Friday Facts #224 - Bots versus belts

[Ractaros96]

I don't know if anyone got to the same conclusions I did, but there is no need to change logistic bots mechanics.

The bots are good for rapid factory expansion, but they come at a cost. Bots require more computational power than belts and this is the reason you won't be able to build the biggest factory possible. Your framerate will start to drop at some point and because of the factory expansion speed (without belts) you'll reach that point quickly.

The belts take much more time to build and manage than bots, but also less computational power. So in the long run factory with belts will be bigger and you'll be able to produce more goods per second with the same computational power.

To say the truth I never got to the point where belt based factory was so big, that my framerate started to drop. Im a bot person, but my games ended quicky thanks to that.

That's the core of Factorio, to produce as many items as possible.

Let me show you some graphs:
BELT BASED FACTORY:


BOTS BASED FACTORY:

[fishycat]

Holy moly, this fff really made me a little angry, in detail twinsen's - I don't even know how to call it - had me close to flipping my table.
If that's a thing now, nerfing all the things and kick out the bots!!! I can quit playing with my mediocre system, but if twinsen is happy then

[bobingabout]

Also, Devs, take a look at some of the things I did with Robots.... instead of just needing to build a frame and a circuit, the recipe is a lot more complex, requiring a "Robot brain" (okay, that one isn't much more complex than just adding a few more circuits with base game stuff) and a "Robot tool" of the apropriate type for each robot.

[IronCartographer]

This is completely the wrong place for this comment, but it's a simple idea:

If the devs want to make things more interesting again, there's something they haven't explored. Instead of space-constrained logistics...what about time? Where are the items that must be transferred between points A and B within a certain number of ticks, or else they lose value in some way?

Chew on that rather than trying to force people to play a certain way. That's novelty. That's good game design. That's why Factorio has been so successful.

[Footy]

So I understand and actually agree to a large part that logistics bots are overpowered.

Some thoughts...
Problem:
Logistics bots being too easy to scale to massive proportions.

Quality of life:
Getting trash items back into the base is important, and preventing this would just serve to annoy people.

Perhaps there are a few ways we could deal with this:
1)
Remove requester, active provider and buffer chests
- I don't think this is a good idea because it removes quite an important element from the game for a lot of people.
- It makes trashing items much more difficult

2)
Change inserters to not be able to move items from chest to chest or building directly without using belt
+ makes robot builds less efficient and compact
+ filter inserters will be required for multiple item types or multiple chests with single length belts
- will likely just piss off players

3)
Restrict the size of logistics networks, so only ~6 robo ports can be linked this means there will only be 24 charging pads available in any one network.
+ keeps logistics bots functionality in game
+ allows hundreds of bots to do bursty work but with the penalty of restricted sustained throughput
+ will force more complicated builds for using bots (perhaps even add an option to reduce the logistics range of a roboport for more flexible designs)
- Construction bots no longer able to cover the base to make building and deconstructing as simple.

3a)
Perhaps make construction networks and logistic networks separate
+ Allows one large construction network to keep the quality of life element

4)
Restrict logistics networks from each roboport so they cannot overlap, just touch at the edges
+ keeps all existing functionality
+ reduces effectiveness of thousands of bots due to travel and recharge time
- harder to place roboports

5)
Make logitics bots wear out, batterys wear out in real life, so why not after x time or x items delivered have a requirements like used fuel rods to deconstruct them then build new with X more resource input
+ keeps existing functionality
+ makes bots have a real cost once built

[Nick-Nack]

Really love that you discuss this! I totally understand why you would want to nerf logistic bots, and I agree that the game is more fun when played with belts instead.
I have for some time now thought about this, and maybe some of this might be helpful. First of all, when are logistic bots used (appart from transporting stuff to myself):
1. Mass transport through the base
2. Transport of exotic components for rarely used items.
3. Complex item sorting
4. Transporting fuel to trains

For each let's have a look at why bots are used and how this could be changed.

