Friday Facts #224 - Bots versus belts

[jasendorf]

Nobody cry about eletric furnaces is OP vs stone furnaces.

Because they aren't op.

They're OP comparatively... which is the point. Compared to a furnace you have to feed directly with fuel, an electric furnace provides a MASSIVE advantage over fuel fed furnaces.

But, seriously, I don't want to run belts out to every artillery piece I own just to feed them ammo.

[GenBOOM]

Imagine, for example, if the base game was changed to be the Creative Mode mod. Nobody could tell you how to play factorio, true. But new players? There would not be so many. Newbies would find themselves in a world of limitless freedom to assemble wierd inscrutable factories building multi colored flasks.. but why bother? Pretty soon they'd just decide they had better things to do. Newbies need artificial challenges presented to them so they can tackle the learning curve and understand why and how the game engine is a powerful potential catalyst for fun. Until they've had that education, they mostly will have no use for the limitless freedom to play different styles of factorio.

I find this hilarious because when I saw what a single player could do designing things in creative mode and then building them with blueprints and bots in survival, I bought the game.
so for me, creative mode is half the fun where I can chill and design better blueprints. the game would be incredibly more time consuming and frustrating to play without it.

now, I find bots are pretty much a must have once you get to the point in the game where you want to build either defenses, solar panels, or trains.
being able to make these three things expand via blueprints and the mini-map is the only way to play effectively as a single player.

the reason you need logistic bots are as follows:
#1, INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
#2, INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
#3, INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

the only other things that solve this?
MODS

so if you change this you will force single players to download mods just to manage their inventory in a VANILLA GAME? skyrim anyone?

when I build things, usually the first few times things go wrong, inventories get full and then have to be emptied to verify that I actually fixed it.
removing logistic bots makes survival 100% harder to design anything that you don't already have a blueprint of unless you want to be manually emptying things for hours on end; the same thing goes for replacing belts (which is also partly solved by MODS, but still requires logistic bots for INVENTORY MANAGEMENT).
to me that is not fun and thats WHY logistic bots exist in the first place.

the whole idea of removing them makes no sense at all if you actually play single player and try new things.

clearly the devs believe that there is a player that exists that never makes mistakes and is 100% perfect when designing things.
I say that player doesn't exist and this is coming from a place of ignorance of how people actually play the game and use the logistic bots in the mid game, not the late game.

[jasendorf]

The more I think about this, the more it bothers me.

Lasers, too powerful because they're not fed by belts?
Solar Panels, too powerful because they're not fed by belts?
Trains, too powerful because they're not belts?

If the game is a big 2D puzzle as some have suggested, then there are a number of physics-breaking pieces to the game. If "this is a game about automation" (taken straight from the introductory video), then bots are nothing more than a natural progression of the game's complex automation.

[rldml]

Nobody cry about eletric furnaces is OP vs stone furnaces.

Because they aren't op.

They're OP comparatively... which is the point.

Ah..... no.

Compared to a furnace you have to feed directly with fuel, an electric furnace provides a MASSIVE advantage over fuel fed furnaces.

It's not that massive as you think:

At least you need to create the power for your electric furnaces anyway, so at the perspective of energy creation they are no nobrainer. Additionally they cost MUCH more ressources and doesn't smelt the stuff faster than a normal steel furnace. If you set up modules, you have to add the ressource cost of the modules and beacons to the cost of the electric furnace and the hugely increased power consumption too, which makes it MUCH more expensive than a row of coal based furnaces. The RoI is extremly high with electric furnaces, so at some situations it's no good idea to build them. The last point is the simple fact of greater occupation area you need to build them, which decreases the advantage of not need to build a fuel belt to them.

There are some furnace setups, that intentionally avoid the electric furnace because of this reasons after all.

To be honest, this is off topic, so please let us return to the genuine discussion

[Kirvesmies]

A lot of discussion on this issue is also a matter of misrepresentation and assumptions regarding the point of the game and supposed acts on players. Many have pointed aspects of this out.

