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Your OTHER option is to eyeball what you need, go with good enough, and then constantly fiddle with your design and ratios until it works smoothly based on what parts aren't working correctly. Belt full? Ok, remove machines from that line, or add a new line! Machine at the end starved? Add more ingredients!
if neither of these are appealing, then I do no think factorio is a good fit for you.
Helmod is very handy for figuring out inputs, outputs, number of assemblers, takes into account modules and beacons etc. Lets you pin the info on screen, and you can even click on the assembler in pinned window to automatically put an assembler in your hand with recipe and modules all configured, that you just drop where you want.
I get not wanting to have to work out ratios and whatever else just to feel like the foundation of the factory won't collapse and screw you over later on in the progression, and realizing there isn't much else you can do besides give up and either stop playing and leave yourself a mess to clean up later, or stop doing much if any serious planning and possibly leaving yourself with an even bigger mess doesn't feel like much of a choice at all.
However, after all that planning and calculating, moving machines around and considering where inputs and outputs go, it feels really good to have everything work perfectly and know that you actually improved something. I think that is the main point of the game, and why it is so addicting.
If you're feeling frustrated by all that, try taking a break. Trying to force it won't help. Personally, when this happens to me, I start a new game and just go full spaghetti to get it out of my system.
Factorio is great because it focuses everything on just a few basic resources, which you can spin out into so many different products. The interconnectedness is both what causes ratio calculation nightmares and what makes it way more fulfilling than creating a series of "solved" chains with clearly defined breakpoints for when to expand production.
Example red circuits. If you want to make 1 per second you need 6 machines. (Speed doesn't matter you are going with ratios). If you later add something that uses 1 red circuit per second then you'll need to add 6 more red circuit machines.
Your other option is to just over produce. The machines will stop when the belt/chests are full. once you build something that is the right speed just blue print it so you can easily reproduce it.
Only people that want to squeeze the optimum out of their factory have to do the math to the decimal point and a lot of those people have done the math and posted it in tutorials or a wiki so you don't have to do the math yourself. You can just look it up.
but when i started writing the calculations i realized that i was kind of proving your point!
yes, i can see how it may be frustrating to need to do some maths to get perfect ratios - but you don't need perfect ratios to get things moving - it's only if you start getting bottlenecks or line starvations that you may need to start looking at the ratio of production to consumption, and you can do that on a per item basis, and all the information is there (i often start with the total raw for the end item and its production time and work backwards - but do beware some total raw are incorrect - green science i just noticed says 5.5 iron when it is 7 - will need to see if that is a known bug) ***EDIT: as pointed out in a later post i was wrong here, and had forgotten that we get 2 yellow belts for every iteration***
but yes, i can see you may find it frustrating and not fun, and i hope you are able to find a way past that and enjoy the game - either by not getting bogged down by the ratios until it's necessary, or by embracing the maths! :-)
(quick note - all the required ratios are available online in the many YT videos by all the popular Factorio content creators, as well as on the various wiki pages and lists that people have created for the game - so you can just put sown that many drills or assemblers or smelters and be confident that the beast will be fed!) :-)
It is up to you how you play the game.
These numbers are not manually calculated. The game recursively calculates them from the recipe data. If there was a bug in that code then it would be wrong for pretty much every item and it would have been reported and fixed ages ago.
Yeah this pretty much. Unless you want to, there's no need to go into too much detail.
Much like me, I doubt you'll ever build anything on the scale of a megafactory. So you don't really need to worry about perfect ratios or UPS.
You can just slap down a few lines of miners, slap down a smelter array and see if its feeding enough ore into it. If the belt is maxed and some smelters go unused, you have too many. So that blueprint will do fine for your next one.
You can add in a green chip plant and copy/paste it till you get enough of them to fill a belt. Chances are you won't use all those chips till later on so the system will back up until you realise you don't have enough copper later and need to inject more into it.
The only thing I've really put thought into is my science creation, and even that was haphazard. At some point I'll clean things up, but as I'm still in the early stages on this new factory, it'll take some time.
I'm usually a very reactive player, rather than planning ahead. Although my designs are generally expandable by just copy/paste of the last few assemblers/chemical plants etc.
e.g. Drop down 4 chemical plants (two each side of a belt) to produce my initial batteries. As I expand, some time later I notice I'm consuming all those batteries, so I copy/paste and now have 8 chemical plants producing batteries, and so on.
The only planning I might do is to leave space to add beacons at a later stage, especially for anything that can use productivity modules in the assemblers/chemical plants.
You have that written on the machine itself when you place it down.
By hand? You're not supposed to mass craft anything this way.
And in a factory, if you did not failed supply chain, only the item craft time multiplied by machine speed matters.
You are not supposed to mass craft in hand anything.
Because its completely irrelevant and if it is a factor for you, you made something wrong.
If that is a concern for you, you probably haven't saturated even a yellow belt with any of basic materials, in which case, why personal failure on engineering be factored?
You have that on drills.
You can easily calculate that yourself.
Same as above.
You mean like.... actual optimization of factory?
Sorry, this isn't going to happen automatically since that's literally what the game is about.
Also, are you even aware of existence of production tab?
From what it seems, pretty much every single one of your problems comes from not understanding the game well enough yet and not checking what each UI button does, especially top right ones.
You have all the basic tools in game.
If you need something more advanced, there is a mod for that, regardless what you want I guarantee you there is a mod for that already.
Made by engineers for engineers
My rating:
For engineers: 10/10
For other gamers: 5/10
One morning, an engineer woke up and thought “Hey! What if I design an engineer game?” He was designing printed circuits all day long and couldn’t get enough. Even his boss ran out of projects to give to this engineer. In the evening, when he would get home around 10 PM, he would sit at his PC and design even more complicated circuit boards (because the ones he was doing at work were too simple to his taste).
So he decided to basically replicate what he was doing all day long but just much more complicated (because it was his understanding of the word “fun”). How should I call the hero and only human in the game? Why not Engineer? That’s a good name and it will appeal to my audience (who are, as you guessed, engineers - if not in the real world, at least in their hearts).
Graphics? Nah, people are not interested in graphics (he was still playing Civ 1 on his beloved C64).
Random events? No, no, no, we don’t want anything to mess with our beautifully designed printed circuit board. Ah, some of my engineer-game-testers do complain? Ok, I will add some… mmmmh… ALIENS! (people hate aliens) so that the game is not too dull. They will come from time to time. Wait, why would they come? Ah I know! POLLUTION! (people hate pollution).
Clear and detailed tutorial? Who cares? Engineers will understand my concepts and others just have to watch Youtube tutorials.
And as our engineer still had a 110-meter long Märklin model railroad in his cellar, he thought: Let’s add some train! It is cool and overly complicated to run properly.
Let’s get back to the essence of my game. I know! I want people to keep on multiplying and dividing ratios on how many gears divided by how many red science multiplied by how many copper cables you need in order to produce the components for the next object. Yeah, that will be REAL FUN!
Don’t get me wrong, I love you engineers. You make my PC run pretty smoothly. And I understand that, from time to time, you may want to design a game for your fellow engineers.