1. Mass transport through the base
This is the big one, e. g. using logistic bots to move green circuits from the place they are produced to all the assemblers that need them. Why does it happen? Because belt logistics doesn't scale with the rest. To scale production you simply pop down some more blueprints. For logistics you need to address many points in the system. If you just add more belts at the end this won't help, because the first part of the belt will be a choking point, limiting how many material can be deliverd through the whole system. This could be solved by the stackable belts. To truly challenge bots, it has to be possible to have an endgame base with one belt line per material where logistics doesn't grow in width, but in height (stackable belts). The stackable belts need to scale in a way so that at some point you can pop down a lot of stachable belts on top of each other and not worry about capacity for that part of your factory anymore for the rest of the game.
But that's not all: Logistic bots also have the advantage of using up a lot less space than belts. Often you would have to either tear down half of your base to rebuild your logistics - or use bots. Given that "tearing down half of your base to rebiuld it" is what Factorio is all about, it doesn't make sense here to power up belts, instead we need to nerf bots. This is the part you have also already put a lot of thought into, and I fear I can only offer some ideas, none of which have to be the solution, but in my opinon are worth trying:
- Make chests bigger. To be more precise: instead of building requestor chests, you have to build a 4x4 landing pad next to the chest. This will take away usage like optimized mining and train unloading.
- Force logistic bots to the ground. If they cannot use the direct airway, then creating paths for them takes up some space, too
- Decrease roboport reach, or, more precisley, increase space-used-to-range-ratio. If you need to put them close together than you would have to rebuild parts of that base just to fit in the ports.

2. Transport of exotic components for rarely used items
Logistic bots are really helpful for supplying assembling machines that rarely run but need exotic components. For example my assembly machines for requesting chests usually get thei red circuits from logistic bots, because it would be very tedious to weave these to the assembly machine, with a lot of red circuits just lying on the belts. For these situations, logistic bots make a lot of sense, as they can also work if the bots take ages to transport the material. I don't think there is a need to change anything about this.

3. Complex item sorting
Say I have a train station with multiple trans arriving and dropping off different goods. Now I want to sort these goods to where they are needed. With bots this is trivial. Without them, it becomes a hell of filter inserters that takes exorbitant amounts of space. This could be easily solved via sorting splitters (as shown by many different mods). The splitters should be expensive and late game only, though, putting them in the same tier as logistic bot networks.

4. Transporting fuel to trains
Unfortunately in a complex rail network, you basically have to supply every second train station with fuel to make sure your trains are automatically supplied. Currently this can be solved by including a supply station to the trains path, so this is last on the list as it is least important. One way to improve the situation would be to not only set conditions for leaving a station, but also for entering it, and a way to use current fuel as a condition. Or, even simpler and more elegant: By introducing electric trains (see mods).

[quyxkh]

Aren't bots necessary to keep max-boost assemblers running? As it is now there's lots of things that you can juuuust barely manage to keep running with bot-fed/drained chests, if belts can't be avoided everything's going to slow to a crawl, no?

[zorg19]

Hello, I'd like to throw my 2 cents into the discussions.

I am for the use of bots in the game, but I can understand their overpowered-ness when it comes to the complexity of bases. For players that are advanced, bots feel like a cheap, but for average or new players, bots feel like you've advanced passed the need for the rudimentary need for belts everywhere. This gives players both a sense of accomplishment and a sense of progression and as others have mentioned here, having bots allows players to create mega bases with much more ease. Since your game is about automation, having bots makes sense. Removing this option does not.

Now, I am the type of player that doesn't really play the vanilla game anymore. With mods like Bobs, you can get recipes that get above 8 items required, which makes having bots a requirement to get the really really good items in the mod. However, one of the other things I also love is that Bob still gives us more options for belt throughput. With the addition of more inserters and faster belts, there is also an incentive both is throughput and resource costs that getting belts is a lot better earlier on than rushing bots. Bobs mod also nerfs the crap out of the level 1 bots, where-as level 3 bots are much more amazing (but with the cost need more materials and recharge costs). When I play Bobs, I find myself more likely to get the level 4 belts before I even consider getting bots, and when I do go bots I usually build my bot manufacture base to skip levels 1 and 2.

My point is, don't remove this option from users when there are still a ton of uses for bots for newer players in the vanilla and gives more advanced players the utility for when we use mods that require large numbers of items for recipes (I 'm looking at you Bob's Modules). Instead, I'd rather have you guys give use more options for belts and inserters that balance the 'belts versus bots'.

