Are you using more bots?

[Entropy]

Since space age, are bots appealing more to you? Or with stacked belts and improved circuits and trains, your opinion is unchanged?

To me, i am using more bots. I played my first sa map by tech rush style so abused bots on Gleba, when i had Legendary bots, i abused them in Aquilo too.
Then when i started to produce many sciences on Vulcanus, i used bots in some extent. My Nauvis is almost full bots. My malls are full bot style ( if u ask me, when logistics are researched, i see no reason for belt mall).

As far as i know, in some fff , bot performance is improved but i dunno to what extent. My current problem with quality roboports are; charging spots do not increase like personal stuff.

[Nonotorious]

I would never use a belt mall. Depends what it is and where it is, i like to barrel lube instead of having to run pipes around, same with other things. Yknow what i haven't done is use turbo belts yet.

[Hurkyl]

I'm still playing from time to time with an 'automall' where one assembler is responsible for a bunch of different items. One of the features is that it can build its own intermediates, so it just needs basic materials brought in, which is something that can reasonably done with belts without much trouble.

[kremlin]

The charging spots don't increase in quantity but they do charge faster so it's like having a couple extra spots.
I think Space Age's research tree makes it pretty clear that they intend for you to have the robot logistics with you when you drop down to the other planets. I try to avoid the robot logistics until pretty late game, which worked fine in Space Age - I started using installed roboports when it came time to start refactoring the bases on the other planets before heading toward Aquilo.
Even with 5x energy usage they were really helpful with bootstrapping Aquilo, because you just don't know how you'll need to lay things out to make belts work until you've laid things out and made it work. It takes a ton of fuel to get those heating towers hot enough to start running turbines and you need the ice melting before those run, then you very quickly have so much ice being produced you have to do something with it. Before I was making enough fuel locally to feed the heating towers the solution processing was spitting out way too much ice to belt it anywhere so having a stack of ice filtered storage chests that overflowed into recyclers and got fed by active provider chests seemed like the only way to actually get moving. Once it gets going you can figure out how to manage it with belts and sidestep the massive energy usage penalty of the robots.

Late game, there's no better solution. By the time I'm creating the highest level stuff in the mall, that part of the mall is fully bot based. It's a breath of fresh air replacing the wacky squiggles of the intermediates that feed into each other (the belt and inserter chains) with everything being output into passive provider chests and being requested by the next step up.

[argrond]

A combination of both.
Bots for something which does not need much precision/speed.
Belts+inserters for more definite stuff.
Personally I do not like bots for many reasons, in particular their unreliability and slowness, especially if dealing with spoilage feature. There are processes they can be useful at, but that mostly occurs from the lack of proper planning. If I can do things properly and fairly smoothly without them - I'm not using them, at all.

[Evilsod]

If I'm running a production line, I'll use belts.

I had built malls before that were nicely organised and focused on producing a crap ton of iron gears at the start, and belting all other resources in as they were needed, while trying to give it some semblance of organisation.
But it's just not worth the effort vs a bot mall, especially on Vulcanus/post-Foundry where gears are made directly.
Sure, when I started placing it down, I ended up with a few thousand bots waiting for charging points all over the place, but once everything got produced, all it's doing now is keeping it topped off.
Plus it makes logistics for bringing in uncommon/rare components so much easier. I imagine it'll only get more useful when I get recyclers, epic and legendary.

[Serendipitous]

Originally posted by argrond:

A combination of both.
Bots for something which does not need much precision/speed.
Belts+inserters for more definite stuff.
Personally I do not like bots for many reasons, in particular their unreliability and slowness, especially if dealing with spoilage feature. There are processes they can be useful at, but that mostly occurs from the lack of proper planning. If I can do things properly and fairly smoothly without them - I'm not using them, at all.

My fellow belt guy :)

I use bots for when i need to deliver some small amount of stuff somewhere not exactly convenient, where running a belt or train would be overkill. Example is crafting uranium fuel cell - i usually keep my reactor arrays quite away from the main hub, mostly because i like to have room to expand them. So delivering like a 100 iron and both uraniums to a single assembler is pretty convenient

[UhohhotdogYT]

I was always heavy on bots before the expansion. Bots are fun to watch fly around.