-Game officially ends with FIRST rocket. Any tech requiring white bottles is for the infinite, "pointless" endgame. At that point you have very likely solved any issues you have with expansion, protection or resource acquisition. Many techs at this stage are op, like nuclear power, artillery, uranium ammo, power armor 2 and they trivialise any challenges left, rightly so. Imagine trying to remove biter hives further on, the ones with hundred spawners and concentrations of 5 or more blue worms combined with hordes of blue and green mobs with just tanks or turret creep. Tedious, frustrating, pointless.

-Blue belt is mid game tech (or late game tech if you consider the first rocket as goal) while bots make their real rise up at game end with space research. They do not occupy same technological tier, I think. Also, belts don't enable full inserter speed.

-Just because you do it with belts doesn't mean it's smarter than the "just paste assembler and 2 chests and add bots" option. You can simply add more belts, build more sprawling and generally do the same thing, just with belt. Look where material is sparse, add belt. rinse and repeat. Add more inserters if they lag behind. If you need more space just blueprint, demolish, build 10 squares away and connect belts again. It takes more work, not more brains. It's not particularly fun either if you do it like that, same as I assume if you spam bot assemblers mindlessly.

-Tightly spaced factories are (generally) designed and multiplied, not grown and improved. They can be built with trains, belts, bots or combination. Point is, you have output and input matched reasonably close with no intention to "upgrade" any part of it, generally this build has already modules and beacons in. Altering it would be stupid, although bot based you could get away with it slightly easier. Point is, you already got things balanced out, changing it would create problems, multiplying it is easy and efficient.

-"Just add more" is the core principle of Factorio, it's all about parallel manufacturing and transport.

-"just adding more bots" to a bot factory that is poorly designed will yield poor results. You'll need 5-50 times more bots and still have issues.

-Building efficient takes planning no matter your method.

-Said planning can be avoided by loading a blueprint by someone else.

-Factorio is PVE sandbox more than it is PVP and PVP should have options to disable items or tech anyway.

[jasendorf]

To be honest, this is off topic, so please let us return to the genuine discussion

So, the issue isn't about whether something is OP or not? Funny... that's not the article I read. Here's what I read: "Bots vs. belts is a controversial subject, even in our team, but most of us believe bots are too powerful. "

So, while I hear that you want to shut down anything that exposes the flaws in the anti-bot stance, it is not off-topic. It is simply an extension of the question of whether bots are too powerful or "take away" from gameplay.

There are some furnace setups, that intentionally avoid the electric furnace because of this reasons after all.

If you're playing a 2 hours game, this might be true. If you're playing a 1000 hour game, the ROI goes up massively... even if you figure in enough solar panels, accumulators and beacons to make them compete in production, they're hands free after that. Not having to find new sources of fuel for my furnaces is a huge advantage if I want to focus on some other part of the game. If you want to spend day and night hunting for fuel for steel furnaces, be my guest.

BUT, for the sake of your argument, let's assume that steel furnaces ARE superior to electric furnaces. Then those furnaces are too OP and must be removed from the game. (See how silly this sounds?)

The obvious progression of this argument is that for every action, there is one thing that could be considered better than another. Do they remove all these things from the game until there is just one way to do any "thing?" If not, why are bots so different? I mean, belts are way OP compared to passing items from one burner inserter to another in a long chain. But, then the game would be all about who wants to spend all their time fueling burner inserters.

[Lilly]

Second tier belts huh? Why not use buckets:

bucket.gif (1.88 MiB) Viewed 7449 times

There is a forgotten feature that you could put cars on belts as a way to significantly improve their throughput. However, cars are too big to be used for this purpose, and wouldn't look right. I hacked a mod that adds buckets (prototype: car) that you can place on belts, just to show this idea. there is a little ring at the top of the bucket to allow it to be lifted up, by cranes for example, to move them between different belt lanes, or pick them up from a train wagon. Or even better, so they can be moved into a ropeway conveyor station, grabbed by a little hook dangling from that rope to be transported to another station. I've looked into creating a mod that implements these ideas. While that certainly can be done, it would depend too much on lua code and thus kill your frame rate with even a medium sized factory.

[meganothing]

And to the people who talk about collision box for bots..or why a bot can move a power plant. Why can the player have 1000 trains in his inventory why, this or why that?

