Friday Facts #224 - Bots versus belts

[HerpicusMcDerpington]

I think the most compelling argument for leaving logistics bots as they are, is this: "you don't have to use them in your play through" Which is true.
However, gamers have also demonstrated a common inability to resist the use of a dominant strategy even when it is not required. And even if it makes the game less fun. (Don't believe me? lets talk about micro-transactions in other games)
Having a dominant strategy is generally bad for game balance and logistics bots are a dominant strategy. No question.

I think the devs have to decide if logistics bots are true to the nature of the game they want to be the creators of?
And is the presence of a dominant strategy helping or hindering the intended core experience?
"I'm a player of the game, and I like feature XYZ" isn't sufficient justification for keeping a feature that is unbalanced, broken, or not true to the core experience of the game.

You DONT HAVE TO and probably most people SHOULD NOT BOTHER to use them anyway.
Lets be honest, the majority of people playing this game are not at a stage where bots are really needed. I hop between my saves, but in my most advanced base i have just launched rocket #200 only using belts with the exception of train fuel, builder trains providing and personal logistics and i havent even used up the 4th huge patch of iron in my train world. And it works just fine. If I need to access another patch, i´d just call artillery to a biter occupied perimeter and push out a little. Noe thats what i call OP.

I guess most of us have just tried to copy "that cool base I have seen on youtube", copied a few BPs from the net, but dont realy understand why.
Yes, i have watched/read alot about high efficent endgame, but im far away from crunching numbers on my own spreadsheets, i dont have a specific goal yet anyway. Like i said here before, i failed at just stamping down a bot based array and running it efficently, I simply dont understand it enough, resources and space are practicly infinite and my UPS is still at 60 unless at the moment of stamping huge BPs and construction bots start to figure it out.


I think with the PC performance increase it would be possible without bots for those "cool bases on Youtube", but with the compression issues that were implemented with it, bots shouldnt be touched at all.
People who spent hundrets of hours designing the base layout (as stated by others, its not just the mini factories any more, cos once you have perfected them for you, its just copy&pase), they deserve the so called OPness.
I think whoever came up with this FFF didnt think about all the train designing that went into it as well, which limits throughput even more than belts. I think people could work around a bot nerf alot more easier than if they´d need to rethink all of their trains.
So whats next? Nerf trains?

I DONT think bots are the master of all, and even tho my aim is probably leaning towards a world where trains even dominate short distance transport, just for the fun of designing it, I´d say leave bots alone!
They are not so OP as alot of people think, only newbies push for them and then realize they cant help them them before infinite research#20 or so. there is also a point were they are worsening your base by sucking power til it crashes, as i can still recall one of my earlier saves.
And i have to relive that stage, recently introducing a friend to this awesome game.

And if they were talking about nerfing personal logistics and not being able to support builder trains, or building, for example, solar arrays, im the hell out of here.

Just imagine your personal logisics. I run with requesing hundrets of belts and tracks. Now think of it, with limited flight speed, limited cargo capacity and a "Mall" thats not right next to your taxi station. You might as well just pick it up yourself.
Just NO!

[Tricorius]

literally 2 kids playing in a sandbox and one kid says:
"I know you have having fun with all this sand and this shovel allows you to pick up the sand and put it in the bucket faster but I would rather have you use your hands to make a path on the ground to push the sand into the bucket and then make the sand castle because shovels are OP and I feel you would have more fun making dirt paths by hand."

Heh. I like this, but I’m going to reframe it a bit.

Two kids are playing in a *really* big sandbox.

Tricorius is having a *lot* of fun having his drone army scoop up gobs of sand and bring them over to where he is building his sandcastle.

Twinsen is having a blast building a bunch of belts to bring his sand over to his sand castle.

Twinsen, turns to Tricorius and says “Hey, man, you should do it this way! You can’t possibly be having any fun...”

Tricorius looks around at his drones a little confused. “Well the belts do look like fun, but these are *robots*. And I’m their swarm-master. They are all so pretty when they flock and get me sand. I think it’s fun with the drones.”

“Naw! Belts! Robots aren’t any fun. They aren’t hard.”

“They are totally fun! I tried belts and that was fun, but then it got boring ... all I did was draw a layout I wanted on that blue paper, and then I had the robots build a bunch of belts to bring me sand. That was pretty fun too.”

“No! You’re wrong! Robots aren’t any fun!”

... and we get 803 pages of this as more and more kids on the playground join the “discussion”.

I think the devs have to decide if logistics bots are true to the nature of the game they want to be the creators of?
And is the presence of a dominant strategy helping or hindering the intended core experience?
"I'm a player of the game, and I like feature XYZ" isn't sufficient justification for keeping a feature that is unbalanced, broken, or not true to the core experience of the game.

Again, I think this discussion is falling into the territory of not considering the overall player base. I have no idea what the average player does in Factorio. I know what I do, what some of the YouTubers I like do. And what some of the people in these forums do.

I agree with, and defend the rights of, the developers to make the game of their vision. However, everyone has the segment of this game that they find enjoyable. For instance, I didn’t care that much about fluid wagons. I like barreling. The barreling nerf was a bit painful, but I worked around it by building bigger.

If bots are removed from the game that kills a major enjoyment factor for me. I now get to choose whether I want to run mods or not (I generally don’t like mods). I would likely adjust my steam review to “it was fun while the game had bots...much less fun now...quite tedious actually”. The game is a pure vision for the devs, but not something I want to put my limited entertainment time into. That is fine...there are plenty of other games out there.

If bots are “reasonably” nerfed (higher cost, max throughput or max total caps) I’ll live with it. But it is just punitively delaying my fun because I don’t like to play a sandbox game the way the developers do. Again, perfectly fine. It is within their rights.

