What about a situation where the accumulator charge drops to 9.9%, so the steam engines are connected, which immediately charges the accumulator back up to 10%, disconnecting the steam engines, which lets the accumulator chrage drop down to 9.9% again, and so on?

That thread is obsolete. The simplest method now is to isolate your steam engines with a power switch, and only turn it on when accumulators are low. I thought you still had to use a little circuitry to keep things from rapidly switching as the accumulator cycles between the target point and target...

The default design for accumulators is to either accommodate brief spikes in power use, or as a last-ditch source of power, and their priority reflects that. You CAN use accumulators before steam, but you'll need to do a little work with circuits to make it happen. If you're interested in going that...

I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree with more powerful radar. Having used the Big Brother mod, I've discovered that revealing too much territory can play havoc with the biter expansion behaviour. What could stand to changed is the random nature of the scanning. Right now, on an already-scanned area,...

I'm pretty sure that the acreage involved in a 90-degre turn would dwarf quite a few bases at this point.

I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree with more powerful radar. Having used the Big Brother mod, I've discovered that revealing too much territory can play havoc with the biter expansion behaviour. What could stand to changed is the random nature of the scanning. Right now, on an already-scanned area, ...

Also why do the robots keep piling up in a circle around the roboports as seen below? If you could answer that that'd be great.

Each roboports can only recharge 4 bots at a time. So if more than 4 bots need to charge, the excess bots have to sit and wait their turn.

Hopefully I understand the description of your setup properly. Depending on whether you're running single track or one lane for each direction, this is how you'd let two (independent) tracks cross each other: http://i.imgur.com/T09OOeo.jpg?1 http://i.imgur.com/85dLa5R.jpg?1 The basic premise is that...

To be honest, I am not sure if I am interested in having resource sinks, I produce stuff in order to increase the size of my factory, and then to better defend myself and to reach/transport more resources to mantain the factory and meet the production goal. Same here. That's a perfectly valid plays...

Achievements work fine. They'll be disabled if you use any console commands, and if you have ANY mods operating, they'll only be registered in-game, not on Steam.

you know, enough shields helps even with train. as long, as you notice, that your purple bar is going down :D Yeah, it's fine when I'm on biter patrol, because I'll have 4+ shields equipped. But when I'm building, I'm maxing out my movement speed and roboports, so I generally only have one or two s...

Not going to lie, I'm pretty sure my train deaths vastly outnumber by biter deaths at this point. A little caution and shielding goes a long way with biters. But with trains, a 250km/h unit can cross even a maximum-zoomed screen in a second and lubricate the tracks with your entrails before you can ...

The second design (by Daniel34) works fine. Because of the splitter, both lanes of the input belt can be sideloaded onto either lane of the output belt as space allows. Try feeding it a single lane and watch it balance things out. On the other hand, that example by Rose there will be capped at a si...

That's right - put them to work! Add a few power poles and accumulators for the look of it

The second design (by Daniel34) works fine. Because of the splitter, both lanes of the input belt can be sideloaded onto either lane of the output belt as space allows. Try feeding it a single lane and watch it balance things out. On the other hand, that example by Rose there will be capped at a sin...

I'm not sure why there is so much resistance toward the concept of electric boilers. They would be a simple and space/resource-efficient way of storing solar electricity. For example, considering the attached image - In this situation, the coal boilers could be replaced with electric boilers hooked...

Well, my complements to the long and compact design. It took awhile to paste everything, but I now have a 2GW steam complex where I had original been expecting to settle for only 600MW. Based on calculations, 4 blue belts of coal should fully supply all the boilers even at max load. Just need to get...

On a list of things that could stand to have their bounding box shrunk - how about solar panels? Not as big a deal, especially since they tend to be set-and-forget, but laying down multiple blueprints via personal robo-port, you currently need to take care that you don't make a blueprint that your r...

10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not. Since there is currently no application for boilers EXCEPT for heating up liquid to make electricity, an electricity-powered boiler would be roughly analogou...

Just to clarify, after hooking a red/green wire to a roboport, select the roboport. You'll see an extra heading where it assigns various robot counts (const/logi/total/available) to certain variables, which you can change as desired, and reference at other points in the network.