Factorio Forums

I'm running Vanilla 0.15 Marathon Mode, nearing late game.

Ok, maybe i just dont get it, but I'm ready to be educated.

I've got 16 labs, with Lab research 3 done. I realise this was probably a waste of time, and should have just built a few more labs.
I dont care about efficiency modules. I've got around 2000 lasers, and 2000 accumulators, and 4 reactors. Power typically sits around 25% used, although spikes massively when several laser clusters kick in, but i've never dropped under 100% satisfaction. I have used 5% of the uranium i've got stored in the last 2 weeks. eg, Power is not an issue...

I also dont care about Speed mods. I struggle to supply all the "zones" in my base as it is. In Marathon mode, running 11 yellow belts of copper plate mainly gets smashed creating green circuits- which mainly is because of yellow science (hitech?). I have 21 Green Circuit Assemblers, and they are often paused waiting for more resources.
And my 10 yellow belts of iron plates get also soaked up, mainly by military science, but its a lot more spread than copper.

So, I have headed down the Productivity Modules, wherever possible, to try and reduce the demand on resource.
My base is now about 30x30 chunks, with 15 active outposts stretching far wider than that. I think I must have depleted at least 30-50 outposts already.

So, given the only logical mod I can think of is Productivity, and they cant be used in Beacons.

So, my question, does this mean Beacons are redundant (in 0.15 marathon mode) ?

If you're going to use productivity modules in your labs, then the speed research isn't a waste, since they let you get by with fewer labs, which therefore requires fewer total productivity modules. But otherwise, all the research is doing is saving you a little bit of space and a minuscule amount of power.

The best use for beacons will be to combine productivity modules with speed modules. The benefits of productivity modules are offset by the speed slowdown, leading to your super-productive assembler/refinery/etc only outputting roughly half of what it used to, and thereby requiring you to double the assembly (and corresponding modules) just to break even on output volume (even if you're saving on input materials). Or, you could use a single beacon loaded with speed modules to regain the lost speed across multiple assemblers at once, thus requiring fewer overall modules.

If you use speed3 beacons you don't need to make as many tier3 modules overall.

For example Assembler 3 with 4x Prod3 modules runs at 40% speed.

That same Assembler 3 covered by 8 Speed3 beacons providing a +400% speed bonus, runs at +340% speed - which means it produces items 11x as quickly as the first case.

In the popular "alternating rows" layout each assembler is covered by 8 beacons, and each beacon covers 8 assemblers, so on average for 1 assembler with 4 prod3 modules, there is 1 speed beacon with 2 speed3 modules. So by adding speed3 beacons, you add 50% more modules to get a 1000% increase in production rate. It will also produce the items at a lower energy cost per item by slashing the time to create an item, this maths has been done lots of times but let's do it one more time:

4x Prod3: 210kW * (1 + 0.8 * 4) / 0.4 = 2.2MJ per recipe-time
Beacons: 480kW + 210kW * (1 + 0.8 * 4 + 16 * 0.7 / 2) / 4.4 = 0.58 MJ per recipe-time

Which means prod3+speed3 beacons produces items at 26% the energy cost of pure prod3.

Now infinite alternating rows is the idealized case and thus numbers are not attainable in practise, but the scope for improvement is so massive that beacons are almost always a benefit in terms of items produced per prod3 module and energy use. These improvements in the amount of work each prod3 module is doing allows utilizing prod3 modules further down the production chain, even right down to running furnace setups as prod3+speed3 beacons and the holy grail of "full stack prod3" which allows cumulative productivity of like 500% for things like tech science packs (meaning 6 belts of copper can be replaced by 1 belt of copper, and prod3 in all machines)

Marathon mode IMPROVES beacons.

Productivity modules (esp. lvl3) are so expensive that you'll gladly use even spd1 in your beacons to get more out of them (nuclear solves electricity thankgod).

Also everything is so expensive that not using productivity is just madness.

You probably still want to use speed modules on your pumpjacks -- once they're down to 20%, speed bonuses are equivalent to productivity bonuses, and speed modules add more than productivity does. Other than that, if you don't care about production capacity or about electricity, then you're right that beacons aren't going to be useful to you.

evopwr wrote:I also dont care about Speed mods. I struggle to supply all the "zones" in my base as it is.

Speed modules in beacons for your miners and smelters would help with supply problems, rather than increase the problems on your assemblers.