Break the 'City Block' habit

[Chindraba]

I've figured out why WUBE moved cliff explosives off of Nauvis.

Dealing with the odd shapes forced by cliffs, if you build large enough, will break the City Block style of building and encourage finding ways to use odd shaped spaces for factories.

At first this seems like what some have called an 'artificial restriction', though I dislike the name, and the implied concept. Still, it is not an arbitrary thing. Rather it gets our habit of building in 'blocks' a bit less firmly entrenched. Once we get to Fulgora even cliff explosives won't be of much help and the building blocks just won't fit. We're going to need to develop some other style of building. Working around the cliffs on Nauvis will, with luck, help break the 'City Block' habit, Fulgora can be fun and interesting rather than restrictive and frustrating.

[knighttemplar1960]

What they gave with one hand they took away with the other. Removable landfill allows you to fill in extra lakes except for the tiny bits you need for water and build your city blocks there where there are no cliffs to begin with.

Elevated rails allow you to go up and over the cliffs and just ignore them until you get around to going to Vulcanus which you don't have to do until you have all Nauvis available science packs and space science packs. Then once you have cliff explosives you can just smooth out Nuavis and pave it over into city blocks that connect to your city blocks you build in the lakes.

[Warlord]

I did city blocks on my first expac playthrough, and had 90% of my end-game blocks built. Then I went to other planets. Once I came back, pretty much EVERY city block had to be redone, using the advanced machinery found on the other planets. So I will wait on doing most major city blocks until I get advanced machinery. And if I'm on an the planets for machines, then i'm also on Volcanus, and have access now to cliff explosives. So... yeah, by the time I want to go city blocks for real, I can deal with cliffs.

That is if I even turn on cliffs. I still plan to keep it turned off going forward anyway.

[Sinclair]

I've never really adopted the city block style. The most I've done is a single main bus with a network of roboports and power poles. Sure, I have some standardized blueprints, like the forge stack, but other than that, I've pretty much just slotted machines whereever there is space along the bus.

[Fletch]

It immensely expensive to create "Foundation", to pave over the oil ocean, which is what would be required to implement city block designs on Fulgora.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Foundation
You need ingredients from Gleba, Vulcanus, and Aquilo to create that Foundation -- not worth it at all to do a city block design on Fulgora. Similar with Vulcanus.

You can likely do city blocks on Gleba though -- would be interesting to see someone create a megabase there. My playthrough has each planet just doing minimal work to produce the planet-specific science, and shipping everything back to Nauvis for researching.

[Trubbles]

Nilaus did "sub-blocks" as he calls them on every planet. They are neat. I like the challenge of designing useful blocks that fit in a predefined space.

I'm still in the spaghetti phase of learning and striving towards organised blocks, and I don't understand for the life of me why it's such a contentious topic.

[Acrylique]

I think it's more likely they:

1) wanted to push you to launch rockets and build space platforms early, instead of building big on Nauvis before having been anywhere else, or
2) didn't want you to land on Vulcanus and blow everything up immediately, especially because you don't have to build big to go to space.

You can totally make a tileable base on nauvis later, once you come back. And I'm sure building a big base is more fun once you get science packs from other planets.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Fletch:

It immensely expensive to create "Foundation", to pave over the oil ocean, which is what would be required to implement city block designs on Fulgora.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Foundation
You need ingredients from Gleba, Vulcanus, and Aquilo to create that Foundation -- not worth it at all to do a city block design on Fulgora. Similar with Vulcanus.

You can likely do city blocks on Gleba though -- would be interesting to see someone create a megabase there. My playthrough has each planet just doing minimal work to produce the planet-specific science, and shipping everything back to Nauvis for researching.

For end game there is noting else to do with the materials and since you're probably all ready producing foundation why not? Its not that expensive to grow islands that are close together into one large amalgamated whole. You can produce quality items of everything except planet specific items there and launching rockets from Fulgora is insanely easy. One of my goals was to try to NOT recycle stuff into oblivion and use the surplus rocket parts produced there to ship that stuff to other planets.