The argument for collision boxes is not about realism, it is about identifying what properties make bots overpowered and what could be done to change that (if there is a way at all).

I think this is part of the problem that Twinsen is trying to talk about. There are people who occasionally show up in the support forums who get to bots, and seem to think "Bots are the new hotness. All my new production is going to be bot based". So then they build an assembler with a requester and provider. Make that a blueprint and stamp it down repeatedly. No thought or planning to it, just add more copies of this same blueprint anytime they want more production of something.

Exactly. This is the hole a newbie could fall into and this is something the developers probably want to prevent, because their goal must be to "pave" the road to interesting challenges for new players, without impacting mega-factories (which is something Wube is very much interested in, judging from all the optimization work they do in an alpha).

Why fear discussion? Remember that not discussing something doesn't mean it isn't done. Discussion is the part where we can possibly excert some influence by making suggestions and presenting new ideas. It is called brainstorming, but storm shouldn't be taken literally

[meganothing]

I find this hilarious because when I saw what a single player could do designing things in creative mode and then building them with blueprints and bots in survival, I bought the game.
so for me, creative mode is half the fun where I can chill and design better blueprints. the game would be incredibly more time consuming and frustrating to play without it.

And this still doesn't mean the base game should be with creative mod enabled. What an experienced player shows you and what most new players should see on their first playthrough are different pairs of shoes.

the reason you need logistic bots are as follows:
#1, INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
#2, INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
#3, INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

...

the whole idea of removing them makes no sense at all if you actually play single player and try new things.

clearly the devs believe that there is a player that exists that never makes mistakes and is 100% perfect when designing things.

Please reread the FFF, especially the part about his hypothetical idea of keeping logistics bots for just inventory management. I don't think inventory management is the target at all.

[Lostblue]

Well I'm not for either approach. Since I finished factorio vanilla and numerous game mods that totally change how factorio works (Bobs, Angels, DyTech[World], Marathon, ...) I do like various approach of factorio gameplay.

I can see two different way to play factorio mods that I like:
-A DyWorld approach were there is many many base resources, recipes tends to have at least 3 components giving a real headache to distribute correctly the resources with no obvious pattern if any. Here bots are mandatory and tends to be needed at early stage.
-A Angel/Bob Metallurgy and Ore Sorting approach, were you would have enormous engines and installations to provide a very large flow of resources. Here everything is about space, bots haven't their place and are more used for providing players than chests. (Bots here are nearly of no use and can be ignored.)

I thing both of them can be fused efficiently; you need to have different ways to obtains the same products.
For example, imagine a somewhat big industrial furnace were no bots can fly around that have very large input of ore/output of intermediate product. It's speed change depending on how many time it was (in)active.
In contrary, a really small furnace with integrated chests (requester and provider) but with slow speed and low productivity (with no space to burn something).

To make it even more personal some research could disable others or become expansive if some others have been researched. Doing so, every player could feel a different kind of feeling and vary his/her objectives. (Example of research dependency, portable roboport and filter inserter can be crafted quite fast when choosing an industrial approach(tier 3/2) [belt] while it will be available later for a robot approach (tier 5/4) [bots].)

Also if you can rework research tree to have thematic tabs (as crafting does), it would be great.
Also more diversity in every aspect of the game (as give some mods) can give you a solid base to further improvements. Did you ever think to makes modes has an official way to play factorio within various scenario?

[GiftGruen]

What about making bots have collision boxes that are used to detect collision with other bots only? They could still fly over factories etc., but not transport your main ore from the train station to the smelters.
The change would make them less and less efficient at moving large quantities, but still very good for supplying the player and moving all those intermediate products that are not really produced in bulk. Also, bots would still be a nice end-game tech to work towards.

Alternatively, make bots have a finite lifespan? They would just recharge less and less power with every recharge, and once they hit a threshold, they could simply no longer recharge and as soon as they're out of their last bit of power, they drop to the ground as a "robot wreck" item. That would also increase the challenge of using them e.g. to cross your main bus, if they could crash onto it and therefore taint the contents of the belt with robot wrecks over time.

