Interesting to try your own ways of doing things

[SilentLight]

I've "beaten" the game once and am continuing my save - hardly anything remotely "mega" about it.

But what I find interesting is how fun it can be to try new things.

Right now I'm switching plate production from my main base to each mining facility instead and transporting the plates via train instead of the ore by train. The ore goes right from the new mines to the furnace. The train can hold twice as much (100 plates a stack instead of 50 ore), and it clears a lot more room in base for other things. It's also easier to set up, say, 54 electric furnaces operating at max capacity if you have 18 of them each at 3 ore mines instead. Before (with less furnaces but all at main base), many would become idle because there wouldn't be room to put their production no matter how I split and recombined the belts, unless I wanted to go to more belts transporting the resulting plates.

I'm not sure this will in the long run be better than just doing the typical 'bring ore by train to the furnace section", but it feels like it - and yet again something that keeps the game interesting beyond just 'winning' : always seeking to improve designs, change designs, test design ideas, optimize and more.

Well done on great game design, developers.

[astroshak]

It will both be more effective and more work in the future.

More effective, because you are reducing the traffic on your rail network. It takes two trains to carry the ore that one train of equal length can carry in plates. It takes four trains to carry in ore what one train of equal length can carry of stone bricks.

However, you are obligating yourself to set up those furnaces at every mine. That means larger ore outposts, more stuff to set up, more stuff to tear down when done, and potentially more attacks from biters due to the increase in pollution generated at the mines.

[leadraven]

I suggest to go further : you compressed ore into plates, but you can compress Iron Plates into Steel Plates, Iron Gears and Engines right in mining outposts. I mean each mining outpost to produce one of those pseudo-basic resources.
I'm trying it right now and like it very much. Especially in marathon.

[planetmaker]

It's not uncommon that a green circuit factory is built near spots where iron and copper are close together. And you hardly ever have enough green circuits

[SilentLight]

Good points. Thanks for the feedback!

[leitk]

One thing to keep aware of is that for train operations you need a few buffers:
1 - the factory needs a buffer of the items
2 - the depot should have at least a train load full and probably more
3 - the train itself

For a 4 car train, that's 16k plates in at least 3 places, so at least 50k buffered.
This is not a problem for plates, but for something like engines, it may be a bit much.

That being said, I do this as well, for iron, copper, stone bricks, steel, and green circuits, and sometimes concrete (although that was a case were stone and iron were at the same spot already).

Gears and engines I'm not sure are worth it due to the lower usage and buffer requirements, depends a lot on the size you're going for, mega bases is probably fine.

One other option I'd thought of for train management, but never needed to go to is to have layers: an outside raw resource layer that feeds to an intermediate layer, that feeds to the main factory. The trains wouldn't cross from outside to main (except for raw stone).

What kills most of my mega bases is the requirement to keep feeding it raw resources, I get tired of doing that.