Early-Midgame bottleneck

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emp138
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Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by emp138 »

I finished my first play-through of the game a few weeks ago and was absolutely hooked. I played the 45hrs it took me to launch my first rocket in 4 days.
I moved to .15 and off of steam, so I'm running .15.31 right now.

My issue is this bottleneck of enjoyability after blue science. Around the time when you set up military and production packs/science. I'm not sure if it is just the layout of my factory that makes the production of the precursor materials convoluted, or maybe this area of learning factorio where I want clean, modular factories off of the main bus, but don't have the experience to know exactly how to do that.
Either way I seem to load up my save, look at how to do it, procrastinate for a bit cleaning up something else, and then getting bored and exiting the game.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it just part of the natural learning curve of the game, or getting hung up on the 'right' design. Would love to hear if others got to a point like this, and how they progressed through, both in that save, and in general with factorio.

Thanks!

d3x0r
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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by d3x0r »

I get kinda stuck at purple/yellow science too. I just haven't seen any good ways of doing it, and everything looks horrible when I try.
Alwyas seems like I end up with a setup that's not extensible so I end up just limping along with a few packs per minute production. Just seems I can't produce enough red/green circuits.

Frightning
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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Frightning »

My first go at 0.15 has been pretty smooth so far, but I'm a veteran of previous version of the game, so I already have a good intuition for how to solve the new problems that come with some of the new stuff. Still, science has proven much more resource intensive than in the past, and I've upgraded to a (double sided) red belt of iron early than ever before because of it (currently iron starved because my main and first outpost are both running low, with few drills left, but I will get that back up to speed with new outposts soon; waiting for the first outpost to get cleared so I can use the space to extend my smeltery line to handle the higher ore input first).

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Sicnarf »

emp138 wrote: Either way I seem to load up my save, look at how to do it, procrastinate for a bit cleaning up something else, and then getting bored and exiting the game.
Has anyone else experienced this?
That describes my first few games alright. Everyone is a bit different depending on the map settings they like but
The next stage you should experience is to keep restarting as you hit a point where you figure you made a bad design decision some hours ago and now it's going to be really hard to expand something.
The stage after that is where you don't want to use rails as it looks complicated and as you run out of local resources you start running huge long belts from distant mines, this gets annoying and you restart with different map settings a few times.
If you stick it out you eventually bite the bullet on rails and figure out it's actually not that hard after all, simple two lane rail system, T-Junctions, sorted. Shortly after you restart as you figure out your base was not built in a manner that was conducive to using rails to supply your furnaces.
Finally after a few more restarts due to bad design decisions you build your base really nice and neat with a well organised train system and you have one of every science a second coming in. I feel like this is everyones target when they start, 5 red science assembler, 6 Green etc all working flat out.
About this point the game really opens up as you have access to all the tech, where you go from there depends on the type of player you are.
Have fun.

Koub
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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Koub »

The learning curve is steep indeed. I have personnally launched my first rocket (or what was the rocket launch back in 0.9) after restarting maybe 10 ou 12 times. My wall was hit with blue science automation at that time. But every time I start a new game, I try to change my gamestyle to do a couple of achievements. It helps a lot to see things differently.
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.

Hannu
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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Hannu »

I noticed that. It is easy to make higher sciences after blue, but they take huge amount of resources if you want to get reasonable rate (0.75 bottles per second). It is quite tedious to conquer ore patches from biters and make larger scale production without proper weapons, power armor and construction bots.

I have never done clean structured base from beginning. I make always a starter base until I get fully functional bots, power armor and decent weapons. After that I begin to make new clean base nearby or separate factories for railworld. I keep starter base running until new base can produce everything. Currently I have 2 red belts of iron plates, 1 belt of copper and 1 belt of green circuits (from separate source) and I have began to make railworld. It is good tradeoff for starter base in my opinion.

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Lav
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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Lav »

I normally drop my games around the same period too. Not because I'm stuck, and I can live with suboptimal layouts.

The game just kinda loses it's challenge.

