0.13 balance discussion

[Photoloss]

For me their main purpose is loading and unloading trains. If you use them to load high-speed assemblers you run into the problem that is discussed in that thread I've mentioned: the assembler will run low on materials and then the inserter will wake up, but since it takes the inserter some time to gather up the full stack of items, the machine will run dry (and stall) before it receives the next batch of input. The inserter would have to wake up earlier in order to compensate.

That is probably not an issue if you load the assembler directly from a chest, but belts are often more convenient, and then the stack inserter fails.

Right now it's better to use 2 Fast Inserters to load from a belt; that is now faster than in 0.12, because they can take batches of 3 items from a belt (in 0.12 they could only load single items). So with 2 Fast Inserters you match pretty much every machine in practice (barring some corner cases and setups that are inefficient for other reasons).

So the bottom line is: Stack Inserters are the way to go if you load from/to a chest (train stations and robot factories). In other cases the old inserters are better. If they tweaked the loading behaviour into machines a little you could also use them to load from a belt into an assembler, but right now that seems to be a bit broken.

Nice catch on trains&bots, haven't gotten to megabase stage in 0.13 yet.
A green circuit assembler with prod3 modules and 8+ speed beacons seems to need more than a single Stack Inserter. Two might be enough but belt-fed I need three due to the stalling, the idea being that one inserter will always be still swinging its arm while the others are stalled. Why am I running a single green circuit assembler with 8 beacons? No idea, but it keeps my core base supplied and is more compact than the equivalent beacon-free production capacity

[siggboy]

A green circuit assembler with prod3 modules and 8+ speed beacons seems to need more than a single Stack Inserter.

An Assembler III with 4xProd3 and surrounded (flanked) by speed beacons has an effective crafting speed of 5.5. So you need 11 iron plates per second if you want to make EC (the cables will come directly from another machine). Two Fast Inserters can handle more than 12/s, but they also need time to grab 3 items, so it's probably less than 12/s (we need 11/s).
The same is true for Copper Cable (1 plate per 2 cables), but probably you'll run these a little slower if you go for close to a 1:1 ratio between the assemblers (cable and EC).

So I guess 2 Fast Inserters are enough to feed a 0.5 speed recipe in all practical cases (if you need more than 1 inserter anyway, then it's better to go with 2x Fast instead of 2xStack, it probably uses less energy and they're cheaper to craft). (I still have to test this in the game, but at least in theory it should work.)

Edit: I've just tested it, it works; runs at max. speed with 2x Fast Inserter feeding the iron plates from a belt, provided that the Copper Cable supply is working (actually a single Stack Inserter feeding copper cable from a chest is too slow!)

Gear Wheels need more input per second, but they're not needed to make Rockets so it doesn't matter. Everything else is either way slower to craft or it's not needed at max speed, so we don't even have to think about those.

All this only applies to feeding from a belt to a machine, if you go machine->machine or chest->anything then the Stack Inserter is usually better as long as you require the throughput.