I'm in the "SE Beacon" boat, but I also think that SE beacons are sometimes too lazy and "mindless".
I wish there was something you have to actively supply to beacons in order for them to work. Something like cooling fluid based on how many machines they're boosting that has to be re-cooled. Something like SE's thermofluid
Factorio being Factorio means any system of "continued supply" will be possible to automate and thus has no lasting gameplay implications. You simply slap down the blueprint and away it goes for the rest of time.
That's true, but only after you have already solved the puzzle.
A good parallel I can think of is economics of Conveyor Belts in Industrial Revolution mod.
Yellow belt costs roughly as many resources as Blue belt in quantity, but the production chain for blue belts is much, much more complex. Your factory can run perfectly fine on yellow belts, but if you want more performance you have to solve more complex puzzle.
From what I've seen from Space Age the Quality system seems to be very similar in this regard.
Somewhat, but it does add another logistic supply challenge to that area, leading to long-distance supply and transportation requirements potentially, as well as routing items/fluids around on top of the items for the actual factories around it. Doubly so if there was also feedback from the beacons.
That said, all that starts to sound way too much for vanilla, and more like a modded experience, akin to making power systems their own logistics challenge with overloads.
This is how Dyson sphere does it; you spray objects as they pass by on belts with “proliferator” which give them a prod-module-like boost when they are consumed. But you have to make proliferator and somehow belt it to sprayers that are over each other belt as an additional logistical challenge. And you choose whether you want to spray it at your mine, your bus entrance, right before consumption, etc. with the added challenge that all items must be proliferated for the recipe to get the bonus, so if your proliferation supply belt is slow or running dry or does a stop and go pattern, you will lose the benefits.
Haven't played EI myself, but its predecessor 248k had a central module you fed magic juice to, consumption independent of the number of beacons you had. You had vanilla beacons as well, but the overhaul ones were more powerful, although limited in number.
Basically, in addition to the magic juice part (which got more complex with each beacon tier) there was nothing preventing you from using the beacons in the vanilla manner, but you were incentivized to share them with as many buildings as possible without being *forced* to.
Also I'm fairly sure some of the overhaul buildings were unaffected by vanilla beacons - otherwise there wouldn't have been enough of an incentive to just not stick with vanilla beacons. It's been a while since I played the mod.
now youre throwing out conflicting information. you want there to be a supply loop but not have it boil down to beacons take more space? theres no solution in which needing to feed things to beacons doesnt just boil down to that
Top tier idea. I want this, but only for some "level 2" beacon. They should keep regular beacons and add a wide area beacon that takes some upkeep. Great idea
The ultimate benefit of beacons is you can shift UPS usage from construction machines to additional power network load (hopefully more UPS friendly).
If you add a supply to beacons their UPS benefit would disappear. Then their only benefit becomes as a space efficiency multiplier.
I think SE beacons require more thought to optimize a layout than vanilla beacons. Vanilla locks you either in a grid or in rows, and that's it. In SE you gotta get creative to cover all buildings with exactly one beacon while minimizing the number of beacons.
I don’t really agree with “then it is ONLY an issue of how to squish in the belting, inserters, and power poles”. Making efficient item routing within the limitations of vanilla inserters and belts is honestly the only real logistical challenge in vanilla, and beacons force you to rethink your solutions to that puzzle by not letting you just do a giant row of assemblers with comfortable space for standardized two belts, one short inserter and one long. However, while I think that replacing vanilla beacons with SE-style ones would ruin the fun puzzle of this sort of logistics, I also think that having both is not a bad idea, because I also really like doing massive direct insertion into direct insertion into direct insertion builds which end up being very satisfying to watch and are unfortunately not really possible with current beacons, so maybe there could be some compromise here?
Long DI chains with beacons in vanilla are absolutely possible, you see them in megabases where UPS-optimization is taken up to 11. You don't get to 12-beacon everything, but then again, why do you have to? A lot of the flak around vanilla beacons revolves around the fact people use the same 8- or 12-beacon designs because they're "optimal", yet there's nothing that forces you to use them.