Originally posted by Acrylique:

I think it's more likely they:

1) wanted to push you to launch rockets and build space platforms early, instead of building big on Nauvis before having been anywhere else, or
2) didn't want you to land on Vulcanus and blow everything up immediately, especially because you don't have to build big to go to space.

You can totally make a tileable base on nauvis later, once you come back. And I'm sure building a big base is more fun once you get science packs from other planets.

Except you pretty much can do that anyway. You can get all the way up to nuclear power without ever leaving Nauvis. Landfill lakes and build there leaving the water on the edges for defense and use elevated rails to go in and out. You have splotches of cities (blocks) all connected by rail. Once you get the machines that are only available on other planets you can just smooth out, fill in, upgrade, and connect. You could literally run the same map for thousands of hours if you want.

[Chindraba]

Originally posted by Trubbles:

I'm still in the spaghetti phase of learning and striving towards organised blocks

I practically live in that phase. I can, eventually, organise a factory unit into something comprehensible. Connecting them together, however, just ends up being railway pasta instead of belt pasta.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3367796435

Originally posted by Trubbles:

I don't understand for the life of me why it's such a contentious topic.

Simple, because it's Factorio. Seems every engineer-in-training has their own perfect system and anything else is blasphemy. More seriously, however, it's usually a question of scale and progress, for all the contentious topics - city blocks, roundabout junctions, optimised nuclear fuel cell usage, lasers vs flamers vs guns, speed vs efficiency vs productivity modules, belts vs trains vs bots, &c. &c.
I stand guilty as charged myself sometimes. The vast majority of the time these topics come up when someone beginning the game has questions. The thread rapidly evolves into a debate about this, that, and the other - all depending on scale and technologies which the OP doesn't even know exists yet, let alone have ready to deploy. To make the debates even more 'lively' each combatant has their own version of what's important to optimise, or waste. Those priorities determine which version is 'the best', and that version should be seen as the best by everyone.

Even when I'm not involved, I often quietly follow the battle. Little hints and ideas can often be found in the 'facts' as they fly like spells between mages. None of it helps the new player with a simple question, however.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Chindraba:

I stand guilty as charged myself sometimes. The vast majority of the time these topics come up when someone beginning the game has questions. The thread rapidly evolves into a debate about this, that, and the other - all depending on scale and technologies which the OP doesn't even know exists yet, let alone have ready to deploy. To make the debates even more 'lively' each combatant has their own version of what's important to optimise, or waste. Those priorities determine which version is 'the best', and that version should be seen as the best by everyone.

Even when I'm not involved, I often quietly follow the battle. Little hints and ideas can often be found in the 'facts' as they fly like spells between mages. None of it helps the new player with a simple question, however.

Fortunately those debates tend to start after the OP has gotten all the information they need from the question they asked and most of the time they don't even come back into the thread but the debate is still there and they can come back to it for further information later when they have more experience with the game. The Factorio forumites are at least better at that than many other forums I haunt.

[kremlin]

City blocks make more sense than running the entirety of the raw material for your whole factory along a series of parallel belts, at least.

[Acrylique]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Except you pretty much can do that anyway. You can get all the way up to nuclear power without ever leaving Nauvis. Landfill lakes and build there leaving the water on the edges for defense and use elevated rails to go in and out. You have splotches of cities (blocks) all connected by rail. Once you get the machines that are only available on other planets you can just smooth out, fill in, upgrade, and connect. You could literally run the same map for thousands of hours if you want.

Well, yes. You don't have to leave Nauvis at all, you can play the game exactly like you did before Space Age (for the most part, space science is obviously much cheaper). I'm aware of that, I'm just speculating on why the cliff explosives need metallurgic science ;)

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Acrylique:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Except you pretty much can do that anyway. You can get all the way up to nuclear power without ever leaving Nauvis. Landfill lakes and build there leaving the water on the edges for defense and use elevated rails to go in and out. You have splotches of cities (blocks) all connected by rail. Once you get the machines that are only available on other planets you can just smooth out, fill in, upgrade, and connect. You could literally run the same map for thousands of hours if you want.

