Trains vs Drones?

[MysticDaedra]

I searched this exact phrase, and there are no threads about this, to my utter shock and surprise.

So, what are your thoughts? When and why would you use either trains or drones, or do you prefer one over the other?

[Man's Best Friend]

Well, trains are unlocked far earlier, can carry far more resources, work as the backbone of your electrical grid, and can be setup with far more complex delivery routes. Really the only up side drones have if you ask me is that you don't need to worry about actually building a path between stations, or even mapping out a route for them to follow.

[The Big Brzezinski]

I've made a total of one drone circuit. I wasn't really impressed. They used a lot of an expensive fuel to deliver not much cargo at a speed that doesn't really help anything. I think they were added primarily because of player requests for flying machines, not because there was a pressing need for them.

On the other hand, a well developed rail network can handle dozens of trains traveling all over the map carrying every kind of good. They're faster than ground vehicles and conveyors and run directly off the power grid. Their only tangles are that railways take some practice to setup well, they can take up a lot of room, and building them absolutely requires you to have steel and basic electronics production setup already. You won't have enough parts to build it properly otherwise.

[DocThugx]

I have had trains for almost two weeks but still have not made a route, Cant wait to use them, but belts are just so easy and dont need power, hard to give them up for me.

[QWARZ]

my choice is definitely in favor of conveyor belts, they are much more economical and easier to use, but despite this, I use the train for simple and quick travel between distant industries, the only thing they can still be used for, in my opinion, is the transportation of gases / liquids from far away and with a large elevation difference, each station and railway platform consumes a huge amount of energy even in idle mode (50MW, just imagine 200MW passive energy consumption for transporting 1 resource between 2 points, and if you have 5 resources and 5 points - 1250MW), in this connection, using them as the basis for transportation is energetically impractical, while drones generally make sense to use only as some kind of temporary hut, because in addition to energy they consume batteries, and to use drones, you will have to establish a huge output of batteries, and then entangle the entire map with ribbons with delivery of batteries, it is easier to start transportation on these tapes of delivered resources, if trains have energy consumption by railway stations and platforms only during loading / unloading, then they will become an attractive option, and drones, in my opinion, lack the ability to transport liquid / gas and get rid of the need for batteries

[DrNewcenstein]

Trains win for quantity, despite not being able to carry 48 stacks, but drones win for ease of setup. Set up a starting port and a delivery point and you're done. Obviously you need to set up a battery factory and battery delivery, and the more drone ports you have, the more batteries and refueling stops.

There always seems to be some ludicrous trade off.

[LazerRay]

Trains are good in places you can build a direct line to, drones are very useful in remote places with very difficult terrain to build through.

[Bernkastel]

What I found out is that you want to use trains in order to avoid large conveyor buses spanning through the whole world and trains do look cool. I havent reached tier 7-8 yet but from what I understand drones should be used for low quantity end products or radioactive stuff and they seem to be relatively easy to setup compared to both trains and belts.

Sure belts are the most efficient compared to both solutions in terms of power and the time you put into the planning but do you really want to create giant belts across long distances? I heard those kill performance because game will render items in belts. Efficiency in this matter also includes the time you spend creating these infrastructure, also your sanity and aesthetics

[Wesk Alber]

Are drones not exactly like Factorio? You don't build one or two, you build an army. The low throughput doesn't matter when you have an army of bots running. Bulkier and have a standby but you can still queue them up the moment one delivers and leaves, the next begins to deliver

[Man's Best Friend]

An army of drones isn't really feasible. Each drone port requires 100MW at all times (third highest standard energy draw in the game), and drones require a supply of batteries (a late game resource) to run. Not to mention that an individual drone will only go between two ports. Its home (which a port can only be one drone's home) and its destination (port can be the destination of any number of drones.)

[Wesk Alber]

At the point you can invest into Drones you can also go Nuclear so your power output should be able to support it. Not like Trains have 0 energy footprint either.

