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This game is like a designer drug designed specifically for my brain. I loved producing crap in Dwarf Fortress even though there wasn't any real reason to do so after a certain amount of trade goods. But good god. Was anyone else's first factory also a giant heap of ill-conceived garbage? I never started building it with the idea of expanding production later, or to allow for the building of more or new science packs. How do people keep a factory expandable other than in a straight line and adding more units at the end? Do you use one stream of raw resources or get additional streams for every new item in production? Do you just go and make a whole new separate factory for every Science Pack? Is it worth it to automate coal delivery or should I hold out for non-coal technology? Also, I'm assuming my normal turrets can't shoot through walls? 
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Jul 5, 2014 11:04
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:55 |
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I love learning to play this game. This was my first game, screenshot already posted a while ago but again for comparison. Looking back, I can see I had no clue. Steam engines and iron smelters have barely any room to expand, I have a grand total of 1 copper wire assemblies, and only 2 red pack factories. There is no room to expand, even though I was situated in the middle of a desert plains. Pollution is low because there's barely any production. I saw that it'd be a complete pain to get blue packs from this, so I started another map.  Much, much larger, the idea was to simply leave space open for expansion - not always working out that well. Red and green worked well, but then it came to building an oil complex and I never did that before so it naturally turned into a mess, spilling over into the blue pack production in the bottom right. There are bottlenecks everywhere and no easy ways to fix them. I saw some screenshots of other builds, so I thought I'd try a bus.  Not as far in as the previous game but the bus is amazing. Having all factories to the right be expandable is perfect. This being my first bus, I still didn't think big enough and the bus spilled over into my copper smelting area when I added blue packs. Also had some difficulty properly integrating chemicals into the manufacturing lines, so I ended up placing sulphur, acid, batteries and plastic outside of the main area. The most pressing problem right now is expansion of base resources, but also an increase in belt speed because one slow belt of iron and copper isn't going to have enough bandwidth to feed the entire system anymore. I've already ended up augmenting iron plates in the middle from another source, which is another solution. But I need to add engines and CPU's and that'll require a massive amount of copper. Also, pollution has become a serious problem with really early, constant and later on rather large attacks that I'm increasingly badly prepared for to fend off. I've spend so much time building the bus that I didn't have any time to develop weapons and armor, and before I can get really good stuff I'd have to start building CPU's and engines anyway. Which I'm at a loss as to where I should put them. I always seem to end up needing more room than I planned for, regardless of how much room I'm allocating at the start.
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Jul 8, 2014 09:46
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Don't think people-bus, think geek-bus. Basically the main artery in the middle of the last base I posted. I still need to get used to it, especially with how and when to branch off nicely, but it's a pretty great system to build modular, expandable production lines next to it.
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Jul 8, 2014 10:22
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Yep. In theory a bus is awesome. In practice it's nice, but still difficult. Through all my games, it always comes down to not having enough space. I've been trying for an hour to solve a copper wire production problem so I can get ready for CPU's but drat I'm not fixing anything, just moving from one bottleneck to another. Mines, furnaces, then belts, then again more furnaces. I don't even know where all my current copper wires disappear to. I'll probably end up building a whole new copper mining/smelting complex elsewhere to feed into the bus again. That's the neat thing about the bus though. You have one place where a resource enters the system. If your current source runs dry it's a lot easier to just connect another mining/smelting operation to the end of bus from elsewhere than when you've build your whole production complex around a specific resource location.
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Jul 8, 2014 11:43
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Is there a maximum bandwidth limit to the bus that anyone has reached yet? I had a feeling that, with one line of copper plates, my copper wire factories weren't getting fed properly, but then I added a few more smelters and that fixed it. Got me thinking though that if I were to expand even further, at some point the copper plates from one belt aren't going to cut it to feed the entire system. Is that where you need to give wires a dedicated plate supply, or decentralize wire/circuit production? Finally finished my first game. The rocket defense isn't a very fun goal though and I'm glad the developers seem to realise that as well. I didn't even get attacked during the 10 minutes I had to wait. I was actually kinda looking forward to getting a large attack, what with having roughly 200 laser turrets set up and gate-like defenses for my train depot. 
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Jul 13, 2014 13:26
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Slow down and shotgun all the trees. First few times I had a car, I promptly exploded them against my walls because apparently I put the car on-screen pointing straight at my wall instead of away from it.
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Jul 14, 2014 12:27
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A huge cannon to blast critters from far away would also give some sort of meaning to the radar. Currently I find radars to be useless. Sure, it's nice to have your surroundings explored for you, but driving around in your car you'll quickly explore the same and more anyway. If radars could be integrated with an automatic long range targeting system, the additional resource and energy cost offers another balance check, and perhaps I'd finally have a reason to build more than one or two novelty radars.