[Tekky]

What about making bots have collision boxes that are used to detect collision with other bots only? They could still fly over factories etc., but not transport your main ore from the train station to the smelters.

I really like this idea. It has already been suggested on page 2 of this thread, in this post.

Alternatively, make bots have a finite lifespan? They would just recharge less and less power with every recharge, and once they hit a threshold, they could simply no longer recharge and as soon as they're out of their last bit of power, they drop to the ground as a "robot wreck" item. That would also increase the challenge of using them e.g. to cross your main bus, if they could crash onto it and therefore taint the contents of the belt with robot wrecks over time.

I like the idea of bots having a maintenance cost, so that they must be used sparingly. Since electrical power is practically free in the game, they must cost "real" resources.

On the other hand, maybe the real problem is that electrical power is practically free?

[Kirvesmies]

I think this is part of the problem that Twinsen is trying to talk about. There are people who occasionally show up in the support forums who get to bots, and seem to think "Bots are the new hotness. All my new production is going to be bot based". So then they build an assembler with a requester and provider. Make that a blueprint and stamp it down repeatedly. No thought or planning to it, just add more copies of this same blueprint anytime they want more production of something.

Exactly. This is the hole a newbie could fall into and this is something the developers probably want to prevent, because their goal must be to "pave" the road to interesting challenges for new players, without impacting mega-factories (which is something Wube is very much interested in, judging from all the optimization work they do in an alpha).

Why fear discussion? Remember that not discussing something doesn't mean it isn't done. Discussion is the part where we can possibly excert some influence by making suggestions and presenting new ideas. It is called brainstorming, but storm shouldn't be taken literally

While the pitfall of building stupid by new players is real, does it really require us to drop the only endgame logistic system off because people who don't like optimising their factories won't optimise their factories? Yes, bots can be spammed to work on small/medium scale even with horrible design. So can belts, without much though. Adding endgame belt mechanics, such as less space intensive box-to-belt solution that could be used with trains without gimping throughput and scaling throughput on belts could replace logistic system, but no talk of such compensation outside of inventory management likely moved to construction bots. One actual thing to help avoid stupid logistic systems would be adding some indicators on system efficiency: statistics on active bots vs bots in system, item throughput/bot, total bot "uptime" (how much time is spent actually traveling with cargo vs total time spent on traveling to and waiting for recharge) etc. Currently you won't see how bad your system actually is (outside of fps issues, which new/ignorant/stupid player might not attribute to bots). Something to actually compare systems would be nice.

Other reason for new players falling into build stupid trap is that game doesn't require smart design until very late when fps issues force design efficiency. On basic settings (I think, haven't played it for a long time) biters are only a hazard at the very beginning if you don't know what to expect. Resources are not going to run out so fast that you need to optimise material consumption. Biters do not evolve strongly enough with time alone that your factory throughput speed has any real consequence, since slow production means low pollution. What is there to push players into actually designing their factories and building smarter, not bigger?

Fear of discussion comes from dev going out of their way to say (to the effect of) "Hey, not doing it right now at least, but wouldn't it be cooler if this game had no logistic bots or if they were nerfed to belt level?". How do you think the situation would evolve if the reaction to that would be just "meh"? Strong reaction to potentially devastating situation, should dev decide that people don't really care about bots that much.

I find this hilarious because when I saw what a single player could do designing things in creative mode and then building them with blueprints and bots in survival, I bought the game.
so for me, creative mode is half the fun where I can chill and design better blueprints. the game would be incredibly more time consuming and frustrating to play without it.

And this still doesn't mean the base game should be with creative mod enabled. What an experienced player shows you and what most new players should see on their first playthrough are different pairs of shoes.

You have to pretty much finish the game for logistic system to be unlocked. They require yellow bottles, and while you could just do those in your pocket for the most part, do you think many people will? Construction robotics, however, are available surprisingly early though you need to use roboports for it and the speed is abysmal before purple bottles. Using personal roboports is a bit too late in my opinion, could put them in the modular armor if solar panels were capable of supporting them.

This, in no way, is comparable to having creative mode active on default game (granted that's not quite what you said), logistic networks are not in game until you have practically finished it. You really need to aim for them to get a logistic robot base before a rocket.

