New pipe- and pump-tiers

[VampireSilence]

Hello everyone, this is my first post in this forum and first of all id like to say that i absolutely LOVE Factorio. <3

TL;DR

After my 1500 hrs of playtime i think it would be nice to have more tiers of pipes and pumps like we already have multiple tiers of belts.

What ?

The solution i think of would be aligning those new tiers with belt tiers, so red pipes und red pumps would be 2 times faster, having 2 times the fluid volume they can contain and blue pipes/pumps would be 3 times faster, having 3 times the fluid volume they can contain. Pretty simple and pretty effective.

Why ?

Because it would allow us to build pipe tracks with a certain amount of fluid throughput for a longer distance and you could mix 3 underground-pipes with different colors along a 1-tile wide track, like you can already do with underground belts, which adds some more nice puzzling possibilities to the game.

What do you think about that?

Best regards

[NotRexButCaesar]

Hello everyone, this is my first post in this forum and first of all id like to say that I absolutely LOVE Factorio. <3

This is a very well composed first post. Most first posts seem to either make no sense, are unreadable and rambly, or don't follow the template.

The solution I think of would be aligning those new tiers with belt tiers, so red pipes und red pumps would be 2 times faster, having 2 times the fluid volume they can contain and blue pipes/pumps would be 3 times faster, having 3 times the fluid volume they can contain. Pretty simple and pretty effective.

What exactly do you mean by 2 times faster? Pipes don't have a "speed". Doubling the capacity does not necessarily double throughput, at least not from testing I have heard about.

I am not sure that there are many situations where this would contribute to gameplay. A full line of pumps/tanks already has far more throughput than usually needed for a build. I believe that the constraint of fluid throughput and the lack of "pipe weaving" adds gameplay value more often than not.

specifically in situations like this

1.jpg (306 KiB) Viewed 1608 times

In addition to the above, there are already many, many mods that add or change pipes/pumps.

[starlinvf]

I can see applications for mega factories to compact fluid networks. But thats about the only value it would have in vanilla.

A simpler way to go about it is post-rocket research to either increase pipe capacity, or change the coefficient on fluid transfer. Implementing pipe tiers would require this anyway; but this approach is less messy, and ensures the entire network has matching values, regardless of research level.

[Koub]

Tbh, event through simple pipes, the maximum throughput is already massive. I don't feel the need for "faster" pipes. Same thing with pumps. Virtually anything can benefit of higher tiers, but what does it really add to the game ? Not much if the tiers are just an upscale, the game just shifts towards incremental games, where, the only goal is look at numbers go up (don't get me wrong, I'm very much into incremental games). What makes the tiering really interesting is when higher tiers allow you to do things you couldn't do with lower ones.

[becks0815]

In the meantime you can use:
5DIM mod for pumps and pump jacks, Factorio++ for another type of high capacity water pumps, and high pressure pipes when you need extra capacity in the pipes.

[VampireSilence]

What exactly do you mean by 2 times faster? Pipes don't have a "speed". Doubling the capacity does not necessarily double throughput, at least not from testing I have heard about.

I refer to this table: https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system#Pipelines

So to give some example values i think of:

Code: Select all

No. of Pipes - Maximum flow (Default) - Tier 2 - Tier 3
0 - 12000 - 24000 - 36000
1 - 6000 - 12000 - 18000
2 - 3000 - 6000 - 12000
and so on..

Thats what i ment with "speed" (maybe i missunderstood that mechanic), but i hope you understand what i try to achieve with additional tiers now.