Friday Facts #224 - Bots versus belts

[engineer2]

If you want to remove bots from the game, you should definitely provide more features for belts, i.e.: an even faster belt than the blue one with according inserters and underground belts (maybe even another speed for very, very late game?). Also, another (faster/better..) version of the electric furnace/fast stack inserter would be required then to load those types of belts.

I've experienced that belts can't beat bots at some point in very late game - simply because you are required to build up to 16 or more rows of belts just to provide your base with enough iron. So, if you want to remove belts (which I would consider a very interesting and good idea at this point), you should definitely expand the possibilites of belts & co.

[irbork]

While in theory belts add all sorts of interesting complexity, in practice I hate it. Belt balancers/taps are overly complex and have just that touch of unreliability due to weird timing quirks in splitters. Make them 100% reliable, give better ways to lane balance, and make compression actually sane and belts might just have a fighting chance.

A more realistic suggestion though: overhaul modules and beacons. Currently the optimal way of using them is the bands shown in your screenshot. It's high throughput and cheap material cost. And it's boring. Belts can't compete because it's usually impossible to weave them in there (although there's a few cases where a clever design makes it work.) Instead I suggest making the beacon itself have decreasing returns (so there's little point maximizing the overlap), integrating the module into the beacon (so it becomes a "speed beacon" rather than just some slots), and make each module a unique combination of effects. You could have a low grade "eco module" that's low cost and lowers energy with a small speed boost while a "tycoon" module is expensive but increases productivity, speed, and energy consumption. Each machine would have only a single slot so you just use the modules fitting your style rather than min-maxing. You could also avoid having 3 tiers of everything unless each has a clear application.

Very good observation about beacons. As long as they are as they are now belts become obsolete at certain point. In my opinion beacons should have much larger field of effect (something like substation), cost extra power consumption (480kW+120kW for each affected machine) for each affected machine and affected machines should receive diminishing returns for each additional effect source (and I mean 1-100%, 2-100%+10%, 3- 100%+10%+1%).

[Tekky]

But maybe one could consider making bots fermionic (maybe you have a physicist in the team). At the moment the robots can stack apparently infinitiveliy, you can have arbitrarily many robots in a certain area. If you change it such that only one robot can be on a certain amount of area (a tile) maybe this would restrict the use of logistic bots to use cases where you want to transport only a low amount of items like transporting some rocket parts. But of course I cannot estimate performance implications or other problems.

I really like this idea. However, I am afraid that implementing ATC (air traffic control) for bots would be very CPU intensive.

[Tinyboss]

I suggest making the beacon itself have decreasing returns (so there's little point maximizing the overlap)

Ooh, I like this, at least in principle. I agree that going for an "8-8" beacon/assembler layout really pushes belts out in many cases. Of course, I'd like a solution that allows us to reach the same (or greater!) productivity levels that are possible now with bots and beacon rows.

integrating the module into the beacon (so it becomes a "speed beacon" rather than just some slots), and make each module a unique combination of effects. You could have a low grade "eco module" that's low cost and lowers energy with a small speed boost while a "tycoon" module is expensive but increases productivity, speed, and energy consumption. Each machine would have only a single slot so you just use the modules fitting your style rather than min-maxing. You could also avoid having 3 tiers of everything unless each has a clear application.

Eww, I hate this. Give us building blocks and let us find our own optimum configuraitons.

[admo]

The topic of bots has been something I've been modding to adjust for a bit, but I think bots are just one facet of the bigger issue of "free/resourceless/infinite" power. The argument goes like this:

• Bots are too powerful because their cost is negligible.
• The one-time cost of building anything in Factorio is amortized over time, one time cost of bot, belt, train, etc.
• To create a balance between logistic systems the ongoing cost must be meaningful, for bots this is power.
• Power cost is meaningless over time because solar power turns power into a one-time cost issue with no logistical concerns.

I therefore suggest the real issue here is free infinite power through solar, that allows one-time cost to mitigate a whole aspect of Factorio gameplay.

[Siergiejus]

Hi everybody, here is my little thoughts. On belts many products is in hold position like in chests, but chests are more compact way of gathering resources. That lead in the late game to use bots aka. evolution from spaghetti to full optimize bot factory. Megabases truly need bots for transportation in straight line A -> B no matter to obstacles, and to optimize UPS/FPS.
If You wanna nerf bots so maybe we should have some ultra fast belt and loaders? Or just simple option when we start the game to use bots or not, like with biters we can turn them off/ on.

