Love the game, tell all the ppl making the game THANKS!
I did a search for a map that had a mostly flat ring around the map that I could build railways to use trains to move large amounts of ‘cargo’ to supply districts. I found one and built it. Science was in the southeast, manufacturing in the northeast, and a sprawling city over a hill in the southwest.
An old suggestion supported by a new player. I found that I ran into a bottleneck with this map build. Consumer goods made in the NE (manufacturing) and shipped to the SW (city) arrived too late. Each time a building created a ‘demand’, an ‘item’ was shipped by a factory. The ‘item’ was specific to the building that created the demand. Even with multiple trains to ensure timely movement, the time delay resulted in the housing units flip-flopping between levels. Distribution centers would be a great solution (I want this), however the ability of housing/factory units to have ‘storage’ would be a backstop to this problem.
My suggestion. Underground power distribution. When I get to the cities I end up with problems getting power to the substations without creating lots of single squares. I can use them for food generation, but I would suggest a re-searchable upgrade to underground power distribution. I think this would be nice if they don’t ‘clip’ other buildings between them.
Support for an old suggestion and my suggestion.
Again - please pass my thanks to the entire dev team.
In Satisfactory you have a large map with resources spread across the map. It is too expensive to ship the raw materials to a all-in-one factory complex, so you process the raw materials to make goods and ship them to another factory that combines several goods. With the lack of distribution centers or housing units storing items means that the city must be a massive complex. Besides, we have these really nice trains - I want to use them. My goal is to make stars around each train station, using the highways to rapidly feed the station or the star (depending on which way goods are flowing). This way I get to use the entire map, which is a challenge itself.
One of the things I love about InfraSpace is the use of roads and highways (multi lanes and oneway’s) and having to intertwine them around them each other and the terrain without creating traffic jams. I want to be able to add trains to the mix. I’m looking forward to where and how the dev’s take the game.
I’ve had great success with trains, having just reached a level 6 city on hard difficulty for the first time while using them. However, there are only a couple of resources in the game that really benefit from the long-distance transit option offered by trains, and those are Aluminum, Motors, Radiation Cores, and Iridium Alloys. Nothing else really benefits from trains (in fact, using trains hurts more than it helps), which is a shame.
Aluminum is a relatively rare resource, and usually found in inconvenient locations. I find it’s easier to just ship it in with trains since it’s only used by final product factories which will be placed near to your city and thus can all be clustered near a train station quite easily without generating much thru traffic. For Motors, the reason you want them on a separate production grid is due to the fact that they share the Copper/Iron inputs of Electronics. Electronics->Microchips->Neural Processors are going to represent a huge portion of your overall economy, and you don’t want Motor production traffic clogging the roads feeding them. The only other resources needed for these production cycles are Sand and Carbon, which can be be built literally right next door to the building that needs them and generate no traffic beyond their own street. You can literally have Electronics, Microchip, Neural Processor, Sand Mines, and Carbon Processors all built in a big clump and the only incoming traffic is the Iron and Copper.
This leads to a setup where you have a dedicated Motor production area with Iron+Copper feeding Steel Mills and Motor Factories, a dedicated Aluminum mining area, and then you hook these up with trains to other areas that produce Electronics->Microchips->Neural Processors that feed into the final production cycle of whatever product you’re making, and those products then ship directly into the city with no need for trains. Moreover, building like this gives a sizeable efficiency bonus since you can place every step of the production cycle.