Factorio Forums

Explanation of the situation.

First of all I want to discuss one of the last changes in v.0.15.x(beacons now consume electricity even when they are empty). Who really need some useless trash on map which one can only consume electricity all time when it is empty? This is even totally Illogically. And someone can say "if you don't have modules for beacon-just don't use them". Yes, I agree, but now I make concept of my megabase and now I need make a giant perimetr of solar panels and it is real problem, I need to do this only becouse of these useless beacons with no modules, cool story...But it is not the only problem of beacons. I was confused when developers add opportunity to connect mining drills in circuit network, what is useless in my opinion with drills, but anyway. Why developers can't add such very usful opportunity to beacons - I don't know. Seriously, beacons in nowdays is extremly wasteful component of production, and you can't even turn off it when they don't need, only shut down electrical network near, what is too stupid for such game. And yes, mods is not solution in this case, cuz such simple and useful thinks must be in vanilla.

What I/we want

1.Add opportunity to turned on and off beacons using the circuit network.
2.Don't let beacons consume electricity when they are empty(just like it was before 0.15).

I hope that this problem worries not only me. Only with your reactions and feedback we can make this game better. Thanks for your attention.

I dont like beacons at all. They are bad game design and should be subsituted.

What I prefer:

1, more Tiers of faster production buildings, so beacons become obsolete

2, changed beacons which work only in conjunction with one single production building. The beacon itself is then a modular building to enhance a production facility. It basically "MERGES" with the enhanced production facility. The beacon can have 2 modules slots and TRANSFERS 200% of the effect on the building it is merged with.


The big problem I see is that the energy efficiency is extremly dependent on geometry and situation. In my opinion the whole energy system in conjunction with beacons is very gimpy.
Also beacons make a factory look ugly.

Nasabot wrote:changed beacons which work only in conjunction with one single production building. The beacon itself is then a modular building to enhance a production facility. It basically "MERGES" with the enhanced production facility. The beacon can have 2 modules slots and TRANSFERS 200% of the effect on the building it is merged with.


The big problem I see is that the energy efficiency is extremly dependent on geometry and situation. In my opinion the whole energy system in conjunction with beacons is very gimpy.
Also beacons make a factory look ugly.

Such radically changes can wait, but I like this idea. I agree that efficiency of beacons is very low, but sometimes it is better than nothing+they can allow to make factory much smaller with the same productivity sacrificing power efficiency. But in nowdays this sacrifice is too big.

Beacons cause assembly machines to have a worse energy to item ratio, but it's not as bad as you might think. Even calculating in the beacons energy consumption and the increase they cause in the assembly machines you end up with maybe 3 times the energy per item, but over 6 times the throughput. You also gain A LOT of free items. So you transform energy into items. With solar it's literally free items. With nuclear it's uranium 235 -> other items.

If we assume 120% productivity in the first machine (furnace) and then 3 further steps in assembly machines (140% each) you end up with 329% of the starting items. It eventually becomes energy-efficient even. Plus you get more end-product out of the same starting items.

As for beacons as mechanic - I don't know. They force you to create smart layouts. If you had an "enhancer" that only worked on one building then you could build however you want and layout would be irrelevant.

I don't get why you're actually building structures and plugging them into your grid if you're still designing. Why not just ghost things until you've got it figured out?

Frankly I think you're overestimating how much people care. I could be wrong. I certainly don't. If you're building the beacon you're eventually going to have to power it, otherwise what's the point?

You can also use power switches if you'd like to have control over their draw.

If the power draw of beacons bothers you just build some solar panels to offset it. After all the solar energy is wasted if not consumed by something.

Beacons should be used with speed3 and prod3 modules, as such the cost of the beacons + electricity to run them is minuscule compared with the cost of the modules (seriously, you can get like 80 solar panels just for the 2 speed3 modules you'd reasonably put in a beacon - the beacon itself only needs the output of 11 solar panels). And beacons are even at a higher tech level than tier3 modules (in the sense they need high tech packs) so there isn't even much of a use case for beacons without tier3 modules.

Syrchalis wrote:Beacons cause assembly machines to have a worse energy to item ratio, but it's not as bad as you might think.

This is already delicate question of balance, thats why I was don't discussed the consumption of the working beacons with modules.

Syrchalis wrote:You also gain A LOT of free items. So you transform energy into items. With solar it's literally free items.

Much more clever disition will be just put a lot of assembling machine in a row with same productivity. Productivity will be same, only size of factory and consumption of electricity will be different. Word "free" is unacceptable in this case.

Syrchalis wrote:As for beacons as mechanic - I don't know. They force you to create smart layouts. If you had an "enhancer" that only worked on one building then you could build however you want and layout would be irrelevant.