Basic production and science up to military/production is done, oil is pumping, energy is available, biters have been pushed back and cordoned off, sufficient resource patches liberated from them to fuel my base for years ahead. Only thing that remains to be done is build and expand the base. And simply building and expanding is boooring. :evil:

That said, I'm probably not the most typical Factorio player - I get more enjoyment from the planning phase than from the actually implementing those plans. Pretty sure I spent more time with pen and paper than at my screen when playing Factorio. :-)

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Wanderer »

I've been trying to nail a solo TINS (There Is No Spoon) run on pure default settings, so I've ran into what you consider the bottleneck too. It's even worse when you're trying to get everything done in 8 hours. R/G science runs for ages though while you setup (~2 hours worth at 1 pack / 1.66s). In regards to this since I've been playing heavily in the 0.15 experimental, though, I've surrendered and given up on the main bus. It was how I used to design all my factories, but I find it no longer worth fighting it. There's just too much iron needed for everything leading up to Yellow to handle it without multiple Express Belts if you want timely generation of science packs. Mil consumes turrets and Blue Electric Miners at a rate that could astonish the cookie monster for IP/s consumption. Yellow consumes a monstrous amount of copper now (2 x 48Steel furnace banks), too, and I'm still trying to balance out green chip production, but that's another topic.

First, I would recommend you modularize and blueprint (for between games) each science pack area you need to feed, with ratios of furnace to equipment roughly right. Purple and Yellow are HUGE layouts if you're looking to keep up with the 1 pack/1.66s , so leave some room for construction bots as it takes ages for some of those layouts by hand. These blueprints should include unique furnaces for each section, in-process steel creation for the light steel you need for Blue and Mil (Purple needs a dedicated steel furnace line, particularly if you plan to use it later for the rocket), a plastic or two somewhere mid-run, etc. Try to break them up a bit for sanity instead of all or nothing drops, you'll thank yourself later.

Next, I recommend in that blueprint book you layout some basic rail stations and rail lines to drop (if you dual line, anyway). I don't have time in the TINS run to do much more than layout whatever I can fast and dirty, but having the rail stations laid out with coal feeds and similar concerns saves me a number of headaches, particularly for the ones near the base that my construction force can build out for me.

Finally, the upgrades between versions to the tank make it a beast. If you can get Blue/Mil started, get that early. It's very powerful and can be used for all but the deepest huge bases with some repair kits between combats. I believe it's getting the turret bonuses as well for the MG, as it simply shreds things until you hit blue biters. It's really the only way I've found in midgame to be able to secure the resources needed at default levels to feed the beast of a base you have to build now.

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Matthias_Wlkp »

I'm there too... I launched only one rocket on .14, while started the game probably 6-8 times.

My story is:
1. Automate Green and Red - looks good
2. Shiet, this does not work well for the Blue Science, let's redo everything
3. Ok, now Blue and Black are automated.
4. Shiet, this does not work for the Purple and Yellow science...

After 140 hours of gameplay, I'm yet to figure out how to use roboports and automated construction... This is the next task on my list to do, which probably means rebuilding the whole "non-science" production area.

One of my challenges is, that I HATE the "river of stuff" design, so I'm trying to use circuit networks to make product flow that somewhat makes sense...

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by webkilla »

I'm familiar with this problem - sort of

My solution is usually to go big very early - basically spread out your factory to a HUGE early on.

Sure, it'll make bug-attack response tricky (that's what auto-saves and gun turrets are for - also concrete roads and cars) but it'll mean that you can cram more stuff into your factory later on

this has worked fairly well for me - though it did make for a rather stress-full period just before I got construction drones up for auto-repairing the turrets, and swapping them out with laser turrets.

Before I managed to do that, a lot of my time was wasted running around repairing my turrets, instead of developing the factory complex

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Matthias_Wlkp »

I respectfully disagree with that. Large plant is so much harder to maintain... What I find is that the research goes so fast - I would recommend to go as small as possible initially. The only thing you want to have expansion space for is your iron, steel and copper smelters, all the rest you can make locally where needed.

The thing that slows me down the most is that I tried to make enough blue and black science to keep up with two assembly plants making red and green... It all grows exponentially and then you suddenly end up with no iron ore in the area, all Red/Green research is done, coal is running out...