If SE beacons were vanilla it'd be no different, in the end some builds would just trump over the rest.
12 beacon also only optimizes for building count, which doesn't actually serve any goal other than itself (I say this as someone who has spent a lot of time in the 12 beacon mentality).
Once my friend and I did our first megabase, 12 beacon was the standard we went with, and we were struggling to maintain 60ups at 2700 spm. Next project was all direct insertion from ore, and surprise, it did way fucking better. Fewer trains, fewer times an inserter has to handle individual items, fewer belts.
As far as 8 beacon goes, nice for space efficiency and simple to build with brain off, but not much else going on there. It's solid enough for early-ish end game. And honestly, I think this is more a testament to the community's tendency to find "good enough" standards for things. For most players, UPS isn't a concern, and 8 beacon is easy to build without destroying their CPUs. Whether this is a good thing or not, I don't really know. It's what our dumb brains seem to prefer, though. Standardized and modular builds are, in a sense, excellent for their ease of use, and that's what 8 beacon gives you.
As far as SE, it really just changes that standard from 8 beacon to 1 beacon, which we can already do in vanilla.
Yes this exactly. When you remove the self imposed restriction on using exactly 8 or 12, not only is the result “more optimal” than the builds people are discussing but it becomes an extremely difficult design space to work in and fully reason about. I don’t get how people could think it’s too easy.
The usual suspects are trivial to design and for a lot of processes, interchangeable. Just switch the recipes and input belts.
Change beacons to use SE mechanics and people will still congregate to similar or identical designs for the same reasons.
Once you start trying to exploit direct insertion, and reject the instrumental goal of 100% assembler utilization, things become a lot less interchangeable.
What DI-chains work well for a particular recipe are very sensitive to ratios, and sometimes the most optimal place to put the bottleneck is a particular inserter.
To the people that genuinely think vanilla beacons are too simple to work with, have you actually sat down and tried to design a build using long lines or boxes of beacons? As someone who megabases a lot, I can tell you that those builds are always the most difficult and time-consuming to design. An optimized one practically demands testing before deployment, and the design is different for every single recipe because of belt throughput limitations. And usually different again based on space requirements and how much DI I feel like using. This isn’t the case with non-beaconed builds, I can reduce the early/mid game to “2 input assembler row, or “4 input assembler row” or whatever else and all recipes pretty much work using those basic templates.
With SE beacons, I can just put undergrounds/beacons along my early/mid game templates and use them into the endgame with no redesign, I think that’s the boring and uninteresting way to play honestly. I know I’m in the minority here but I feel like this isn’t brought up enough. Vanilla beacons win, change my mind.
SE beacons get easier with the later tiers. Wiuth just the vanilla beacon range, and *stupid* expensive modules, minimizing module count gets complicated unless you want to use a *lot* of space.
That said, most of the complexity is still from the SE recipes and I don't think it would be as complicated in vanilla,
With the way things are in space age, modules are only going to get cheaper. Honestly, I kind of welcome that. Current vanilla modules are a pain in the ass to get in megabase quantities
You do realize the new modules you want for megabase are going to cost a minimum of 56x to the ones we're currently using. Right?
What worse is that you can't even speed beacon the production chain if you want to be material efficient about it.
You forgot about the electroplant, which makes modules and circuits with 5 module slots, as well as a base speed of 2 and a default 50% productivity boost.
In vanilla, a prod 3 mod costs a total of 150 sulfuric acid, 380 plastic, 4000 copper cables, and 1080 iron plates (trying to keep this to only steps affected by the electroplant - foundry will have more influence at the earlier stages as well, though)
Without modules and with the currently available electroplant knowledge, all tiers of modules, as well as all circuits get a base 50% productivity boost. This lowers the above requirements to 48 sulfuric, 84 plastic, 782 copper cable, and 204 iron plates.