My main claim is that developers complicate and make gameplay worse with no obvious reasons. Why this is it - I was explane.

smithist wrote:I don't get why you're actually building structures and plugging them into your grid if you're still designing. Why not just ghost things until you've got it figured out?

Frankly I think you're overestimating how much people care. I could be wrong. I certainly don't. If you're building the beacon you're eventually going to have to power it, otherwise what's the point?

You can also use power switches if you'd like to have control over their draw.

I can't shut down area with beacon becouse the electrical network is too near with assembling machine and beacons+I need to experiment with lamp in different areas of factory using circuit network. But even without problems in my case - such solution is too primitive, when we have circuit network, but we can't use it with beacon. And there is no reason why this problems should left with no attention. If you can deal with this - I am glad for you, but this is not constructive solution.

BlakeMW wrote:If the power draw of beacons bothers you just build some solar panels to offset it. After all the solar energy is wasted if not consumed by something.

Beacons should be used with speed3 and prod3 modules, as such the cost of the beacons + electricity to run them is minuscule compared with the cost of the modules (seriously, you can get like 80 solar panels just for the 2 speed3 modules you'd reasonably put in a beacon - the beacon itself only needs the output of 11 solar panels). And beacons are even at a higher tech level than tier3 modules (in the sense they need high tech packs) so there isn't even much of a use case for beacons without tier3 modules.

Obviously that I can make a lot of solar panels, problems is that beacons with no modules just consume electricity and giving nothing, what is really illogical and completely meaningless. There no reasons why it must consume any kind of electricity, a lot or not - it doesn't metter, it just complicate gameplay and giving nothing for this, just more problems. If someone can explane why this ridiculous decision is right - I really want to hear it.

Hagaret wrote:Obviously that I can make a lot of solar panels, problems is that beacons with no modules just consume electricity and giving nothing, what is really illogical and completely meaningless. There no reasons why it must consume any kind of electricity, a lot or not - it doesn't metter, it just complicate gameplay and giving nothing for this, just more problems. If someone can explane why this ridiculous decision is right - I really want to hear it.

Even lowly inserter uses 400W of electricity when it just sits and does nothing. (On the other hand burner inserter does not, it only consumes fuel when it works.)

Muche wrote:

Hagaret wrote:Obviously that I can make a lot of solar panels, problems is that beacons with no modules just consume electricity and giving nothing, what is really illogical and completely meaningless. There no reasons why it must consume any kind of electricity, a lot or not - it doesn't metter, it just complicate gameplay and giving nothing for this, just more problems. If someone can explane why this ridiculous decision is right - I really want to hear it.

Even lowly inserter uses 400W of electricity when it just sits and does nothing. (On the other hand burner inserter does not, it only consumes fuel when it works.)

Inserts always ready to work, assembling machines always ready to work. Empty beacons can only consume 40 MW for nothing in my case, no one can ignore such elephant in room.

The best case szenario looks like this:

Beaconed machines use more energy per product then normally, but are "better"( =less pollution/product, more producitivity, faster)

but then, electricity also needs to be a non-trivial resource. The quasi-infinite nuclear power ist fine, but the solar panels make energy in conjunction with beacons weird.

Beacons should encourage the player to design a more complex energy system (like the nuclear power) and not just simply build more and more (solar)

Nasabot wrote:The best case szenario looks like this:

Beaconed machines use more energy per product then normally, but are "better"( =less pollution/product, more producitivity, faster)

but then, electricity also needs to be a non-trivial resource. The quasi-infinite nuclear power ist fine, but the solar panels make energy in conjunction with beacons weird.

Beacons should encourage the player to design a more complex energy system (like the nuclear power) and not just simply build more and more (solar)

Solar or nuclear power - it is must be choise of each player. And don't forget that your "best case szenario" is just your opinion.

My problem with becons is that there is really only 1 way to build with them. Leaves very little creativity.

Hagaret wrote: Much more clever disition will be just put a lot of assembling machine in a row with same productivity. Productivity will be same, only size of factory and consumption of electricity will be different. Word "free" is unacceptable in this case.

No, free is the very correct term. Productivity modules give you FREE items. Having more assembly machines alone does not give you free items - throughput yes, but not productivity. And if you only put productivity modules in assembly machines they require A LOT more power AND work slower at the same time, costing you easily 500-800% the energy and you need twice the assembly machines as without any modules or beacons just to get the same throughput.

Why make it complicated? Because beacons are END GAME. Players need something to do. You can't go DOWN in difficulty at the end of the game, otherwise players will get bored - they need a challenge. Making large beaconed and optimized arrays is a challenge and harder than building the same production chain without beacons.