And now I'm tempted to start a new game with no mods on default, just to build the most retarder factory ever to have shot a rocket to space

[GenBOOM]

Merging logistic and construction bots into just Flying Robots.
Removing Active provider, Buffer and Requester chests and having just Passive provider and Storage chests.
Flying Robots will do everything construction bots do now and also supply the player.

yeah I read it, except all I hear is what many have pointed out: "this feature exists and I don't like it so remove it" when you can play the game entirely without it.
I personally have never done a huge robot based factory because I know my pc can't handle it, but you want to deny me the possibility of ever doing it in the future when I upgrade my pc.

from what I can tell people like robots because they actually like creative mode, but want to earn the ability to play creative mode in a survival game so that they feel a sense of accomplishment and can easily introduce new designs.
if someone wants to skip making belts and spam robots? thats their business. let them have fun doing it.

only in games would you ever have a silly discussion like this about whether the customer is right or not. to me thats what the devs are saying, "we know you play this way but we think if you played like this you would have more fun so we will remove the possibiltiy of you ever being able to play like that again" this is beyond childish.

literally 2 kids playing in a sandbox and one kid says:
"I know you have having fun with all this sand and this shovel allows you to pick up the sand and put it in the bucket faster but I would rather have you use your hands to make a path on the ground to push the sand into the bucket and then make the sand castle because shovels are OP and I feel you would have more fun making dirt paths by hand."

completely missing the point that designing and making the sand castle is the goal, not moving the sand around.
its about how you design your base, the challenges involved, and the goal of the sand castle you want to build.

the player chooses the design and the sand castle. the challenges will vary depending upon those two choices.
if you change the way the shovel is designed so that its so small that using your hands to make a dirt path is faster, it will not make shovel users happy because the sand gets everywhere, and we shovel users hate it.

let the kid play with shovels for petes sake wtf is wrong with that

devs its your job to give the player more tools to design better sand castles, not limit the tools

this analogy works great because everyone knows that buckets (trains) are the best, this shovel vs path argument is stupid

please put down the shovel and let the kids build sand castles in peace or gtfo of the playground you manipulative catering brat. we don't care what you think, we just want to build sand castles.
you can play by your rules but we will play by ours or one of us will not come back to play on the playground
make no mistake if you take away the shovel or make them worse instead of introducing a new tool you will be the bully that took the shovel that these kids loved. nothing will make them forget how much they loved that shovel.

[PaszaVonPomiot]

TL;DR
Nerf logistic bots but don't remove them. Leave construction bots. Don't make faster belts. Optimise performance for higher belt usage.


I only use logistics bots for reasonable automation eg. fueling trains and supplying player with items. That seems reasonable and convinient. However using huge amount of bots for unloading trains or production is so OP that I consider it cheating and no fun at all. Sure for lazy people bots are blessing but Factorio is not for lazy players (at least not in thinking aspect). The same goes for beacons - I can't find any realism in beacons. They are just stat boosters, that's it. I don't use them at all.
I would like to see logistics bots heavily nerfed with maybe lubricant requirement or something. Actually the best idea I have is to limit the number of logistic bots per roboport to let's say 10. This way it would be pointless to use them in massive scale because there would be no space for roboports and it would be much better to use belts and trains. I myself am great fun of belts and trains and will always try to use them to their maximum potential. With regards to faster belts I personally don't like to watch belts moving as fast as blue belts so adding even faster would probably hurt my eyes. But that's my preference. If you really have to buff belts you can increase density of items on belts maybe. I'm fine with existing belts and if I'll need faster I will use mods.
Construction robots must stay because they are the only way to build from blueprints and efficiently repair things. Period.
What you need to take into consideration is performance because using more belts instead of bots will eat UPS a lot faster.

[WarpZone]

Open question for the Factorio devs: Where are the battle lines drawn on this issue in-house? We know Twinsen and his cronies want to remove bots from the game because they're "not fun enough." So who's on the other side of that debate?

