. Right now they're sorta like semi-trailer trucks on tracks.

[Tricorius]

And while it flies in the face of euclidean-space logic, the player can carry even more barrels than a train can, and with the right modular-armor inserts, can travel nearly as fast as a train. If the devs are to nerf anything because of releastic space constraints, then all the item stack sizes in the game must be looked at, because why does the ability to carry 2.000+ factories around in your pocket make any sense?

This always entertains me when people bring up realism in Factorio. I can carry dozens of rail engines and rail cars in my power suit.

Regardless. I prefer cargo wagons to fluid wagons, but I’d definitely like to see both systems in the game. It is nice to have the freedom to choose. I could care less how much capacity everything has. It is simple to just add another train when I need to. Even with beacons fluid barreling tends to slow down over time to be well below the maximum capacity of a single train. You generally need many oil fields to sustain the oil requirements of a megabase.

[irbork]

wait, you said the fluid wagon has too much capacity?

if you actually compare it to storing barrels in a cargo wagon, the fluid wagon is too small! you can transport more fluid in the cargo wagon.

But the oil in barrels is pressurized inside of a barrel by assembler. That's why it takes less space.

[dgw]

wait, you said the fluid wagon has too much capacity?

if you actually compare it to storing barrels in a cargo wagon, the fluid wagon is too small! you can transport more fluid in the cargo wagon.

But the oil in barrels is pressurized inside of a barrel by assembler. That's why it takes less space.

Liquids are generally not compressible to any meaningful degree. And barrels would negate the compression anyway by being circular, because they can't be packed very tightly in a rectangular space.