[torham]

I personally tend to avoid bots for large scale factories, but I find them extremely useful as well. I use them for the delivery of tricky goods, that would need crazy complex belts, like fueling trains, fueling nuclears and so on. I think I would miss them, if they were removed completely, but even a serious nerf would not affect my play strategy.
I can however appreciate the massive mega bases they enable, and I think they would be missed by a lot of people...

PS: so you want to steer players to use more belts, and then nerf belt compression to oblivion??

[MatHack]

In the current situation I see logi bots as a sensible replacement for belts/inserters when you're running a 8 beacon layout. The current belts/inserters just can really keep up with the speed the assembling machines 3 at that speed (speed ~9), especially for the more complex/expensive recipes that are in the game (eg. High-tech science packs). Higher tier belts/inserters would at least be some insentive to use belts/inserters at the very end-game of factorio.

I agree with you that logi bots are overpowered, did you guys ever think about removing the connections between the different logic networks? So bots belonging to a single roboport and they can only work within the range of that one roboport. You probably would need to make something like charging stations for robots so the robots keep being viable. This would really limit some of the massive bot-based bases I see, where bots fly 10 chunks to get from one side to the other.

[Yehn]

The topic of bots has been something I've been modding to adjust for a bit, but I think bots are just one facet of the bigger issue of "free/resourceless/infinite" power. The argument goes like this:

• Bots are too powerful because their cost is negligible.
• The one-time cost of building anything in Factorio is amortized over time, one time cost of bot, belt, train, etc.
• To create a balance between logistic systems the ongoing cost must be meaningful, for bots this is power.
• Power cost is meaningless over time because solar power turns power into a one-time cost issue with no logistical concerns.

I therefore suggest the real issue here is free infinite power through solar, that allows one-time cost to mitigate a whole aspect of Factorio gameplay.

Agreed. See also: laser turrets.

[MeduSalem]

The topic of bots has been something I've been modding to adjust for a bit, but I think bots are just one facet of the bigger issue of "free/resourceless/infinite" power. The argument goes like this:

• Bots are too powerful because their cost is negligible.
• The one-time cost of building anything in Factorio is amortized over time, one time cost of bot, belt, train, etc.
• To create a balance between logistic systems the ongoing cost must be meaningful, for bots this is power.
• Power cost is meaningless over time because solar power turns power into a one-time cost issue with no logistical concerns.

I therefore suggest the real issue here is free infinite power through solar, that allows one-time cost to mitigate a whole aspect of Factorio gameplay.

Agreed. See also: laser turrets.

Yeah, that's also an issue...

... but even if power wouldn't be infinite with Solar Power or "near infinite" with Nuclear power... Bots would still be better due to them not being throughput limited... they just scale much better in terms maximum sustainable base size.

[ske]

I therefore suggest the real issue here is free infinite power through solar, that allows one-time cost to mitigate a whole aspect of Factorio gameplay.

In most games basically everything is quasi inifinite after some time. Power, space, ore, everything. At that stage it is not really a game (of managing resources) anymore but rather a sandbox (of building complex art). It becomes a game again by placing well-chosen restrictions that the player has to work around using creative designs. Like a lack of power (suddenly you have to choose between using blue or yellow inserters), a lack of some resources (you have to think again about stacking all your smelters with level-3 modules), a lack of space (you can't build everything everywhere, landfill the place and copy-paste some string containing a whole base), etc.

[OrwellianChild]

This would be taking things in a different direction, but you could explore the idea of making logistics bots land-bound instead of flying... That way, they would still need corridors to travel on, would suffer from traffic and congestion (couldn't pass other bots in limited space), and would rely on semi-intelligent path design by players to make them work. They would operate more like a dynamic belt than a flying drone.

Radical change to the dynamic, but would make for a new set of challenges and provide a bit of rate-limiting on capacity.

[IronCartographer]

If you change it such that only one robot can be on a certain amount of area (a tile) maybe this would restrict the use of logistic bots to use cases where you want to transport only a low amount of items like transporting some rocket parts. But of course I cannot estimate performance implications or other problems. For example player refilling should stay fast. But maybe that suggestion has already been discussed and rejected.

Bots may not collide with each other, but more bots = more energy = more roboports to keep them running. And roboports do take up space.

Logistic bots may trivialize things on the surface, but they are a completely different optimization space with their own set of design considerations.

It sounds like Twinsen has not had the pleasure of watching an inexperienced player unleash a swarm of bots, only to discover that doing so uses all their power, kills the laser turrets, and invites the biters in for dinner.

Bots are not "I-win" buttons, and plenty of people choose to avoid them--perhaps not realizing the emergent challenges of even such simple behavior.