Some suggestions:
- Add faster belt options after blue for more throughput(splitters and underground belts included).
- Add faster inserters for unloading of trains or inserting into AMs.
- Make yellow Assembly Machines bigger to 4x4 (or another faster AM level) for allowing more belt space and insertion space.
- Give use more, or better options for underground belts ( ex: being able to have multiple different blue underground belts in a line would be nice). (Maybe the ability to set the entrance/exit of a belt in a line which would allow us to stack any number of underground belts in a line). The current requirement for allowing only 1 Yellow Under Ground Belt, 1 Red UGB and 1 Blue UGB in a line sucks.
- Make level 1 bots slower, carry less and have less battery life, but then give us the ability to make better level 2 bots which are faster, carry more and last longer (but require more recharge and cost other materials).

-Zorg

[MaexxDesign]

Well, imho, you could simply add a couple of options to the „new game“ tab:
- Disable Logistic Bots
- Disable Construction Bots
- Disable Solar Power
- Disable Atomic Power

This way, people can simply choose the playstyle they prefer, and enforce it when creating a multiplayer map.

What I strongly disagree against is, to make any recipes LESS complex ... the situations where you really have to think about how to manage 3, 4 or even 5 belts between a set of machines is one of the most fun experiences in the game ... especially in lategame, many recipes are just „more of the same“, just with different items.

I agree.
Let the player choose their own way to build a factory.
I never saw this outstanding collaboration with the community before !
You devs did a fabulous work in the last 5 years !
But nerfing or removing logistics bots is a very bad idea !

Factorio is the best game I played in the last 25 years.

[Zephyrinius]

I agree with everything written in this FFF. I am having a blast in 0.16 because my trains-and-belts megabase came back to life (UPS-wise) and can even be substantially expanded. In 0.15 I had started to rework it to use bots because I wanted to go bigger, but I quickly got bored and stopped playing Factorio altogether until the new belt improvements were announced with 0.16.

I would love to see a world in which bots fill a different niche than belts, and can't be used to replace belts altogether but instead add more interesting design strategies to the game. I think it would be great to add more powerful belts, or to nerf bots.

You could always leave the old bots as a "super-bots" option in the game setup; this would be similar to turning off biters in that everyone understands it makes the game easier, but many players still prefer it.

[Tinyboss]

This is completely the wrong place for this comment, but it's a simple idea:

If the devs want to make things more interesting again, there's something they haven't explored. Instead of space-constrained logistics...what about time? Where are the items that must be transferred between points A and B within a certain number of ticks, or else they lose value in some way?

Chew on that rather than trying to force people to play a certain way. That's novelty. That's good game design. That's why Factorio has been so successful.

Wait...so you mean attach a timestamp to *every manufactured entity in the game*? I don't think that's gonna fly.

[Panderturtle]

I always build my bases without Bots (except of delivering the Player and building up the factory), just because, like you mentioned, belts are more interesting and look and feel like a real factory.
Your idea about taking out the logisticbots is, from my point, a good one. As well I think that it will be more difficult (which is the fun of doing so) to build a megabase with belts instead of bots.

I hope you will change the situation, for a good ending for both sides, belts and bots.

[DreadIron]

I like idea nerfing bots by

• take care about collisions (hello pathfinding!)
• add cooldown for grabbing/dropping item (like landing / take off) and allowing only x bots accessing the building (chest)
• tune power comsuption and other stats, make it costier (eg. add 2nd level of module)
• add acceleration and slowdown
• creating some kind of new resource needed for bots to operate, like some intell(command) building or something (not sure what it could be -> so it can't by spammed). Or something that you must do to have bigger pool of bots (exploring? fulfill quests?)

Just some of my ideas (didn't read others so I'm not influenced)

[raidho36]

As outlined in the article, logistic bots are inherently broken simply for the fact of being a resource teleport equivalent. Grand zero management is involved, just place a "teleport gate"and "teleport power cells" and you're good. There's no way you can look at it and justify any other way than it enables lazy players being lazy and avoiding fun playstyles. Someone once said that, given opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game. Putting barriers on their way to do so amounts to little more than adding more tedium in front of it. A basic example is that in a shooter game most weapons have very short range and one weapon has infinite range (i.e. railgun), bonus points if it's also the strongest weapon. The game strongly encourages using this one weapon over everything else. Limiting ammo supply to the minimim and putting map elements that break long distance lines of sight amounts to little more than adding tedium to the game, it doesn't makes anyone prefer a different weapon - hence instagib game modes exist, where the railgun is the only weapon available to start with, has infinite ammo, and is buffed to kill instantly anything it hits. People feel like removing everything else from the game altogether is a better strategy. Which is exactly what happens in this game with bots - the only people left using belts are the one who do it deliberately to challenge themselves. So I don't think you can fix this aspect of the game without getting rid of logistic robots.

