I too feel that belts should not be taken over by bots and should provide the benefit of higher throughput for less space. While robots provide flexibilty, they should not provide higher throughput for comparable space/time investment, especially since belts take much longer to plan out and lay out.
From the solutions that were considered and proposed it seems this is the most logical one and best suited to the spirit of the game:
I know I should probably just sit and wait and hope this will happen, but seeing that you guys also:Technology which would turn all belts into stack belts.
You would research this and automagically all inserters, splitters and side-loading (also mining drills) would be able to make stacks on any type of the 3 belt tiers we have now.
You don't get any new entity, but you get the choice between upgrading all of your belts with this technology and not having to do any extra work, or tearing up your base and replacing with robots.
When you get the research, all of your belts would start buffering extra items, which some people might find annoying.
If we could code this and find a visual solution which wouldn't take too much work, I would prefer this option.
I wanted to throw my 50-cents at it.If we could code this and find a visual solution which wouldn't take too much work, I would prefer this option.
I am no coder, but graphics-wise I couldn't help but suggest a solution that has a potential to be both simple and good-looking:
Stacks could simply look like in the attachment below - literally like multiple icons stacked together (but actually one icon for each stage of stacking).
Stacking icon stages - up to 6 visually, should not look awkward and will still work ok with current inserters without looking weird.
Visual stacks could either correspond one for one each actual stack, thus 6 being max stack size on a belt, or each visual could correspond to two logical stacks (i.e. 6 visual = 11 and 12 actual, 5 = 9 and 10, except for 1 only = 1 and 2 = 2, 3 and 4). This visual trick could work for most intermediary products, thus only ores and some types of ammo like rockets would need specific "bigger-pile" and "smaller-pile" icons created for them. And final products for ground placement like solars or machines or refineries should simply not be stackable at all and be treated normally.
As for stacking mechanics - after researching, they could potentially only be created by stack inserters and should be created by them on belt automatically. Stack inserter with max research will take 12 plates and will create a 12-stack of plates on belt (visually looking like 6), or will take 12 ores (represented by a big-pile icon), which will occupy 1 spot on the belt, currently only occupiable by a single item. Other inserters, including stack inserters, could take from the stack as it passes by - each one will take only as much as is supported by either the machine behind it or by the inserter limit. Each grab from stack will reduce it but will not remove it from belt till it is depleted and it will visually change according to how many units are left.
If it is not too challenging, you could probably enable inserters to add to existing stacks, however for simplification they may not add to stacks, only take away from them, so max size stacks would require stacks inserters. To compensate for this, if a machine is serviced by a stack inserter and the product is intermediary or raw product the inserter could wait till there are enough products in machine to match its stack size and would only then unload, to avoid unloading singular units on a belt.
Other than this - underground belts and splitters could potentially need a graphics update as well to accomodate for tall stacks.
Waiting eagerly to see those stack belts in game
