Seablock Beacon Rebalance

by minno

Beacon rebalance mod that emulates the balance of endgame beacon spam with SE-style mechanics to encourage more varied designs.

Tweaks
15 days ago
1.1
26
Manufacturing
Owner:
minno
Source:
N/A
Homepage:
N/A
License:
MIT
Created:
24 days ago
Latest Version:
0.0.3 (15 days ago)
Factorio version:
1.1
Downloaded by:
26 users

Based on wretlaw120's Beacon Rebalance, but with the goal of balancing endgame costs and capabilities against Bob's modules in Seablock. One high-powered beacon can replace an entire row of normal beacons, but with construction cost and power consumption to match.

These beacons are balanced for cost and effectiveness against alternating rows of assembling machines and Bob's beacons 1/2/3. Endgame builds use the equivalent of vanilla 8-8 beacon setups with Mk3 beacons to get extreme speed bonuses. Other SE-style beacon overhaul mods, like the one this is based on, don't allow you to get anywhere near that high, making them uncompetitive for seablock even though they make builds so much nicer to look at and design.

Each beacon's effectiveness (# of module slots times distribution efficiency) and cost (# of ordinary beacons required for construction and # of module slots) are set to match the effectiveness/cost of alternating rows of beacons and 3x3 assemblers. Standard beacons use an 8-8 layout of alternating rows to hit each machine with 8 beacons, while using equal numbers of beacons and assemblers aside from at the edges of an array. Beacon 2s can do the same with 2 rows and a wider area of effect, hitting each machine with 24 beacons and using twice as many beacons as assemblers. Beacon 3s in 3 rows hit each machine with 48 beacons and use 3x as many beacons as assemblers.

The number of machines that each beacon can hit is key to balancing the cost. I packed as many assemblers as I could in rows around these beacons while leaving room for belts and got 8 around Bob's beacon 1, 16 around a beacon 2, and 32 around a beacon 3. You can get higher than that if you use logistics bots or electronic assembling machines and lower if you use machines that are larger than 3x3, but I think that's a reasonable baseline to use.

High-Powered Beacon 1:
- Beacons:machines goes from 1:1 to 1:8, so 8x the cost and power.
- Costs 16 modules and wants the effect of 8, so 50% distribution efficiency.
High-Powered Beacon 2:
- Beacons:machines goes from 2:1 to 1:16, so 32x the cost and power.
- Costs 64 modules and wants the effect of 24, so 37.5% distribution efficiency.
High-Powered Beacon 3:
- Beacons:machines goes from 3:1 to 1:32, so 96x the cost and power.
- Costs 192 modules and wants the effect of 48, so 25% distribution efficiency.

Due to the absurdly high costs of these modified beacons, I'm leaving the regular Bob's beacons available as well at normal costs and without machine overloading. Machines will only overload if they have multiple beacons affecting them and at least one is high-powered.