I work currently a lot with them.
Two things must be said:
- Logistic robots are in general not thought to transport over longer ranges than - hmmm - one screen fully zoomed out. But you can do that, and I have and will do this - you just need enough LRs. That's also the temptation: Once you know how they work, you try to use them for everything.
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They make only sense, if you use them with the logistic-network! I mention this, because at the beginning I made that (also?) wrong. You need to say "Don't produce 6000 items of that, I need only 20" and the robots move that to the place you need.
How I use them:
- I normally need not more than 50-150.
- they can replace a lot complicated belt-stuff, when you need to bring something from A to B but A needs to be here, because C is there and B needs to be there, because D and E are there. That's really a case for the LRs. Pure logistic.
- For main-production-purposes I try to bring all chests as near together as possible, because here are the really big amount of stuff transported.
- distributing the spill-over of one production-line (e. g. electric circuits) to help out at other lines, because it takes really much time to balance them right and for every game the balance is different and in detail it is not always interesting.
- making a production-line more effective. This is complicated to explain, but really easy. I place a storage chest at the end of a belt (with a smart-requester inserting it) and a requester-chest at the beginning. For example blue-potion. The over-production is put in the storage chest and then moved to the requester-chest, where it is re-inserted into the belt. When the belt is empty, the blue potion are so much better distributed between the researchers. When the belt is full, the requester is filled up to the needed amount. This is a very well working self-regulations mechanism, because you have two steps, of filling a chest (the storage chest by the smart-inserter and the requester-chest by the logistic robots). For other items like wheels for example this is much more effective, because you have more production-lines. which needs wheels and in most cases, one line currently don't need wheels, while the other line needs much more and so the wheels are automatically transported to the placee, where it is needed most.
- filling chests withing seconds instead of minutes with the inserters. (you can place only 4 smart inserters around a chest. A smart inserter can take an item every 0.4 secs. So 4 inserters can insert 10 items per second, then it takes about 6 minutes to fill a big chest completely. This is much too long in some cases. Logistic robots can fill that much faster, if you have enough and you have stored so much items anywhere).
- making excursions and build something. When I found a big site of ressources, and I'm out of mines, belts etc. I don't want to walk back. instead I place a requester-chest and order the stuff I need. This assumes, that you produce that stuff anywhere an put it in a storage chest.
- the same is also correct for building special stuff like solar panels and other resource eating stuff.
- I saw others making something like a central storage. I think this isn't needed, I just store it where it is produced and control the number of stored items with a smart-inserter there - but maybe I'm missing something, because I never used provider-chests (the red ones). Currently I think, they are really useless, because you cannot control, what and how much is stored in the provider chests.
- I also used them to create outposts, masses of guns to protect me a bit, or reducing the massive waves. The problem with powering it so long outside and don't want to build extra power-lines can be solved with solar panels and a bit accumulators. Guns have the advantage, that they can be filled during day and work also at night.
What must be said: LRs turns the game in a total different and I mean also "unlucky" direction. It makes everything easier, but they remove the need to really think. They are also too mighty, that's why they want to have charging-posts for them:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =917#p7629
That post means in my opinion, that the LRs will have a limited range (must charge after e. g. 300 fields otherwise it falls to the ground and may be destroyed - but thats all speculation, cause I don't know how it will be implemented). It means also a natural limitation, because who wants to see so much LRs standing or flying around, that you can't see the ground?
It's also my opinion that I think that the speedup for LR AND the "double-carry enhancement" are too mighty. It's like multiplying the number of LRs with 4. I think,, that even with the need for energy they need to be limited, because otherwise the players just build more energy instead of making logistics. And I think that they should act more random. They should not always use the next item waiting for transport, the should use some item in the list, within it's range. And if this it's not in the range it should search a charging-post inbetween, so that there is the chance, that the items are transported at some time, even if you don't have enough LRs to handle every order in time.