Factorio Forums

TL;DR
pipes should be nerfed to give fluid wagons a purpose

Why?
Fluid wagons are pretty useless.
Currently, there is no downside to just running a huge pipe from a to b. Yes you need intermittent pumps, but you need to run power to the pump jacks anyway, so that's barely an inconvenience.
10 minutes into the game, I transport my water with pipes.
3 hours into the game, I transport my oil with pipes.
500 hours in, would you believe it, pipes are still by far the best option.

What?

My Proposal: Leakage
What if pipes aren't 100% air tight? Let's say, a pipe loses 5% of its contents every 100 meters. This means that a pipe of 500 meters will leak about 23% of the fluid. This doesn't invalidate the approach of using pipes for everything, but it does incentivise using trains for longer distances if you care about efficiency. If you don't like trains, you can eat the losses.

Bonus: Expensive Pipes
What if some fluids are too dangerous to be transported in mere iron pipes? What if you needed to make special pipes, for example using steeel and copper, for transporting sulfuric acid and the Space Age fluids?
Of course this wouldn't impact late game players much. At that point most people would transport their fluids in heat pipes if they had to.
This does however incentivize using trains to supply uranium mines. You might even see trains on Vulcanus and trains for more than just scrap on Fulgora.

+1 also that "leakage" might make non-steam/water pipes a good biter attraction via pollution

Each has its own purpose. Pipes are good for spaghetti/bus bases, fluid wagons for city blocks. There is no need to force either way over another.

My main gripe with the new fluid system in 2.0 has been that it's essentially made pipes have infinite throughput (obviously it's still limited, but it's effectively infinite for all practical purposes).

I feel like the Factorio developers should take a page out of Satisfactory's book and limit pipe throughput significantly, with multiple pipe tiers available (similar to belts).

Throughput essentially doesn't matter at all right now for fluids, and I feel like it results in an oversimplified and unbalanced system.

This would potentially add a lot of depth similar to belts, by encouraging things like pipe buses and networks, using pumps to redirect fluid around when throughput is limited, etc.

Satisfactory's fluid system is really deep, and every time I play it I get annoyed at how basic and barebones Factorio's fluids have become. Sure, the old system had it's problems, but they threw out the baby with the bathwater in my opinion.

Pipes in Factorio 2.0 are essentially mindless, which feels extremely out of place for a game with so much depth and so many different variables and parameters to consider when building.

Yeah so I will just say it again: Bring back 1.1 fluid system.