Factorio Forums

After you started Factorio, your factory get's bigger, you need more of everything, so you build more to get even bigger. That is a lot of fun for me. Many people do a restart or stop playing after sending up a rocket. For me the game starts there, so my factories are growing to Megabases.

I am missing a (lategame) solution to improve my factories. It is ok to place down a huge number of buildings, but at some point, it should be possible in a better way, more optimised and just more efficient.
Examples: (first number is ok for me, second number of needed buildings should have alternative solutions!)
Solarpanels, 50'000, >350'000 // Accumulators, 40'000, >250'000 // Steam turbines, 1'000, >4'000 // Smelters, 1'000, >4'000 // Miners 1'000, > 4'000 etc...)

What are your thoughts about?
1. For vanilla, it is good as it is now.
2. It should be optimised with more (infinite) researches
3. It should be optimised with more Mk.N Type-Buildings (like we have 3 types of assembling machines)
4. Other or new ideas?

Why?
Better performance
Question of balancing and simple-mindedness
Ex. after laying down 2000 smelters, it would be more interesting to produce something advanced in a enlarged assembling chain than just laying down 2000 smelters more. Any Mk.N Type Building should also consume something extra (fluid or whatever) for more interesting new layouts. So totally you would have then 2000 advanced smelters instead of 4000 normal.

"more optimized and more efficient?" Sounds like blueprints and construction robots with a personal roboport.

Assemblers have tiers that are not only more efficient (faster), but more capable. Assembler MK2 can create many items that MK1 cannot, due to resource limitations. MK3 can produce (in vanilla) one item the other two cannot. Regardless, it is not just about speed, but capabilities.

Factorio is sort of like Legos. We build factories from tiny little pieces. What you are suggesting is to bring back the 2000-2010 era of Lego, where sets were made from a small number of large pieces, limiting creativity. I don't want that.

You bring up solar panels and accumulators as an example. It is already trivial to blueprint a square containing the perfect ratio of the two along with a radar and roboport, then feed all the resources to build more at one end of a solar panel field. Then place them down via map view. What does solar panel MK2 offer? Saving time because I click less? It sure would not save resources, because higher tiers tend to consume more resources disproportionately with the benefit (e.g. each tier of belt and splitters/underneathies consumes a bit more than one yellow belt worth of materials, despite adding only that much to that tier's speed).

If you want to add solar panel MK2 or equivalent for the other items you mentioned, then I want a meaningful decision as to why I would use them. The examples you brought up have been discussed to death and I just do not see any meaningful tradeoff in using or not using a higher tier like there is for belts (resource costs, allowing belt weaving).

Tongs wrote:"Factorio is sort of like Legos. We build factories from tiny little pieces. What you are suggesting is to bring back the 2000-2010 era of Lego, where sets were made from a small number of large pieces, limiting creativity. I don't want that.

Me neither. I am not suggesting a small number of large pieces, more something to reduce too many buildings of same kind. Please see my updated post "Why"? For an individual building like a advanced smelter, you have to enlarge your production chain an logistic to produce it and if it needs something additional like some fluid, you have to build new designs.

Regarding solar...did you ever placed down more than 100K solarpanels? If so, you really didn't have similar thoughts?

Id go with 2, and 3, and *triggerwarning* remove or repurpose beacons.