My rail-connected specialized-factories campaign (so far)

[sillyfly]

In my latest game I have decided to make specialized factories for different products, and connect all of them with trains. This is what I have so far (I am planning to do it much bigger, but I have taken a break in the meanwhile):

Overview map

This is the entire factory (except for one outpost to the south). Map scaled x2.

Main bus - science production

The main assembly line - the start of the main bus and science production. Some of the designs are heavily inspired by ideas I saw in various places, mainly Bentham's LPs (https://www.youtube.com/user/MangledPork).

I didn't want to flood this with images, so if you want to see more pictures, they are here:
http://imgur.com/a/W0klA

[ssilk]

My idea to this is, that the small sub-factories can be found by random - you will find them, when you discover large (very large) areas around. All you need to do is to make them running again and connect them by train.

The result is maybe a OpenTTD-like gameplay, where you need to bring big amounts of items from A to B and B to C etc. I think this you be quite interesting.

[sillyfly]

This is an interesting idea!
Maybe a multiplayer mode, where the players start far apart and each one gets a recipe only they can craft, so they have to find eachother and transfer goods between their factories?

[ssilk]

Yes. But also for single player. For example you cannot create advanced circuits. You need to bring the plastic, green circuits, copper wire etc. to a far away outpost. And you need to rebuild the outpost a bit, cause it parallelizes too much, it should scale instead to avoid having assemblies with only one item inside...

And there I see also the connections to packaging/boxing, cause you need to bring so much. But this is really only some beginning to think about it and starting to be too offtopic...

[Maddie]

This seems very similar to one of my factories. I also had the idea of making all the different products in different mini-factories, and then bring them to the main factory. I have had a lot of issues with my trains though, as they kept blocking each other - I used the same railroad layout as you.

Do you have any issues with the trains, and how many trains do you have?


Maddie

[sillyfly]

I currently have 20+ trains, and they work pretty well. Recent versions (0.11.13 if I recall correctly) fixed lots of train routing issues, so that could be it.

[Maddie]

I believe I have something like 20 trains, but I have had to have two rails going in each direction to accommodate all the trains. I also had to get rid of most of the circles, as it took too long for the trains to pass through them. I tried updating to one of the newer versions, but it doesn't seem to have made a difference.


Maddie

[Idlemind79]

I believe I have something like 20 trains, but I have had to have two rails going in each direction to accommodate all the trains. I also had to get rid of most of the circles, as it took too long for the trains to pass through them. I tried updating to one of the newer versions, but it doesn't seem to have made a difference.


Maddie

20 trains!!! I had a hard enough time getting 2 to play nice together lol.

Do you guys play with lower resource counts? I find setting up the game with rich there is no reason to expand to get all the research.. going to have to stop doing that, feels like cheating.

[Maddie]

I have everything set to max, but seeing as I can produce right around 10k iron and copper plates per minut, I need all the ore I can get.


Maddie

[ssilk]

I believe I have something like 20 trains, but I have had to have two rails going in each direction to accommodate all the trains. I also had to get rid of most of the circles, as it took too long for the trains to pass through them. I tried updating to one of the newer versions, but it doesn't seem to have made a difference.


Maddie

20 trains!!! I had a hard enough time getting 2 to play nice together lol.

Do you guys play with lower resource counts? I find setting up the game with rich there is no reason to expand to get all the research.. going to have to stop doing that, feels like cheating.

In my current world I think I've about 70. Handling that is only possible, with https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =14&t=4504 the Fat Controller.

[Maddie]

I believe I have something like 20 trains, but I have had to have two rails going in each direction to accommodate all the trains. I also had to get rid of most of the circles, as it took too long for the trains to pass through them. I tried updating to one of the newer versions, but it doesn't seem to have made a difference.


Maddie

20 trains!!! I had a hard enough time getting 2 to play nice together lol.

Do you guys play with lower resource counts? I find setting up the game with rich there is no reason to expand to get all the research.. going to have to stop doing that, feels like cheating.

In my current world I think I've about 70. Handling that is only possible, with https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =14&t=4504 the Fat Controller.

Your factory must be massive if you have 70 trains? I have a reasonably large factory, and I have FPS issues. Sometimes it gets as low as 10 FPS. Do you encounter the same problem?


Maddie

[ssilk]

Yes, of course. Currently I'm around 15 FPS.

What I do against it:
- I built nearly only with the construction bots (ghosts). This is much faster. While the bots are building I do something else. Therefore
- I use the test mod to move fast. This helps a lot. (*)
- I use the boxing mod. The packing/unpacking is complex, but a) it's a totally new game b) it reduces the total load a lot.
- Don't use much belts. Especially full belts are bad. The boxing mod helps here also a lot.
- Try to avoid inserters filling into (provider/storage) chests, cause, the game cannot use it good in 0.10. (**)

(*) I cheated also a bit to make me some basic mines, that never deplete, cause it eats the whole time, to always find new mines (and I need a lot of them); you cannot create fast enough new outposts. So I achieved about 50,000 ores per minute, but need "only" 70 trains (not really running full currently). This is only possible with the boxing mod and double headed trains, each with 4 wagons. My funniest issue yesterday was, that I run out of coal for my trains (3 mines are not enough). That really sucked. Luckily the trains have always 2 locos, so the chance, that both engines run empty was really low. But it caused also the biggest deadlock I ever saw (about 40 trains where involved).

(**) Yes. I'm still playing with 0.10 I tried to switch to 0.11, but something in the save isn't compatible anymore. So with 0.11 I think it would run much faster, cause I'm forced to use a lot of inserters in the worst case, which is fixed in 0.11. (What I haven't tried/will try is to load with an early version of 0.11, save it and retry to load it with the current).

I think I'll post some pics, cause especially the boxing is interesting. Maybe this evening...