If bots are “unreasonably” nerfed (massively higher costs, maintenance needs, severely constrained range, throughput) I’m back to choosing mods or uninstalling. These sort of things would just be highly punitive. Basically, we don’t like how you are playing, so there is now an emotional cost to this.

I tunnel-vision to construction bots because manually-placing things is tedious to me. I divert for enough military to keep the base secure. Then depending on my resource needs I tunnel-vision to logistics bots because that is how I like to build my outposts.

I automate as much as possible. Including outpost building. I have “supply” trains (and with .16 “military” trains). These would be very irritating to load without logistics bots. They contain dozens of different filtered items. And I’d have a *lot* of high-value stuff sitting on belts. (Or I would figure out a way to build this out with direct-rail drop-offs and pick-ups.)

There are a massive amount of ways to use the logistics network other than just spamming two assemblers connected to a power pole, requester, provider, and stack inserters. Removing or nerfing impacts all these fun things you can do with bots.

Finally, I’m curious. How many people who hate bots weave belts? I welcome you to try to figure out how that can “realistically“ happen.

[WarpZone]

Twinsen, turns to Tricorius and says “Hey, man, you should do it this way! You can’t possibly be having any fun...”

Tricorius looks around at his drones a little confused. “Well the belts do look like fun, but these are *robots*. And I’m their swarm-master. They are all so pretty when they flock and get me sand. I think it’s fun with the drones.”

“Naw! Belts! Robots aren’t any fun. They aren’t hard.”

“They are totally fun! I tried belts and that was fun, but then it got boring ... all I did was draw a layout I wanted on that blue paper, and then I had the robots build a bunch of belts to bring me sand. That was pretty fun too.”

“No! You’re wrong! Robots aren’t any fun!”

... and we get 803 pages of this as more and more kids on the playground join the “discussion”.

You left out the part where Twinsen threatens to ban everybody who doesn't use belts, because his daddy owns the sandbox, and then in the same breath says he totally would never ban anybody from his sandbox. And then ends "but seriously, we have to make bots less fun so Tricorius stops using them. Who's with me, guys? What's your suggestions for how to stop Tricorius from using bots?"

And then EVERY kid suggests different ideas based on what wouldn't get them personally excluded from the sandbox club. "You should ban all the kids who wear sandals," a kid wearing sneakers suggests. "Nuh uh! You should just make the bots not work for left-handed people." (I have no idea if Tricorius is left-handed or not but for the sake of argument let's pretend he is.) "You should reduce bot throughput by 35% on alternating thursdays while requiring every third bot to consume a piece of coal every 12 items it delivers!" shouts the kid in the back with the spreadsheets. Nobody has any idea how he uses the sandbox, but they're definitely not going to vote for an idea they barely understand.

Of course, this isn't a vote. It's not even really an argument. Twinsen has all the power, and nobody, short of his daddy, is going to stop him from weilding it like the playground bully he, (in this metaphor helpfully provided by Tricorius and GenBOOM,) is.

[PTTG]

One option: Make logistics bots only travel along pre-defined roads or paths on the ground. Then they become a separate logistics network, but still provide small-quantity but widespread support.

That's how I use bots, anyway. Belts for iron, copper, steel, gears, circuits and some of the other basics, but for advanced sub-components, it's either made there or else transported by bot.

With this change, bots become a bigger gameplay consideration, and problems like street traffic and walk-up access to every input chest become considerations. On the other hand, thousands of pathfinders is a problem.

[Rayfie]

As i conclude by thoroughly reading the FFF, this whole discussion about bots just arose from a figment of someone's imagination.
Lets for a moment ignore specific adjustments and look at the bigger picture, and of course how and if bots fit in.

TL;DR This game needs more and different goals.

I'm guessing that to most of us this game is mostly a sandbox game. Sure there is one goal of launching a rocket, but lets face it: thats just one output of one type of building. The game literally does not have to end here, so launching a rocket can be considered endgame for someone who likes to reach 'the' goal, or just the early-game in terms of size and efficiency. After launching your first rocket you probably haven't researched, thus unlocked, everything. So we can agree there's more to do, as in unlocking everything, completing every achievement, and also making everything as efficient as possible. As fas as i know there is no 'best base setup' that makes you call this game finished, so sandbox mode can be seen as endless. As i see it, why should you limit the possibilities to play this game in endless mode? In this mode not only bots fit in just perfectly fine, i can think of way more extreme ways to boost your ingame creations to the limits of your pc performance (no need to wander off on specifying this right now). Let this game be played as much and as long as possible.

However, about the fun part and facilitating an audience as broad as possible. Sure there already are some alternate modes to play this game, and there are some mini-games as well. There even is a campaign, which to me is no more than a general tutorial beside the other really helpful ingame tutorials. If you you want to make limitations to certain parts of the game to make it more fun (to whom?), why not put those ideas into alternate scenarios? And why not counter these limitations with counterweighing benefits in those scenarios? For example, think of how scenarios in many tycoon games work. You often get a time or space limit in which you must accomplish something, like create this many things (per time unit), giving you a physical limit like no landscaping, but a benefit in production or a head start with unlockables. Or exactly the other way around. This could enable many game modes to anyones liking, keeping the possibility open to play on ('post-game') with these different parameters. As i see it, bots often will not fit in during these specific goals as they indeed might give the feeling of cheating, but may still fit in during extreme goals like rushing or extreme limitations. Maybe you should even get the option to switch to sandbox mode after you've 'completed' the scenario, to get the satisfaction of finally being able to optimize all of your work anyway. But don't forget the ability to start sandbox mode right away (which many still will do i presume, but hopefully not exclusively).

