Beacon diminishing returns

[spacedog]

So now that people have had a chance to play with this a bit... I'm curious what everyone's thoughts are about it.

Personally I feel like it's mostly an improvement. I can drop a single beacon down and get a huge boost (3x what it gave before). That really frees up a lot of space for other things. Usually my belt spaghetti.

On the other hand, I have reflexively found myself trying to drop extra beacons with efficiency modules into unused space... and then realizing it diminishes the effect of the nearby speed module beacons. I sort of feel like the diminishing returns should be on a per module type basis. The possibly unintended result of this seems to be that I'll never use efficiency modules anymore, except for where I have the odd module slot free in assembler/refinery/etc... which is practically never.

[MeduSalem]

I find myself doing circular & honeycomb layouts now. With a beacon in the middle and 8 or 12 assemblers around it. Just to avoid the penalty. ^^

At least it is aesthetically more pleasing than my previous approach of alternating rows of assemblers & beacons. xD


There is a use for efficiency modules still... I will likely put them in beacons when I put quality modules in the machines. But that said I haven't done the math whether that actually pays off or if the beacon itself just draws so much power that it doesn't offset the power savings from the assemblers.


That said I don't have a proper strategy yet for when to use quality and when productivity. Speed modules also kill the quality so they only go together with productivity.

[jamiechi1]

I have not used Beacons in 2.0, and it seems like months or years since I have used them in Factorio 1.1.
So have not noticed the differences. Maybe I should look at the wiki.

So what are some 'use' cases for Factorio 2.0? Is the new Quality thing making Beacons less useful?

[470lm]

i mostly use 3 or less only, i always found beacon spam distasteful

[HadesSupreme]

It feels a lot better if you are spaghetti-ing and want to boost throughput with a few cheeky beacons barely fitting in somewhere.

For lines of beacons I don't really see how it changes much aside from being a gentle nerf, it's not like if you run with half as many beacons you can really use that space for much in the typical alternating lines of assemblers and beacons setup. At the same time if you're at that stage of game you probably don't care much about power or efficiency, you've got an infinite solar grid swamping the planet, a big nuclear setup, or fusion, so might as well throw extra speed beacons in.

Personally I've never seen the point of efficiency modules in beacons even if they were a net positive. Power generation is really just not an issue once you've either teched out of coal or expanded to extra coal patches.

[nzer]

Personally I've never seen the point of efficiency modules in beacons even if they were a net positive. Power generation is really just not an issue once you've either teched out of coal or expanded to extra coal patches.

Efficiency modules in general are used to reduce pollution rather than power draw, since anything that modulates power draw affects pollution proportionally. Even if you're using non-polluting tech for power you can still significantly reduce pollution with efficiency modules.

Using them in beacons I'm not sure about though. It's at least viable now with the changes.

[deepfield]

I found efficiency beacons to be great on Fulgora when I was struggling to collect enough lightning to power everything, with rares it doesn't take much to get to the cap and it really lowered the impact of my EM plants

[Khazul]

I found efficiency beacons to be great on Fulgora when I was struggling to collect enough lightning to power everything, with rares it doesn't take much to get to the cap and it really lowered the impact of my EM plants

Hmm - I gave up and built a massive reactor that ate most of my ice and flew the fuel in. Part due to most of my space being taken up by accumulator fields. Then thought hmm loads of power and went nuts with speed beacons...

[Nemoricus]

I'm mostly happy that beacons got a boost if you're using small numbers of them. It means I can sprinkle them in so that each machine gets the effect of no more than one beacon and still feel like it's contributing significantly.

[vark111]

I'll admit I was a sceptic when it came up in the FFF, but after playing with it, I really like the way it has given legs to what I call the new mid-game+ phase.

Early game is your jump start base with stone furnaces, Assembler 1's, yellow inserters, yellow belts, coal power.
Mid Game was red belts, steel furnaces, blue inserters, Assembler 2's (with the occasional speed 1/prod 1), and starting up an alternate power source (solar/nuclear)

This base is more than sufficient for launching one or ten rockets.

After that, the games start to diverge.

In 1.1 I would just jump strait from the mid game build to a Mega Base. 12 beacons per assembler 3, full speed 3 / prod 3s, stack inserters on everything, end game boss factory.

Now? This new Mid Game + phase means I'm not anywhere near the "End Game" which is going to be Foundaries, EMP's, Fusion Power, Green Belts, etc...
So I am having a blast building out this new style of factory which is based on Assembler 3s with Prod2 clustered around a beacon or two with some Speed 2s. Creating a blue belt based factory that can support multiple rocket silos and all the space platform needs is pretty easy with a "minimal beacon" build.

[Visione]

I'll admit I was a sceptic when it came up in the FFF, but after playing with it, I really like the way it has given legs to what I call the new mid-game+ phase.

Early game is your jump start base with stone furnaces, Assembler 1's, yellow inserters, yellow belts, coal power.
Mid Game was red belts, steel furnaces, blue inserters, Assembler 2's (with the occasional speed 1/prod 1), and starting up an alternate power source (solar/nuclear)

This base is more than sufficient for launching one or ten rockets.

After that, the games start to diverge.

In 1.1 I would just jump strait from the mid game build to a Mega Base. 12 beacons per assembler 3, full speed 3 / prod 3s, stack inserters on everything, end game boss factory.

Now? This new Mid Game + phase means I'm not anywhere near the "End Game" which is going to be Foundaries, EMP's, Fusion Power, Green Belts, etc...
So I am having a blast building out this new style of factory which is based on Assembler 3s with Prod2 clustered around a beacon or two with some Speed 2s. Creating a blue belt based factory that can support multiple rocket silos and all the space platform needs is pretty easy with a "minimal beacon" build.

This is exactly how I feel too. It's honestly great. Back in 1.1 I would basically complete skip module-1 and module-2. Just go straight for module-3 as it was the only one that felt worth it. Now, as module-1 and module-2 feel much more rewarding with also low beacon counts, and module-3 is behind planet tech, it's really worth it to experiment with them early on. And only scale to module-3 much later. And then after that scale to Q5 mod-3. Great progression experience tbh.

[NineNine]

Personally I've never seen the point of efficiency modules in beacons even if they were a net positive. Power generation is really just not an issue once you've either teched out of coal or expanded to extra coal patches.

Efficiency modules in general are used to reduce pollution rather than power draw, since anything that modulates power draw affects pollution proportionally. Even if you're using non-polluting tech for power you can still significantly reduce pollution with efficiency modules.

Using them in beacons I'm not sure about though. It's at least viable now with the changes.

True, but once you have something that gives you virtually unlimited power (like regular nukes + Kovarex), you can just ring your entire base with a couple of rows of laser turrets and not worry about biters any more. At least that's how I play.

[Stargateur]

what really great is that beacon allow you to fully use a legendary machine or legendary module. instead of having 10 machine with 20 beacon, and normal module in them you can have fewer machine one or two beacon legendary module and building. It's more efficiency to have 1 very good beacon than 10 bad beacons. So beacon of diminishing return reward people who invest in quality.