Playing for a while - I find the maintenance unit to be not very useful, primarily because you need so many of them. It becomes only a small advantage to walking nearby with personal robots. My thinking is the fun parts of this mod are around reliability needing to bring redundancy, disrupting ratios and bringing utility to buffering as well as automating parts that would probably not need to be automated normally.

To give some context, my current game is using AngelBobs and I have automated green science only after 25 hours of play. My base occupies about 20x20 chunks and has many machines to get to this point. Since I don't have bots, maintenance is still largely manual. At this size base, it is not practical, so many machines are disabled and have short lifetimes. This is not too bad, but the need to patrol to keep plates moving is not ideal.

I spent some time and feel that 8 is probably the right number of the radius - one can reasonably cover a group of machines this way if they are tightly packed, but not entire chunks of factories

I also tried reducing the cost of the units (steel is particularly expensive) and spamming them, but this required a lot of material deposit and not that fun in the end.

Thanks again for this mod!

The radius of the maintenance unit will be increased, that's for sure. I consider to raise it to radius = 3 as a first step.

For your needs (and I think, a full mod pack is the highest bench mark for any kind of mod balancing) a second, more powerfull maintenance station would be suited better. The only problem I see here is UPS, because rising the radius of maintenance units will make it more time consuming to scan areas around machines/maintenance units. Maybe I should return to the idea of adding some kind of early construction bots.

Speaking about this: Do you have experienced any kind of UPS problems with this mod so far?

That can work also. Though I would consider radius=4 as the setting, as it would work for two factories separated by a double belt:

AAA_BB_AAA
AAA_BB_AAA
AAA_BB_AAA

which is a common configuration for me. Up to you of course :)

Angels has an early construction robot (cheap but slow), which after ~28 hours I am close to unlocking. And I think there are enough mods that add something similar shouldn't need to do much about it. It is only a question of the time before these robots are available.

For performance, I notice no issues so far. I did expect some given the nature of this mod, but the time spent in the mod as measured by F5 is much lower than most other mods I have, including things like FARL, evogui and bottleneck. So far so good.

Short update on this topic: After some testing I also came to the conclusion that a radius of 4 for the maintenance unit would be the best option.

To counter the improved range, the energy demand of the unit is doubled. Maybe this is not enough, but this could be balanced out later on.