Along the way I bumped into a few annoyances and things that could be improved. Some of them are probably known. If so, I'm sorry for reiterating.
I'll split the post into three sections: iron/copper balance, supplying the outposts and everything else.
Iron/copper balance
By far the most annoying part of this playthrough was looking for copper. At some point in the game I almost completed the core factory, and had to spend literally hours looking for copper deposits. It seems that the game is balanced around having more iron ore than copper ore. In my latest save the game knows about 330M iron ore and 121M copper ore. I've calculated the numbers as follows:Code: Select all
local x = 0
for _, e in ipairs(game.player.surface.find_entities_filtered{name="iron-ore"}) do
x = x + e.amount
end
game.print(x)
But the end-game factory requires more copper than iron. Here's an approximate calculator for my factory: http://tiny.cc/j2csjz. It requires 6 copper for each 5 iron. Even after removing module production, which is copper-hungry, the ratio is still approximately 1:1.
I understand that in the beginning of the game, when the player builds a lot of transporters and pipes, iron is more useful. But starting in the middle game, copper begins to be just as useful. In my mind a good solution would be to bias the resources in the starting area towards iron, but keep the 1:1 ratio for the rest of the map.
Supplying the outposts
In this game I experimented with supplying the outposts with dedicated trains instead of building a huge logistic network. This generally worked great, but with a few caveats.I supplied defence outposts with 6 types of items (turret, wall, substation, repair pack, artillery missiles and construction bots). Some other items could also be useful. I packed all the stuff in the same carriage, using slot filters.
I ran into following issues:
- I tried to load the train from a single requestor chest that was supplied by logistic bots. Unfortunately if the inserter from the chest to the carriage can move more than one item at a time, it gets stuck when it tries to insert say 3 items while the carriage has only one slot for a given item type. Unlike all other complaints in this post, this looks like a genuine bug.
- I would expect to be able to use a single destination chest as well, but this is simply not possible, since chests don't have slot filters. It seems that at least smart chests should have this feature.
- It would be nice to have a train condition "wait until at least one of the item types has run out". Currently the only way to do it is to manually create N conditions that each of the items has count 0.
- ... which brings me to the next point. Once you create the condition for a single train, there is no easy way to copy it to another, that goes to another stations. In particular, there is no way to keep the condition, but change the station.
Other
- When I build on top of cliffs, the cliffs are automatically removed. Why when I build upon water, it is not automatically covered with landfill? There is even no way to see where exactly you need the landfill, since there is no way to put a ghost on the water.
- The ammo counts should work the same way as the counters in the panels, i.e. show the total number of the remaining ammo.
- It would be nice to have a way to insert a given set of modules into a machine. For example, I used 3 green + 1 blue in most assemblers. The only way to automate insertion is to delete assemblers and then copy-paste the new ones.
- Speaking of copy-pasting. It works perfectly. Traditional blueprints though... I accidentally found a way to build from a blueprint book without extracting the blueprint from it. You need to right-click on the book, then use shift-mouse wheel to choose the right blueprint, then select the book, and build using it. This is super unintuitive. Why can't I just change the blueprint with shift-mouse wheel without opening the book?
- It would be more logical if blueprints didn't live in the inventory, but in their own repository, and could be moved to the shortcut panel from there.
- When exploring deeper and deeper into the world, you have to fight on every step. It would be nice to find from time to time a peaceful place without biters, same as in the beginning of the game.