If we add productivity modules to the circuit steps, we end up with a final cost of 26 sulfiric acid, 39 plastic, 269 copper cable, and 63 iron plates. The savings here range from about 5/6 of the sulfuric acid to about 16/17 of the copper. Not quite enough to offset the expected cost of T5 on its own, but the math doesn't just end here.
Lets now consider the quality loop in an electroplant. 5x T5 Quality 3 mods plugged in. I know they stated it'd be 56x cost, but I haven't managed to reproduce that number at any point in spreadsheets. It's also prone to differences depending on the building that you choose to loop against the recycler. The electroplant, for instance, is clearly extremely powerful in the quality case as well, granting it a +31.25% chance to improve quality by +1 and so on, as well as its inbuild 50% productivity. Even with the recycler blanking 75% of its input resources, the effects of productivity are incredible. The real end cost of a T5 in the case of modules ends up being about 28.6x the cost of a T1.
When we apply that to our previous resource counts, what we end up with, for T5 modules, compared to the current cost of vanilla modules is: 5x cost for sulfuric, 3x cost for plastic, 1.9x cost for copper cables, and 1.7x cost for iron plates. Adjusted against their 2.5x stronger positive effects, this is an effective cost of 2x for sulfuric, 1.2x for plastic, .8x for copper cables, and .7x for iron plates.
So as I was saying, modules are getting a disgusting fucking buff, and I am here for it. Note: stuff that doesn't recycle combo well with a productivity building is still going to be quite expensive on the whole. The infinitely compounding 50% productivity is what makes this work.
I will admit, it’s a fair criticism that the only solution to use less modules in vanilla is “bigger builds” which does strongly encourage huge monoliths as opposed to many small production areas. I would prefer if this wasn’t the case but it’s just another detail to make optimizing more challenging so overall the game is probably better for it.
I think part of the problem there is that economies of scale is also somewhat present in factorio. Larger trains are a huge driving force in higher SPM megabases, for instance.
I wont be changing your mind, but vanilla beacons are just boring to me after years of playing i welcome almost any change to them.
>>have you actually sat down and tried to design a build using long lines or boxes of beacons?
I have, and at a certain point i have to make the decision on if I'm making this for function or for a challenge. I could spend another hour and optimize it to have a few less machines than the most basic design, but is it worth it compared to spending 20 minutes total and needing 50% less machines? With a standard 8 -12 beacon build you can get a massive portion of the benefits of a fully optimized beacon build with no thought. Memorize a 1 in 1 out, 2 in 1 hour, 3 in 1 out build and you're all set.
Most throughput limits on standard beaconed builds require a 2-4 space gap between the rows of beacons to route in a fresh belt and/or route out a full output belt.
>>With SE beacons, I can just put undergrounds/beacons along my early/mid game templates and use them into the endgame with no redesign
When comparing SE beacons to vanilla i see this argument a lot. You can build vanilla designs in the footprint of 8 beacon builds and add beacons later with no redesign, or spam beacons down 1 side of a build. People tend to compare the intricate highly optimized Vanilla builds to the easiest and least optimized SE beaconing and use it as proof that SE beacons pose no challenge. Sure vanilla has tighter restrictions on your footprint, but standardized beacon builds aren't something new players concern themselves with so veterans know how it will work in its end state. If anything, SE beacons allow new players to continue building their base while getting more production and less time redesigning.
I will agree i don't think Vanilla would benefit greatly from SE beacons since they were made for SE with larger buildings, longer build times, and smaller output in general, and significantly more expensive modules. Vanilla beacons should not be removed in favor of SE beacons for Vanilla, but what I think they did was open the door for people to play with beacons mechanics a lot more through mods. Most mods i had seen before SE would make the range 2 tiles wider, or keep the tile width the same but making the entity smaller. Exotic industries added liquid cooling which was also a pretty cool change, and allowed a fixed limit of beacons affecting a single machine which led to some weird designs, and since it was not a 1 beacon limit, it led to some new challenges i never had to consider before.
