Science questions

[VanSinn]

Howdy folks. I've been playing Factorio for about a week now, and I definitely have the "Just one more thing before I quit" syndrome. Loving the game so far. I've watched a couple of "how-to" videos and figured a few things out on my own, but I've got a couple of questions I'm hoping the general community could answer.

First, I've got a fairly bog-standard red/green science setup I came up with (borrowed from a few places, but mostly my own design, even if it's not terribly creative) that I wouldn't mind critique on. With only minor tweaks, it's pretty well infinitely expandable, and it's a fairly compact build for 5 red/6 green assemblers.



My only "issue" with this setup is the gear assembler on the green pack line doesn't quite keep up with the inserter and belt assemblers. It's not terrible, especially once I upgraded the gear assembler to the blue, but the inserter assembler has a brief moment of downtime every 2-3 cycles. I put a small buffer chest on the belt assembler, limited to one or two stacks, both for personal use and to get the belts to ride on the north side of the output belt. I'm using 5 red and 6 green assemblers to try to give me approximately one of each per second (5 second construction time for red, 6 for green).

This setup seems to feed 10 labs fairly easily. I haven't noticed any shortfalls when the labs are running full out. My question, though, is how many labs would this support? How many labs should I need by mid/late game? I've gotten blue science automated in another world (that I'm abandoning, due to poor base design choices on initial set-up) but I'm not sure how many science assemblers I should put up for each level of science pack.

Thanks in advance for any tips/tricks/advice/feedback anyone cares to give.

[Koub]

My opinion is : 10 labs is enough if you don't want to speedrush research. I have never been able to keep up with setting my factory up fast enough to make full use of my research when I research too fast (always found blue science packs to be a pain in the a**).

Don't forget that for a 5-6 red-green tier 2 assembling machines,, you'll need like 12 tier 2 assembling machines for blue science alone, plus 8 to build the red cricuits for the blue science.

With that, you produce roughly 45 science packs of each every minute. that's more than enough

[VanSinn]

My opinion is : 10 labs is enough if you don't want to speedrush research. I have never been able to keep up with setting my factory up fast enough to make full use of my research when I research too fast (always found blue science packs to be a pain in the a**).

Don't forget that for a 5-6 red-green tier 2 assembling machines,, you'll need like 12 tier 2 assembling machines for blue science alone, plus 8 to build the red cricuits for the blue science.

With that, you produce roughly 45 science packs of each every minute. that's more than enough

Thanks for the reply. I don't really go into the speed run gameplay, but I don't want to wait forever for research. On my prior world, I had 14 labs going, but kept running short on red packs with 6 red assemblers. I kept running low on copper, though, so that had a large impact. I'm just figuring out the numbers, "optimum" setups for X number of labs, etc. I think this time around I'll stick with the number of assemblers/labs and work towards modules, see how that does.

I appreciate the input!

[RoddyVR]

3-3 (though blue assemblers) keeps up with 10 labs, so i imagine your setup could pull 20 labs.

[Xterminator]

Really nice setup honestly, especially cfor only playing for like a week! As for the gear wheel problem, personally I prefer to have 2 gear assemblers, one just for the belts, and one for the inserters. This is probably over kill but I don't mind sense it keeps up very well with the demand of belts/inserters.

For lab count, you can definitely support more than 10 labs with what you have. If all your science pack assemblers are blue level 2 assemblers, and everything is getting the resources they need, you should be able to support about 20 labs I would think.
Hope this helped!

[VanSinn]

3-3 (though blue assemblers) keeps up with 10 labs, so i imagine your setup could pull 20 labs.

I appreciate the info. Thanks for replying!

Really nice setup honestly, especially cfor only playing for like a week! As for the gear wheel problem, personally I prefer to have 2 gear assemblers, one just for the belts, and one for the inserters. This is probably over kill but I don't mind sense it keeps up very well with the demand of belts/inserters.

For lab count, you can definitely support more than 10 labs with what you have. If all your science pack assemblers are blue level 2 assemblers, and everything is getting the resources they need, you should be able to support about 20 labs I would think.
Hope this helped!

Thanks for the compliment. I've seen a few of your videos too, and that's helped in figuring a few things out. I may not go a full 20 labs (blue science for 20 labs would be insane I think) but I like the clean lines of the setup I have. I appreciate the comment!

[Koub]

As a rule of thumb, you can add labs 2 by 2 until they start to get starved on a regular basis when your assembling machines work at full capacity. Then, remove the last ones you added, and you'll have maximized thebandwidth of your science pack assembling machines.

[Peter34]

In the current game, alpha 11, with no research queue, it's my experience that there are often long pause intervals from one research project finishes and until the next begins. That allows for a backlog of potions to build up. This is my experience playing alpha 11 both solo and coop MP.

Once a research queue is implemented, and I haven't heard that that'll be in alpha 12 so more likely alpha 13, that phenomena will largely go away, and so potions will tend to be used faster than in alpha 11.