You can finish the freeplay game with rocket and sattelite perfectly fine with only transport belts.
I read the awesome wiki article https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?tit ... ch_case%3F
The article boils down to:
-for long distances, trains are best
-for medium cases, belts are best
-for your dense factory, robots are best
Now the problem is:
-for finishing the freeplay, you don't really need such far distance to justify trains
-inside your factory, almost all things you'd build in assemblers require max 3 or so components, so the factory is really not that dense and complex. Only if a recipe needed 8 components things would get interesting as you can no longer have 4 reachable lanes on one side and 3 input and 1 output lane on another side to provide it the resources
My suggestion would be...
-nerf belts slightly to have less items / minute, while beefing up trains slightly, to make even bigger item/minute difference in favor of trains
-have resources farther away at default settings so that the distance argument becomes more valid, or have closer by resource mines be smaller while farther away ones bigger and longer lasting so you're more willing to use those
-require more complex recipes, as well as just more of them, for endgame things such as everything rocket related, level 3 modules, and maybe alien science packs (which are sooo easy now), so that one is more willing to solve it with robots
-possibly (maybe unpopular...): remove laser towers from the game, require ammo to defend always, so you have to bring ammo to the distant mines, a train can do that on its way back, while for belts it'd require a second one! Make good defence require both ammo and electricity, so we got both extra logistics to do AND the awesome effects of your electricity stuttering during an attack
Making both logistics robots and trains more justified would be AWESOME as I would be so excited to build them if they had an actual reason!
What do you think?