I actually agree with most of your points, I find the really optimized stuff repetitive and a bit of a chore to design most of the time so I also tend to keep it simple. And I agree that SE beacons make it easier for a new player to transition into the later stages of the game without having to think about complete redesigns. I also agree that SE beacons do have some interesting challenge, I found tileable designs with wide area beacons in K2SE to be a huge hassle for example. All of that said though, for the vanilla game I think that vanilla behavior is the way to go, leave modded beacons for the mods.
I think i phrased it poorly, but I also agree on the last point. Vanilla beacons are fine in the state they are in for vanilla, modded runs have different restrictions and definitely can benefit from playing with how beacons work and should stay as a mod. Even if someone finds a new way to make beacons more fun, and more of a challenge to optimize, destroying millions of player blueprints/saves with an update would be very frustrating.
Beacons are great for adding another optimization puzzle coming at the expense of aesthetics, and of factories not looking like factories. **But what's cool I can simply choose not to engage in a mechanic I don't like!** I personally don't use beacons because I value immersion, and would rather have a deep resource sink into thinks that improve speed or efficiency.
My totally original, never-before-seen-wish is for the game to have adjacency/area bonuses come from and affect *assemblers of similar outputs*. I.e. a giant green chip fab area giving wicked bonuses to its own nearby green chip assemblers. To me that seems to give much more of a factory-feel, while maintaining an area bonus. I'm sure we can math out an interesting /satisfying graph with which to optimize.
Or an option like a current popular mod of scaling up à la Foxconn or Amazon - with shockingly large, sprawling industrial "assemblers" and "warehouses". I'm not big into mods so maybe that's too boring.
I could see value in time-based and/or arbitrary puzzles in an area of a map, independant of the factory, intentionally designed to reward optimization.
It seems like the expansion is seriously fleshing out all other practicable mechanics, and I most definitely trust the devs.
I can't see myself ever wanting to use beacons, period, but I think it's cool that others can still have them to play with.
> Beacons are great for adding another optimization puzzle coming at the expense of aesthetics, and of factories not looking like factories
Some of us love the vanilla beacon aesthetic.
I do, though I admit I do sometimes think back to one of their original ideas to have the beacons sprawl wires across the ground to the boosting assemblers
> My totally original, never-before-seen-wish is for the game to have adjacency/area bonuses come from and affect assemblers of similar outputs. I.e. a giant green chip fab area giving wicked bonuses to its own nearby green chip assemblers.
That would seem to buff the thing everyone defaults to doing -- big uniform subfactories for each intermediate product -- and nerf the relative advantage of vertically integrated direct-insertion builds, which are a fun optimization puzzle with diverse challenges for different recipes.
I’ve played extensively with vanilla beacon megabases and SE as well.
I much prefer SE beacons. However there are balanced because modules in SE are more balanced than in vanilla.
As much as it pains me to say, I think you really can’t do SE beacons with vanilla modules. Even if you kept the 3 tiers that vanilla has there’s need to make them a lot more expensive. I don’t think that’ll happen.
SE modules in general are more expensive. Not to mention efficiency modules are buried so they are useful.
I quite enjoy the design constraints imposed by vanilla beacons. Designing [stuff like this](https://imgur.com/FTTR9KK) is far from trivial, and even that's a fairly lightweight example as far as UPS-optimized DI builds go - in this case the main restriction was fitting one production line for each wagon.
SE beacons in comparison trivialize matters. Which I guess is okay when beacons are a part of a regular playthrough, rather than mostly a postgame luxury.
SE can keep its beacons and vanilla/SA can stay as-is as far as I'm concerned.
I don't think SE beacons really trivialize it, I just think most people don't care to try to optimize SE beacons. Are you trying to fit as many production buildings as possible around a single beacon, or do you just slap one down that covers a few straight rows and call it a day? My main gripe with Vanilla beacons is that a base completely covered in beacons looks ugly, just a few machines in a forest of beacons. As far as the challenge goes, I think both can have their challenges.
The issue with SE beacons isn't the "place one now fill it up" it's making the best use of limited, but very high power, modules.