I felt like i had to make a forum account just to start about this. I hope some can agree with me that this fits with the mindset of the FFF as well as many players here (both pro and anti).

[sweenezy]

From a game design perspective I completely understand the argument, as belts and their inherent challenges is what made me fall in love with this game in the first place.

That said, I don't think bots should be removed or nerfed at all.

Whilst my early playthroughs I felt that bots made production too easy as mentioned in the FFF, the fact was that this was a very primitive take on bots and I later realised that any real throughput required far more thought and planning than simply slapping down some roboports and requesters. As with trains and circuits, they introduce their own challenges, mechanics, complexities and drastically increase the overall depth of the game. I've come to really enjoy using bots and feel they are well balanced for where they are placed in the game. That is, some early access for construction and personal logistics, late access for requesters, even later access for high tier speed and throughput and ability to capitalise on their strengths.

They are incredibly powerful however this power is only realised in late game factories with beacons, modules, and all the throughput challenges that come with it. They are a nice perk and a welcome change of game mechanics in the late game and would hate to see them nerfed, especially in the ways suggested in the FFF.

If they had to be nerfed the best idea i've seen is this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... mechanics/

But again, I like it how it is.

[HerpicusMcDerpington]

To anyone who thinks that bots are boring or even OP, i think i can prove you wrong.

Lets first define overpoweredness itself.
My approach to that is the following and i will give you two examples.


Lets start with a whole different topic, that will actually bring me back to bots at some point:


1.) Nuclear Power
When you reach the stage of your game where you can run just a few (i have 6 beaconed and speed moduled) centrifuges running Kovarex Process, its done. Power sorted, at least for a VERY long time.
With my current setup, running just 20 centriuges on refining raw ore, i actually have to stop them on a circuit condition when the BAD uranium is getting too much. It would jam the belt, not leaving the "good" one through, cos they put it on the same belt. While the Koavrex just spits out more and more. I have like 20k good one, and still only 60k of the bad. And all that while im on a stage of my game where 4 reactors and some steam storage can give me alot more than i need. And im already in the hundrets of beacons just for science and oil, providing a simple blue belted bus.
Power? Who cares!?! All i had to do is run them long enough (while doing other stuff like connecting my 1st oil field via train) to find me the first 40 good uranium pieces.

Which leaeds me to my 2nd argument.

2.) Small quantity movement by Bots

Ever had to move 10-100x/minute(not seconds!)?
Branching from my first point, ever since i discovered nuclear fuel, im "dumping" my "good " uranium into the train fuel system.
Now i have trains which run very rarely, like every 5 minutes, to refuel uranium mining, buildung trains etc...
Would you call it efficent to "store" thousands of fuel canisters on a belt, like you do in the early game with coal?
Would you call it exciting to think about a spagetti belt running through your base, from the U-refinery/rocket&nuclearFuelFactory to the station area(s)? at 1 item/stack?
IMHO, its would just be stupid! But thats an opinion, i wouldnt dare to call anyone who is doing that an idiot, not even via the anonymity of the internet. Its a CHOICE to be different.
But requester chests just "overpower" a belt here.
Or you need just 20 blue chips on the other side of the factory every once i a while. It just "overpowers" the time needed to lay that belt. PLOP goes the requester and you saved like 10 minutes of (tedious) belt placing.


Now to the thing i wouldnt call overpowered.
I think the whole FFF is the first one which is just a huge chunk of personal opinion and very badly thought through.

3.) Very high efficent end game bases run by bots
Yes, they are much more powerful than a belt design.
Even more so since you cant compress with undergounds any longer. You would just need too much space thats "wasted" (comared to the "optimal" bot setup) cos you cant run a 100% possible beaconed assembler/smelter, compared to what it is now. So yes, some people might be "forced" to use them.

But they are actually more efficent than overpowered.
Afterall this is a game about automation and efficent design. And automation, with robo(arms), is actually making manual labour alot less wanted RIGHT NOW, IRL.


__________


Now on the the boring part:

Lets be honest! How many of your high end BPs did you actually come up with yourself? I doubt the number is more than 1% of the overall playerbase.
And its not like the argument that Blizzard had for trivializing raids in WoW, where they said only 1% had seen their end game content they come up with in thousands of work hours. BPs are aviable to anyone!
And even if you only design those things yourself. How many times do you have to come up with yourself? Once! Then its just copy&paste.

The monstrosity used as an example in the FFF is just showing the work of some genius (or a person with too much time) and i think the author isn´t even close to achieving anything like this.
At this stage, belts are just as boring as bots, as they are just another copy&paste, except for the truly unique "produce all from a few raw mats inputs" designs. And if you want to take away that, i dont want to be in the office when it goes live

As stated above, i think all this could be achieved somehow, as belts are far less UPS unfriendly now, and it could actually be done, leaving the player a CHOICE!
Afterall, its beacons causing the real problem: You have to built TIGHT to higly optimze it. With enough room you could easily fiddle in belts/splitters/undergrounds/whatnot and still not waste too much energy put into said beacons/modules

Just balance beacons to supplying a maximum amount of assemblers, lower their power consumption, but give them a 1 or 2 tile bigger area so that we can fiddle in belts at their currently bad compression state.
If players still want to go big, in terms of stamping down more beaconed arrays (maybe at a lower resouce cost in beacons and modules) they can still do that by more copy&paste.
But it would be their CHOICE to go belts or bots

[Tricorius]

Of course, this isn't a vote. It's not even really an argument. Twinsen has all the power, and nobody, short of his daddy, is going to stop him from weilding it like the playground bully he, (in this metaphor helpfully provided by Tricorius and GenBOOM,) is.

