Factorio Forums

So I'm currently using mass amounts of drones to rebuild my horrible first mega base and I've noticed that with only 4 charging ports the current Roboport is absolutely slow for late game use and mass item transport like ore unloading and sorting(I warehouse my ore before it goes into a furnace stack) or main bus rebuilding. I know the first response to this is "just use more Roboports between point A and B but if you realize 1 roboport can hold 350 drones, so if all the ports get full I run into the same problem with most just running out of power and waiting to recharge destroying efficiency.

To approach this problem why not have 3 Variations of Roboports? The base Model in game could be for Drone storage with its massive drone inventory, while being the first kind you can build, having the same construction area and logistics range as normal. Logistics Drone Hives With maybe 8-16 charge ports with half the capacity ,extended logistics range, and no construction area. Lastly a Construction Hive With again 8-16 ports, But like the name suggests for construction with extreme range, and no logistics are.

I would also like to suggest another idea. A charging pad that has no bot storage, no logi or construction area, and is smaller than a roboport. It would have more charging slots than the current roboport does as well. Research could give it more slots and faster charging.

There is a mod for that https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Robo-Charge-1x1
but YES I think it should be part of the base game

It's worth pointing that that belts, bots, and trains all present their own challenges when building a megabase. Issues with fitting enough charging in key places, and keeping average travel distances short, are some of the challenges that make bots based bases not as simple as they seem.

Just because the game presented you with unexpected challenges, doesn't mean that the devs should make changes for vanilla.

I think roboports are fine the way they are. There needs to be some sort of balance between their apparent OPness vs other transportation systems, aka trains and belts. The limited recharge slots limit the number of robots that can efficiently work at the same time in a given area. There is no magic number sweet spot like exactly 4 is perfect balance, but as it is right now is okayish. At least that's my opinion.

i disagree that there needs to be any balance at all. im perfectly ok with robots being a replacement for prior transport methods, after all, its a game about automation.

that said, if i ever wanted a mode where it was "balanced" i would instead tie logistic robots to a specific roboport. such that they always return "home" after completing a task to charge.
then on top of that, limit the storage of roboports to something like 20. in that way, its impractical to have masses of robots without also having massive fields of roboports, that would not necessarily be close enough to help things flow faster than belts for certain tasks.

Eh, this would get complicated. Remove player inventory filling? Different typea of slots for construction robots and logistics robots? Not to mention the extra bytes spent for roboport pointers, or the cost of the extra logic.

thats sorta the point... the only way to make logistic robots anything like belts in total throughput would be severe limits, etc.
again though, i dont think this needs to happen. im happy with robots. in fact i use mods to get even faster robots, including fusion robots that dont even charge.

Why can I vote both yes and no at the same time?

Gergely wrote: ↑Thu Dec 13, 2018 10:13 am Why can I vote both yes and no at the same time?

Two options are allowed, presumably because the best option is "spaghetti belts for life" and anything else is just a secondary choice (although it seems that many people don't realize that for some reason).