Well, yes. You don't have to leave Nauvis at all, you can play the game exactly like you did before Space Age (for the most part, space science is obviously much cheaper). I'm aware of that, I'm just speculating on why the cliff explosives need metallurgic science ;)

To give you a choice (and also to force you off Nauvis to experience the extra content you paid for). Do you leave Nauvis early (just post blue science) to unlock cliff explosives immediately, or do you stay on Nauvis and use elevated rails to go over cliffs and develop so Demolishers are easier, or do you put off leaving Nauvis until late game when you have low level quality items, nuclear power and atom bombs and are capable of quickly wiping out every thing but large demolishers on Vulcanus or clearing huge swaths easily on Gelba?

If you stay past nuclear power and atom bombs you can use atom bombs to clear cliffs on Nauvis.

There are lots of options. Pick the one that suits you best or try them all.

[Fletch]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

For end game there is noting else to do with the materials and since you're probably all ready producing foundation why not? Its not that expensive to grow islands that are close together into one large amalgamated whole. You can produce quality items of everything except planet specific items there and launching rockets from Fulgora is insanely easy.

For sure in late-game, anything goes -- late game you have unlimited amounts of everything. I guess my point is that you can't _start_ Fulgora with a city-blocks mindset, because you will be extremely space limited, and the technology to pave over the world is locked way further out behind Aquilo.

Late game: you can do city-blocks on any planet because you'll have all the technology and resources to pave over anything (theoretically -- dunno if anyone would try city-blocks on Aquilo, heh).

One of my goals was to try to NOT recycle stuff into oblivion and use the surplus rocket parts produced there to ship that stuff to other planets.

Same for me.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Fletch:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

For end game there is noting else to do with the materials and since you're probably all ready producing foundation why not? Its not that expensive to grow islands that are close together into one large amalgamated whole. You can produce quality items of everything except planet specific items there and launching rockets from Fulgora is insanely easy.

For sure in late-game, anything goes -- late game you have unlimited amounts of everything. I guess my point is that you can't _start_ Fulgora with a city-blocks mindset, because you will be extremely space limited, and the technology to pave over the world is locked way further out behind Aquilo.

Late game: you can do city-blocks on any planet because you'll have all the technology and resources to pave over anything (theoretically -- dunno if anyone would try city-blocks on Aquilo, heh).

One of my goals was to try to NOT recycle stuff into oblivion and use the surplus rocket parts produced there to ship that stuff to other planets.

Same for me.

Drop a tank on Fulgora when you arrive. If you drive around enough you'll eventually find a cluster of larger islands close enough to connect with roboports and large power poles, Even if Fulgora was your very first new planet. Its possible to build a bot based city block style set up. It could even be considered "better" there. Belts take up too much of your limited space pre-foundations.

[Fletch]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Drop a tank on Fulgora when you arrive. If you drive around enough you'll eventually find a cluster of larger islands close enough to connect with roboports and large power poles, Even if Fulgora was your very first new planet. Its possible to build a bot based city block style set up. It could even be considered "better" there. Belts take up too much of your limited space pre-foundations.

When someone says "city-blocks" I think train-based and very large blocks. As @Trubbles said above, using roboports to define block sizes and bot-based (instead of train based) logistics is called "sub-blocks" (or mini-bloks). These are terms Nilaus uses in his videos, I dunno if he invented or coined the phrases.

So when I say "city-blocks" not a good idea on Fulgora: I'm talking about the huge blocks with train-based logistics -- these blocks are ~3 big electric power poles in length/height -- they are very large blocks -- Fulgora can only support a few of these blocks, per island, at best.

I'm definitely a champion of the sub-blocks/mini-blocks using roboport-sized blocks on Fulgora -- Fulgora has plenty of space for that design. You can probably have 30+ blocks of this smaller size per island.