Is the jump from science pack 2 to 3 too large?

[tehroach]

My design goal was to NOT have a gap between assemblers. Because reasons

Well that is a good enough reason lol
but like you said it will work fine with a substation, either way I think it is a good design, I am impressed but I think it really provides a good point as Tricorius states

I'm entertained by the implication a new-ish player would be able to more easily construct this belt / lab layout than be able to complete oil and blue science as it currently exists.

.

I think this is really the essence of the problem

Its a focal point, as caveman age to the modern age.

the missing links between the caveman age and the modern age.
Where is the bronze age, iron age, the Renaissance.

[Koub]

Its a focal point, as caveman age to the modern age.

the missing links between the caveman age and the modern age.
Where is the bronze age, iron age, the Renaissance.

It is well known that the first steam engine was built in a cave, with bone and stone tools
I agree that at some point, the current blue science complexity is adequate. I only think it's not adequate at the place where it stands.
I have several hundreds hours of Factorio gameplay (even if I'm definitely not good at Factorio). I always have a clean and adequate base layout ... until I start automating blue science production, along with oil industry, at what point my elegant base becomes an infamous spaghetti mess. And it has been the case for every single game I have started.

[hoho]

I'm entertained by the implication a new-ish player would be able to more easily construct this belt / lab layout than be able to complete oil and blue science as it currently exists.

Something like that would only be needed if we have 24 different science packs or if the player doesn't want to use logistic bots to feed science labs.

In reality, feeding 6 different items to science labs per side is absolutely trivial. Even the noobiest of the noobs shouldn't have problems coming up with something like this:

6 per side belting

20160709101722_1.jpg (215.36 KiB) Viewed 5187 times

Having belts on both sides of labs makes having up to 12 different types of science bottles easy. I don't think there should be 12 different types of them in Factorio but more than 4 wouldn't be bad. An alternative would be to do as Bob did with his modules and have a completely different set of consumables and labs for researching module related things. He has 7 different types of consumables for modules. He also has extra science bottles for alien research. That lab takes 8 different types of consumables. I haven't seen people complain about either.

Long story short, I don't think complexity of logistics is what should limit the amount of different science bottles.

[tehroach]

It is well known that the first steam engine was built in a cave, with bone and stone tools

Mine or Cave! what is the difference?
Hands definitely contain bones!
and you can't make iron without breaking a few stones

So very loosely, technically your statement is absolutely correct.

I agree that at some point, the current blue science complexity is adequate. I only think it's not adequate at the place where it stands.

yep absolutely agree with this

I have several hundreds hours of Factorio gameplay (even if I'm definitely not good at Factorio). I always have a clean and adequate base layout ... until I start automating blue science production, along with oil industry, at what point my elegant base becomes an infamous spaghetti mess. And it has been the case for every single game I have started.

I don't really think that there is away to avoid the Spaghetti Monster in Factorio!
Long live the FSM

I tend to use alot of trains in my games, so the individual factories become fairly neat and tidy, however the Spaghetti will then manifest itself within the layout of the rails.

Having belts on both sides of labs makes having up to 12 different types of science bottles easy. I don't think there should be 12 different types of them in Factorio but more than 4 wouldn't be bad. An alternative would be to do as Bob did with his modules and have a completely different set of consumables and labs for researching module related things. He has 7 different types of consumables for modules. He also has extra science bottles for alien research. That lab takes 8 different types of consumables. I haven't seen people complain about either.

Long story short, I don't think complexity of logistics is what should limit the amount of different science bottles.

I think 8 would make a nice round number, as it could easily be done and would make for a nice extension to the tech tree.

[Ranakastrasz]

I don't really think that there is away to avoid the Spaghetti Monster in Factorio!
Long live the FSM

Its only the Flying Spaghetti Monster once you add Robots. XD

In my games, its kinda organized. Sort of, until I get to, yes, Oil. Then things start falling apart. And eventually I give up and start using robots.

[Tricorius]

Long story short, I don't think complexity of logistics is what should limit the amount of different science bottles.

Yeah. I agree that a simpler belt system would allow them to "finish the game" and the proposal is to use advanced types of science to unlock other stuff.

