You'll note that other than RSO Radar, I didn't change the game really - just added some color and display stuff. I wanted to see what the default experience was. The default settings aren't too bad except: 1) not enough stone - there's never a patch worth running a train to. 2) too many biters - it's a sea of red out there and it gets ted.i.ous.
I added RSO Radar much later and regretted it pretty badly in terms of filesize and depression over the huge sea of red. Around the same time I added colored concrete, which is awesome, and the blueprint mods, which really should be in the base game because life without them kinda sucks now, and nixie tubes, which are totally sweet. I also did "enhanced map colors" and despite its simplicity, it really, really, really enhanced my day - another candidate for the base game.
Anyway: on with the base tour:
Iron Unload
... copper unload is a duplicate on the other side of the smeltery. Someone once asked someone else (I was neither of these people): "why are all your trains sitting in stackers when they could be busy unloading?" I tried to address this by having 8 unloading stations and no stacker. But the experts (if any are reading this, which is unlikely) are already ahead of me and know what I'm about to say:This plan was an utter failure. Because the trains always choose the nearest of the 8 unloaders, so I had 1 or 2 stations backlogged with ore, and 6 stations sitting empty, and 12 empty lines into my 16x16 balancer. Sadness.
In v 0.13 I can fix this with combinator tricks (I could fix it in 0.12 with the smart trains mod, but I just explained why my base is vanilla at the moment).
The 'real' fix is, of course, to do logistic bot unloading, so that I don't care if the trains prefer one station, and I don't have to sort them by ore (and I no longer have to worry about miners which sit on two resources out in the field), but that's a different base. Not the one I'm trying to make. In 0.12 I hacked around it by having my trains cycle stations, but that's a workaround I only used because 0.13 is so close.
Moving on:
Smelting
Just imagine huge amounts of this. Pretty standard stuff. The splitters are so I don't have as many idle furnaces at once - also the lanes are 36 long, so in theory those 72 smelters can compress my copper and iron belts. The stone paths are "reserved for beacons" space - though if I go beacon, the lanes will be too long and I will have to shorten them from 36 to X, where X is a number I don't know.Next stop:
Basic Greens
Ho hum, the same 3:2 green build everyone uses. I didn't reserve space for bacon because if I use beacons, the ratio approximates 1:1 more closely and so I would need a total redesign, anyway.Speaking of basic stuff:
Red Battery Blue
Pretty standard fare here, too. By now you may have a noticed a trend in my "designs", but I'll get to that in a moment. For now I can say: the blue circuit build would be wholly inadequate for multiple rocket launches. It drains pretty quickly if I build modules. Not nearly as quickly as the red circuit build, though. I have 64 assembly machines making reds (the setup you see there goes to a length of 16, thus 32. Then is mirrored on the other side of the main bus) and they empty quickly and refill slowly (not for lack of resources, though, just for being slow). It is sad making how quickly all my reds fly away.And finally for the basics:
Sulfur Acid and Plastic
Zzzzz. Probably too much sulfur and acid for the batteries+blues, but whatever. That plastic build can keep up with the reds as long as I don't run out of oily.I also have belt-based builds for ammo, which looks like batteries without the liquid import, and concrete, which looks like batteries. And a smaller smelter for stone bricks.
For the rest I went with your joe-basic smart factory. But we'll get back to that. The trend in my belt-based builds was this: ||-> belt, inserter. There is nothing else. No inserters loading from or to corners, or underground belts, or splitters, or even facing belts end-on. No mixed belts. No long-handed inserters. Sure, I may spend more resources loading up the belts, but it's a one-time cost. Even if I empty a belt and have to refill it, it means I used that much resource, so it would have been spent anyway. The "belt buffer" only has to be filled once. And one-time costs depreciate to negligible over time. But that's not why I do it that way. I just don't like/trust anything but ||-> . Probably an aesthetic thing. You may have also noticed (especially if you consider "standard" builds for green circuits) that I don't buffer-chest. Which brings us back to the smart factory.
Smart Factory
Why have my bots running around all over the base, when I can bring everything to them? My 'smart factory' is probably faster than the average 'smart factory' because my bots move less and thus recharge less (and thus I don't need a million roboports covering basic traffic lanes around the whole setup). And if I'm gonna have a 'central storage', then it might as well be convenient to the smart factory as well.I have more to add about the refinery, oil load/unload, details about the combinators on the left side of the smart factory, engineering trains, and my walls, but I'm super tired and not sure anyone is interested, so I'll snooze for now.
Game #3 was for experimenting and learning.