Twinsen said it's "a controversial subject, even in our team." He then went on to say "most of us believe bots are too powerful," but of course, that's just weasel words. You can't have a controversy with one person on one side of the debate and 20 people on the other side. Ergo, there are two sides on the dev team hashing this out, probably causing rifts among the team, possibly even creating a hostile work environment. It could be anywhere as high as just under half the team disagree with Twinsen. But let's put that aside for now and focus on the effects this debate has been having on the game since long before FFF 224:

Bots have already been nerfed several times over the years, in the sense that they cost more to make, they occur later in the tech tree, they require two full extra types of science just to unlock. And the real irony here is that the effect of all these changes has been to take bots, which Twinsen alledgely believes to be unfun, and make them even less fun/more work. (How is that solving the problem!? If bots are unfun, wouldn't you want to fix them by makign them more fun?) But bots players keep using them anyway. Twinsen doesn't seem to understand why this is.

Well, it's simple: Bots players want to use bots. I don't understand why that's such a shocker. The fact is, you could make bots require Space Science Packs, and bots players would still hold their noses, and build and launch an entire rocket, just so they could tear down all their belts and start playing "the real game."

Twinsen's goal, misguided as it is, seems to be to somehow convert all the bot players to belt players. This goal literally cannot happen because bots players find bots more fun than belts. But it hasn't stopped Twinsen and the Fun Police from adding nerf after nerf after nerf to the game to try and stamp out their usage. One assumes that eventually he'll go all the way and talk somebody into removing bots from the game.

There's literally no other way to accomplish what he said he wants to accomplish with these tweaks in the FFF. (Force players to stop playing the way they want to play, and get them to play the way HE thinks is more fun instead.) And then he'll wonder why all the bot players, rather than convert to belt players, have suddenly stopped playing. Why negative Steam reviews are piling up saying "they changed it now it sucks." Why people are demanding refunds in unprecedented numbers, and gee, you know, Steam usually has a policy about no refunds after so many hours of play, but, gosh, there's just soooo many refund requests coming through, maybe Valve will make an exception this time. He doesn't understand that you can't force people to like something. And he's willing to take the entire game down with him in this absurd crusade to get people to stop using belts. (I wouldn't be surprised if he was the guy nerfing solar panels all this time and making alien evolution compulsory, too.)

(And by the way? A game that you just picked up on Steam and want to play a quick game of is a totally different experience from a game you playtest 40 hours a week because it's your JOB. It's possible I'd get bored with bots too, if I had to build 4 bases a week from scratch. If that ever happens, I just won't research bots.)

Twinsen and the Fun Police ought to be ashamed of themselves. Twinsen himself ought to be fired. If not for his incredibly toxic, community-dividing idea of basically removing the noobtube from a single-player game, then at the very least for being so foolish as to openly discuss his botkilling ambitions in public. It's a PR disaster! Everyone knows what's going on behind the scenes now. The veil has been lifted. They can try to walk the comments back or flood this forum with sockpuppets to make it look like the community wants bots gone. But they can't pretend that there wasn't a controversy in the first place now. They can't pretend that they didn't know some players like bots. Even if management is on Twinsen's side in the bots VS belts debate, Twinsen shot the entire team in the foot with this bombshell of an FFF post.

Do I know for sure that bots will be removed soon, or even at all? Of course not. None of us knows what will happen next.

But there's one thing we know for sure.

If bots do go away, if they get nerfed, if they get destroyed, we'll all know Twinsen and his goons were to blame.

[Sonik-HSC]

Hello This FF have beat the record of posts in entire forum...no?!?! This game its very unique no one will find anithing similar...ate least with this grafics.... This game have infinite ways to shape factorys.... If this geme only gets reach of feacture... I have a question for DEVS.... " Why remove features....??? " If someone doenst like some feature, there is um amazing way to do is " Just don´t use it ! " Can this be more simple!!!! For example: ME - I dont like aliens, combinatores and cliffs... I have turned aliens and cliffs, and only unlock the teack combinatores because i need wires!

The players enjoi this game because have endeless ways to build.... and i dont think there is an game in world thath can do same as Factorio.... This game is kind infinite... The other games have limitations!!!!

