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As your factory grows larger (because of course it does), your UPS will drop. Reducing the number of active objects is the main way to optimize performance and grow the factory more (i.e. produce more SPM). Beacons/modules allow building fewer structures for the same output.
Same goes for huge solar arrays instead of nuclear plants - fluid calculations are heavy, while solar panels are just static objects.
As for what to do next, a lot of people seem to enjoy designing megabases and seeing just how much science per minute, including space science from launches, they can get. That doesn't really interest me; personally, I'd go achievement hunting and/or start a new game, such testing myself on a deathworld map or using overhaul mods that make for a new experience.
Speed modules become a big deal when you're using productivity modules, for two reasons:
- The things you're speeding up have themselves become rather expensive compared to the cost of the speed modules
- Speed bonuses / maluses stack additively, so speed modules are proportionally a lot more effective than usual
.For example, an assembler 3 with four productivity 3 modules runs at 40% of the normal speed. If it's in range of a single beacon with a pair of speed 3 modules, its crafting speed jumps up to 90%. So you more than double your crafting rate at much less than twice the cost.
Just a few? Sounds like automating rockets is a thing you can do!
And just like progressing through the main game, as you grow bigger, the logistic obstacles still have some room to shift and change in quality. For example, at some point you are likely to face concerns over keeping your train network running smoothly.
And as I remember the history, to some extent the devs did intentionally decide at some point that they needed to actually produce a finished product rather than continually dive deeper and deeper into the limits of what gameplay they can get out of the engine.
In part, to my understanding, that's why the factorio devs put a lot of effort into their mod interface and why the mod community is such a big deal.
IIRC, the kovarex enrichment process was an intentional example of "Hey, look at this hint of the kind of interesting logistics challenges you can make with our engine" -- both as a suggestion to players who were interested in designing more sophisticated factory segments, and as a suggestion to modders of the kinds of things they could design.
Modules are expensive; yes but they ALSO save you resources in the long haul when building megabases. This means less resources used thusly you can last longer with the resource patches you have whilst at the same time needing less assemblers to make the same amount of product. They ALSO save time; allowing you to build more product in less time OR pollute less (see later point as to how this can be important)
In the endgame vanilla biters are just a nuisance, true... but setup your game to evolve biters sooner or expand more and they CAN become tricky. A higher Evo-factor means you'll be fighting stronger biters sooner ( maybe before you have access to the weapons that trivialise them). A higher expansionfactor might result in nest-clusters growing into eachother....which might result in the idea that if you agro 1 nest... you might just end up agroing the entire map... have fun with a full 360 assault which never lets up... you might end up needing those productivity modules just to keep up with ammo fabrication just to keep the biters at bay...
Infinite space?... sure... unless it means you need to expand into an area with a biter nest you can't handle yet due to your game's settings...
Infinite power? Sure... unless it means your pollution cloud causes biter evolution to push it beyond what your current weapons research can handle...
If you're playing vanilla on the basic map setup then yeah...I agree with everything you say in your post... Add a couple of mods to that setup and stuff might change... tweak the biter difficulty too and it might just turn into me fully disagreeing with every point in your post...
It's subjective... highly dependant on what kind of game setup you're using...
For example bob&angel already starts out with 6 different ores. and you can refine each of these ores several times to get more and more rare ores out of it, like tin, silicon, silver, cobalt, gold or tungsten ore, and all of them can be smelted to plates and are used for all kinds of things. And you also don't just have the 3 types of oil, you can split it in even more stuff, like ethan or butan, and you also don't just have sulfuric acid but also hydrochloric acid or hydrofluorid acid. And all these resources can be produced in several ways and are needed for many things. Compared to Vanilla it basically feels like Vanilla was just a small tutorial, considering how overwhelmingly many things you have to do.
And there still are many other overhaul mods. Like in Nullius you are basically responsible for creating the Biters and spreading them through the universe. Or in Space Exploration you travel to other planets to find rare ores. There are so many great and huge overhaul mods that it nearly feels like this game has endless replayability. Since if you get bored of one way how you can play the game, you can just try out a different one.
