Play styles and factory designs

[Mosel]

Hey folks,

I play Factorio for a some years now (with some breaks from time to time) and I wonder about your play styles.

Sure, most prominent is building megafactories creating quadrillions of science packs and so on, which is impressive for sure.... but I doubt most people have that much time to invest (maybe they also don't hang around in forums *lol)

So maybe you would like to tell about how you enjoy Factorio (because it's the best game ever ).

That said I'll begin:

I prefer starting on an Island without "neighbours", build up supersuperslowly and expand in godmode . It's mostly about building making it nice and cosy and figuring out solutions.

Most important:
I use a main bus design with basic materials only (i/c-plates, stone, coal, advanced oil liquids+water ) so every factory section builds their own circuits, steel or whatever is needed. So setting up processors is a little different.
I wonder if somebody uses a similar design away from almighty rainbow bus.

Curious about your input

Cheers

M

[GrumpyJoe]

I just hit 4000h and im going back to the roots with SA. Focusing on making it pretty over pure efficiency.

TLDR: it just occurred to me that with over organising, you try to explain your base to someone who hasn't built it and joins your game.
Beside my own playing I've watched too much other people and let them influence me too much.
A little inspiration is good, but I've lost my own way.

I know what I thought when a built a train around that cliff and forked a small stone mine off in that bulge. Or the loop that makes tracks long enough to park a 2nd train waiting to be loaded at the cramped U mine.

My plan is to not have a plan. If I need to figure out what I thought 100h ago, that's part of the plan.



So..
Trees will only be cut if very dense forests to see items, at least a little. Maybe when they are destroyed with the tiny amount of pollution, cos I'm using mostly green modules.
Cliffs will be kept.

Small nuclear power plants scattered around.
Solar field design inspired by Dosh's megabase, not as big tho.
Power might be overbuilt now, but I don't care. It looks good.

Organic train network. A few BPs. Mostly offloading stations.
Elevated rails will be kept for special purposes, I like when trains have to stop. I like signals.

The offloaders and the smelters are the only thing that looks the same. But I mixed em up, steel is not wider, it's twice as long. Stone is only half. A coal offloader for plastic in between two copper stations.
Coal having no smelting obviously, so there is room for train fuel production.

This goes into a highly spaghettified base that is kind of handbuilt. Ofc I'm using bots for repetitive tasks, but it's not looking like a soulless warehouse with rows of production and nothing in between.

My defense perimeter consists of pillboxes to the north and east, cos it's small openings between big lakes.
South and west has a few strips of longer walls between smaller lakes.
4 different automated defense trains cos I designed walls and pillboxes differently.

Production doesn't need upgrades to research faster, cos designing takes time anyway
Coal and solar is not enough and nuclear is not ready yet? (forgot to automated buildings, uranium was running), turn off part of the base. I've had a few brownouts and didn't upgrade then.

Fulgora will be first, just for the recycler so I can let quality grind for a few blue items at home.
Since it's the easiest planet to escape naked, I'll only bring rocket silo materials and leave early.


The plan is to go Gleba "first", naked, only personal bots. It's beautiful, it's interesting, the sound is the best.
It's not the most efficient way, but I wanna build a "normal" base that supports itself and the solar system with its products, without outside help.

From there I don't know.

I've been to Aquilo in my first save and I liked it.
But I need to integrate the planet into my long term thoughts before I set up a fleet of space platforms.

My first save was brute force building to beat the game and that was a huge mistake.

[wizcreations]

I like trees and cliffs. I try not to destroy them unless there is no choice. My current map has a huge oil field covered by trees. I only cut down the trees needed to place power poles, pump jacks, and underground pipes to get the oil out.

I also like spaghetti factories. I have a main bus but the belts go both directions. Plates, coal, stone, brick, plastic, green circuits, and red circuits on the main belt. I place things where they fit and use as many undergrounds and splitters as I need to make it work. I do not destroy anything I built except for the starting burner miners and hand-fed assembly machines.

