Long distance transport

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ssilk
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Re: Long distance transport

Post by ssilk »

A full setup for the first train can be built in under half an hour.

I think we will need to deliver much more than 750 items/min, when the devs develop the end game contents. If I'm right, the sooner you get used to, the less you will be struggling around with it. :) but well, this is a kind of discussion, which doesn't bring anything forward. :roll:
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Boogieman14
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Re: Long distance transport

Post by Boogieman14 »

I'll take any excuse to put down trains, more complicated the better :lol: (and I guess, almost a requirement when playing with RSO)
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Re: Long distance transport

Post by Rahjital »

I think this depends a lot on how familiar with trains you are. If you don't yet know how to set up a station without having to fiddle with it first, belts seem much better as they are simpler and do the job fairly well. Once you get the hang of railroad building and train schedule setting and see the advantages, railroads win pretty easily for long distance transport.

For me, the important pros of trains are throughput and speed, versatility and extendability. Belts are slow and their response time is terrible, if anything interferes with your ore production, it will take you a long time to find out and then your base will be resource starved for quite a bit until the new ore flows in. A large enough train (I personally use 2 engines and 10 carriages) will easily beat belt at throughput and if you want even more, you need to do a few small modifications to the track accomodate more trains; without trains, you need to built an entire new belt, which is pain at this distance. And finally, you can use a single track for more than one kind of a resource - there's no problem with using a single rail for coal, iron and copper; you would need three belts for that (or two if two resources shared a belt, but such trickle would hardly be enough to feed a larger base.)

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Re: Long distance transport

Post by Xterminator »

While I agree that trains are a huge pain to set up (I still hate the process of getting one up and running), I think for long distances, especially for like going to and from an outpost, trains are almost always better. As several other people have mentioned, they go both ways, and can carry you along with other types of materials. Especially useful for automatically delivering supplies to an outpost, which you would almost always have to do, unless you cleared all biter bases around for a long distance.
Also for unloading... With using a belt you can't fully utilize the inserter stack size bonus you would get with a train.

So in the end it preference just like anything else, but for long distances I think a train is just better, an of course more fun. :D
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Re: Long distance transport

Post by Psycho0124 »

Psycho0124 wrote:Excellent. I get to abuse my calculator again. :twisted:

Say you had a big hungry factory; it requires 10,000 items per minute (copper, iron, coal, stone). Say those resources were 1000 tiles away.
At ~1800 items per minute per express belt, you'd need 6 Express belts side-by-side to get the throughput you need(!). At 31.5 Iron per tile, you're looking at 31,500 iron to get the job done (not to mention the mess at the factory to handle all those belts).
Or you could just spend 2,750 Iron and 500 stone on rail tracks, 335 iron on a train and 3 cargo wagons, and transport the same amount of material. Since cargo wagons can each carry 960 items (15 stacks technically but all resources stack to 64), a train with 3 cargo cars could handle the job with 4 trips per minute (with sufficient inserter stack size bonuses for loading/unloading).

Belts are many times more expensive and their capacity is limited. Once you lay a train track, you can just run more trains on it when you need to move more. I have one section of track in my game that sees a 2-car train once every 5 seconds. Max throughput for that line is somewhere around 38,000 items per minute (same as 21 express belts side-by-side!!) if all trains were 100% full. No telling how high you could push it with more trains and tighter signaling.. :D
This is an old quote from a previous version, before we even had oil. The capacity for trains has also changed since the stack size changes. Still, it's mostly applicable now. I go for trains as soon as I can afford it since it gives me a network I can expand cheaply and quickly. Trains have a lower initial investment, negligible upkeep (especially compared to the energy required to run tons of inserters without the benefit of stack size upgrades), and have a huge capacity right off the bat.

Mmmm.. Trains... :D

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Re: Long distance transport

Post by Xterminator »

Psycho0124 wrote:
Psycho0124 wrote:Excellent. I get to abuse my calculator again. :twisted:

Say you had a big hungry factory; it requires 10,000 items per minute (copper, iron, coal, stone). Say those resources were 1000 tiles away.
At ~1800 items per minute per express belt, you'd need 6 Express belts side-by-side to get the throughput you need(!). At 31.5 Iron per tile, you're looking at 31,500 iron to get the job done (not to mention the mess at the factory to handle all those belts).
Or you could just spend 2,750 Iron and 500 stone on rail tracks, 335 iron on a train and 3 cargo wagons, and transport the same amount of material. Since cargo wagons can each carry 960 items (15 stacks technically but all resources stack to 64), a train with 3 cargo cars could handle the job with 4 trips per minute (with sufficient inserter stack size bonuses for loading/unloading).