While I don't neccessarily disagree, I'm not sure the main value-add created by a bunch more types of science packs. It feels like just adding more things for the sake of adding more things.

I just got done working more through my Ringworld map and so far I've only come across two fields of three oil deposits (each) with an average yeild of 40%. Man, it has been quite a challenge. I ended up setting up a partial blue science chain and manually fed an assembler with a chest. It worked, but certainly wasnt fast enough to keep up with my labs.

But it got me to advanced oil, which helped me get everything working again.

Honestly, I don't the problem is with science...it is with oil. Now I haven't played all the way through the campaign so oil might be properly covered in there. But the two main trips for me when learning were figuring out how to best lay pipes that had to connect multiple assemblers or chemical plants (without reducing throughput) and figuring out that maxxing capacity for any type of oil brings your oilworks to a screeching halt.

In fact, when I was more of a newb, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with my oilworks (heavy oil had backed up). I eventually traced it back to things filling up (and accidentally loosing at least 2.5k of each oil when ripping up tanks in desperate teoubleshooting). It makes sense once you figure it out. But until then it is pretty crazy.

Again. All of that might have been explained if I'd had the patience for the tutorial campaign.

[hoho]

Honestly, I don't the problem is with science...it is with oil.

Oil problem gets more or less solved once you get modules and beacons. Surround each pump with speed beacons and they'll be producing a LOT more oil.

Sure, you'll also increase power usage by a few orders of magnitude but at that point in the game, it shouldn't be that hard to spam solars at a massive scale.

[tehroach]

Honestly, I don't the problem is with science...it is with oil.

I wouldn't really say that there is a problem with the science or the oil system in general
the problem I see is the ratios.

SP1 requires 2/5ths of the raw resource types
and so does SP2 but at a ratio of 1:3.3... raw units over SP1
then SP3 requires 4/5ths of the raw resource types and at a ratio of 1:8.1 raw units over SP2
but then SP4 uses 1/5th of the raw resource types and at a ratio of 1:565 raw units under SP3

also I think the best ratio of assemblers for SP's is 5:6:12:2 and having 2 assemblers is a real over kill but you can't really have 1.2 assemblers
to get a 1:1:1:1 ratio of SP production you would need a factory with ratios of 25:30:60:6 SP assemblers, which would probably blow through the tech tree faster than you could build it, well at least faster than I could

IMO I think that they should replace the battery and steel component of SP3 with barrels of lube and replace the red chip with solid fuel.
then move the battery and red chip with some extra stuff to be a component of SP4 and remove the Alien Artifact from SP4.

-Allow the current end game to be completed with just the 4 SP's.

Then maybe add another 4 SP's that required Alien Artifacts that could be used to unlock another completely separate tech tree, that could be used to add items that could be used to alter the aliens in various ways etc.

While I don't neccessarily disagree, I'm not sure the main value-add created by a bunch more types of science packs. It feels like just adding more things for the sake of adding more things.

What if you apply this same logic to the rest of Factorio?

[5thHorseman]

I've given this some more thought (and read the entire thread, though not all of it recently so if this was brought up before I apologize) but I think that Science 3 could be simplified a bit (I like the idea of making it more basic oil products, and then making Science 4 even harder than 3 is now) but only if you also made more tech tree items require it.

Essentially what I'm proposing is to shift the entire tech paradigm down a bit. Make science 3 easier to make, but require you to make it earlier in the game. Then make science 4 actually hard (really hard) to make.

[bigyihsuan]

Read through the thread, and I also agree on how my bases are always nice and tidy until I start to make oil, then it devolves into this absolute mess.

I also agree on making Science Pack 3 easier by using "tier 1" oil products, then use "tier 2" oil products in Science Pack 4.

SP3 could have the existing Filter Inserter and Steel Plate, but swap out the Advanced Circuit and Battery with Solid Fuel and Lubricant. Makes it 3 items and a liquid, simpler than otherwise.

