First Train-Megabase concept. Would this work or is it inefficient? (read first comment)
Posted Mar 12, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC
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I'm in the progress of finally planning and building my first ever megabase.
The goal for now is just 1000 SPM. I also want to make it train based.
I was watching a video earlier about train grids and the dude said, that it's really inefficient to use both direction on one lane and that you should make all lanes one directional.
So a grid based design would look like the one in the picture.
I'll prob. not need as many grids obviously, i just made this as example to ask here if this even makes sence in terms of efficiency. The blue and green circles are examples of how the trains would prob. move through the grid.
I will probably build it so that all the smelting is done in the north and the product complexity gets higher, the more south you go, resulting in hopefully lower transport ways.
Any advice?
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I made a 2k megabase with a rail grid. Each intersection was a roundabout. The grid was sized so that a radar in each roundabout exactly covered the whole area. There were 2 rails each going in opposite directions, I don't know what you're trying to do with everything going in the same direction.
It had congestion problems until I moved all the smelting way off to one side of the base. Once the ore trains didn't intersect with the other resources it ran smoothly.
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Well, ye i might aswell just stick to the standart way.
I have never built a megabase and saw that video about how you get way more out of your trains by using only one direction. Probably bullshit ^^
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Probably referring to two way on the same line.
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Probably referring to making trains go only one direction on each track. You can still have multiple tracks side by side along the lines of your grid, one going in each direction.
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No, watch the video i posted under another comment.
He explains, that he used 2 lanes one, 2 lanes the other direction and it was really inefficient in comparison of what he did after, which was having everything going in one direction, all 4 lanes.
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I had a 750 spm base in .16 and had similar findings. Moving all the raw ore and crude oil trains to their own highways was absolutely required. At one point I notice my smelters were only 50% busy so I doubled my ore trains. Went from 300 spm to around 100 spm...
Ore and Oil needs its own highways in these setups.
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As long as you do what you can to keep traffic out of the grid in the first place, it's not really necessary to do this. Don't move ore inside of your core base ever, and keep all of the lower density things to a minimum (stone, coal). Do that and you would have zero problem hitting 1k SPM with 4 way intersections inside the grid.
Compress everything you can on the perimeter (or better yet on site) and you can reduce traffic by quite a lot. Things like steel, gears, green circuits, engines, are all substantially more efficient to transport than plates, and in .17 you actually need very few plates outside of low density structures.
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I'm in the process of planning a grid magabase too. My solution is to make a stacker inside each cell so nothing gets backed up when a train is unloading. I still have far to go before I know if I'm successful.
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Don’t listen to the dude you are referring to. If he is using 4 rails going one direction in a grid base, there’s something very wrong with his trains. There’s never ever a load for more than one train lane per direction.
I built a train grid 5k spm with 2 lane train network, 1 in each direction. Works smoothly. The most loaded intersection has 36 trains crossing it every minute. You can find it in my posts, together with the save file.
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Even though I have never attempted this, my intuition tells me that the throughput in all these intersections will be really low.
What I have done for large bases (500+ spm) is to build it in a more linear fashion. Having just 1-3 main lines, which are connected. Starting somewhere, you have ore processing. Most of the trains from here go from outposts => smelters. Then trains from smelters => circuits, and other plate needing things => this output then goes to actual production.
This connects all the things in a more linear fashion, but what is dependent on each other, is still relatively close. As such, there is a great throughput, as considerably fewer intersections than a grid is needed, traffic is spread out more evenly, and it makes it easier to expand and/or adjust size of individual sub-factories.
But, I have seen quite a lot of videos featuring a city-block layout? So I figure it can be made to work, and provided the blocks are big enough, and that the cells are planned out such that traffic is spread as evenly as possible, it might work just fine, and look really cool while doing it!
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https://i.imgur.com/1RL8PeU.jpg
Here is an example of how the intersections would look like kinda. The 2 crossings of the 2 top & bottom lines should be in the middle of the square.
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Looking at this, I start to think that it may actually just work fine, but I would make sure that when trains enter the lines, that they are up to speed, or, at least, are in configurations that makes them accelerate quickly. But dude, give it a shot! I would really like to see if it can work out in a good manner. It would look really cool!
