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Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 2:58 am
by GopherAtl
TRIGGER WARNING! The following post contains images of rail networks that include both loops and roundabouts.

if you're hoping for amazing combinator stuff, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. I've been puttering very slowly through this game since 0.12 came out, tho I keep getting distracted playing with ideas in my cheaty test world or making mods, and even when I've been playing, I've been plodding along with a staggering lack of efficiency.

I made a deliberate decision starting this game to go for a distributed base, with lots of separate, specialized outposts, rather than one massive megafacility with my only remote outposts being short-lived mining operations. I also decided to try and cram most of my rail traffic into a sparse main backbone of tracks, with outposts build off from there, as an experiment to find out just how much rail traffic one pair of tracks with proper signaling can handle. It's cause my already lethargic play speed to slow down to a crawl, what with all the traveling, but it's been fun, and I'll get to the top of the tech tree eventually!

The known world so far:

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A keen observer will notice the lack of polution around several outposts; almost everybody is backstuffed at the moment. Here's everything except the two southern-most mines zoomed in a bit, so the train stop labels show up...

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(pics from here on will be in spoilers)

The top-left-most outpost is oil processing; barreled oil is hauled in by train, along with coal and iron, and made into plastic, sulfuric acid, lubricant, and solid fuel. Here's that outpost closer-in:
Oil Processing outpost
North-west Oil
Circuit City
Hellbase
The soon-to-be-demolished smelting outpost
That's it, except for frontier walls and mining outposts, which are undefended and uninteresting, respectively. This whole distributed outpost approach isn't terribly efficient, and I spend an appalling amount of time traveling from place to place, but it's been great fun for all that, and I've enjoyed it for the variety of not doing another of the same megabase deals I've always done before.

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 9:10 am
by Boogieman14
8/10, nice loops, shame about the vertical stations ;)

I'd be interested in reading more about your barreling setup, sounds interesting. In my previous games (pre-0.12), I tended to just reserve a bunch of slots in the cargo wagons for full and empty barrels and push empty barrels into the system until it could take no more :)

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 11:54 am
by GopherAtl
Boogieman14 wrote:8/10, nice loops, shame about the vertical stations ;)

I'd be interested in reading more about your barreling setup, sounds interesting. In my previous games (pre-0.12), I tended to just reserve a bunch of slots in the cargo wagons for full and empty barrels and push empty barrels into the system until it could take no more :)
I generally go with 4 inserters to a side so I can use blueprints for unloading/loading that can be rotated and always work, vertically or horizontally, for any carriage.

I'll do a breakdown of how the barreling set-up works when I get a chance; expecting to be busy on and off today, so it might take me a while.

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 12:01 pm
by Boogieman14
GopherAtl wrote: I generally go with 4 inserters to a side so I can use blueprints for unloading/loading that can be rotated and always work, vertically or horizontally, for any carriage.
I guess I'm more of a minmaxer in that respect, I prefer to have all my wagons serviced by 7 inserters (or even 14 if I'm using a mod that increases stacksize beyond the default 50). For some reason, in most of my games I do place the first station vertically.. Then when I'm placing inserters I remember that isn't a good idea, make a blueprint for a loading base and use that the rest of the game :lol:

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 1:47 pm
by Tashen
Boogieman14 wrote:
GopherAtl wrote: I generally go with 4 inserters to a side so I can use blueprints for unloading/loading that can be rotated and always work, vertically or horizontally, for any carriage.
I guess I'm more of a minmaxer in that respect, I prefer to have all my wagons serviced by 7 inserters (or even 14 if I'm using a mod that increases stacksize beyond the default 50). For some reason, in most of my games I do place the first station vertically.. Then when I'm placing inserters I remember that isn't a good idea, make a blueprint for a loading base and use that the rest of the game :lol:

I haven't used rails much, so I am curious why is that a bad idea to use the same blueprint for loading the rest of the game?

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 1:55 pm
by GopherAtl
Tashen wrote:
I haven't used rails much, so I am curious why is that a bad idea to use the same blueprint for loading the rest of the game?

Think you misunderstood, he meant vertical stations were a bad idea, he sets up his station horizontally instead then makes a blueprint to use forever.

I use blueprints too, I just use a per-carriage blueprint that can be placed for each carriage in any length of train.

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 2:01 pm
by Boogieman14
GopherAtl wrote:Think you misunderstood, he meant vertical stations were a bad idea, he sets up his station horizontally instead then makes a blueprint to use forever.
Understanding is a two-way street, perhaps I could've written it a bit more clearly :)

Anyway, in this post is a screenshot of the type of base I used in the 0.11 era. Just plop the entire thing down, manually build a roboport, feed the robots and the goods to the system and walk away :)

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 3:22 pm
by Tashen
I guess I just didn't understand why something can work horizontally but not vertically. Do things not line up the same?

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 3:25 pm
by ratchetfreak
Tashen wrote:I guess I just didn't understand why something can work horizontally but not vertically. Do things not line up the same?
trains are shorter when they are vertical vs. when they are horizontal

This leads to less optimal vertical stations.

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 3:29 pm
by Boogieman14
A train wagon on horizontal rail can have 7 inserters servicing it (used to be that every third wagon could have 8, not sure if anything's changed about that lately). A vertical wagon can only handle 5 max, i believe.

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 4:25 pm
by Tashen
Ok, so that makes more sense now.

Re: Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2015 3:06 am
by GopherAtl
After spending last week with the modding api, got back into playing this weekend. Progress was made, though going continues to be slow. But everything is back online again, which is a start!
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