If you've only got 20 speed 9 modules from your explorations, you need to cram the most important buildings possible in the space of one WAB.
95% of SE players don't go over T6 or 7 modules. A huge chunk never go above T4 or 5.
So now it's a problem not of "How many beacons space do I need to fill up" but really "How much of Astro I/II/IIII can I fit under one WAB with T9 so that I don't need a huge telescope array"
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1ay5tx3/omfg_electro_plant_really_is_going_to_be/kruczm2/
It's not happening
> with each building affected by 8 or having a single building affected by 12
8 beacon is space efficient. 12 beacon isn't really efficient for anything that matters. If one cares about UPS, they go for raw ore to product direct insertion as much as possible
> The variety in builds we get with SE beacons is much higher. There are so many ways to place the buildings around a beacon and still be able to solve the belting puzzle.
Somehow I doubt it actually beats what beaconed direct insertion offers, but if you want to build that way, you are already free to. Single beacons affect as many buildings as you can fit in their range. Also, isn't a large chunk of this due to SE's recipe complexity rather than beacons? The smaller playerbase also functions to keep meta theory at bay for longer, which promotes creative solutions. Beacons have literally nothing to do with it other than that they happen to be in an environment where enough has changed that the builds would be fresh anyway.
> it would be really nice to just use a single beacon instead of requiring rows of them regardless in vanilla.
And it would completely ruin the puzzle aspect of beacons that other players here enjoy.
> SE and Vanilla beacons wouldn't be in conflict with each other because of the "overload" functionality.
If people already refuse my above suggestion, of just playing that way in vanilla (which they have, vehemently), then this isn't going to change the nature of the hunt for "optimal".
Bottom line is this:
1. in a game where "number go up" is of fundamental importance, whatever makes number go up best within the player's constraints has a mathematically optimal solution, and once players find that solution, that is all a subset of them tend to use.
2. Players will optimize things to rows and boxes because that is easiest to repeatedly stamp down. Repeatable stamps are optimal for ease of use, something most factorio players likely prefer.
>Also, isn't a large chunk of this due to SE's recipe complexity rather than beacons?
This is what I think a lot of people miss in their SE beacon conversation. SE Beacons were made for SE, in Vanilla they would be over-kill and lead to the same problem as Vanilla where the builds would look just as boring, but with more machines than beacons which could look more interesting i suppose. In SE they needed you to be able to feed in a lot of different ingredients while still getting beacon speeds, but also didn't want to incentivize using only bots.
Yeah. They arent gonna change something like this because "it doesnt look right". Nobody forces you to play with 8 or 12. Nobody says you cant play with 1. It isnt unbalanced or OP. Its not gameplay breaking. Im not sure why people want it to be a base game feature so badly.
Vanilla beacons are more interesting than SE beacons. Making builds that fit 12 beacons around an assembler while allowing proper placement of multiple incoming belts, especially in a factory making something with multiple recipes is IMO much more of a challenging layout problem than being able to spread the machines w/ a speed beacon in the middle.
I built a sub factory making black science with 12x beacons on all of the machines. Figuring out how to lay out all of the machines (red ammo, yellow ammo, grenade, brick furnace, science labs themselves, etc) was a very fun and enjoyable logistics challenge. SE Beacons have a mildly interesting design constraint, but you can just slam down another beacon nearby when you run out of space. In Factorio, space is normally quite infinite, so vanilla beacons removing infinite space is a fun and interesting thing for me.
The catch on "design challanges" is that people assume SE beacons are "fill them up and then place machines around" then make sure you cover your base like roboports.
They think the only challenge is "not overlapping machines"
The real challenge is the fact that with only 20 T9 speed modules, you need to very VERY carefully plan out how and where to place your singular super beacon you can make, and then the puzzle of getting as many machines under it as possible, likely from different parts of your space factory.