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Jul 22, 2014 18:51
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Aw dang I never thought about sending ore from front and back to the train to fill it up evenly. I just have a one-way line of ore belt->inserters->buffers chests->inserters to train (and the same but in the opposite direction for dropoff) and that has always resulted in the car closest to the direction the ore is coming from filling up, thus filling up the first few buffer chests both at the pickup and often dropoff, and then ore being shipped back and forth between my dropoff and pickup without being properly deposited because everything is full, while a bunch of other buffer chests and cars at the end of the line remain empty. On the other hand I didn't really need more ore right now, but it's not about that anyway. It's about building proper logistics 
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Jul 23, 2014 18:24
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Been a while I’ve been playing this, but a nice (and fairly easy) way to keep your science production expandable, is to have a main buss or artery of conveyor belts to transport resources (like iron and copper plates) going in one direction (say south to north) and to branch off from there with splitters to supply every other production line. Parts and finished products go back into the artery and can then also branch off to other production areas further up the chain. This was how that worked in my last base, red/green and a bit of the blue packs marked. I wasn't entirely happy with how this ended up because I planned my base too cramped (there's water in the north, iron fields in the south). 
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Aug 17, 2014 19:26
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Torpor posted:Pro-tip: construction robots are the best way to clear cut all the loving trees. God I loving hate trees. The next best thing to clear trees is the shotgun; the flamethrower is really not good at it. You can also carpet bomb an area with
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Nov 28, 2014 13:46
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The bus was the only way I could go from 'oh god everything is full where do all these belts go what is happening' to a base that I could happily wander around in without triggering some form of autism, OCD, or  Just make sure you allocate a lot of space where you plan to put the bus. Last time I played this way back in 10.2 and made a bus I still ended up cramped for space.
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Jun 29, 2015 20:55
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The raw resources section was to the south, but after I depleted everything there I still had a huge patch of ore up north so it was coming down from there (older shot) and for some reason I thought it was a great idea to use bus-space in rewind direction. I also put the raw resources section waaay too close to the bus and later moved the whole drat thing further away. It's probably just best to always build different sections further away from each other than at first planned; space in Factorio seems to work according to Parkinson's law, where your base ultimately always expands to fill any given space. Edit: Yeah that bus was pretty messy in the end, there's way better ones back in this thread. Edit edit: Yep, there's always a point where that happens to me, and with every new map I start, the difference is always in being able to go a little bit further before everything turns into a disorganized mess. Then I start over, fill up all the space I never thought I'd fill, and see my sperg-empire crumble under each new haphazardly placed emergency belt that 'I'll probably get rid of later...yeah, definitely, just...not now' I'd love to try a good modular base one of these days. Fleve fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 21:09
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On the topic of ore veins, what kind of map settings do most of you play the game on? I'm strangely reluctant to deviate from the default, but having less water to screw up your basebuilding and having richer veins is a really nice thing. On the default settings, ore patches just run out pretty fast and running trains around the country quickly turns into moving outposts from one spot to another. That's not much of a hassle with a bot army though. Also, what are good outpost defenses like? I've begun using cut off corners because whenever the bugs attack a corner the amount of turrets that have coverage there is much lower. There's still a decent amount of damage after an extensive amount of time, but so far a handful of bots with a stack of repair kits seem to hold up nicely. Perhaps I could do with 2 rows of turrets.
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Jul 9, 2015 10:53
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Finally fired up a new game with a friend and after around 40 rockets fired off into the sky I think we're reaching the limits of our bus. All sorts of problems just start cropping up when the bandwidth of our currently placed belts, and even pipes, are maxed out. We pre-planned 3 iron and 3 copper plate belts, but copper is getting a bit low when running full power, and a lot of other poo poo is getting increasingly non-trivial to deal with. Trying to max out the speed on a single launch pad seems to require a ridiculous amount of resources and I don't think our current bus is capable of that. Especially oil/petroleum. We got about 100 pumpjacks with Speed 3 modules and that's still no where near enough. I think I put in the wrong map settings or something cause I can't find more oil however loving far I run and if I do find new patches they're down to 0.1 in a few hours. Regardless of oil, how do you expand the bandwidth of a bus when it's nearing the max of what you planned at the start? I could remodel the bus to accommodate more belts of resources, but apart from being a huge hassle that seems like it'd only solve things until some other resource runs out of either belt bandwidth or real-estate early in the bus. It's a pain when something at the bottom of the totem pole starts requiring multiple belts and rows. The other solution seems to be to outsource more and more, and only deliver finished goods to the base. I've never done that before. At least green chips seem to be a great candidate to make elsewhere, but oil processing seems to be more suitable for a central approach, so I'd probably keep any stuff requiring plastics at home. Compared to what I've seen this is all still pretty small, and the bus itself is nothing special to look at, but for anything larger I feel like I'd want a fundamentally different approach than the bus, but anything else seems to be far less common.  Also, I've never actually had a decently sized train station. Turns out I love trains. The main reason I kept expanding was to make more train stations at some point really.  Finally, anyone know how many smelters in a row can be fed by one belt of ores? My production lines aren't currently running at full speed cause of an oil deficit, so things start clogging up, but I'm assuming that at some point I need to stop expanding left-wards and need to add more rows instead, or just smelt at the mines and train plates back. 
