Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Clever and beautiful constructions, bigger than two chunks
- Defense: killing biters as an art
- Castles, Throne Rooms, Decorations (comfortable living in the Factorio World)
- Main Bus Concepts
- Modular Systems, Factory Streets, show how all works together
- Megabases
Please provide us with blueprints or saves, if that makes sense of course.
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Clever and beautiful constructions, bigger than two chunks
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Dragony
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Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by Dragony »

Hi,

I have posted my base before, actually just a few screenshots. I really was not in the mood for going through all the work to actually post my 160 MB save.

But since my megabase only uses belts AND in the most recent FFF V453000 asked for some belts-only megabases, I decided its time to invest some more time for my favourite game.

Since the base is belt-only and fun-only, there are some strange concepts like recycling unused ore for steel, which is of course unneccessary if you just analyze the numbers and build your base right. But I think most of the fun is just doing what you feel to be happy to do right now and then just do it.

Actually there is now ONE requester chest, because thats actually the last save existing marking the end of the belt-only era. Now I am at a point where belts are just more of a pain in the ass than not, so right now I am 20 hours further and my factorio is already heavily populated with bots.

You might also wonder why there are only 250 SPM in the stats. Thats because I am playing with cost*10 for science AND expensive setting. I dont know how many SPM I would have when I would have played on normal settings. But if expensive is twice as expensive ad normal, then 250 SPM on my base is 5000 SPM on a normal base. Tell me when I am wrong, I really dont know. I am just a producer after all!

As a player with 600 hours of playtime (on this base at least) I have an own opinion about the Bots vs. Belts topic as well.

For me, it is a fact that bots are way less fun than belts.
For me, it is a fact that belts are way more frustrating than bots.

The solution should NOT be to nerf bots, but to buff belts. (Nerfing is always a bad thing anyway.) But it is just boring to raise the throughput. Whats the point? If you just boost the speed, in the end the only change is that a number rises. You should buff the "fun" in the belts instead.

So whats fun? For me, fun is to build an elegant solution for a suddenly appearing problem. I really love the presented splitter extension and I wish there are more of them. I hope it also solves the really frustrating problem of belt balancing. I really HATE the fact thats its so ridiculously hard to actually do belt balancing. All I want are full belts all of the time. But a station always has 6 (or 12, if both sides are used) chests per wagon. And if you happen to have 5 blue belts waiting for ore, you have a problem. I know there are many Rube Goldberg machines out there, solving the task more or less good (i.e. the belt balancer wiki page), but in my eyes thats NOT a solution, thats a work-around for a fundamental problem.

I will use belts and bots at the same time, depending on the fact how hard it is to actually use belts. Yes, thats the way I work. I try belts first, because they are most fun to build and they "feel right" to use. But if its just too hard to use them, then I switch to bots. So I ask you to make belts easier more versatile to use. Add belt features! The better splitter is a great idea. Add more! Maybe you can have them to be researched first, but I really think we need more belt features.

I also vote for automatic belt compression by inserters!

Honestly I don't have an easy solution for the problem "oh, I need more throughput here. Oh, the belt is already blue... oh, to add a second belt, those structures have to more down 1 tile. Oh down there, there are more structures.". Those scenarios happen quite often and in most cases, I need around 30 minutes until I have added a second belt... Not that fun indeed.

But I have an idea, and you programmers will probably not like it. Have you played Heroes of Might and Magic? I love that game. There is also an underground map. You toggle underground/surface map with a button. The portals of both levels are at the same place. If that would be possible in Factorio, you could add a whole layer of underground construction (limited to belts and pipes). The most biggest advantage would be that you can plan corners and curves. This would be a massive belt feature, since it would solve most space problems belt users have. I would love that feature, because it would give me so much more space for belts. Space a full factory just does not offer anymore.

Ah yeah, get the save here: http://5.9.116.181/beltsonly.zip

joonnnyy
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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by joonnnyy »

i do prefer belts over bots, as bots are just like a way to circumvent the biggest challange factorio has to offer getting stuff from a to b in the needed amounts
but sadly belts are very inadequad for some productionsteps, eg. one yellow assembler needs unmodified 2.5 green circuits per second to produce 1 blue circuit ->16 assambler and fully compresed blue belt is empty

so while i would love for belts to be buffed in any way to increase throughputdensity* and your solution looks extremly good on first glance one feature would be completely destroyed by it: crossing belts
atm you just plop down an underground belt and be done
but when overground and underground transport stuff from west to east then how do you get anything to go fro north to south to cross this
onlything i can come up with now is multi lvl underground but that would open a whole different can of belts

same thin with pipse btw only worse since the connect to every adjacent pipe independet of direction


* i used throughputdensity in the meaning: items per secon per width (measured in tiles)
so blue belts have 40 item/second/tile
and bots have semi-infinity since they use 0 width to transport, only roboports which can be on the side

Dragony
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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by Dragony »

I don't see the problems you mention. I create electronic circuits in real life and when we are routing the traces, its exactly the same like routing belts in Factorio. Mostly we are doing two-layer boards and sometimes you have to "jump" multiple times to reach your goal.

