[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.