Make underground belts/pipes use belts/pipes directly

[sparr]

Currently an underground pipe or belt has a fixed cost to create a pair of items/entities. When you place them, you decide how far apart they go, but the price doesn't change. So it costs just as much to build an express underground belt that's 2 tiles long as 8 tiles long. This doesn't seem right, and the disparity has gotten a lot worse now that red and blue underground belts can go so much farther.

Obviously an underground building layer would solve this, but that idea didn't make it into the 1.0 roadmap.

Here's an alternative suggestion: Change the entities to JUST be the "pipe to ground" and "belt to ground" tile, and actually consume belt items from the player's inventory when a second one gets placed. When you deconstruct one of a pair, you would get the belts back in addition to the entity you deconstructed. Things get a little tricky when you consider blueprints, bots, and deconstruction, but I think those are surmountable problems.

[AndrewIRL]

Yes, this would make the belt costs more realistic per unit distance but would it really do much to enhance the gameplay?

[mophydeen]

Yes, this would make the belt costs more realistic per unit distance but would it really do much to enhance the gameplay?

No

Who cares about the cost of infrastructure. Unlimited science costs a lot of research.
Launching +100 rockets to do 1 research that is costly.

[sparr]

Who cares about the cost of infrastructure. Unlimited science costs a lot of research.
Launching +100 rockets to do 1 research that is costly.

Not everyone builds megabases.

I've played 500+ hours of Factorio. I've launched one rocket. I've gotten as far as automating blue circuits maybe half a dozen times, total, among the dozens of games I've played.