And for modules ... yeah, efficiency feels a bit weak, but speed is a great way to save some space. And production is really strong if used at the right places, since you basically save the needed space and resources for all previous steps in the production chain. And if you even use it for every step of the production chain it gets even more insane how many resources you could potentially save. Though it does mean that you need to build more buildings or also use speed modules to compensate the speed loss of the productivity module. But in general it just means you get more resources without having to change anything.
Efficiency Modules are generally a waste of time IMO; but putting them into Miners/Pumpjacks can dramatically reduce the pollution of your mining outposts (per the wiki, at 10 Pollution/minute these two machines are only out-polluted by the Burner Mining Drill's 12 Pollution/minute and the Boiler's 30 Pollution/minute).
Productivity Modules are kings of materials savings. Simply putting 4 Productivity Module 3's into the Rocket Silo reduces the number of Rocket Parts it needs to make by about 28%! For every 5 Rocket Parts it tries to make, the productivity bonus gives it two more, for a grand total of 7. Thus, you make 5/7 of the Rocket Parts, and don't make 2/7. 2/7 is about 28%. 28 Low Density Structures, Rocket Fuel, and Rocket Control Units .. that's a lot of savings. Alternatively, you can make a lot more stuff with them. Electric Furnaces consuming a Red Belt of Iron/Copper Ore (30 ore/sec) spit out 36 plate/sec. 5 such smelting columns can turn 5 Red Belts of ore (150 ore/sec) into 4 Blue Belts of plate (180/sec). Of course, using Speed Modules in Beacons to counter the slowdown effect reduces the number of necessary machines to produce that effect, as well.
One Refinery drinks 20 Crude Oil/sec to produce 5 Heavy Oil, 9 Light Oil, and 11 Petroleum (each is also "/sec"). One Refinery that has three PM3's and a bunch of Speed Beacons around it, making the Beacon Sandwich (row of Beacons, row of Refineries, row of Beacons) has a Speed of 5.55 ... which means it drinks in 5.55 times the Crude Oil (111/sec) and produces (5.55 * 1.3 = 7.215) more than 7 times the Heavy Oil, Light Oil, Petroleum that the basic Refinery did! The same treatment of the Chemical Plants that are cracking Heavy Oil to Light Oil, and Light Oil to Petroleum Gas, brings them to a speed of 4.55. This means that instead of drinking 20 Heavy Oil/sec, the Heavy->Light machine drinks 91 Heavy Oil per second, and spits out 88.725 Light Oil per second. the Light Oil->Petroleum Gas Chem Plant would seek to drink 68.25/sec Light Oil, and spit out 59.15/sec Petroleum Gas. Using the Box Method (where you maximize the Beacons per machine by surrounding the machine in a box of Beacons) you get even more speed out of them, resulting in machines that want more input and give more output per second than what I've shown here.
In other words, when using Productivity Modules and Speed Beacons, you get more work out of fewer machines than the basic machines can do. The trade-off, of course, is power. But by the time you are looking at beaconed/moduled designs, power should be the least concerning item on the agenda, simply plop down a ton more solar panels/accumulators, or a few more reactors and accompanying machinery.
Tell me about it... these days I have a dedicated train if I need to go anywhere in my base... no way in hell I'm going to run from my farms (on the South east side of my base) to my ore refineries (on the North west side of my map)...
Spidertrons without exoskeletons move very slowly. You can get where you want to build in a nuclear fueled train carrying supplies, build a blue print with your personal robots, and get back to your main supply area by the time your spidertron building crew arrives when your base is enormous. Making your base more compact with beacons and productivity modules cuts the size of your base down significantly and saves on UPS.
Right now I'm 7 days in and don't have the science needed to research the spidertron (pretty extensive mod pack I'm playing)... but aside from that I doubt Spidertron would move faster than my MK4 trains with nuclear fuel. It's also in the midway when it comes to megabases... I just set up my arc-blasting centers to be ready for the megabase stage. FYI That's what you get for doing a B/A-block playthrough with some heightened difficulty settings (see some other top threads if you're interested... )