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Sep 28, 2015 13:56
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I 'solved' greens by adding a line on top of the bus that feeds back down into blues, but there's a shortage of room to add belts as well. Come to think of it, the whole bot network to the right of the bus was a bad idea. Got bots flying from the top to the bottom. Should've just put them at the end of the bus where all the resources gather anyway. I'll probably displace the bus to the north, keeping the current base area for smelting and solar, while updating the whole bus as well as getting rid of the old research facilities. But first, oil. Oil is a real bitch. I can't even maintain 1/5th of my top production when the wells run dry to 0.1. When I made the game, I had the parameters set to encourage trains and outposts; large, rich, but few patches of all resources. For everything but oil that worked out nicely. Most of my oil nodes were around 100%, but what I really want is just a lot more of them to make the 0.1's add up into something sustainable. All the outposts on my map got started cause there's oil, there just happened to be other stuff nearby too. Finally found some new oil but...well...  Even with 135 destroyer bots swarming around me and 1000+ shield power equipped, those big groups full of worms and behemoths are drat tenacious. I wish I could send in the bots alone, they got enough fire power to murder almost everything, but I don't have the staying power to let them do their work uninterrupted. I want new weapons, artillery or bombers or something.
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Sep 28, 2015 17:39
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Evilreaver posted:One thing I do is 'slingshot' bots around. If you've got a buncha exosuits and can move quickly, you can whip the bots back and forth and you can end up throwing them pretty far. That's a neat trick I'll need to get a hang of. I accidentally had it happen a few times and having a full bot-swarm in the middle of an enemy base murder the lot in one sweep is very satisfying. With bots, most of my downtime during fights comes from waiting for shields to generate. Two reactors, three exo's, night vision and the rest shields seems to work ok'ish, but perhaps I'll switch in another reactor, or temporarily switch from exo to reactor to get my shield back quicker. I always feel silly when I got 100+ bots out and all I can do is wait for my shields to come back. Boogalo posted:Personal roboport makes walking turrets around very easy. I use a simple blueprint with a big power pole in the middle, surrounded by 8 turrets. I have a sillier one with a substation, power pole and 50 turrets, but it seemed to be overkill. 3-4 personal roboports give you enough range to be safe when placing. You do have to tank a little so initial bots can work if there are tons of worms and spitters, otherwise your bots will get sniped. Do you plop it down in range of the base? Usually I start off outside of their range and then creep closer with subsequent bunkers, but that takes quite a while. If I plop it down too close there's a pretty good chance a lot of my bots get murdered, even 10-20 turrets need to shoot a while to deal with a squad of behemoths and drat they spawn pretty quickly too.
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Sep 28, 2015 18:57
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chairface posted:Heh, so those kinds of isolated little outposts, is that how most people play? I've been pushing out through the aliens to decent chokepoints in the terrain and setting up turret/wall barriers between lakes/seas etc that way to cordon off huge swathes of land at once. This could also be why I was having to fight large biters before I was even effectively mass-producing tank shells to fight them with. I probably should figure out trains and robots work at some point, hrm. Trains are hella fun. Get trains. But don't get under trains. With the amount of pollution and biters I've got at the moment, I really don't feel save unless everything I make is fully walled and lasered. Walls without lasers are just lines in the sand, but putting lasers in areas I'm not using is too expensive. I've already got 2400 lasers in use right now. I've also had water set to low because I didn't want it to interfere too much with my building plans, but that means I got zero natural borders. Clearing areas and then plopping down some electricity poles to prevent new biter settlements is a great way to spread electricity and safety, but its rather time consuming.
