Wanted to try doing a Vanilla+ no-rail, no logistics bots, version of the Ribbon Maze.
Standard 32 tile passages, standard 21 chunk wide maze.
I was using the Deadlock Beltboxes for better throughput, but after the fact I realise they really weren't necessary.
I didn't go above yellow belt for the bus, and only used 12 belt + 4 pipe lanes, so still had half the chunk width left, it could easily have been done with red belt and a few double-lanes.
The nature of the ribbon maze means you are likely to be doing multiple smaller production setups and reinjecting at different points along the bus, rather than one huge production setup, so throughput it less of an issue.
Things I found:
- Long reach makes the maze massively less frustrating
- Nanobots makes the game more fun, as with every scenario
- Biters weren't really an issue. Initial manually filled turrets followed by belt-refilled turrets followed by laser turrets meant defence was simple, offense was slow but never impossible. Worms were the only difficult part, as they out-range laser turrets.
- Oil is really rare, and low output
- As a result, coal liquefaction is a really key process, whereas I don't think I've used it at all before. Coal is much more common than oil. I had one setup cracking everything down to petroleum gas for plastic and for artillery shells, and another making rocket fuel for the silo
- I felt that water was a real constraint, and kept searching for more sources, but by the end realised that it wasn't an issue. I only used three off-shore pumps for the whole base, and could have pumped the lot through from the very starting tile, it would just have been a bit more tedious to lay the pipes all that way
- The maze is ideally suited to solar power. There are lots of passages leading to resources you don't need, like stone, and I found I had to explore so far to find my second oil patch (1500+ tiles) that I could backfill with solar and power the completed base. Because resource patch sizes keep increasing the further you go, there is really no reason to ever use the patches you have gone past.
- I ended up with a starter base, up to blue science, built around the first oil patch, then completely abandonded it and build a whole new base around the second one, it was just too far to try to belt resources
- Robots are hugely useful for laying down the solar grids begin your base, but frustrating for anything in advanced areas, as they fly in a direct path, which can take them over areas you don't control and don't have easy access to, leading to them getting destroyed by biters. I ended up using logistics bots for two things, moving space science and refilling artillery turrets. The latter really wasn't necessary, just quality of life. The former I could have belted back, but the game was done by that point.
- Artillery turrets are hugely overpowered in this scenario. They can fire over the maze walls and reach several chunks to destroy bases and worms. When they land they also reveal the tile for a short period, allowing you to manually target clumps of biters. Mopping up the biters that are left is then easy.
- I think the 32 tile wide maze is a good size for a Vanilla-ish setup. I had to come up with some new layouts to minimise the width of production processes, which normally wouldn't be an issue.
- I started a 32 tile wide train based version, and had working setups for everything, I just find building train setups very boring in Factorio, so switched to the belt version
- For Vanilla, it feels like 64 tile wide paths would just make it much like a normal map, it wouldn't really impose much of a restriction.
- For large mods like a Bobs/Angels run I don't know if you could do a belt-only version in 32 tiles, at least not in a main-bus sense, you might need the wider maze