Belts are many times more expensive and their capacity is limited. Once you lay a train track, you can just run more trains on it when you need to move more. I have one section of track in my game that sees a 2-car train once every 5 seconds. Max throughput for that line is somewhere around 38,000 items per minute (same as 21 express belts side-by-side!!) if all trains were 100% full. No telling how high you could push it with more trains and tighter signaling.. :D
This is an old quote from a previous version, before we even had oil. The capacity for trains has also changed since the stack size changes. Still, it's mostly applicable now. I go for trains as soon as I can afford it since it gives me a network I can expand cheaply and quickly. Trains have a lower initial investment, negligible upkeep (especially compared to the energy required to run tons of inserters without the benefit of stack size upgrades), and have a huge capacity right off the bat.

Mmmm.. Trains... :D
Hmm good post, it is nice to actually see the numbers. After reading this, I am fully convinced trains are better. I kind of figured they were cheaper than belta for long distances and lots of throughput, but good to know for sure now. :D
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Re: Long distance transport

Post by The Lone Wolfling »

Theoretically, trains are better.

In actuality? Unless you're talking absurd distances, belts generally are better. People forget one of the most important resources is *time*. Your time, that is. It takes much longer generally to set up train tracks than it does to run a belt, especially in the late game when you have "boots of speed". (And yes, I am crazy enough to have a separate powersuit mk II for running)

Most of the time is spent at the ore loading spot, for me at least. Trying to get the station set up.

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Re: Long distance transport

Post by GewaltSam »

The Lone Wolfling wrote:Theoretically, trains are better.

In actuality? Unless you're talking absurd distances, belts generally are better. People forget one of the most important resources is *time*. Your time, that is. It takes much longer generally to set up train tracks than it does to run a belt, especially in the late game when you have "boots of speed". (And yes, I am crazy enough to have a separate powersuit mk II for running)

Most of the time is spent at the ore loading spot, for me at least. Trying to get the station set up.
Try the "Resource Spawn Overhaul", and you get those absurd distances ;) And trust me, it's great fun. Belts are just an option to trains because the original resource spawn simply sucks, and I hope that Wube really takes a good look at the RSO in that regard.

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Re: Long distance transport

Post by Psycho0124 »

The Lone Wolfling wrote:Most of the time is spent at the ore loading spot, for me at least. Trying to get the station set up.
Have you tried just building a prototype train station, copying it, and using a roboport and some constructions bots to just pop it in place out where you need it? I usually set up the miners while the construction robots get the station up and running. By the time I'm done placing miners and belts, the station is ready to go. I use a few logistics slots on my player to keep station-building supplies topped off (lasers, tracks, wall pieces, buffer chests, inserters, belts, etc.). It takes me longer to ride out there on a train than it does to get a new mine running.

Also, keep in mind how small the tiles are. 1000 tiles isn't really that long of a distance.. My current base is 450 X 300 tiles and the break-even point on using conveyors over trains would be FAR less than that (closer to 300-400 tiles, so a base-width for me). Belts would only really make sense for stuff just outside my walls. Another issue is the time and energy spent building all those conveyers. I hit down-time waiting on conveyers to produce with two full production lines of 'em and only short conveyers to build.. Tracks are cheap and produce fast.

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Re: Long distance transport

Post by Martc »

The Lone Wolfling wrote:People forget one of the most important resources is *time*.
I think most important is fun. So if you like trains, you have no problem spend time to play with them. And if you don't like trains just don't use them, but there is no reason to discourage others from using them.

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Re: Long distance transport

Post by Jythier »

Martc wrote:
The Lone Wolfling wrote:People forget one of the most important resources is *time*.
I think most important is fun. So if you like trains, you have no problem spend time to play with them. And if you don't like trains just don't use them, but there is no reason to discourage others from using them.

But if everyone doesn't play exactly like I do how will multiplayer be any fun? He'll be over there building 5000 belts while I am over here making railroad tracks and engines so I can build a train out to the middle of nowhere where there's an iron patch. ANARCHY!

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Re: Long distance transport

Post by katyal »

Turn it into a race and once he's lost a few times maybe he'll think better of trains.... :D All kidding aside though I don't care how people play...as long as we keep getting more people to buy and play the game and that all of that keeps getting converted into new content for me to play with.

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