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Sep 28, 2015 19:41
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100+ hours into a game and I never knew about pumping stations. My current base needs about 200-250 plastic per minute to not be bottle-necked, and I just couldn't figure out why the drat petroleum didn't want to move from the buffer storage tanks to the factories. The tanks were full, but the pipes just didn't seem to want to shift stuff. At first I thought it was that my 30 refineries and 100-something light-to-petroleum things were all feeding into one central petroleum pipeline which was perpetually at 10, and doubling that with a parallel pipe helped a bit but not much. Throwing a bunch of pumps on the pipes along the way to the factories didn't seem to help at all, in fact, it seemed to throttle the speed at which I was producing. Two pumping stations later and my petroleum tanks are empty and I need to build more refineries. Is there a way to automate rocket launches from the launch pad? It would still take some substantial expansions but I'm getting closer to producing rockets without interruption. Other than some odds and ends, without the rocket there's no production, and I feel sad when the graph lines plunge. Edit: actually scratch that, I'm nowhere near continuous rocket production. I can switch it on for 5 rockets or something and things go splendid, but then I discover that I have problems everywhere. Apparently all my mines ran out of ores while I was building new oil bases, which have also run out, and I'm also not smelting enough, and seeing as how everything just blacked out for a second, I'm guessing we're not producing enough energy anymore either. gently caress me. The rocket is like pouring buckets into a black hole. Fleve fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Oct 4, 2015 |
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Oct 4, 2015 20:48
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FISHMANPET posted:There's a mod that does auto rocket launching. It's a sattellite dish type building you place, and whenever a rocket silo in its range finishes, it launches the rocket. Thanks, I'll give that a try. Although I seem to have to revise my idea of continuous rocket launches. I'm afraid it depletes my resources so quickly that I can't keep up with maintenance while actually expanding input. By the time I explore and clear a new (oil, probably oil) resource patch something else is bound to have run out. But at least I've got a bus running that I'm finally happy with. Does anyone have a neat solution for supplying outposts with repair kits and the occasional replacement wall or turret? I thought about making a service station at the main base, which is easy, but I can't come up with a way to unload at the outposts other than making service stations over there as well. If I use the existing stations, there's no place for unloading cause the full length of two wagons is already used for loading ores.
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Oct 6, 2015 11:56
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MeLKoR posted:I just placed requester chests all along my walls and outposts with repair kits / ammo / walls / pylons to allow quick automatic repair of any damage suffered in an attack. That'd work, I'd have to connect my outposts to the bot network I guess. Currently each outpost is a network on its own, connecting them all would be a lot of bot buildings, but if I just draw 'connecting lines' with roboports....that might be workable. It takes a full minute by train to go from my most northern to the furthest southern outpost, but having bots lug that poo poo around instead of making the rounds myself every few hours is definitely preferable. Edit: ↓ yeah gonna go with that I think. Fleve fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Oct 6, 2015 |
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Oct 6, 2015 12:50
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Technically, biter bases shouldn't spawn within a certain radius of any man-made object. But I've just tested it with the console markers for potential biter locations, and after clearing out some existing biters and placing some concrete, the area is supposedly still viable for settlement. If you want to 'civilize' an area, use electricity poles.
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Oct 25, 2015 21:14
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Any significant changes since last October, roughly? I played 0.12.8 last time, just restarted an old game of mine. I never made it to constant, full speed rocket/satellite production with my bus back then and, as far as a bus-build goes, felt like I had exhausted what could be done in a reasonable amount of time (well...roughly 100 hours). Still, I was rather happy with the train network and concreted end result. It takes more than a minute of rail-time to go from one end to the other.     
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Feb 25, 2016 20:38
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GotLag posted:Belt balancing handy hint! Are there space-efficient ways to balance multiple belts of the same resource? My first good attempt at a large bus had 6 iron and 6 copper belts, but I ran into all sorts of problems when I started treating them as two large belts. I'm guessing, though, that it's just better to not try to treat multiple belts as a single belt-highway and instead maintain dedicated resource lines. Re-shuffling more than 2-3 belts without lowering belt bandwidth after a split-off seems to require a lot of space. But it just felt... wrong to have my copper/iron plate belts end before the end of the bus. They make such beautiful, colourful lines.
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Mar 1, 2016 18:19
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At first sight I thought there'd be no way you could keep such a long line of wire factories in a row without running out of copper plates, but hah, gently caress me, I never would've thought of augmenting my resource belts with an additional parallel belt and then splitting it onto the other belt. Those kind of solutions are exactly what I love about Factorio. Edit: It's weird, I do that all the time with a bus, but I never thought of doing it within a production line. How do you supply all of that with enough oil? I already had trouble just supporting one rocket factory while scrambling for every tiny bit of oil I could locate. Edit: ↓ Ah. I did the speed modules thing, but because I was lacking electricity at the time I got efficiency in my refineries. Fleve fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Mar 2, 2016 |
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Mar 2, 2016 23:19
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:55 |
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Wouldn't one long train lack the speed to crush bugs efficiently? If you're going train-defense, it might be better to make them into multiple, smaller trains, perhaps even go for a frogger-like setup with multiple tracks and trains coming and going at intervals. Of course that also means having to navigate your own train hell whenever you want to go anywhere.
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Mar 3, 2016 14:52
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