Ok. To be fair I did jump on the sandbox analogy for some humor. However I didn’t intend to actually portray Twinsen as a “bully”. I don’t think that is fair. (For the record I also feel it is silly to request someone should be fired because they expressed their opinion.) And I think there was some humor and sarcasm in the original FFF that was lost in translation.

I don’t think that the devs plan on removing bots from the game. And this is an entertaining distraction while they enjoy the rest of thier vacation.

I merely want to point out that, after selling 1.2 million copies, there is a very real risk to continuing to remove items under the guise that they aren’t any fun.

To be honest, I wish they’d go the opposite direction and enhance the robot network. I’d love for them to add combat bots into the roboport networks. I’d like a combat zone to be added to the roboports, in addition to construction and logistics zones.

Regardless, I’m fine with “logistics are too complex to maintain” or any of a dozen other explainations. Even if I don’t disagree with the reason, though, I’m left with my decision of whether the game is still fun for me after the change.

[Koub]

To all discussing here, I'd like the discussion to remain on the bots vs belts level, and not see any kind of personal attack aimed at (any of) the devs.
Don't even try to turn the devs who question the balance of the game as bad/cruel/evil persons. I've seen a few posts that were really borderline, I'd hate having to start moderating the contents of this topic.

[Hertzila]

Open question for the Factorio devs: Where are the battle lines drawn on this issue in-house? We know Twinsen and his cronies want to remove bots from the game because they're "not fun enough." So who's on the other side of that debate?

Twinsen said it's "a controversial subject, even in our team." He then went on to say "most of us believe bots are too powerful," but of course, that's just weasel words. You can't have a controversy with one person on one side of the debate and 20 people on the other side. Ergo, there are two sides on the dev team hashing this out, probably causing rifts among the team, possibly even creating a hostile work environment. It could be anywhere as high as just under half the team disagree with Twinsen. But let's put that aside for now and focus on the effects this debate has been having on the game since long before FFF 224

Twinsen's goal, misguided as it is, seems to be to somehow convert all the bot players to belt players. This goal literally cannot happen because bots players find bots more fun than belts. But it hasn't stopped Twinsen and the Fun Police from adding nerf after nerf after nerf to the game to try and stamp out their usage. One assumes that eventually he'll go all the way and talk somebody into removing bots from the game.

Twinsen and the Fun Police ought to be ashamed of themselves. Twinsen himself ought to be fired. If not for his incredibly toxic, community-dividing idea of basically removing the noobtube from a single-player game, then at the very least for being so foolish as to openly discuss his botkilling ambitions in public. It's a PR disaster! Everyone knows what's going on behind the scenes now. The veil has been lifted. They can try to walk the comments back or flood this forum with sockpuppets to make it look like the community wants bots gone. But they can't pretend that there wasn't a controversy in the first place now. They can't pretend that they didn't know some players like bots. Even if management is on Twinsen's side in the bots VS belts debate, Twinsen shot the entire team in the foot with this bombshell of an FFF post.

Do I know for sure that bots will be removed soon, or even at all? Of course not. None of us knows what will happen next.

But there's one thing we know for sure.

If bots do go away, if they get nerfed, if they get destroyed, we'll all know Twinsen and his goons were to blame.

If there's anyone that has created a toxic, hostile enviroment, it's you. This was idle thinking, a thought experiment, Twinsen's own personal rant about fun and designing things to be fun. You are the one that immediately went hyperbolic with the arguments and insisting that your fun is being threatened because a dev made a blog post about design elegance and how elegant Factorio would be. They repeatedly point out that they won't remove bots.

You keep escalating this "conflict" more and more for no reason. Now you're demanding that a guy who made a blog post that offends you must be fired and he must be causing a full-scale war in the dev team and that we are one spark away from Factorio team self-destructing and disbanding, erasing Factorio from existence. Again, because of an academic blog post.

You are a nice crystallization of why we only ever get PR bullcrap from dev teams and everything is in corp-speak. Because the moment a dev says something that slightly offends your sensibilities, rather than just saying "That's stupid, please no", you decide to explode, insulting the dev team, threatening to spearhead boycotts and causing a PR smear campaign unless your demands are met, over that tiny perceived slight that may not even exist. This attitude pretty much ensures that no dev will ever post anything interesting again and worst of all, would rather not discuss any ideas whatsoever with the player base, if this is the reaction they'll have to expect. After all, what would be the use?

I'll just again point out that they are not going to remove bots. Please just calm down and understand that.

[Rainhate]

Factorio friends,

I too have a love/hate relationship with bots. ( also with steam/solar )
First off, belt and bots have intrinsic differences that fundamentally change how we use and improve them. Here is summary of the breakdown:

The function of belts is to move the items placed upon them along a path which other entities may take them as needed. And with the use of circuit networks and filter arms we add logic to the belts to greatly aid in operational efficiency. Note: belts do not choose what to move or where to move it. The player directs where the path goes and how items enter and leave.

The function of bots is to move an exact item available in the logistical network to a chest that is asking for that same exact item while not exceeding an asking value or exceeding room available. And with the use of circuit/logistic networks we add logic to limit the bots activity ensuring they don't mindlessly toil in a way that could be detrimental to the efficiency of the factory. Note: bots choose what to move and where to move it. The player creates various nodes for the bots choose where to deliver items or pick them up.

I think part of my discontent stems from the fact that bots are so powerful and simple. Part of the simplicity lies in the fact they only need electricity to run, throw down a substation and a roboport and you are up and running ready to harvest a neighboring forest. Then you can pick it all up and move the whole powerhouse operation to a new location.

