)So I've been playing the game for a while, went through two restarts of my map. One commom problem I had was with how I was distributing my potions into the research labs. My initial approach was naive and it had a belt line going by my set of labs. What happened here was that the first labs in the line would be greedy and stockpile up multiple potions and depriving labs later down the line of the same potions. Labs closer to the potions source would stockpile potions more than labs after way from the source of the potions.
My second approach was to loop my potion belt around the labs... but this didnt solve the greedy stockpiling problem either.
After thinking for a while, this is my third solution:
Let me explain whats going on here:
You have two lines of potions coming in on either side of the line of labs: reds and greens on the right and blues and purples on the left. There are eight labs in total. Each line of potions splits once, then its branches split again, and those branches split a third time. If you are familiar with the binary tree data structure in Comp Sci, that is where I got the idea from.
I like this solution for the following reason:
Splitters seems to remember (maintain state) which direction it split previously. So if a splitter put one item on the left output belt previously, it puts the next item on the right output belt. (I think this is the bees knees!) The implication of this is, if you have a hierarchy of splitters like in the picture, you can pretty much guarantee that your items will be distributed in a round robin fashion among the various branches of the "splitter tree". This is really useful for research labs because ideally you want to maximize the number of running labs.
Using this method; given an input of 8 potions; I went from having:
2 running labs with 6 "idle" potions stockpiled between them
to
8 running labs with 0 "idle" potions stockpiled between them.
In my next map, I plan to use this to supply most facilities that take a long time to produce output.
