Clean or Dirty?

[syneris]

How do you run your factories?

A clean setup can practically negate the need for defenses as biters won't attack. By using solar power and limiting the number of drills (effectivity moduled), your pollution levels can stay very low. Production is slow and you use more resources. Shutting down at night instead of using accumulators can let what little pollution you have to dissipate.

A dirty setup can ignore pollution by relying on heavy defenses. This lets you put productivity modules in everything to get a higher output. Production is fast, but you need to maintain strong defenses. You'll burn a lot of coal with the increased power requirements, though there are ways to reduce it.

These are just the two extremes. Do you have a different setup that you like?

[ficolas]

Both.
I dont care about the drills, but I use solar pannels+acumulators, and I have 5 idle steam engines.

[kovarex]

I like the idea of destroying the nature and being the bad guy
It would be great if we had time to let the pollution to damage the enviroment somehow.

[ficolas]

I like the idea of destroying the nature and being the bad guy
It would be great if we had time to let the pollution to damage the enviroment somehow.

Says a developer...

[SilverWarior]

A few times I tried the dirty appraoch but I always ended up overrun by biters.

So right now I'm focusing on more clean approach to get started but I'll proabably go for dirty one later when I will feel stong enough to defend myself with bunch of laser turets. I already have 35
Power is generated by 60 solar panels and I have 48 acumulators for my power reserve.
The only steam engine is only used for powering coal mines. I'm intent upgrading this section with two solar panels and one acumulator.
At the moment I only have automated production for Red and Green science potions.
After I finish building my Main base defeces and seting up defence perimiter for two of my off base coper mines I'll go and set up automatic production for other potion types.
And once I research to the point of logistics robots I'll move my main base to new location (have huge flat empty area near me). And that would be a real fortress.

[ficolas]

Did you craft blue potions to research solar pannels by hand?

[SilverWarior]

Did you craft blue potions to research solar pannels by hand?

Yes I did
Infact I crafted all potions by hand until I researched the Solar panels

[kovarex]

Did you craft blue potions to research solar pannels by hand?

Yes I did
Infact I crafted all potions by hand until I researched the Solar panels

Wow
The only science packs I craft is the first 25 (now 10) for automation

[Balinor]

I absolutely love playing the clean route. I mix solar and steam for the very early part of the game but as soon as I get automation going I focus on getting a large solar bank setup with accumulators to carry me through the night.

[Nova]

I TRY to use only solar power, but that's pretty hard. I have huge amounts of solar power in the end, but not enough for the whole base through the night. But this time I want to try a real solar base. ^^

[FreeER]

I've done the solar before, but doing it in the beginning is rather boring for me So I usually use the treefarm mod and build 'walls' of trees around 'my' area, then I can use as much power as I like. Eventually I get to a decent resource level and switch over to solar but I leave all of my steam engines in place for when I expand I rarely use the modules to be honest, too much work to make/place lol. Though i'll admit that if I didn't use the treefarm I'd be using effectivity in beacons nearly everywhere

[ssilk]

I tried both. In both setups my first main-goal is to have an efficient blue-potion production, then going for logistics. The green way is just too boring ATM. So my current games are all more or less dirty.

Playing with default setup is a problem, but I haven't tried out v0.7.5 (more resource), because after I got logistic bots, my resource run out. Perhaps I should go earlier for trains? But I had really a map, where even that won't help: so few resources, that it isn't even worth building mines to get them. The problem there is, that I need more ammo to kill the natives as it brings me resources.

And fighting itself is another problem.

I don't like it with fighting, this part is currently a bit too complicated for me. And so I've the problem, that I cannot built where I want (no chance against bigger biters) and so cannot build trains to the resource fields. And I didn't found out, how to fight them, if my resources are just too low. Perhaps I need to change my strategy and research more in weapons, but I wanted to avoid that, because I really have problems to use the stuff;
The reason why I don't like fighting is, I have a bad finger left hand and have problems to feel the keys, and when I come in the middle of an fight on E or Q or X the game is over for me. And this happens soon, when I need to react fast. This makes me sad and crazy because I have played so many games in my life (I was for example a relatively successful bf2 player) and only for factorio it is such a problem, and I don't know what could be changed to make that better in a way, that doesn't break with current behaviors. I hate that, because normally I know very soon, what's wrong with something and how to change that. but here???

I think the wrong part is, that - unlike the other games - the keys Q, E, X change the whole mode. This is very unusual. First thought was to change it so, that mode-changes are more away from the movement/fighting keys. But this way it breaks nearly everything, like it works now. So I don't have any good solution, but an idea I played with was different keyboard layouts between building and fighting, and when I think into that I believe it could work.