SP4 could be Alien Artifact, Advanced Circuit, Battery, Express Belt, and Light Oil. By the time you're able to make SP4, with this recipe, you should be familiar with how oil works, and be comfortable with using many products from the oil industry. I also tried to get at least 1 product representing each refined oil you get from a Refinery.

1 Alien Artifact for 1 pack in this case might be too expensive, but unless a Small Alien Artifact (10 Small for 1 regular) is added, SP4 might be limited to Artifacts on low-biter worlds.
Advanced Circuit is moved here from SP3. Uses Petroleum.
Battery is also moved here. Uses Sulfuric Acid, from Sulfur, from Petroleum.
Express Belt is new, because it uses Lubricant from heavy.
Light Oil is Light Oil.

[lancar]

The jump in tech green to blue is a bit long, for sure, compared to red -> green or blue -> purple
reg -> green is fairly short, and due to necessity since tech lvl red contains so few techs and are done with quickly, forcing the player to evolve the factory. Honestly, I feel this setup is good design as it develops the players ability to play the game.

Green -> blue however takes SO long. The complexity involved in setting it up is unmatched in the whole rest of the game, since blue -> purple is absolutely trivial (1 single assembler and a chest. done.) and you can even research purple using only red and green! It's like the game progression ends abruptly upon achieving blue tech, even if research does not.
This is also the reason why both the tank and modular armor are utterly pointless once you got blue tech set up. You'll already have the red circuits pumping out, so plopping down assemblers for blue circuits is really simple, so (when it comes to your protection) there's literally NO reason whatsoever to build anything but power armor at this stage, which is significantly more powerful than both the tank and modular armor combined and, as an added bonus, does not require you to setup cannon shell production.

[BlakeMW]

This is also the reason why both the tank and modular armor are utterly pointless once you got blue tech set up. You'll already have the red circuits pumping out, so plopping down assemblers for blue circuits is really simple, so (when it comes to your protection) there's literally NO reason whatsoever to build anything but power armor at this stage, which is significantly more powerful than both the tank and modular armor combined and, as an added bonus, does not require you to setup cannon shell production.

Modular armor is really, really cheap to get, once you're producing batteries you can throw down a processing unit assembler next to them and hand fill a chest with some advanced circuits and electronic circuits to make a few processing units. You can then get about 4x portable solar panel, 2x battery and a energy shield or two. With the energy shield buff it's surprisingly non-useless (as long you don't expect to fight all day). There's also my old trick of using (up to) 4xPortable Roboport in Modular armor with no power supply at all, you just hoover up the robots when they try to recharge, since you can transfer all the roboports to the Power Armor setup it makes a very cheap way to get started with blueprints and deconstruction planner and there's no useless crap to get rid of besides the Modular Armor itself.

Now the Tank... the poor poor Tank. But it still makes a bloody good battering ram and capsule deployment vehicle (sadly cannon shells are simply inferior to capsules), and with a total research cost of only 90 blue science (50 Military 3, 40 Tank) and the cost is "basically free" compared with power armor.
Also it still makes a really good combat option for a devoted personal roboport user who can't be bothered with extra gear for combat - and now that repair packs heal 200hp a pop the repair bots work really, really well. Each time a repair bot touches the Tank it heals 1/5th its hitpoints.

[lancar]

This is also the reason why both the tank and modular armor are utterly pointless once you got blue tech set up. You'll already have the red circuits pumping out, so plopping down assemblers for blue circuits is really simple, so (when it comes to your protection) there's literally NO reason whatsoever to build anything but power armor at this stage, which is significantly more powerful than both the tank and modular armor combined and, as an added bonus, does not require you to setup cannon shell production.

Modular armor is really, really cheap to get, once you're producing batteries you can throw down a processing unit assembler next to them and hand fill a chest with some advanced circuits and electronic circuits to make a few processing units. You can then get about 4x portable solar panel, 2x battery and a energy shield or two. With the energy shield buff it's surprisingly non-useless (as long you don't expect to fight all day). There's also my old trick of using (up to) 4xPortable Roboport in Modular armor with no power supply at all, you just hoover up the robots when they try to recharge, since you can transfer all the roboports to the Power Armor setup it makes a very cheap way to get started with blueprints and deconstruction planner and there's no useless crap to get rid of besides the Modular Armor itself.