Plus its drone PORTS. Unless something changed since I last did my research, adding on a ton of drones to a single port means a nice circular transfer of materials, up to the max throughput of drone system.

[God of Snacks]

Trains are Drones are for giga end game megabases or cosmetic. Having belts everywhere really ♥♥♥♥♥ with your CPU and memory usage, you will also likely hit the object limit only using belts if you're planning to tap every node. You can do it any way you like, but if you want max efficiency and maintain FPS, you want trains to haul your ore to refineries. Drones aren't too helpful in my opinion, but they look nice. The most efficient thing I did with my drones was deliver fuel to truck stations.

There is also the current bug of belts losing resources. Mk 5 belts cannot transport resources long distances without "losing" things (I think this is data limitations).

[NukeAJS]

Trains take a lot of time, patience, planning, and just practice to get running right. But once you get the tracks/system setup correctly, you can basically run A TON of trains on a single circuit. In my current save, I have a single circuit, that's running just the west part of the map, with 32 trains on it and I could probably add another 20 more before I had significant slowdowns due to traffic. Careful planning and a lot of space is key.

Drones are good for shipping low-output items across the map that are far from your train networks. Think of them like tractors/trucks but more expensive. Their usefulness depends on how far you're shipping.

So -- close to your rail network: use trains. Medium distance from your rail network: use a tractor/truck to ship to your rail network. Long distance from your rail network: Use a drone to ship directly to your factory.

Drone's HUGE downside is they require sulfur in the form of batteries. This means you're going to have to get batteries to those ports somehow or another. If you're shipping batteries/sulfur via train or truck to get drones going -- just stop playing the game. Therefore, the only way to utilize drones effectively is low-output items, near sulfur, that are far from your rail network. Personally, I've only used them to deliver space elevator parts from one large factory (that had aluminum and sulfur) to my space elevator base (that didn't have those). Of course, I could have just rebuilt my elevator at the other base, but drones are kinda cool.

TL;DR -- you'll almost never find a good use for drones whereas trains are difficult to setup but extremely useful/quick once you have your network in place.

EDIT: Forgot to add that any low-output item like supercomputers/fused frames/turbo motors SHOULD be connected to your rail network anyways -- so that's also working against a good case to use drones.

[Wesk Alber]

Alright I consider this a challenge now. It's annoying to need to backtrack to the southern tip of the map for my main base anyway so this is a good excuse to make a new base powered by only Drones. Will it be perfect? Doubtful cuz trains do have definitely upsides. Will it prove a point? Yes, if I do well.

[SourHammer]

I stopped running belts when I learned how to program the tractors to retrieve and deliver ore from the mines. They can climb the steep ramps needed to get to some things. Then I learned how the trains work, and now I have several trains running. Some trains make multiple stops to pick up items to be built in a manufacturer on a different side of the map. 3 of my train lines bring enough oil/coal/water to bring my power grid up to the 13000 mw range. I have tried drones in a previous save, and I was not impressed. They suck up batteries, and only carry a little bit of cargo. Granted they travel much faster than trains, but only have 9 cargo slots. One of my trains is pulling 2 full cars of coal and 3 full cars of water, that is dedicated to running 10 coal generators, and the excess coal is used for making steel parts. In my opinion trains win hands down over drones.

[WildDogsGaming]

I use trains for things I need to be brought over in large quantities. However, late game items, I am not moving anywhere near the same amount to my "home base" storage unit. The reason I did this instead of trains is the space at my midway base. I didn't leave enough room at that base and the whole design of it to bring more items back from the midway base to the home base, and didn't really want to go through the trouble of figuring it out. Plus, the train at the midway base was already 8 carriages long, and although not a lot of up/down, I didn't feel the need to over complicate it.

I was already planning on building batteries, quite a large battery factory was planned, in fact. So I just built a few drone battery delivery at the late game item bases, to keep the drones powered, then built drones to bring all the items home.

LOL, now that I type it out, it sounds complicated, but really, it was very simple, and much less time than redesigning my midway base, and my home storage base.