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Have you thought about making the horizontal grids like the vertical grids, so that each line is either left or right instead of alternating? Alternating is definitely cool, but it also makes sure that trains moving horizontally travel twice as much track and intersections as they would otherwise, and diagonal trains don't get any benefit.
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Your overall throughout is limited by the throughput of your business intersection. Since there's no way to rout around the busy ones to longer paths... You're basically screwed.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBukkQ3M0lg
Here is another example of a base, using only one directional lanes.
2.5k science with 1 single exit lane
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He's also set up his base linearly, so there are basically no intersections at all. The trains follow each other along the track like a conveyor belt. There's not really any comparison between that and a grid-based layout.
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true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkvB86wwA6k
He did use it tho, thats where i got the idea from
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My previous base was built around a similar layout, except that each EW line went in a single direction (i.e., E-only row, W-only row, E-only row, etc.) and similarly for the NS lines. It worked just fine (it was a large base for me, but not what you'd call a megabase) and I never had problems with deadlocks. It was a lot of fun watching the trains snake around the place.
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Train city-grid designs are usually extremely inefficient because the many of the components are far too small to justify the full logistical infrastructure of the full cell.
Figure out how many acid factories you need, and figure out how much logistical infrastructure (train load, unload, stacker, etc) that you need and look at the ratio.
As a rough rule of thumb, about half of the factory is smelting, with about 1/3 being iron and steel smelters. That does not play well with a city-grid design because your grids are way too big for the other things.
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I have long term plans for a train based megabase, but it uses a 4 lane (2 each way) street grid system.
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There's actually some interesting research on building deadlock free multinode networks under the category of NOC routing algorithms. Not sure how it would work with the train pathing though.
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I have built a couple decent size bases using almost this exact design. I really love using a one way grid design. I find that it’s super easy to expand and to blueprint and stamp down new cells. My design incorporates 3x3 grids that all connect into a highway. I think my design would be superior to yours because in your design all trains could try to use the same fastest route through the middle and grid lock. If you look through my post history I have a post about city skylines/factorio with more details about my design. Let me know if you have any questions. Good luck!
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I use a hybrid that is these types of unidirectional blocks like you have, but an outer railway that goes around the whole thing so getting from one side to the other is faster on the outside.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH3hCy4l4sY
has a kinda similar system.
It works but it scales poorly, the systeml has so many intersections they get blocked easily
It block easily and make train lag because of so many possible path
Well there is a big difference, since i highly reduce the parts and blocking by only using one direction throughout the whole base.
The intersections would look something like this. ( slightly different scale)
https://i.imgur.com/1RL8PeU.jpg
There would be two crossings in the middle of the square, which connects the each the top 2 and bottom 2 lanes.
And then another one, right before the intersection that connects both the top 2 with the bottom two.I have this idea from this video btw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkvB86wwA6k
He explains it the way, that with having only 1 direction, the pathfinding works much better and there are no traffic jams.
I did exactly this (right turn only grid megabase, belt based inside each grid) in .15 or .16 and it got me up to 2.4k spm (one blue belt of each flask).
When running full steam, I was down to around 30 ups.
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well the big difference is, that he uses both direction on every lane.
In my version (prob. 4 lanes each) all the lanes only serve one direction, which causes a lot less traffic jams.
But at the cost of longer routes and less possible routes, that doesn't mean it's not better but the inefficiency doesn't completely go away.
Yes, thats true. Altho, only vertical or horizontal transport ways get longer.
If the way is diagonal, it can still take an optimale rute.
The question is, which way is more efficient, crossing lanes and causing traffic jams on crowded intersections or have some trains use a longer lane in benefit of way less traffic jams.
Not trying to discourage you, just thinking of variables you may have not. I'm actually quite curious about this but don't have the time/desire to properly test it.
Unless you plan to dictate pathing by use of circuits, keep in mind a train will recalc it's route to much longer ones when the shortest available is blocked, even if it will take considerably longer it doesn't take that into account in it's pathing algorithm.
I'm also not sure you are actually creating less traffic jams as halving the potential pathing means(without really thinking it through thoroughly) the same amount of traffic will jam up in half the time.