That same simple powerful nature is also a danger. If something is wrong on a belt setup it will backup. If something is wrong with bots they keep working elsewhere. You might go set up a mining outpost and come back and your factory has halted with 1 million red science clogging storage and bots caught in loop moving items to a requester chest with a stack inserting pointed to a passive provider chest, consuming electricity for their fruitless endeavor.


Belts-Pros
Look amazing, i see them in my dreams
Can create multiple solutions to logistics problem
Solutions can be optimized for throughput, power consumption, redundancy, etc.
Can create isolated belt networks granting reserved resources i.e. coal miner -> belt -> boiler
Can create belt modules which can be inserted along existing belts lines
No continued cost to operate

Belt-Cons
Fixed throughput
Only viable short to mid ranges
Lack of inherit sorting end game
No cost savings when scaling throughput
Scaling belt system usually means more items sitting on belts creating a larger item bulk not in use

Bots-Pros
Being able say. “Domo arigato mr roboto” when bots come to your aid
Auto filtering and sorting of items
Scaling throughput requires minimal geographic scaling
Scaling throughput can be done by adding more bots

Bots-Cons
Power is trivial late game, and since bots continued cost is power there is not a real cost(seems like a pro but it is not)
Unable to isolate resources in a logistic network.
Bots sitting inside random roboports makes it hard to round them up once deployed




I don't just want to cry about bots, so here are some suggested fixes. Any values suggested does not reflect the rigors of the QA process, but rather hopefully gives a sense at the weight of the change.




Belts - Buffs
New entity Filter Splitter-filtered objects out one side all else out the other, rotating will swap sides

New entity Vacuum tube Belts - Ultrafast Belts that take input from a large-chest-type object and place them on the belts at super high speeds which can me made faster with infinite research. Objects would emerge into same large-chest-type object at the other end. Items on the vacuum tube belts would not be accessible to inserters or to be hoovered by the player. This would ideally suit the need for mid range inner base transport. I'm not going to build a train to get freshly smelted plates to the sorting hub just down the way.

Belts - Nerfs
None


Bots - Buffs
Bots have longer duration before recharging to off set new cost

Larger amount of charging nodes per Roboport to off set new cost

Ability to designate a Logistic chest to a “Logistic Network” i.e. a passive chest is on Logistic Network 17 and can only supply chests on network 17, even if the resources exist in the same logistic area from the roboports. Granted by research maybe??

Make Construction/Logistic robot one unit 99% of the time my construction robots sit idle waiting for me to hit a object with my tank or car so they can replace/repair it


Bots - Nerfs
Bots cost 1 lubricant each recharge you know for general wear and tear, also to force cost other than only electricity. Also providing a more fixed operation.

Passive, Active, and Requester chests have reduced storage At its core a efficient factory is about matching rates. And large bloat of storage can innocuously obscure rates. Let the storage and buffer chest be used for bulk storage and the other chests be a nearer to the active logistical pipeline.

I hope someone finds this helpful, otherwise disregard.

[anarcobra]

This talk of legislating fun is really depressing, so instead I will try to think of some ways to make belts more fun.
Even just more circuit controls on splitters for instance, so we can set a splitter to always send items to the right/left.
With current approaches the only option is to disable the belt after the splitter, but that will result in some remnant items sitting on the blocked side of the splitter.
Also, about the stacked belts or whatever everyone calls them: I think this would be a good place to combine with stack inserters.
A stack inserter could just grab, and insert a whole stack of items on a single spot of the belt, instead of spreading them out.
This would drastically boost the throughput of belts and reduce the need for 10s of belts of a single resource for even a small to moderate base.

[Termn8r]

Maybe you are going about this the wrong way. What if, instead, you made belts better. Currently there are only 3 types of belt speeds. What about upgrades to underground making it longer, what about bridge belts? Splitters that filter, a 3 lane belt, 4 lane? I feel like you stopped on belts and are complaining they aren't good enough.

So, make belts better?

Just my 1 cent.

[Profit-]

In addition to the post above, how about having factories with belt "Inputs" and "outputs" where we do not need to use inserters? That would go a long way to giving the factory some flow and people might start thinking about not using the logistic system if they had some alternative high capacity throughput systems.

[Lilly]

A lot of the posts here talk about why bots are overpowered, I agree with them.
A lot of the posts here talk about why bots shouldn't be removed or nerfed, I agree with those too.
If you don't like bots, don't use them. Factorio is most of all, a sandbox game, so in the end, it should be the player who decides for themself how they play it, what goals they strife for and how to have fun with it in general.

For those who fear that bots are removed, Please remember that they just implemented the Buffer chest. Why would they do that if they wanted to remove bots? Furthermore, logistics bots have been a part of the game for quite some time and a lot of the game design and balance has come to depend on it. Removing bots would leave a big hole in the game that would be too difficult to repair before the game is released. Also note what Twinsen wrote in his FF:

Don't worry, logistics bots won't be removed from the game, mostly because it's a feature that has been developed and polished quite a lot. Also many players love the feature, and we've all become used to it over the years.

But I have the impression that all of this is missing the point of his post. A lot of development time has been put in bots and they serve a purpose in the game. That time could have been spent on something else. That purpose could have been fulfilled by something else. What is that something else? What didn't get implemented because the developers had chosen to implement the logistic network? That is the question that I believe Twinsen is asking. What didn't make it into the game because bots did?

