Factorio Forums

Hi,

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?

General consensus is BOTS are overpowered, not belts.

A nerf to belts is not needed to give trains a need - merely changing resource spawning does that (see RSO mod which makes trains essential and completely resolves that part of the problem).

Bots are already ridiculous as it is (I'm experimenting with a no-logistics playthrough so I don't end up with boring solutions to interesting problems; construction bots are still fair game though), I'd rather not see them made mandatory by nerfing belts when belts are fine as it is.

You're also supposed to be able to use only belts, they're the general-purpose tool. You can also complete the game using only burner inserters, burner mining drills, and basic furnaces; it would be completely pointless when electric versions are vastly superior for automating, but you can do it.

Aardwolf wrote:What do you think?

I think:
Bad Idea.

Seriously, you have to restrain yourself NOT to use Logistic Bots, because they're so much more usefull compared to just using belts.

Im currently doing a Map where I only use Logistic bots for loading and unloading trains, for everything else I wanna use belts.
An MAN is it tempting to just use bots again because that is so much easier... but also much less fun trying to find good factory designs ^^

So, no need to strengthen the Bots, they're already the best in the game.
And Train Usage can be encouraged by overhauled map generation (see RSO, like Lallante mentioned).

That's really all that needs to be done.

The normal philosophy with that is: Let the people play what they want. Nobody should be forced to play like others think it should be played. Everything is right, nothing wrong. So if someone wants to play with bots or belts only: why not?