[Tinyboss]

Related to the (IMO excellent) suggestions to limit beacon overlaps, what if we added another tier (or two or three) of beacons? A "Beacon 2" would have, say, 5x the range as a normal beacon, and would stack without penalty. A Beacon 3 could have 20x range, and fully stack with all lower beacons. The point is to create a true "economy of scale" opportunity, giving an incentive to create a huge central production area rather than an equal number of assemblers scattered across a dozen small facilities.

[purdueme91]

Also, Devs, take a look at some of the things I did with Robots.... instead of just needing to build a frame and a circuit, the recipe is a lot more complex, requiring a "Robot brain" (okay, that one isn't much more complex than just adding a few more circuits with base game stuff) and a "Robot tool" of the apropriate type for each robot.

Bob-->I love your mods and it makes Factorio so much more deep. Just wondering when extra tiers are going to be added like you did. We got 3 assembly machines but only 1 miner. Robots seem like a perfect place to add tiers to make them less OP.

Agree with your earlier post that requester chests are now locked behind gold which is a pain. Now we might remove them because it's more fun to build with belts? Maybe for some people but I don't play Vanilla that much. I play Angel/Bob 90% of the time and I can't imagine those without a logistic network. I'm sure if they remove bots that less than a week later I will be installing permanently the Bob Robot Mod that has been released

[IronCartographer]

This is completely the wrong place for this comment, but it's a simple idea:

If the devs want to make things more interesting again, there's something they haven't explored. Instead of space-constrained logistics...what about time? Where are the items that must be transferred between points A and B within a certain number of ticks, or else they lose value in some way?

Chew on that rather than trying to force people to play a certain way. That's novelty. That's good game design. That's why Factorio has been so successful.

Wait...so you mean attach a timestamp to *every manufactured entity in the game*? I don't think that's gonna fly.

No, items can have custom properties. The general case would not change.

Edit: To clarify the original comment...

Factorio is a game about automation, but also logistics.
Time (latency instead of bandwidth) is an almost completely unused dimension, logistically speaking.
It's a missed opportunity.

[kassel188]

Die bots, die!

Seriously, they are the most boring part of the game. Luckily they are so easy to avoid.

Then don't use them when you play. There is however people who do enjoy them, so for that reason, they should be kept

[Omarflyjoemacky]

I think there's a lot of assumptions about bots and belts being made in this FFF. I can appreciate that some players don't enjoy bots, but removing them from the game is a jump that doesn't make sense.

I also believe that building belts is way more fun due to it's inherent complexities, challenges, and emergent situations.

I have trouble reading these arguments and not jumping to a strawman such as "I believe digging up resources by hand is way more fun due to it's inherent time investment, challenges, and emergent situations."

This.

[Lubricus]

Bots is great for building and fetch stuff. That makes it easier to build complex and fun stuff and benefit the gameplay with toning down grindy building, so we can use more of the time designing and effectively use blueprints.
logistics bot for replacing belts on the other hand makes that we don't need to build that complex things. So the bots is a sort of paradox.
So i purpose to buff bots for building and fetch stuff and make them easier to get early in the game and at the same time nerf and make it hard to get bots for replacing belts for transportation.

I have launched a rocket in vanilla without any requester chest and that was fun. On the other hand with around archangel bob's mods it gets overwhelming without them but that is not a problem if they are possible to mod. Megabases would look very different, don't know if that is bad or good it would be different.

So make construction bots easier to research, faster with more cargo capacity so they are useful earlier in the game. I am also thinking if it would be possible to make the constructions bots responsible to fetch stuff (personal logistics request) so that also get easier. Then you could nerf the logistics bots, the requester chest is already late in the tech tree and the logistics bots would be useless without them so put them under the same research.
Know the roboports auto-connect, and it's difficult to control what logistics bots do that is annoying but i don't know if better control of logistic networks and what the bots do only will buff them or could make them more interesting to mess around with.

Stack belts sounds interesting. How would that balance against trains? An alternative could be packaging of several items into one package where the packages only could go on belts and not be carried by bots. Should items have size and weight instead of only stack size? Bot's could then have a weight limit and so on.