I like to believe that the alternative universe that he's is talking about is where the ropeway conveyor belt got implemented. If I had the choice between that and logistic bots, I would definitely choose the ropeway conveyor. They add more diversity and have a much bigger creative potential. You can be creative with logistics bots, as the self-contained 1000 SPM factory shows, but it's difficult, and your options are limited. So I also agree with Twinsen, that Factorio where bots didn't get added, but something else did, could have been more fun to play.

Or maybe, it is not that bots are overpowered that is the problem, but their lack of creative potential? Then removing or nerfing them would only make matters worse. Then we should actually be improving their usefulness. And ask what would make (logistics) bots more interesting and fun to play with?

To give a stab at that, I rarely use combat robots. A shotgun with blue shells and 5 × power armor II is usually enough to clear any biter base and cost a lot less resources. They can be effective when clearing large areas from biters, though, after removing 100+ biter bases that way, that just becomes tedious. And that purpose can now much more effectively be fulfilled by the artillery cannon. I remember that the first I used combat robots I was disappointed that they didn't interact with the roboport and expired after a small amount of time. What if they could be stored in roboports (including the portable one) and act as perimeter defence? Or as guards for your construction or logistics bots? Though, that would require logistics bots to have a much larger range. Which would make them useful for restocking turrets and artillery cannons (which usually are not fun to stock with belts, again because of a lack of creativity, so I tend to do that manually or default to laser turrets + solar farms). Then those guard bots would become kind of necessary too.

Or another option, allow them to inject fuel cells into the nuclear reactor. As you can't insert automatically in reactors that are surrounded on all 4 sides, you're kind of stuck with a 2 x N design, and I believe I've basically found an optimal design for that, regardless of size.

[5thHorseman]

Remember the gameplay when you just generated the map, the early game. You have a couple of machines, you personally interact with every and each of those. You placed manually every one of those, and each placement was a singular case decision.

Then you progress into mid game. You do not think in singular machines anymore, you think in builds as a set of machines consuming something and outputting a belt of something. You don't think of the placement in terms of machines, you place whole builds. You don't interact with machines, you get items from belt or buffer chests. You have therefore abstracted from the singular machine perspective, you think in terms of larger scale constructions.

Then you progress into late game. You think of your base as a whole. Maybe you even have multiple bases (main plus outposts?). You again have abstracted to a different perspective.

Then comes the end-game. You have researched all non-infinite research, scaling up the production. You place bases dedicated to concrete responsibilities, or self-contained builds, big constructs. You don't think about about fitting that output inserter for that assembler in that row inside that build. It is already solved, done, prepared, ready to be placed multiple times. You do not care about this puzzle. The puzzle is now on your M view — fitting that outpost, laying rail, ensuring total throughput, large scale logistics. You don't have time to think about that inserter anymore. It doesn't even matter if you use belts or bots in these builds — it would look the same, placing down the blueprint. There is no such puzzle anymore. The build is basically a black box. You have abstracted again.

This is such a good explanation of why I love Factorio. And why bots are important to it, as are belts and trains.

(Sorry for quoting so much and not saying much. I just couldn't find a way to trim it more)

[jcranmer]

If you're having throughput problems, you should use belts, not more bots. If you think spamming bots is the answer, you're completely ignoring the issues causing the throughput problems. Bots have to travel from their starting roboport to the source chest, then to the end chest, diverting for power whenever needed, and then heading back to the nearest uncrowded roboport to top off and "land". A belt will always exist at the start & end points and move items instantly from point A to point B regardless of power, distance, or logistic coverage. For every roboport you make, that is ~13.5 blue belts of resources, for every logistic bot it is ~3.5 blue belts. It takes 8 logistics bots at 5 capacity per second to move as many items as every single blue belt does by itself. At 100% speed, logistic bots would move 3 tiles in 1 second, for 8 bots you could have made ~27.8 blue belts which move items 5.625 tiles per second. So at 100% speed, a blue belt would have moved 40 items 5.625 tiles while 8 bots would have gone only 3. It isn't until you research worker speed 5 that logistics bots start being faster. It would take Worker Speed research level 20 for 1 bot to move 8 times the speed of a blue belt to be "better", but even then it has to be about 3.5 times better to have better resource efficiency just straight up cost....

I've done the numbers. It's hard for robots, because you have to think about what you're measuring, but effectively the metric comes down to how many robots can you assign to a single roboport such that no robot will have to wait to charge. While the effective capacity of a robot is dependent on the distance it has to travel, it's linear with distance, which means that if you provide a consistent number of roboports per unit distance (which you have to do for belts as well), you get a constant number for the transit capacity per roboport.

When you do the numbers, a roboport can service about 50-60 robots, depending on research. At no research buffs, a roboport starts at providing about 4.2 blue belts of capacity. By the time you start the infinite research and you're rocking 240% robospeed and carrying capacity of 4, you're pushing 700 items/s with a single roboport, 17 or so blue belts. Replacing a block of belts with solid roboports has higher capacity, even with no research buffs, and it costs less per unit area if you ignore the robots. I haven't done the math to figure out the point at which adding the robots are cheaper, construction-cost wise, than belts, but it's probably lower than you're expecting.

[assdlfl]

I think leaving bots late game is good idea. I think they are essential to late game, as if your playing small bases, they reduce the tangle of mess of belts and allow resources that are not usually needed at a certain destination to be transported there. Creating the bots and the logisitic ports is already resource consuming enough, I do not think they break the game at all. They just help players who arnt as good at planning transport items late game without having to rebuild their entire base. If anything is done to nurf them, you should make the research cost higher. Also improving the transport belts might be a good idea, perhaps making the transport belt splitter take up 1 block instead of 2 or other size improvements to reduce the transport belt mess are a good idea.

p.s. I used the logistic system to make wireless communication through monitoring the numbers of items in chests. Wired is far easier but that was pritty fun.