Now the Tank... the poor poor Tank. But it still makes a bloody good battering ram and capsule deployment vehicle (sadly cannon shells are simply inferior to capsules), and with a total research cost of only 90 blue science (50 Military 3, 40 Tank) and the cost is "basically free" compared with power armor.
Also it still makes a really good combat option for a devoted personal roboport user who can't be bothered with extra gear for combat - and now that repair packs heal 200hp a pop the repair bots work really, really well. Each time a repair bot touches the Tank it heals 1/5th its hitpoints.

You're right that it's absolutely possible to squeeze out a suit of modular armor a bit earlier using this method, but frankly why would you?
There are only 4 reasons for leaving a base at this stage in the game:
1, to scout for resources (something your radar, which you built ages ago, is doing for you already)
2, build outpost bases (which you probably don't even need yet due to your starter fields still having plenty of resources left)
3, clear nests to expand
4, gather alien artifacts

If your starter fields are very poor or your factory has been running inefficiently for a long time you might need to gather extra iron at this time, or perhaps if there was no oil at the start. The necessity of oil to even make the modular armor excludes that, however, so we're left with just a shortage of iron and maybe stone if the initial field was very tiny. At any rate, normal steel armor (craftable using only red tech) makes you near-immune to small biter attacks, and medium ones don't really show up until quite some time later unless you've pumped a lot of pollution into them non-stop. With red ammo magazines you can easier clear any non-big pre-mediumbiter nests that lack large worms without issue, all this done using only red and green tech that you get naturally.
Outposts are limited in their use at this stage for the very same reason: no reason to build them yet.
Artifacts are useless until you got at least blue tech up and running, so, yeah...

To build modular armor you need 10 blue circuits, and since they require both gas and red circuits you're heavily incentivized to plop production down at a permanent location in your base, because it just means extra work if you don't, and you'll need more of them later anyway. Factorio is a game about automation, after all, and if a player hasn't figured that out by this point then something is definitely wrong.
The investment cost is minimal. Now, before your starter oil fields start to fade production of oil is plentiful, thus the difference between 10 blue circuits and 100 is almost negligible. Researching something for a few 100 extra blues to get power armor means you wait with your going-out-of-base expedition only an hour at most, unless you intentionally delay it by researching many other things first.

The benefits for going for modular armor are so limited in their scope that I see them as completely pointless compared to just straight up getting power armor and be done with it. I've suggested before that I think modular armor should not require blue circuits because of this. It's a green level tech that requires materials that're only available once blue tech is up and running and grossly underpowered compared to the power armor, so therefore should be available to you much earlier to make it more relevant.
Hell, even iron armor is more relevant that modular right now because it's piss-easy to make and allows you to survive accidental hits from small biters in the super early game.

TL:DR
Once you got everything you need to actually produce that suit of modular armor you're just a stones throw away from getting a suit of power armor instead, so why not just do that?
This is just one of the problems of the current balancing of the technology tier system.
Honestly, I think it could be greatly improved just by throwing the alien artifact tier (purple) into more complex territory, making it harder to get production for and putting power armor in that tier instead. And delete the blue circuit requirement for modular armor to make it available earlier, too.

This way, red would have iron and steel armors, green would (actually) have modular, blue would have the tank, and purple would have power armor (mk1 and 2)
I say this because I really DO want to build the modular armor. It's a great item with creative systems, introducing a player to customizable armor modules and how to juggle on-board power requirements. It just arrives far too late to the party.

[Ranakastrasz]

Blue circuits aren't much further than red. Honestly, they should also be seperate and require blue tech... like how red requires redgreen and green requires re... oh wait. So much for a pattern...

I made modular armor in my modular armor mod use red circuits only, same with basic equipment.

[orzelek]

Blue circuits aren't much further than red. Honestly, they should also be seperate and require blue tech... like how red requires redgreen and green requires re... oh wait. So much for a pattern...

I made modular armor in my modular armor mod use red circuits only, same with basic equipment.

