[rkuykendall-com]

Trains don't need to be optimal, they just need to be viable. The fun makes them optimal. I think the quality, speed, and belt improvements did enough to return them to this balance (but I have not played, so I can't say myself).

[tux3]

For complex recipe graphs beyond vanilla train routing is also way more efficient. You get to reuse the same rail network, and sometimes not have to route dedicated belts for 6 low throuput ingredients from all over the map

I feel like a lot of the challenge in early Pyanodons is place-and-route and belt congestion. Unlocking trains feels amazing. They're definitely optimal for a lot of recipes in that mod I think

[kryogen1c]

> For complex recipe graphs beyond vanilla train routing is also way more efficient

This had never ocurred to me. Starting to develop a picture in my head that looks a lot like train-served dropshipping. Continuous vs demand signals like top-up and running out? The space savings seem extreme.

Guess I have to do a train play through :-/

[VorpalWay]

I haven't played the space expansion, but from old vanilla I only used trains for bringing ores to the main base. For rare low throughout recipies the flying bots (I forget the name for them) worked well, and towards the end of the game they got pretty fast as well.

As a longtime fan of trains in games like OpenTTD, it always felt like there wasn't enough of a focus on trains. Arguably this is something that Satisfactory did slightly better, there was more reason to use them there (that game certainly has other weaknesses though, and overall I prefer Factorio).

[Shish2k]

I'm am curious how you used satisfactory trains - I always found the satisfactory stations to be so overwhelmingly huge that they basically didn't fit anywhere (unless I build a layer of foundations a couple of hundred feet in the sky, which feels like cheating)

[VorpalWay]

I don't care about aesthetics in factory games (which is a reason I prefer Factorio to Satisfactory, there is way less focus on building pretty factories), that probably helps. I'll happily build a massive factory with very few pillars to hold it aloft, with a bunch of train stations on the side. And to be fair, many machines in Satisfactory are also massive.

I found that the way the resources are spread out in the games and the amount needed for various recipes and the amount of scale you needed to beat the game lead to more trains in Satisfactory. In particular it made it such that spread out smaller factories near resources that then transported intermediate products to big central factories made more sense. In addition, since resource nodes are infinite you don't need to keep moving the mines all the time like in Factorio, so building additional local infrastructure is more viable than in Factorio.

Because the world is hand crafted and more rugged it also means running belts all over the map is less viable, building one long difficult rail that can be used by a bunch of separate transports makes even more sense than in Factorio.

So in summary, I think it is a bunch of small things that all nudge me more towards trains in Satisfactory than in Factorio.

[reitzensteinm]

I agree they’ll be viable. They’re much harder to use but roughly equally good.

Also my late game experience is probably not representative of the phase just after victory where trains may have a slight edge - there could be a sweet spot there where the decoupling is worth it because you can horizontally scale through bottlenecks.

By the end I was using dedicated patches for each science so trains just get in the way.

[dbt00]

they are getting better in 2.1. They get bigger and faster with quality, but the biggest win is the ability to direct unload from the landing pad to bigger trains via the new landing pad unloading bay, within a reasonable range of the landing pad.