For very complex routings, four layer boards are used. But seriously, if Factorio would offer four layers of belts, you can do everything with it. Most pc mainboards are produced in 4-layers and if you zoom in on such a board, it looks not different than a very complex Factorio fab :D

Got a belt problem? Call an electronic engineer! :D
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Dragony
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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by Dragony »

I have to admit that the received feedback is below my expectations.

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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by BHakluyt »

Hey man, don't let the bot baboons bring you down. Your base is cool and it runs a smooth 60ups for me. But I think you can make it way bigger and use beaconed smelting and longer trains and you can easily then make that thing x3 or even x7. Whats your lucky number?

When I press P and select 1 minute it shows only 259 sp used of each. So how can we see it can make 5000 of each per minute like that? You need way more labs. Or maybe all my mods mess things up. 5000 a minute in such a relatively small base would be quite impressive.

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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by Koub »

BHakluyt wrote:Hey man, don't let the bot baboons bring you down. Your base is cool and it runs a smooth 60ups for me. But I think you can make it way bigger and use beaconed smelting and longer trains and you can easily then make that thing x3 or even x7. Whats your lucky number?

When I press P and select 1 minute it shows only 259 sp used of each. So how can we see it can make 5000 of each per minute like that? You need way more labs. Or maybe all my mods mess things up. 5000 a minute in such a relatively small base would be quite impressive.
Dragony wrote:I am playing with cost*10 for science AND expensive setting.
Basically :
- Make a new game > advanced settings >
Factorio - Expensive settings.jpg
Factorio - Expensive settings.jpg (9.57 KiB) Viewed 12239 times
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.

Dragony
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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by Dragony »

Koub wrote:
Dragony wrote:I am playing with cost*10 for science AND expensive setting.
Basically :
- Make a new game > advanced settings >
Factorio - Expensive settings.jpg
Exactly. So how many SPM is this if I played with all set to normal?
btw, with those settings it was a real challenge to get the defense up before being overrun by the bugs!

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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by Koub »

Expensive is not a x something increase, it greatly varies for each recipe.
By the way ...
[Koub] Moving this to Show your creation > Gigantic structures. It might not be the bissest all time, but it's quite impressive nonetheless :).
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.

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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by m44v »

Dragony wrote: So how many SPM is this if I played with all set to normal?
The technology multiplier just makes research more expensive in number of science flasks, it doesn't make the flasks themselves more expensive, so the x10 multiplication you did to your SPM isn't right. About expensive mode, the difference is 2 times more iron and 3 times more copper, so let's say is around 2.5 times the resources, so your 250 SPM could be around 625 SPM in normal.

Dragony
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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by Dragony »

m44v wrote:
Dragony wrote: So how many SPM is this if I played with all set to normal?
The technology multiplier just makes research more expensive in number of science flasks, it doesn't make the flasks themselves more expensive, so the x10 multiplication you did to your SPM isn't right. About expensive mode, the difference is 2 times more iron and 3 times more copper, so let's say is around 2.5 times the resources, so your 250 SPM could be around 625 SPM in normal.
You are right in the point that expensive research does not alter the SPM. I was wrong there. Nevertheless your calculation of x2.5 is wrong. You forgot the multiplication effect of the further needed materials, which also are more expensive needing the already more expensive base materials. i.e., but not limited to blue cards.

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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by m44v »

Dragony wrote: Nevertheless your calculation of x2.5 is wrong. You forgot the multiplication effect of the further needed materials, which also are more expensive needing the already more expensive base materials. i.e., but not limited to blue cards.
what I did was to use an online calculator and compare the iron and copper needed for the same SPM between normal and expensive. So the only thing I didn't account were the resources needed for build the actual base, while it might not be exact it isn't going to be too far from the truth.

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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by EnigmaticAussie »

Dragony wrote: <snip>
Ah yeah, get the save here: http://5.9.116.181/beltsonly.zip
Connection refused for download...

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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by Nomadic Steppe »

The download link does not work,

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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by MaexxDesign »

This is really nice !!
But the UPS is very bad. :o
How many rockets did you launch ?

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Re: Belts vs Bots, here is my 5000 SPM belts-only megabase.

Post by voddan »

Wow, that is really cool!
I must load it to see for myself. Could you please fix the server? I can't load the save as it is now :(

Maybe it makes sense to share huge saves as torrents?
Whatever works for you is fine by me, but I understand the trouble to keep a server just to share a save

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