Unless you are playing with bobs electronics. Then they are.. very far

[reallyLost]

Read through the thread, and I also agree on how my bases are always nice and tidy until I start to make oil, then it devolves into this absolute mess.

I always had this problem as well, until I made one very simple design change that solved everything: I reserved space on my main bus for fluids right from the start. That's all that was needed, and then all the problems with oil layouts completely disappeared. Assuming of course that you are using a bus.

[Tricorius]

I always had this problem as well, until I made one very simple design change that solved everything: I reserved space on my main bus for fluids right from the start. That's all that was needed, and then all the problems with oil layouts completely disappeared. Assuming of course that you are using a bus.

This is certainly one way of going about it. Although I find that I really don't have a lot of areas that use oil. So what I've started doing is running oil "underneath" (to the south of--or really just adjacent to) the production bus.

It's a bit difficult to explain, but basically I reserve enough space where I can branch off my production line toward the oil and meet in the middle area for combined products. It gives enough space for refining / cracking / etc and still allows you to shoot small runs of pipe up where needed for things like plastics.

--- iron ------->
--- copper --->
--- steel ----->
--- (etc) ----->

(Oil / Metals Structures)

|------------------------------|
|------------------------------|
|-----------oil ---------------|
|------------------------------|
|------------------------------|

[BlakeMW]

You're right that it's absolutely possible to squeeze out a suit of modular armor a bit earlier using this method, but frankly why would you?

First because it's pure green science to get a working setup (energy shield ), you only need blue science if you want personal roboports or exoskeletons.

Secondly, for the same reason that you might not skip Power Armor to go directly to Power Armor II: so you don't have to wait before using power armor features. It's not like Modular armor is expensive, it's like 1/10th the cost of Power Armor, you don't save much by skipping it.

[lancar]

You're right that it's absolutely possible to squeeze out a suit of modular armor a bit earlier using this method, but frankly why would you?

First because it's pure green science to get a working setup (energy shield ), you only need blue science if you want personal roboports or exoskeletons.

Secondly, for the same reason that you might not skip Power Armor to go directly to Power Armor II: so you don't have to wait before using power armor features. It's not like Modular armor is expensive, it's like 1/10th the cost of Power Armor, you don't save much by skipping it.

Again, to make it you require blue circuits. To make blue circuits you require a setup that is already producing all the components for blue science (apart from filter inserters, but they're like 1 or 2 assemblers away at that point if you completely ignored them until now).
and if you're already producing blue science, which you likely are since it unlocks pretty much the entire 2:nd half of the game, why go for modular instead of power armor when it's so close?

Modular armor is currently in green science territory in name-only. For all practical reasons, you won't actually be in a position to make it until your factory is configured for blue science. This is the problem, right here!
and, like i said, 10 or 100 blue circuits for even the lowest permanent factory configuration is NOT a big difference.
plus, you can completely skip all the solar research and building of portable solar cells if you do this, as a fusion reactor is, at this point, also just a single research away. This means you can reliably power several personal roboports as well, which we all know are incredibly useful.

[BlakeMW]

Maybe in your playstyle. But it's easy enough to make red and blue circuits on an adhoc basis. You only need 10 blue circuits to make a tolerable Modular Armor setup, which can be made with 10 advanced circuits and 200 electronic circuits put in a chest to feed into a blue circuit assembler stuck on a random sulfuric acid pipe. It's what I do to make my first 150 or so blue circuits because I like to have some before I bother making a proper setup. I also often do the same to get the first 150 or so Science Pack 3. There is nothing forcing to make full setups immediately.

The thing is, that with normal-ish settings before you can really get serious about Advanced Circuits, Science Pack 3 and Processing Units you need to massively increase your copper and iron income. To do so, requires securing more territory. To do that, requires combat. The earliest good cost-effective combat gear available is Modular Armor w/ Energy shield (for use with flamethrower) and the Tank. But even without ramping up your resources it's perfectly easy to make a few hundred red circuits and a dozen processing units to get those combat options. (Okay if you're using offensive turrets it doesn't really matter because gun turrets w/ regular ammo will do everything you need until late Big Biter era - but like many players I prefer to abstain from offensive turrets).