Why trains? (UPS focus)

[blazespinnaker]

I suspect (but haven't tested) that inserters grabbing items from belts is significantly more expensive in cpu cycles than picking up items from a chest/wagon/assembler. Hence a well designed train base is likely to be more cpu efficient than a belt base.

Inserters picking up of belts are worse (ups wise) than from chests. But train tracks take up space that means u can't fit as many beacons without using more inserters, so you end up with a trade off.

Most design decisions involve trade offs.
With a train setup you can get an 8 beacon arrangement with 2 less inserters than the equivalent belt based arrangement.
You can get rid of the long-handed inserter by using a car.
You can get 10 beacon arrangements with either an extra chest and stack inserter, or with a car. (No idea which is better. Using a car does limit your options to circuit control things. So another trade off).

train.beacons.setups.png

So yeah these are less beacons than the max 12 beacon arrangement that belts allow, and none of these designs facilitate chaining multiple steps using direct insertion, but all of these designs use less inserters than a train->chest->belt->assembler->belt->chest->train setup.

12 beacon setups are also possible, but some of the cargo wagons can't be used. (You can replace the unused wagons with locomotives).

Sweet, I think I'm going to try this.

[eradicator]

Ok, i'm out. You're living in a fantasy world that i don't know. Bot -> Chest -> Inserter -> Assembler is the shortest you get, and that's actually two inventory interactions more than Belt -> Inserter -> Assembler.

No man, just google RL assembly lines. Inserters are the exception, not the norm

Wtf do RL assembly lines have to do with UPS optimizing factories in a game? UPS doesn't exist in RL "man".

You can get rid of the long-handed inserter by using a car.

You can get rid of your UPS if you start spamming cars everywhere.

[jodokus31]

Would it help if trains had 1/4th their current slots and increase stack sizes by x8 to put UPS more in favor for using trains? Or other alterations such as the bulk rail loader (1 entity instead of many inserters withdrawing?).

What are the optimizations one could do?

I think, bulk rail loaders or mini loaders use internally just a bunch of inserters. What really should help is to research stack inserter capacity. Also, mining productivity for direct mining into trains.
BTW: Regular base game loaders don't work with trains or when support was implemented, it just kills UPS.

[Stevetrov]

<snip>

With a train setup you can get an 8 beacon arrangement with 2 less inserters than the equivalent belt based arrangement.

How? I have already said machine -> belt -> train -> belt -> machine is BAD.

So it basically comes down to a choice between belts or trains (not both) these are the best designs I know of:



BTW adding combinators to every chest really adds to the UPS cost.

If you want to see more of my rail designs then you can see them in my rail10K rail megabase

[blazespinnaker]

If you want to see more of my rail designs then you can see them in my rail10K rail megabase

very sweet stuff, for sure. What kind of SPM / UPS and on what hardware are you seeing/utilizing with that map?

I also notice that you double up on inserters a lot. I can't help but wonder if that causes issues. Have you found the double (sometimes triple) inserter pattern is preferable to losing some beacons?

Also, using just belts could probably cut down on your inserter/chest/logic usage by 1/2 or even more. Do DI trains really help that much? Or is it just more fun? Cause that map looked like a lot of fun (ignoring the solar, at least, I really dislike solar)

The robots for the silos was an interesting choice. Was that just an experiment or do silos really consume that much UPS without max beacons you had to go with that format? I can't help but wonder if beacons increase UPS consumption per assembler, so I wonder if the gain from more beacons is always justified

Have you measured the % working time of all of your assemblers at peak efficiency?

For me at least, I think SPM / compute resources utilized is the best measure of a map. All resources (space / material) are theoretically infinite, but CPU/Memory is not.

[tamanous]

You definitely wan't to take a look at the UPS Wars.

[Stevetrov]

If you want to see more of my rail designs then you can see them in my rail10K rail megabase

very sweet stuff, for sure. What kind of SPM / UPS and on what hardware are you seeing/utilizing with that map?

Its 10K spm and does 50 UPS on my laptop (i7-7700hq 2x8GB 2666mhz ram) can do 60 UPS on a decent desktop.

I also notice that you double up on inserters a lot. I can't help but wonder if that causes issues. Have you found the double (sometimes triple) inserter pattern is preferable to losing some beacons?

No sure TBH I wanted enough room in chests for most trains to do full load/unload to avoid too many train journeys. as always its a trade off.

Also, using just belts could probably cut down on your inserter/chest/logic usage by 1/2 or even more. Do DI trains really help that much? Or is it just more fun? Cause that map looked like a lot of fun (ignoring the solar, at least, I really dislike solar)

You can cut down the number of inserters but those inserters have to work for about twice as hard (it takes twice as long to pick up from belts than chests)

The robots for the silos was an interesting choice. Was that just an experiment or do silos really consume that much UPS without max beacons you had to go with that format? I can't help but wonder if beacons increase UPS consumption per assembler, so I wonder if the gain from more beacons is always justified

That was probably the part of the factory I least liked and have a train only solution now. (except satellites are delivered by bots)

Have you measured the % working time of all of your assemblers at peak efficiency?

No but most of them should be very high unless I have got my calcs wrong. Some of them like copper wire for RC will be low cause they are DI builds and DI is more important than uptime.

By far the biggest option for improving UPS on this map would be to have far fewer trains moving about, but lots of trains moving about was one of the design goals for a "monolithic" base.

For me at least, I think SPM / compute resources utilized is the best measure of a map. All resources (space / material) are theoretically infinite, but CPU/Memory is not.

Agreed, as I said above this map wasn't designed with UPS as the number 1 consideration. I have another base that is WIP that uses lots of DI train builds but is designs for max UPS, unfortunately I haven't finished it yet.

[blazespinnaker]

With the recent train additions, trains are pretty OP I have to say. Thanks Wube!