[Tricorius]

Removing logistics bots from the game (Twinsen)

During more boring FFF, I like to do these gameplay rants where I share my ideas about game design. Here is one of them.

Ever since I started playing Factorio, I have thought of logistic bots as too powerful. Actually, I refused to use them thinking "surely there is some catch to this and they can't replace belts". Since then I was always a "bot hater". I believed it trivialized base building and managing belts. I also believe that building belts is way more fun due to it's inherent complexities, challenges, and emergent situations (the most common example being belt balancing).

First I would like to apologize if I offended anyone, as that was not my intention. I was simply trying to point out the silliness of telling someone *how* they should have fun. So...instead of something that can be construed as a personal-level attack let me instead debate on direct points.

I’m glad people enjoy belts. I do too, up to a point. There is a sense of satisfaction that comes from the things mentioned. The first, or second time. After that, for me, at least, it just gets tedious.

Where is that blueprint book for my belt balances. Oh, good. My 108th 6-4 balancer of this factory. Building all of that by hand, without blueprints and bots would be far more tedious.

Fun is completely subjective. My wife has a lot of fun watching vampire soap operas. I have fun making fun of all of the plots and characters of vampire soap operas. This is an activity now banned from the house. I now play Factorio and listen to podcasts while she watches vampire soap operas. We are both having fun in our own ways.

Bots vs. belts is a controversial subject, even in our team, but most of us believe bots are too powerful. So we did small nerfs from time to time in an effort to compensate for this, but we still keep coming to the same conclusion.

I’ve noticed. And I’m fine with nerds to balance things.

My argument is that bots are simply fundamentally better. Bots basically cheat by "teleporting" items, plus they are extremely easy to build and expand. This means that almost any nerf we throw at them is always solved by building more bots and/or more roboports and/or more solar panels. All of this can be done with a simple copy paste using blueprints. Plus they are even UPS friendly, so it seems like bots are the win-win-win solution.

Accepted. However, everything here, except the UPS and assumptive teleportation “cheat” points, applies to belts. I can’t help the UPS argument. Im lucky to have an excellent gaming laptop, so this is essentially a non-issue for me. (Aside: the “pneumatic tube belt” suggested in the forums would actually be more powerful than robots.)

Let’s review how I design and build an initial robot network. I use belts (and pipes) to automate the construction of pipes, gears, engines, electric engines, green and red circuits, flying robot frames, logistics robots, and roboports (that is a pretty big list, and I may have missed a few intermediate goods).

By the time I have the tech to do this, I already have most of the stuff I need built using belt arrays. But I do blueprint out a few things that are more efficient to have bots build (two suits of power armor with my standard buildouts for for a war frame and construction frame). I also convert a few arrays that are just cleaner to have bots do (rail goods, nuclear goods, etc).

Let’s contrast how I design and build out an initial belt network. I use belts (and pipes) to automate the construction of gears, green circuits, and the three tiers of belts, underground belts, and splitters. (Apparently belts are “hamster powered...? No power grid, no engines.)

/shrug

Feel free to read through the “fundamentally better” argument above. Then read back through the complexity difference between what it takes to build belts vs. bots. I have time, I’ll wait for you.

So, I count the problems with bots is that they teleport items, are too easy to build, and are better for UPS.

- Again, I can’t help fix UPS, I’m not an efficient game programmer.
- Looking at my arrays to build belts vs. bots...belts are significantly easier / cheaper to build
- I can’t help belts “teleport” items

So I’ll grant one advantage these super-“cheaty” bots allow. (And I’ll point out that I didn’t code increased carrying capacity or infinite speed research in for bots. Even then, I actually disagree with “teleport”. But I will still grant it for the sake of argument.

So I had this rather crazy idea of removing logistic bots from the game. Basically my idea was that construction bots would still be a thing and player logistics would still work. This would be done by:

Merging logistic and construction bots into just Flying Robots.
Removing Active provider, Buffer and Requester chests and having just Passive provider and Storage chests.
Flying Robots will do everything construction bots do now and also supply the player.
Simplifying recipe complexity a bit so the belt spaghetti does not get ridiculous.

Ok. So we remove all ability for bots to transport items for the factory. But this leaves us in a place where some recipes are too advanced and require belt spaghetti to craft. Got it. We don’t want to be rediculous.

Now, hopefully you aren't smashing your desk and writing us an angry email. Don't worry, logistics bots won't be removed from the game, mostly because it's a feature that has been developed and polished quite a lot. Also many players love the feature, and we've all become used to it over the years. But think of it a different way, imagine there were two parallel universes:

1. The universe we are in, where Factorio has had logistic bots since very early.
2. A universe where Factorio never had this feature. Construction bots were eventually added, and using bots to move items freely is nothing more than an idea that pops up from time to time but it's quickly discarded due to it breaking the game.

Woot. Thought exercises. Ok I’m in!

Which Factorio would be the best and most fun one for the players in that universe?
To be honest it's very hard to decide. I would go with the more pure Factorio from universe 2 that focuses on it's core and most fun mechanic: belts and belt logistics. I'm curious what you guys think.

I mentioned this, because I think this way often in an attempt to "make the best game ever" without being influenced by my biases of being used to some feature or style of play.

Well, assuming I’d never played with bots, I’d probably be having fun (mostly) with belts. But boy, as a lover of drones (in real life) those posts in the forums would surely be piquing my interest.

That said, I agree. I’m biased toward bots being a fun thing to play with. I understand others are biased toward belts.

I think eventually the idea of having bots would batter down my dislike of mods, and I’d probably install a bots mod.