[Chaoseed]

I never use bots. It's such a pain to create all the engines and frames and blueprints and stuff. The one thing I use them for, when I get really late in the game, is to "deconstruct" trees, since chopping them down is so tedious! And yet, somehow watching those trees just vanish seems like cheating...

[admo]

The topic of bots has been something I've been modding to adjust for a bit, but I think bots are just one facet of the bigger issue of "free/resourceless/infinite" power. The argument goes like this:

• Bots are too powerful because their cost is negligible.
• The one-time cost of building anything in Factorio is amortized over time, one time cost of bot, belt, train, etc.
• To create a balance between logistic systems the ongoing cost must be meaningful, for bots this is power.
• Power cost is meaningless over time because solar power turns power into a one-time cost issue with no logistical concerns.

I therefore suggest the real issue here is free infinite power through solar, that allows one-time cost to mitigate a whole aspect of Factorio gameplay.

Agreed. See also: laser turrets.

Yeah, that's also an issue...

... but even if power wouldn't be infinite with Solar Power or "near infinite" with Nuclear power... Bots would still be better due to them not being throughput limited... they just scale much better in terms maximum sustainable base size.

The throughput per area seems like something that could be tweaked by adjusting how often bots have to charge and how many bots can charge per roboport. Seems you could push the numbers in such a way that the space required for the roboports would become problematic. I already have this issue today anytime I've tried doing train offloading with bots, after awhile I end up with all the bots charging because I cannot stuff enough roboports into the space.

[Tinyboss]

The topic of bots has been something I've been modding to adjust for a bit, but I think bots are just one facet of the bigger issue of "free/resourceless/infinite" power. The argument goes like this:

<good arguments>

I therefore suggest the real issue here is free infinite power through solar, that allows one-time cost to mitigate a whole aspect of Factorio gameplay.

I agree, but in practice nuclear is just about infinite, too. The reason to use solar over nuclear is UPS, not continuing cost. You have to expand your power when you expand your factory, but running out of uranium is about as urgent a concern as running out of sunlight. Unless you stay on coal/oil power, Factorio isn't really structured to have electricity "cost" anything.

[Loewchen]

Kovarex_Box_2.png (638.73 KiB) Viewed 9462 times

[falizure]

I feel bots are crucial to the game for performance reasons, I have a poor pc and could never reach the megabase stage without them, I would consider it a interesting option but I am never for removing features from games entirely, also the statement about the research being the balancing factor is true, none of the nerfs have as big a impact as locking it till later, and I think the best way to balance that is to continue to do so, perhaps split the chests up into more researches and, but the biggest balance change for recipes and functionality with them would probably be to make the logistics chests more expensive, that way they become a big investment and get used in key areas initially rather then suddenly all over the place, belts could be feasible if they were perfect performance but they really arnt...I could consider them if they had say another tier making it more practical to use them later without resorting to even more belts which drags down performance. I would love to perhaps see a setting without them for those that wanted to try, even id probably give it a whirl for as long as I could but I believe their presence always needs to be a option.

[Razoric480]

It's important to balance the game for the right reasons. "We think it's the more fun way to play" can backfire, and is in something of an elitist bracket way of thinking ("only hardcore gamers can appreciate a real game. Logistic Bots are for casuals, real gamers play with belts, huff huff!") which is a pretty toxic thing to consider.

Cases in point:
Firaxis thought it was way more fun and challenging for players to run through missions in XCOM and thought that going slow and methodical was not as fun, so they punished slow and methodical with mission timers in XCOM 2. Many players hated the timers, and by the time the expansion comes out, most timers in the new missions aren't even there anymore.

Compare that to DOOM (2016.) ID's idea was to have the player in the face of the demons instead of ducking under cover, so they incentivized the rush-into-melee idea by making weakened enemies explode like a pinata with ammo and health pick ups, instead of penalizing players for staying under cover. This was extremely well received.

Firaxis should have incentivized players to go quickly with bonuses of some kind, instead of punishing players for playing the way they wanted to play.

Factorio should incentivize belts instead of punishing players by removing logistics.

Just my two cents, anyway.

[Wakaba-chan]

Oh, god, finally!
Logistic bots surely should be nerfed. Once I've built base like this https://imgur.com/QyftYAW and... It is really not fun at all. You just need to copy&paste the same blueprint to build whatever you want. Furnace, assemblers, science - anything use the same pattern. You just place it and bots do the rest of job.

I believe that belts logistic is more interesting too! Please, reward us to play in a fun way! Logistic bots are too OP. I just don't use them at all because of this. But this frustrates me, since I could have more efficient base using them... But that way I would completely lose fun.