[IV]

People, including me, like the game as it is, so maybe it does not need a radical change. On the other hand, maybe some changes would make it more fun. Maybe make a poll?

Yet an other suggestion to reduce the power of bots.

1) make the logistic area tiny, 5x5.
2) allow the bots only to move items within the area of one roboport; they can only pick something up and drop it in the 5x5 square. Bots should also stay at their own roboport.
3) allow one roboport to hold only 1 or 5 logistic bots.

Transport using bots will become hard: you will need a line (or grid) of roboports and buffer chests. A bot based factory will still be possible, but half of the area will be roboports and buffers.

If you want to make bots even less powerful:
4) make bots single use. Your bot dies after carrying one item. Maybe you even need to recycle (get back engine?) him to free up the space in the roboport again. If bots can carry only one item, then you are doomed to use belts for your bot factory.

[rldml]

To be honest, this is off topic, so please let us return to the genuine discussion

So, the issue isn't about whether something is OP or not?

This isn't a discussion about furnaces

There are some furnace setups, that intentionally avoid the electric furnace because of this reasons after all.

If you're playing a 2 hours game, this might be true. If you're playing a 1000 hour game, the ROI goes up massively... even if you figure in enough solar panels, accumulators and beacons to make them compete in production, they're hands free after that. Not having to find new sources of fuel for my furnaces is a huge advantage if I want to focus on some other part of the game. If you want to spend day and night hunting for fuel for steel furnaces, be my guest.

You missed some points:

First of all: Which setup of furnaces is good for your base depends on your strategy. If you have ore outposts, that are very far away, it might be a good idea to smelt the ore directly at the outpost, because the shipping of plates doubles the effectivity of your train capacity. In that situation, you have to produce the amount of electric energy direct at the ore site, which makes coal based furnace setups more attractive. In this situation, you would only produce enough electric energy for inserters, lamps, circuits logics. You can do that with some boilers and steam machines (water is nearly everywhere )

A setup of stone furnaces can be useful if you have a hard time to get enough ressources, because they are extremly cheap. Of course to the disadvantage of using more space as you need with steel furnaces.

The main advantage of electric furnaces is the abality to use modules. But you have to produce the electric energy to use them. That's a fact. Even if you use solar panels and accumulators you pay a price. Not only with ressources like iron, steel and acid, you pay with space too! If you want to use only one electric furnace over a day without any modules you need at least 5 solar panels and 9 panels, if you want to store enough electric energy in accumulators to use your furnace over night too. If you use modules in the furnace, you need even more. A typical furnace setup of 80 electric furnices need a sum of 720 solar panels, which need a huge amount of space and accumulators, all of the furnaces without modules. If your modules doubles the needed power... (you can follow my thoughts, right? )

BUT, for the sake of your argument, let's assume that steel furnaces ARE superior to electric furnaces. Then those furnaces are too OP and must be removed from the game. (See how silly this sounds?)

I didn't say, that steel furnaces are superior, only that electric furnaces aren't that much overpowered in comparation to to the other types. In fact, i believe in a good balanced setup of three burners, each with it's own advantages and disadvantages... Nothing more to say from my side...

The obvious progression of this argument is that for every action, there is one thing that could be considered better than another. Do they remove all these things from the game until there is just one way to do any "thing?" If not, why are bots so different? I mean, belts are way OP compared to passing items from one burner inserter to another in a long chain. But, then the game would be all about who wants to spend all their time fueling burner inserters.

Good, back to Topic

[corndog16]

I think the most compelling argument for leaving logistics bots as they are, is this: "you don't have to use them in your play through" Which is true.
However, gamers have also demonstrated a common inability to resist the use of a dominant strategy even when it is not required. And even if it makes the game less fun. (Don't believe me? lets talk about micro-transactions in other games)
Having a dominant strategy is generally bad for game balance and logistics bots are a dominant strategy. No question.

I think the devs have to decide if logistics bots are true to the nature of the game they want to be the creators of?
And is the presence of a dominant strategy helping or hindering the intended core experience?
"I'm a player of the game, and I like feature XYZ" isn't sufficient justification for keeping a feature that is unbalanced, broken, or not true to the core experience of the game.