When Do You Upgrade Belts?

[Tyr4el]

So just curious - when is a good time to upgrade your transport belts from yellow to red or blue?

I'm watching MangledPork's Railworld series and noticed he hasn't upgraded them yet even into his 8th hour with a BUNCH of production going. What would be a reason for not upgrading them as soon as you can and when would you even want to upgrade them? I would think you'd want to as soon as possible.

[quinor]

When you need more throughput. Belts are expensive. Though later, when you've got lots of resources, more important is time you need for replacement. Later you just build everything from blue.

[ssilk]

It's generally much cheaper to use parallel belts, instead of faster, cause they really double the throughput, faster belts don't. I use faster belts, when I need them. That are two reasons:
- If I want to have the stuff faster. Faster belts transport stuff faster, so it doesn't take so long to produce something.
- If I need the throughput on narrow space.

In the endgame I use normally only fast belts, because they are a good compromise between speed and cost and I don't need that much, as in the beginning.

[Ohz]

I do these steps:

1) Yellow belts - Yellow corners*
2) Yellow belts - Red corners*
3) Red belts - Blue corners*

*Corners, cross section, ect...

Then there is some input that should be always full in my opinion, such as ore and coal, so I use red/blue belts everywhere.

But as introduce ssilk, I prefer to parallel stuff (like 4 furnaces in 4 rows than 16 in one row), that's just my gameplay.

[Xterminator]

Ssilk hit it right on the money pretty much. Though some of it is just a matter of preference I think and the situation in the particular game. :p For me personally, I usually start upgrading when the resources or items aren't getting to their destination fast enough, or there just isn't enough of it getting through to the end. I rarely use parallel belts as ssilk mentioned, but I should be. For me it is just easier to upgrade rather than add another line. Though a second line is probably better wherever applicable.
Hope this helped mate!

[ssilk]

Perhaps another thought to this: when I see, that I need to replace so many belts, I think also breaking down everything and rebuilt it completely new. The reason for that is simple:
If I rebuilt all belts, I change the balancing. A construction, which previously worked well suddenly turned out to suck, I need to fix this and when that works I need to fix the next and soon, I fix everything.

Everybody knows that.

Yeah that is fun, but if you really want to go on, you should think if it isn't much easier, to built it new.

That is the same with many other things in Factorio.

[SHiRKiT]

Normally I upgrade belts when I go something bigger than 4 lines of something. For instance, I have 4 lines of copper plates, and it's not enough. Then I upgrade those lines (normally to blue belts) and done. I do this so I don't need to rebuild everything I've done this far. I don't like to keep rebuilding stuff, and I do enjoy really long lines of furnaces =]

[GewaltSam]

Furnaces for example: When a full belt goes in, but the ore doesn't even reach every furnace (because it's spent before), then you need a faster belt. If the belt isn't even completely full, a faster belt wouldn't accomplish much - you need more input in the first place (e.g. more miners that put ore on the belts). It's pretty simple when to use which belt, once you grasp the concept Of course, simply cloning a working setup instead of upgrading the old one works, too. And that is the great thing about Factorio: It gives the tools to you, but you got more than one option on how to use them.