Making bots take more power = Build more solar.FFF wrote:We have ideas like increasing the power consumption, decreasing the maximum stack size bots can carry to 2 items or buffing belts by adding a "stacked" belt tier.
Making bots carry less = Build more bots.
Both of these ideas run counter to the "no-tedium" philosophy, and offer little novelty. The only justification is a heavy-handed attempt to make large bases use belts.
We've had a similar discussion about nerfing before: Turret creep vs. turret warmup time. Improving combat rather than weakening turrets worked brilliantly.
It's almost always more satisfying to improve alternatives rather than nerfing things which seem overpowered. Hopefully this philosophy continues.
(Obviously the fluid nerf from last FFF runs counter to this in a way, but it was fairly even-handed, all things considered. The flexibility argument was a good one. Losing side-loading compression and the ability to generate compression in a space too small to fit a splitter, however. . . )
It would be entertaining if you had to build belt layouts which flying robots would somehow learn from, but that's probably too much abstraction for a game about designing factories rather than ushering in the Singularity...