Thoughts on conveyor belt costs.

Question

Does it seem to others that conveyor belts are under-costed?  It costs just a plate to go either 4m or 40m.  I feel that this cost should be proportional to distance. Maybe 2 to 4 plates per 8m?

Why? Running a dozens of kilometers of conveyor belts should be impractical, IMO (of course). This would encourage players into trucks and trains in the mid and late game instead of irrationally long conveyors.

I recognize that there's still infinite resources in the world, but I think this would add a challenge to the game.

(Note: I'm only on mk2 conveyors, I don't know if the faster ones get more cost prohibitive - but I suspect the cost / distance doesn't ramp up very fast.)

Comments

I saw this and thought it was going to be about how it's actually harder to produce the plates needed for Mk. 2 belts than it is for the Mk. 3 belts, which I find to be pretty silly. It takes a total of 12 iron bars to make a single reinforced iron plate, whereas it takes 3 steel bars to make a single steel beam.

If you convert that out into purely raw costs, it's 12 iron ore to make a reinforced iron plate (4 plates (8 ore/bars) and 24 screws, (which takes 4 iron rods, which themselves are 4 iron ore/bars)) vs 4.5 iron ore and 4.5 coal to make a single steel beam (3 iron ore and 3 coal makes 2 steel bars. Need 3 steel bars per steel beam). However if you have the alternate steel bar recipe, like I do, you can make a steel beam with 3 coal and 1.5 iron ore (3 iron bars (3 ore) + 6 coal = 6 steel bars).

There is an alternate screw recipe that uses 2 iron bars to make 12 screws, but that still works out to 4 iron ore per 24 screws so it doesn't change the materials needed, just lowers the processing time.

On top of being more resource intensive, it's a lot more labor intensive to make the plates. Assuming you have no alternate recipes, you have to convert iron ore to ingots at a rate of 1:1, then in at minimum 2 constructors, convert those ingots into iron plates at a rate of 2:1, 2 ingots per plate, and also iron rods at a rate of 1:1 THEN you have to convert the rods into screws in yet another constructor, and then finally feed all your plates and screws into an assembler to make the reinforced iron plates.  Steel beams on the other hand are simply run the ore and coal through a smelter to make steel, feed it directly into a constructor to make steel beams, done. You can cut out the middle constructor on the screw line if you have the alternate screw recipe, feeding iron ingots directly into the constructor to make the screws at a rate of 2 ingots per 12 screws (same resource cost as normal), but it still ends up taking a lot more resources and a lot more time than making the steel beams.

I'm actually gonna make a dedicated post about this.

Answer 1

When you run a conveyor but before you click it, it shows the cost as your inventory/cost. I think its about 24 plates to go 6 tiles which I think is the limit of the range to connect.

Comments

I see that Inventory/cost, but it's often just 1 for me. Maybe there's a computation problem?

I'll run some tests later to see if the cost is computed correctly.

4 plates/tile certainly makes much more sense!

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Even though it only shows a '1' cost, the actual cost will still be about the 4 plates/tile.  I believe this is more of a ui bug since it still costs more despite what it shows.