But let's return to reality and the game we have now. Quite recently I actually realized that bots are not as bad as I thought. The logistics system is placed very late in the tech tree, so most of a typical playthrough will be done using belts. The fact that you get this almost game breaking feature is not so bad because it's late in the game. After this you can continue to challenge yourself and build even bigger using bots, or belts or both.

I’m still not sure I consider bots “game-breaking”. This is probably because I am biased toward liking them. But I’d love to hear from others why they are so bad. If it is just “we think Factorio is all about belts”, then I get that. It messes with design sensibilities. I’m kinda curious why they were added in the first place if the original game design was belts-only.

We are still looking to incentivize belt building a bit more, since it is the more fun way to play Factorio, but the question is how.
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.
Like I mentioned before, I try to balance things by looking at numbers and objective facts. I'm trying to determine how much better bots are than belts, so I can know if for example nerfing the stack size to 2 will have the desired effect, or just make players angry. I thought of metrics like throughput over time to set up, or throughput over base size.
But how do these metrics influence the big picture and will any of these make the game more fun in the long run?

I still think part of the problem here is the assertation that belts are more fun than bots. I’m ok with robot nerfs. I’ll take as many as everyone feels are necessary, but it still feels inherently punitive to me.

A robot network is already more costly and complex to setup than a belt network. Increasing power consumption will hurt at early- to mid-level bases. I agree with you, I’m not sure you can solve the power situation without making power across the board a lot more expensive.

A carrying-capacity reduction would help reduce overall throughput. But in and of itself I don’t think will hamper late-game factories. You can simply build more robots. This will probably just annoy or anger people who play with bots.

I think the answer is to give belts more throughput and increased variety. Those stacker belts sound pretty awesome. I should be able to push so many items through a belt that robots, as fun as they are, actually *are* an inferior option in many end-game situations.

We don't know the answer to these questions yet. What is your take on this bots versus belts thing? What changes, if any, could we do to make everything more fun?

Pro-bot arguments:

- The fact that they are so powerful, gives a very big sense of progression. They are behind a late game research, and gives you things that are very powerful and game changing.
- It adds large diversity to the game.

Anti-bot arguments:

- Bot bases are usually less complex and less interesting to look at, manage and expand.
- Because of their ease of use (and apparent ease of use), players tend to go to bots. We believe that belts are more fun, but we are guiding the player towards a less fun style of play.
- When you learn that bots exist and how they work, building bases with belts just seems tedious.

Bots are extremely powerful, they can do a *lot* of things. It does feel like a huge progression gate when you unlock them. They definitely add a metric bot-ton of diversity.

I tend to think my “bot” portions of my base are more complex and more interesting observe, manage, and expand. I’m still having a difficult time with the subjective reason of “fun” being a driving factor for these changes.

I feel even if I were in universe 2 and hadn’t ever tried bots, belts would become tedious. I *definetly* feel that belts are tedious since I have used bots.

This is not the fault of bots. It is the fault of belts being tedious.

My opinion is that instead of punishing our poor working-class bots, time should spent making belts better.

I just want to point out, the bots commentary in the FFF post literally started with “belts are more fun” and ended with “belts are tedious”.

I kinda wonder if you all really do like belts as much as you think you do. I’ve never once thought “boy...these bots are super tedious”. But every time I start a new map, I think “ugh...this is so slow and tedious doing things manually”.

[WarpZone]

I don’t think that the devs plan on removing bots from the game. And this is an entertaining distraction while they enjoy the rest of thier vacation.

I merely want to point out that, after selling 1.2 million copies, there is a very real risk to continuing to remove items under the guise that they aren’t any fun.

To be honest, I wish they’d go the opposite direction and enhance the robot network. I’d love for them to add combat bots into the roboport networks. I’d like a combat zone to be added to the roboports, in addition to construction and logistics zones.

Regardless, I’m fine with “logistics are too complex to maintain” or any of a dozen other explainations. Even if I don’t disagree with the reason, though, I’m left with my decision of whether the game is still fun for me after the change.

I wish I could believe that, Tricorius, but I've already seen it happen too many times in too many games on Steam that I used to love before the devs "improved" them to death. Factorio was special for me. But they keep making bots worse, they keep making solars worse, they keep introducing new mechanics designed to twist the player's arm until they're forced to play a certain way that isn't how they learned the game in the first place. In video games, learning is fun. Every time I'm forced to unlearn things because the devs decided my go-to techniques were too OP, I'm having antifun. It literally hurts. My blood has been full of cortisol for the past two days from screaming impotently at my computer. It feels like hot itchy nettles in your veins. It burns. I had something beautiful. And now they're gonna take it away from me. You can't even opt out of the updates because that's how Steam works. I'm trapped.

And it's not like the rest of the video game industry is giving people any reason to trust developers. 2017 was the Year of the Lootbox. Bungie proved it could be as bad as EA and then trotted out a bunch of press releases to try and make it look like they still cared about gamers. And EA's bad behavior, while over-the-top even for them, is absolutely nothing new for them. A lot of younger people don't remeber that EA constantly won Worst Company In America until everybody took a look at what their ISPs were doing to their customers.

I think your optimism is unfounded. Video game companies are malicious until proven benevolent, these days. Twinsen's post would be "silly" if it was some player doing it. He's a developer. And he's been thinking about this for a long time.

To put it another way, (and I realize this is hyperbolic even compared to my other posts,) if some sort of diety came down from the sky and said "I've been thinking about getting rid of legs. They're OP. Lol just kidding. I think maybe I'll just make everybody slightly lame in one leg. It's more fun that way!" How would that make you feel?