Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

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Zerro
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Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

Post by Zerro »

Greetings,

I was wondering what the best way to be successful in this game is? Is it better to build short term setups and reorganize as you grow or is it better to plan your setup for the long run?

So far I've done one remodel after I unlocked Electric Furnaces and I feel like I need to remodel yet again due to an inefficient setup.

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DaveMcW
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Re: Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

Post by DaveMcW »

If you care more about speed and production, keep your old setups and expand with new ones.

If you care more about having a modern, perfectly designed factory, you will be constantly rebulding. ;)

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Re: Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

Post by Zerro »

DaveMcW wrote:If you care more about speed and production, keep your old setups and expand with new ones.

If you care more about having a modern, perfectly designed factory, you will be constantly rebulding. ;)
heh that's what I thought. I think my problem is that I am so used to modded Minecraft with consolidated building that I wasn't ready to build more spread out.

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vampiricdust
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Re: Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

Post by vampiricdust »

Well, the more experienced you get building factories, you find yourself using more future friendly builds. Arumba uses a very neat design for his furnaces that are future proof. Make note of the reasons why you need to redesign so the next time you can build with that in mind. I generally end up just building a messy initial factory just to get stuff done and then build a new factory with more future proofing.

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Xterminator
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Re: Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

Post by Xterminator »

Personally I think you should build in a way that can be expanded upon in the future. This mainly applies to things like smelting setups and maybe things like circuit production and oil products. Also power as well.

As others have said, once you get better at the game and the more experience you have, the easier it will be to plan things out. Really just make sure that you leave more than enough room when you build a setup in case you want to expand it later, and use designs that yield themselves to expandability. There are tons of smelting setup designs on the forums/YouTube/Reddit that work well and are easily expandable, even into Electric Furnaces.
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Re: Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

Post by Gregorovitch »

The more I play the more I lay out the factory in sections that produce specific products, provide each with room to expand and think about designs that are easy to double up and double up again.

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Re: Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

Post by Zerro »

I was debating the idea of centralizing my smelting vs setting up smelting districts for different projects. On my current map, I decided to setup a centralized location for Iron/Steel smelting and Copper smelting. Seems to be working well. All the ingots feed from these locations (That's to the north). I setup a huge liquid processing plant to the south of my base. Just finished setting up my first Green Circuit + Science Pack factory. Hope that will work out well.

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Re: Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

Post by sbroadbent »

During the Early Game, I look to just get a quick and dirty smelting operation going so that I get a steady supply of resources.
- One Electric Miner outputting to a chest.
- Two inserters moving ore from chest to two Stone Furnaces
- Two inserters moving smelted plate from Stone Furnaces back to a second chest.
- Dump Fuel into the first chest. Come back periodically to refuel and collect resources

In my Let's Play, I actually had this setup operating for quite a while, and it took me a while to setup a proper smelting operation.

From there I generally figure out a good place for my iron and copper furnaces based on the terrain, and where I expect the factory to expand to, and reserve the area with Electric Furnaces in mind. I will say that Arumba does have a good plan when it comes to leaving space for the upgrade from Stone/Steel to Electric Furnaces.

Once I'm able to transition over to Electric Furnaces, I usually transition over to them gradually, by building enough that my Smelting eventually exceeds my mining before decommissioning the old furnaces, just so I'm not hit by a shortage while I'm shifting things over.
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Re: Planning: Long Term vs. Short Term?

Post by roothorick »

For each game I have a particular factory topology in mind before even generating the map, and then I play to the part. I'll make three burners and manually feed them, then get a basic drilling setup going for the two ores plus coal and stone. From there I'll hook up the power plant to the coal mine so it feeds itself, then expand iron production to 5-6 mines and a suitable number of furnaces. At this point I start realizing my master plan.

One idea I spent a lot of saves on was a straight "highway" of belts, each carrying only one or two items down the line to be used later, with the assembly machines extending away from it. The idea was that I could expand production by tacking on more to the end. It... didn't work all that well; the belts quickly became a bottlene

Then I thought to combine those belts into a single loop of one belt in each direction, turning around onto each other at each end. Took me a while to figure out how to make it reliable. Hint: smart chests.

Now I've got this idea in my head of discrete "modules" of assembly machines tightly grouped together with inserters feeding one directly to the other, producing items by going through several stages in a single module. The number of assemblers, and doing what, will be based on production speed ratios (e.g. an electronic circuit module of three making copper wire and two making the actual boards). I'll reserve a space around each module so I can wire them together with conveyors without already knowing what will be where. Each module will only serve a certain small number of other modules based, again, on production speed ratios. If the supply side of a ratio isn't satisfied by the slack I have, I'll just throw in another module of that item. This should be fun.

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