Tutorial:Transport use cases
< Tutorial:Transport use cases
Good question. Because 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 useable up to long distances of 500 tiles (to compare: a radar station watches up to 100 tiles), but make sense only, if you connect small resource-fields, because 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. With using two belts, the afford of placing the belts rises.
- train should be used to get items from big and distant resource fields. Nothing can compare with it, especially, when thinking about speed. The planing is difficult and the building itself is currently (v0.8.x) really hard (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 buildings, in most cases this is the main factory area, but you can make also more logistic networks. With some updates the logistic bots can handle enormous amounts of items. With v0.8.x they are not longer good useable for long distances, because the bots are not good in long distances, because they need to reload and it is very expensive to create this number of roboports.
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 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| thruput | constant, slow, very exactly calculateable, limited, high afford in optimizing | extreme high, fast, not good calculateable but constant, nearly unlimited if enough space, optimizing not so needed better rebuild | extreme high in small areas, not calculateable/chaotic, unlimited if enough bots, not optimizeable |
| to be continued... |
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.