[End of history]

I love my belt mall on Nauvis. It's mostly because after having meticulously calculated all of the sciences and ratios and what have you and belted everything on a big main bus it felt wonderful to just go all spaghetti on the mall, just pull things off the bus and spaghetti the ingredients where they needed to go. My Fulgora mall is fully botted though (but the scarp handling is belted).

For Gleba, I want to belt everything. I know many find success with the bots but belting and spoilage is a puzzle that i want to solve.

[knighttemplar1960]

Depends on the planet. Belts on Fulgora take up too much space when you only have islands that you can build on. Underground belts and pipe to ground can't connect through lava on Vulcanus.

The tools available haven't changed. Robots for short distance high volume transport or terrain you can't belt or train through. Belts for medium distances, trains for high volume long distance transport. Mix and match what's best.

[Entropy]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Depends on the planet. Belts on Fulgora take up too much space when you only have islands that you can build on. Underground belts and pipe to ground can't connect through lava on Vulcanus.

The tools available haven't changed. Robots for short distance high volume transport or terrain you can't belt or train through. Belts for medium distances, trains for high volume long distance transport. Mix and match what's best.

Meh, a wagon 6*2 = 2880 items in turbo belts for same space. Belts are easier to setup so i will use belts unless trains are a must. So for me, mostly bots->belts -> maybe trains(Fulgora)

[Entropy]

I also would to like to see a 100k spm(production) bot base. Wonder the performance

[Shaman]

i rarely used bots. mainly just for personal roboports and some odd jobs. With space age you kinda need them for loading rockets and i also use them for suplying my quality grining blocks. so i went from barely any to over 2k bots in my base :D But still core of the base is main buss

[Air Bear]

my gleba base is a massive bot swarm. I have 2 or 3 areas with some belt networks (like 4-8 machines doing the same thing connected via belts), and using belts for overflow spoilage fixed my jamming issues. All of the other planets have bots too, but 100-300 in use vs Gleba has 1300+ constantly swarming about. The cloud of bots moving around is vaguely disturbing lol.

My aquilla base is using bots with no belts but they have massive penalties so I need to tear it down and rebuild it to be a belt base but part of me just doesnt want to put in the effort. I keep firing up the game, standing around for 10 minutes while watching something on the other monitor, then realizing I dont want to do the re-organization, and shutting it down.

[Entropy]

Originally posted by Shaman:

i rarely used bots. mainly just for personal roboports and some odd jobs. With space age you kinda need them for loading rockets and i also use them for suplying my quality grining blocks. so i went from barely any to over 2k bots in my base :D But still core of the base is main buss

High quality bots work wonders there if they are available.

[Spears]

Originally posted by kremlin:

The charging spots don't increase in quantity but they do charge faster so it's like having a couple extra spots.
I think Space Age's research tree makes it pretty clear that they intend for you to have the robot logistics with you when you drop down to the other planets. I try to avoid the robot logistics until pretty late game, which worked fine in Space Age - I started using installed roboports when it came time to start refactoring the bases on the other planets before heading toward Aquilo.
Even with 5x energy usage they were really helpful with bootstrapping Aquilo, because you just don't know how you'll need to lay things out to make belts work until you've laid things out and made it work. It takes a ton of fuel to get those heating towers hot enough to start running turbines and you need the ice melting before those run, then you very quickly have so much ice being produced you have to do something with it. Before I was making enough fuel locally to feed the heating towers the solution processing was spitting out way too much ice to belt it anywhere so having a stack of ice filtered storage chests that overflowed into recyclers and got fed by active provider chests seemed like the only way to actually get moving. Once it gets going you can figure out how to manage it with belts and sidestep the massive energy usage penalty of the robots.

Late game, there's no better solution. By the time I'm creating the highest level stuff in the mall, that part of the mall is fully bot based. It's a breath of fresh air replacing the wacky squiggles of the intermediates that feed into each other (the belt and inserter chains) with everything being output into passive provider chests and being requested by the next step up.

charging spots do increase in quantity depending on the quality level of a personal roboport