Just go slow - don't make too much research, as it will eat all your resources and then you will feel like everything is falling apart...

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Meddleman »

I've hit this bottleneck before, and I've found the most useful thing to do is between each block of stuff to research, completely dismantle and rebuild your factory. I meam completely. This allows you to build all your layouts with better belts, use midgame/lategame layouts not conducive to earlygame starts, instead of playing the replacing-game.

Second is, keep an eye on consumption, and allow space to build inlet points for main-resources for the bus. Many people try to keep boosting input at the start, but there are only so many iron plates you can squeeze into the start of the bus. Build inlets, it works.

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by HurkWurk »

i try to use the idea of independant areas.

so if i have a large iron field, i smelt right next to it, then nothing else is made close by, so that i can belt iron or steel to where it is needed. at the smelting site, i use chests, etc, as buffers, then belt everything out. by having distance between each area, i have room to modify layouts without affecting other things.

once i got used to building that way, i started playing with the factorissimo mod so that i could create factory buildings. once i got used to fitting things into factory buildings, building on the normal map becomes a lot easier, because you can figure out density mechanics.

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Nich »

Does no one else find it funny that he referred to the

"enjoyment bottleneck"

I agree the new science packs are a lot of tedium. I do enjoy how they extend the game but they feel like you need to do all 3 at once. Where as red comes first and takes 20 minutes to setup then green takes about 30. Then you hit the "enjoyment bottleneck" of purple/black/blue/gold all at once. To make things worse each time you add one pack you will need to add 2 red lanes of iron and 2 red lanes of copper. This goes very much against the flow of the game thus far.

Starting game (hand mining and basic setup) 30 minutes
POWER 30 minutes
Lets get things automated 30 minutes
Automate red science 30 minutes
Automate green science 30 minutes
WTF blue/black/purple 20 hours
(and this happens to be the time your starting mines are going empty so you also have to do your first real expansion)
Gold science 2 hours
Build a rocket 2 hours

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Selvek »

Nich wrote: WTF blue/black/purple 20 hours
Lol yup that sounds about right ;) Except really, you need gold as well!

The different science packs were intended to give you freedom to move in different directions (military vs production vs high tech), to allow more choice. But I don't think it quite worked out that way. Reason? End game requires heavy personal roboport use (because who builds new mining outposts by hand?) And until you have all the science packs, your personal roboport use is super limited. Using personal roboports with personal solar panels is quite painful so you really need grey and gold. You can maybe get by without purple for a while but at that point in the game not having requestor chests is pretty painful as well.

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by ManaUser »

I blame putting the Logistics System behind gold and purple science for this. If you had the Logistics System already a that stage it wouldn't be such a drag.

Koub
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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Koub »

The idea is that full logisdic system is very much a "I win" feature. unlocking its full potential at endgame is okayish, because you have solved all the logistic problems needed to achieve it.
It's like the power armor MK2, with fusion, exoskelettons, and stuff. If you got them from start, there would be no challenge in accessing enf-game tech. You'de run through biter bases like a breeze and would never have to defend any more.
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.

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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by ManaUser »

Koub wrote:The idea is that full logisdic system is very much a "I win" feature. unlocking its full potential at endgame is okayish, because you have solved all the logistic problems needed to achieve it.
It's like the power armor MK2, with fusion, exoskelettons, and stuff. If you got them from start, there would be no challenge in accessing enf-game tech. You'de run through biter bases like a breeze and would never have to defend any more.
Never said anything about getting it at the start. I just think you should get it while it's still useful. Once you're making the full range of science packs in quantity, what are you supposed to use it to automate? I guess there's still the rocket left to do, but that's about it.

Koub
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Re: Early-Midgame bottleneck

Post by Koub »

Well the way I understand it is : "you have researched logistic network, you have solved the puzzle of automating high tech science. Now, you may use this tool to scale up things dramatically with the help of logistic network to build a megabase.".
It's a design decision. The devs could also decide that it should be a tool to help you achieve the science automation, and lower one tier or two its science requirements.
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.

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