I like curved walls for defense. It allows more turrets to target enemies on approach.

I have never made a "city-block" style base, but I want to try that. I want to design a huge network of trains delivering plates wherever they're needed, and a smaller train network taking higher products wherever they're need. I need to improve my blueprints before I'll be able to do this though. 6 hours in a map attempting to do this I discovered that I simply couldn't get resources where I needed them. I need to figure out how to get a large-scale automation of train products before I start trying to build a base around a train network. So far I have only done that using a bus design.

[Tertius]

The biggest obstacle for me is getting all things together. I'm unable to create something from zero. I must have something to work with, no matter how mediocre it is, something to expand, to build on, to improve. This is my strength, while building things from nothing is my weakness.

So if I start with nothing (on every planet it's the same, even if I bring some starting equipment with me), I run around and look what resources are available, what tech is available, what tech can be unlocked soon to expand my capabilities.

Then I fire up a new game as sandbox, map editor with lab tiles. I place all resources as infinity boxes (ores, fluids), and I randomly place a bunch of production buildings (assembling machines, refineries, etc.) and give them all the recipes currently available to me in the real map. Now I have a bunch of resources and a bunch of converters from ingredient x to output item y, where some need x and output y, and others need y and output z.

Then I arrange them and connect them with belts and inserters. Or place logistics chests, depending on the tech level I have available. It's a long, long cut+paste session with me arranging and multiplying all the buildings until I get sane production lines with the resources from the infinity chests+pipes on the left and the final result(s) in chests on the right, and the production lines between them.
Some intermediates such as green+red+blue circuits are always the same, so they get their own part from some blueprint and I only need to connect outputs with inputs.

In the end, there is something I blueprint and place on the real map. Usually it's an iterating process, since you need to build a small factory by hand to produce the items for the next factory, then use the next factory to build the next version of that factory and so on until every production relevant tech is unlocked. And it's necessary to improve the blueprint on the real map, since the blueprint from the sandbox never runs properly on a real map of course. But this is fun, since repairing existing stuff is my strength.

Within the factory I have guidelines, such as trying to minimize belt and pipe length and place the output of one line as near as possible to the input of the next line it feeds. On Nauvis, I have big smelting and circuit production areas, but everything else is built on the spot. Elsewhere, it's everything distributed and near the spot where it's needed, since you have more powerful production buildings that require less space.

And last, I tend to always build 2 different and distinct factories next to each other. One is the mall for producing items to build the factory, optimized for spike usage. The other is the science production and rocket transport, optimized for continuous, nonstop production.

What I definitely like in Space Age is the scaling of the production. You're able to build a slow basic setup that works as start. Then scale the same setup by adding a few more machines, then modules, then beacons, then better modules, then faster belts, then quality, and then everything again, on the next higher level. You don't need to deconstruct and create a whole new factory with a whole new layout to increase production. At least much less than with 1.1.

[h.q.droid]

I like designing stuff but not building them. I just design the bare minimum for a short term goal and don't bother to scale or tweak rates unless absolutely necessary. I also prefer renewables, tore down nuclear power the moment I get enough free carbons from space to burn. Reached solar edge without depleting anything but the starting Nauvis ore patches on default setting.

[NineNine]

I like designing stuff but not building them. I just design the bare minimum for a short term goal and don't bother to scale or tweak rates unless absolutely necessary. I also prefer renewables, tore down nuclear power the moment I get enough free carbons from space to burn. Reached solar edge without depleting anything but the starting Nauvis ore patches on default setting.

I do the same. When I play, I just go from bottleneck to bottleneck. Over the years, I've learned that when I fix a bottleneck, maybe increase production of that Item by about 3-4 times. Usually, that's enough, but in some games, that's still not enough, so that same thing might be a bottleneck again in a few weeks.

At the end, I usually put everything (including ore patches) in a giant rail/robotport grid, and play that until my UPS/FPS drops too low to make it fun to play any more.