While I honestly agree that beacons shouldn't have drain, ESPECIALLY not when empty, I also think it doesn't really matter. At this point in the game you should always have 200MW+ of spare power. When you place beacons you should also expect them to be on all the time - having them drain energy all the time only prepares you properly for when they are actually on so you don't suddenly have no power anymore.

And if you're just trying out a build you don't need to connect power to it.

So yeah, drain okay, while empty... not sure why the devs did that.

Syrchalis wrote:

Hagaret wrote: Much more clever disition will be just put a lot of assembling machine in a row with same productivity. Productivity will be same, only size of factory and consumption of electricity will be different. Word "free" is unacceptable in this case.

No, free is the very correct term. Productivity modules give you FREE items.

I don't disagree with the spirit of this statement, but technically productivity converts energy into items, so it can be meaningfully treated as a coal->items or a uranium->items conversion. When this analysis is performed it usually turns out that productivity is an insanely good deal and a claim that productivity/beacons is an inefficient way to make items does not stand up to scrutiny.

Beacons make the productivity energy->items conversion a lot more favorable than no beacons, I'll compare producing iron gears with 4xprod3 and no beacons, with 4xprod3 and speed3 beacons in infinite alternating rows:

• No modules: 210kW / 1.25 * 0.5s = 84kJ/cycle
• 4xProd3: 210kW * 4.2 / 1.25 / 0.4 * 0.5s = 882kJ/cycle (2MJ per bonus iron gear)
• w/beacons: (210kW * 9.8 + 480kW * 8 / 8) / 1.25 / 4.4 * 0.5s = 230kJ/cycle (0.58MJ per bonus iron gear)

So the beacons slash the energy cost of the bonus items by a factor of almost 4, and that's because it makes the recipe take 1/11the the time which way more than offsets the approximately tripled energy consumption per second. As per above it's fun to calculate how much coal needs to be burned: in the bad case, it requires 2MJ or 0.5 coal to be burned to make the bonus iron gear - a real iron gear requires 2 iron ore to be mined so this allows replacing 4 iron ore miners, with 1 coal miner. In the beaconized case only 0.15 coal needs to be burned to make the bonus iron gear - 13 iron ore miners are replaced by 1 coal miner. It's actually quite astonishing how little energy beaconized setups require compared with how much value they are providing, they result in a far higher energy-efficiency than just making the factory larger - and that's even in the worst case scenario of mining coal to make power. If solar power is used a beaconized setup will require a much smaller area of solar panels than if beacons were not used.

The only two arguments against prod3+speed beacon is firstly that using eff modules extensively results in overall lower energy consumption - which is true - a massive factory with -80% energy usage everywhere will use significantly less energy than a prod3+speed beacon factory, it will just have 3-4x the footprint (that's a lot of biter slaying to get the extra ore). The second criticism is that prod3+speed3 beacons is pretty expensive in terms of the initial investment - for most intents and purposes it can be treated as an expensive initial investment that will generate nearly free items forever after, reasonable ROI time might be about an hour so not good for speedruns.

Beacons are actually currently very OP in some ways, unless you're doing a speedrun prod3+speed3 beacons is pretty much a nobrainer, it just beats all alternatives so badly.

I suggest you think of Productivity modules as reducing waste. Think of Copper coils using one copper each, but your first-generation assemblers can't handle it, so need 2 copper each. Later, you manage to develop productivity modules, and drop that to ~1.2 copper each. A serious improvement, but not 100% efficient.

Productivity does NOT convert energy into items, it uses a larger amount of energy to increase resource usage efficiency.

I also disagree with the idea that the beacons' contribution is free items. That would be the case if you had, like, 500 iron plates, processed them and shut the factory off. Then summed the costs and profits and realized you've saved 2X coal worth of energy. (To account for boilers' 50% efficiency) But the stuff which can be made with productivity modules is usually produced continuously, so energy per second would be much better metric than energy per item. While I agree that beacons are effective way of increasing throughput of iron gears for example, I disagree that such increased throughput is free.

Also, its more of a "Buy one, Get one Free" thing, which you could argue is free, but really is just you getting them both at half price.

Beacons makes the whole thing run faster, since productivity modules cripple speed without speed modules to negate.

Ranakastrasz wrote: Productivity does NOT convert energy into items, it uses a larger amount of energy to increase resource usage efficiency.

I mean that this is the most meaningful way to analyze the ongoing (rather than initial investment) cost of using productivity modules. Productivity does not intrinsically convert energy into bonus items - a pure productivity bonus would simply provide bonus items at no cost (as is the case with mining productivity). But the productivity modules as we have them have two large energy penalties - increased consumption and increased crafting time, so there is no other way to put it than that that the bonus items are gained at the expense of increased energy usage.