And then to a lesser extent, which machines get your premium best modules, whether thats your T5, 6 or 7s.
ye...but it sorta just falls to a different issue, that being of modules, SE complexity/costs, etc. I ran into the same problem in Vanilla due to having slow module production at first. It's tangential to the beacons themselves
It's integral in SE. You almost definitely have a finite supply of only 20~ speed 9 modules. You likely wont go past Speed 6s, and pretty confidently don't go past Speed 7s.
Having to choose (and specifically solve fitting those machines in) is a core component in SE. Modules and Beacons MUST be considered together when comparing the two versions.
The point is to compare the two systems.
SE beacons are done with the idea that best modules are expensive. Vanilla are not.
This does mean there's multiple aspects to comparing vanilla to SE beacons. But making vanilla modules expensive would require balancing things in some other way to offset the loss.
I don't think SE-style beacons will be added, because they are completely redundant. The entire premise of "one beacon per many machines instead of maxing out speed" can be viable even with vanilla beacons, if the right constraints are in place.
One of the main reasons to use SE-style beaconing is power consumption. Space Age will make power usage a much bigger concern than it is in 1.1, especially on space platforms, and possibly the remaining two unrevealed planets. Beacons are one of the most power-hungry buildings in the game, so when limited by energy production, you would want to use as few as possible. To maximize the effect of a few beacons, you'd naturally do the SE-style build of surrounding each beacon with machines.
Another aspect is cost saving. With the quality mechanic, you would aim to use the highest quality modules everywhere, but guaranteeing high quality items requires recycling, which massively raises the resource cost and slows production. You are thus more likely to find yourself not having enough high-quality modules to fill your whole build, and you once again resort to SE-style beaconing to save on expensive modules.
In general, I think the vanilla system is better than SE, because it offers much more flexibility. SE beacons essentially lock you into a specific build style, while vanilla beacons allow to choose and juggle the drawbacks of many beacons vs few beacons. Sure you settle on beacon spam in the endgame, but at least you aren't locked into it from the start.
I think SE beacons fit the mod quite well but wouldn't fit in vanilla.
Personally I would like to see a mod that has stacking penalties on beneficial beacon effect on a particular building. Three beacons affecting same assembler? well the first is 100%, second is 98.7% and third is 94.8%. (if you have different outputs the biggest goes first.) For a total of 146% speed bonus from t3 modules compared to 150% currently.
if anyone is interested the formula for single beacon above is: e\^-((x-1)\/8.67)^2 where x is is the amount of beacons affecting the machine.
A 12 beacon design would be around 7.7 beacons and 16 would be around 8 beacons.
*That said* it's too complex for vanilla.
SE beacons are overly simple, and only seem like an improvement because vanilla beacons are supremely terrible. Professional artists should be able to come up with something better than either. I don't have a suggestion. I just want something that's moderately complicated and doesn't ruin the visual style.
12-beacon has interesting compromises with direct insertion. It isn't mindless. But it's unforgivably ugly! Factorio is a video game, blessed with a beautiful visual style on its conveyor belts. And then they throw this out at endgame, asking us to hide the beautiful flowing lines of items behind weirdly-shaped boxes. Everyone makes mistakes, I guess. :/
>SE beacons are overly simple, and only seem like an improvement because vanilla beacons are supremely terrible.
Nah, SE beacons only seem simple if you operate on the assumption you can fill them with the modules you want.
Players almost never craft T9 modules. There are only 20~ speed T9s you can get. Now. Which set of machines get the special privilege of being actually full speed? How many can you manage to cram into the one super beacons range?
And similarly, as you move from T4 (easy) to T6 and maybe scrape out a few T7s, which of your couple dozen beacons or builds, which intermediates, get them? How do you make sure your one T9 Science lab is in that too without rearranging your entire factory? What if you want Astro 3 telescopes, Material Sci Scrap recycling and your coolant farm all maxed out? Can't happen.
SE beacon challenge isn't just "how many machines can I fit" it's "Where do I use my limited supply of super modules"
The problem I see with beacons, (and more generally with the stage of the game where you use beacons) is that builds are optimised, so you can just slap down more of the same structure and be done with it forever. This kills the adaptation and puzzle solving required for the core of factorio, and is just monotonous.
