Tutorial:Transport use cases

< Tutorial:Transport use cases

Note: This article is a bit outdated, due to some changes in the game, but nevertheless the most aspects are still valid.

It depends. For example on the amount of resources you have, or how far away they are.

But in general this is true:

• Belts are practicel up to distances of 500 tiles (to compare: a radar station watches up to 200 tiles (100 tiles "radius")). It makes only sense if you connect small resource-fields to the factory area as the capacity of a belt is limited to about 700 items per minute in the best case, when using basic belts. With fast or express belt, this is higher (up to 1750) but the price is gigantic. Using multiple parallel belts is costly.
• Trains should be used to get items from big and distant resource fields. Nothing can compare with it, especially, when thinking about speed. The planning is difficult and the building itself is currently tedious. (tip: use the train to build the rails, this is much faster, you can use it also to build the power poles).
• Logistic robots should be used in a limited area with dense building placement In most cases this is the main factory area. With some updates the logistic bots can handle enormous amounts of items.

Keep always in mind, that a basic belt cannot transport much more than 700 item/minute and an express belt (the fastest) not more than 1750 (see above). Now compare that with a locomotive: a wagon can deliver 960 items (ores) per wagon! So when speaking from throughput, you need to swap to train. This picture changes when you developed logistic bots. They can't be beaten for relatively small areas, and they have some kind of intelligence, currently they try to deliver all requests as equally as possible.

Or in other words: the afford, to squeeze out the last 20% of belt-performance rises depending on distance and total amount and at some point the train will win. But in your central factory area the bots will never be beaten. On the other hand: in small areas, and for simple throughput of one type of item (furnace iron ore to iron-plates for example) we can place some belts in parallel, which is cheap and efficient (uses no energy) and because of parallel belts or using express belts (only short sections) we reach also enormous throughput.

Transport medium	Belts	Trains	Logistic Bots
Throughput	constant, slow, very exactly calculateable, limited	extremely high, fast, not easily calculateable but constant, nearly unlimited if enough space, optimizing not so needed better rebuild	high in small areas, not calculateable/chaotic, unlimited if enough bots, cannot be optimized.
Space required	Small for simple products, large for complicated product chains	Large for train stations and bends	Small for complex products
Initial costs	Very small as long as conveyor belts are not very long. Larger when making express transport belts	Considerable amount of material is needed for initial locomotive. Small costs for making rails	Roboports and especially bots require a lot of resources to make.
Maintenance costs	None	Some fuel needed	Considerable amount of electricity needed
Pollution	None	Some	None
Best used for:	High throughput, small to medium distance. Examples include raw materials and simple products.	High throughput, long distance. Examples include transporting ores or plates from resource field to main factory area.	Low to medium throughput, small distance. Best used in main factory area for complex products like modules and advanced circuits. Also best used for products needed for smaller quantities like placeable structures and ammunition.

The advantages of belts are:

• coming to transport-performance, belts deliver very constantly
• easy calculations possible (e. g. Is belt able to transport output of all mines)
• basic belts are cheap compared to tracks and it is built faster
• you see how much items are on the belt
• the belt works like a small storage

Disadvantages:

• already said: limited transport capacity, cause limited throughput.
• slow. This is a problem with verily long belts because it takes a while to fill the belt. The items on the belt cannot be used. A belt with length of 100 holds 1200 items for 56 seconds. With trains this is much lower (10 seconds).
• Belts work normally fine up to 50% of maximum capacity. Belts are not thought for using with full capacity. As described in belt physics above, the tighter you compress the items, the more inefficient it can become.

See also

• Discussion about using conveyor belts vs. trains. There are some interesting tips in this thread.