But coming back to the theme: there is currently no advantage in going green, only the players believe, that this is better, but indeed it takes much longer to go that way. Anyway, the possibility, to go different is good, but I think the differences between clean and dirty must be enhanced much more. For example, there should be a way to bring the natives to another place, because sometimes I got maps, where it was really impossible to inhale them no pollution, because they where so near to the only resource.

And in the end, the player should have a big advantage, if he goes out with no fight/green. For example no need to make defense. But therefor he needs a system, which warns, if he pollutes too much.

[Dysoch]

what i typically do is this:
i research to logistics robot (all science packs hand crafted) then i go full out. creating rows and rows of automated crafting machines, everything is transferred by robots, EVERYTHING! even the ores are moved.
im not clean, but also not dirty, i use electric furnaces for smelting, effectivity in the crafting machines, and large banks of solar panels, but also a quite large steam engine reserve for when it gets rough. mainly laser turrets for defence.

i use solar array mk2 from industrio a lot, they are expensive, but quite effective on a large scale. charcoal created by treefarm mod for the steam engines.

but the facade of clean or dirty is about to change, (at least for me, for now), because im adding pollution cleaning machines to my mod. those will be in 3 tiers each, and at least 2 different ways for now (2x3=6 machines!)

[slpwnd]

I like solar, but it is not my focus to get it asap. I usually do it when it is relatively cheap for me (making many solar panels in the assembling machine). The biggest advantage for me is that it saves the hassle of finding big coal fields every now and then.

[Dysoch]

I like solar, but it is not my focus to get it asap. I usually do it when it is relatively cheap for me (making many solar panels in the assembling machine). The biggest advantage for me is that it saves the hassle of finding big coal fields every now and then.

thats where at my game the treefarm mod comes in, use large quantities of fields for wood production, and depending on my solar banks (if its power effective) i use either wood in the boilers, or charcoal

[Trucario]

I only have solars and accumulators, and I dont care about the efficientcy, my base is surrounded by laser turrets and I have 10 or more beacons with productivity and speed modules, and every machine has a productivity 3 and speed 3 module.

How? With 1400 solar panels and 1500 accumulators and 5 layer stone wall.

[Psycho0124]

Dirty. Massive production with speed/productivty modules in most fabricators in a sprawling base surrounded by 3-4 layer thick walls and dense turret emplacements. I automate wall, turret, ammo, and capsule production so there is always material on hand for constant expansion/defense/counterattack. For power, I usually end up with 60 steam engines driven by 84 furnaces but I'll add in some solar/accus and one of those cool widgets to cycle the boilers off when not needed (but only to conserve coal a little). I spam miners across every mineral deposit I find and place turret clusters to defend them. If an area is getting hit heavily by biter attacks, I'll exterminate the offending hives and leave small defense bases to keep them from returning.

I'm coming for you Biters.

[DerekC1990]

I TRY to use only solar power, but that's pretty hard. I have huge amounts of solar power in the end, but not enough for the whole base through the night. But this time I want to try a real solar base. ^^

You need the -40% power consumption books, 2 in each machine and you'll have a much easier time; until that point run a mixture of solar and steam, steam during the night solar during the day (or just let everything shut down at night).

[PhantomKnight]

Both. My main base is as clean as possible, running on solar and accumulators. The transition was rough, laying low until I researched solar power, then accidentally forgetting to increase the amount of solar panels and accumulators when I switched to electric furnaces. Now I have around 500 panels and accumulators each, and automated production of accumulators and panels. My outer bases are dirty, in the sense that I mine as fast as possible, using speed modules, and these bases instantly become huge beacons to the biters, and I have to build double layered walls covered with laser turrets, as the iron and copper flow back to my main base to be processed. So the biters have never attacked my main base, but every 5-10 seconds I get little alerts that the biters are assaulting my outer bases. They also attack my radar outposts for some reason. They spawn in the middle of my radar view, and I'm running around with packs of substations and laser turrets, assaulting them whenever they show up within my field of view.

[liq3]

In my first game I did dirty until I could mass produce solars... Even when I had 800+ solars though, my factory was still really dirty due to all the electric furnaces and mines I had. Not to mention all the 4 x Prod III factories I had ;]. Those produced the majority of my pollution I'm sure. I defended myself by using lots of walls and lasers well covering huge areas and occasionally going out destroying any problem nests.

In my second game I'm just doing full dirty since I'm trying to speedrun. I don't even care about solars at all, they're too expensive. It's just so much faster and cheaper to get steam engines up.