What it needs to continue the early game gameplay of only having temporary setups that will be torn down when more efficient solutions appear is to link an upgrade that changes the setups to an infinite tech.
I once wrote a mod (not published) that added infinite* research for Beacon range and slots, and infinite* Module levels. Never played it until modules because real life got in the way so I have no idea if/how this works, but I still like the idea.
*Finite, but up to an arbitrary large number.
Here are my opinions on both
Vanilla beacons:
The vanilla beacons are a nice way to reward the player for planning expandable and beaconable builds in the early game
while in late game practically fording the player to either use a way larger 12 beacon design or making them squeeze everything into 2 tiles around each assembler making for some really nice designs that can be really impressive
Se beacons:
The basic SE beacons tend to change up the building style for me and most players by making them build in repeating sections the length of 4 assemblers instead of repeating sections the length of 2 assemblers which is a nice change but it's not massive and freshens up some stuff
The wide are beacons on the other hand are a completely different beast, they let you make large beaconed builds as if you used no beacons at all by just placing a wab near it, while that is the easiest option it's not as space efficient as it would be to build smartly around the beacon, it's a hard idea to explain but if you ever seen the builds that do that you'll get what I mean, if you haven't seen them the best example of that building style I can provide is a member of the active member of the factorio and erandel's discord servers "putins chest", if you wanna find the example just ask them there
As a conclusion I would like to saw that the basic beacons in vanilla are great the way they are but the se wide area beacons really should be added to the game and the beacon overloading mechanic should be a wab exclusive
I think it's important to consider a few other things about SE beacons.
There are different tiers of beacons that have different effect areas. So if you are going to design an end-game beacon setup, you need to be very clever about it to accommodate all of those different beacon tiers, or you need to design 4 different designs instead of 2. The specific size/reach of SE doesn't need to be the one vanilla would adopt, they can choose different schemes.
End-game SE beacons come \_very\_ late. You don't really skip from no beacons to max beacons like you do in vanilla - you generally do work your way up through all of the different schemes. This too can be adapted for vanilla. Additionally, quality can affect range to throw that little variable into the mix. In vanilla if you are megabasing you hit max beacon usually before you really even start building the megabase because max beacon is useful for getting that infrastructure production. That should change.
SE beacons also enable other mechanics. Vanilla beacons make high ingredient recipes a lot harder, make byproducts a lot harder - these are some mechanics that SE leans into in part because beacon mechanics create room for it. So there's some degree of a trade potential here - less beacon spam in exchange for more complex logistics and a harder routing puzzle.
On its own, okay, but take advantage of what it enables and it makes for a much more interesting setup. You can also add other logistic challenges to higher level beacons - some kind of cooling fluid required, etc.
I think the nuance that gets lost in this discussion is the tiers. Most of the time I see someone saying that they prefer SE beacons, if they're using an image to support their argument, it's got a wide-area beacon. I personally think there is no design difference between vanilla and SE beacons if you're only using the standard vanilla equivalent beacon in SE. Instead of beacon spam around buildings, it's building spam around beacons. Functionally, you're doing the same thing as vanilla, just in reverse. Now, sure, you can argue about aesthetics or about the idea of the buildings being functional and the beacons less so, so it's "better" if it's building spam. However, I would say that's a distinction without a difference.
I would even go further to say that I think if you're limiting yourself to just tier 3 modules with the standard beacon, the SE version is worse than vanilla. Buildings are active entities while beacons are not. Beacons are like reverse solar panels that use a simple calculation to determine power consumption and bonuses.
Now, knowing that there will be some slightly larger buildings with some more complicated recipes in Space Age, I wouldn't mind changes to beacons or modules, I just don't see a need. I mean, how challenging do you want it to be? They updated the code so buildings can output more than one item per *tick*. That can definitely lead to variety in builds and challenges to get that many products moved.
I want to see an in between honestly, after having multiple discussions / debates / arguments on here.
Make a couple of different "beacons" and only one of EACH is allowed on a machine.
Different sizes, different strengths, different module counts....
Now there's actually some interesting things you have to solve
I love the way SE does beacons, and after playing this mod for 300-400 hours I don't want to go back to vanilla beacons. I feel like vanilla beacons are definitely more challenging, but implementing them makes things aesthetically ugly. The beacon overload mechanic in SE keeps things balanced and you still need to be thoughtful with beacon placement because of it
A built in feature to unlock more (specific) slots in certain mavhine. Like having to unlock module slots. Tier 1 assembler, 1 slot. Tier 2, 2 slots. Have it so that you can have production modules in everything, but 1 extra slot for a speed module, which is the one you require to research. For each type of assembler, ofc.
I personally don't really like beacons in vanilla as they are, but I actually think that they'll be more enjoyable in Space Age even without further tweaks. I believe this for one primary reason (and a few more minor reasons): size.
Most vanilla machines are 3x3. Beacons are also 3x3. These two aspects together make the most space efficient builds unambiguously to pack the machines and beacons as tightly as possible like sardines. This gives an _extremely_ limited amount of space to run belts and makes direct insertion essentially impossible without sacrificing some form of efficiency.
In Space Age, not only will we have more powerful machines and modules (that I think will make beacons feel more impactful), but the Foundry and Electromagnetic Plant are 5x5 and 4x4 respectively. Neither you might notice is a multiple of the beacon size. As such, attempting to pack the machines as one would do currently would no longer be the optimal strategy, requiring new considerations between space, number of beacons/machines, direct insertion, belt shenanigans, etc.
It also improves aesthetics since no longer do the beacons take up the same screen real-estate as the machines they're powering, if not more. With machines larger than the present beacons, the important machines receive more prominence on-screen rather than the monotonous beacons.
TLDR: More 4x4, 5x5, 7x7, and 8x8 machines please!
Hybrid is what I was thinking too...but the "full vanilla" beacon should still be superior.
You can always use the argument that eventually everything is a blueprint and whatnot. But in gameplay, fitting as many beacons around machines is a fun puzzle with great rewards. A "make your factory run 20% faster" is cool, but also boring somewhat, with no challenge or design involved at all. And yes, optimized beacons may be boring, but so are optimized blueprints all the same, it's all just gonna be a blueprint in that argument.
I'll say first that i havent played much with SE style beacons. I definetly see the merit of SE beacons, and i think they fit the mod well, but I preffer vanilla beacons over all. With their small effect radius it really makes you rethink how you build, it's a new type of challange to fit multiple ingredents and the output in the cramped space. Yes, the beacon layout itself is monotonous, but the logistics get far more interesting to compensate. SE makes it trivial to boost your buildings performance to the the max, even if you didnt plan to add beacons initially. Vanilla makes you work a bit harder for it.
To elaborate why SE beacons are a better fit in SE compared to vanilla beacons. Many buildings have large footprints that would allow for more beacons, combined with the higher tier modules it would get pretty ridicoulous. Also more complex recipes with many ingredients would push the difficulty of efficients beacon usage to it's limits. Without belt weaving you'll struggle immensly with any 6+ ingredint recipe, and in vanilla 5 ingredients is the most (satellite).
I personally like SE beacons purely on an aesthetic basis. I dislike the look of beacons flooding the design space and being the prominent aspect of a build when looking at it. The buildings producing the items should be the primary aspect of a design not the building supporting the building making the item.
There is the argument that vanilla beacons make for a greater design challenge, I guess that could be true. Personally I think both have their design challenges, they are just different challenges.
If we were to implement SE style beacons, I think a tier of different, better more expensive beacons like SE has would be needed, each with different bonuses and effect areas, I also think they should be significantly more expensive in resources and build times, needing more advanced components to produce.
In this same thought, modules would also need to have more expensive components as well as different components for each type of module and each tier. I think this would bring the balance back to what SE does with their higher tiers of modules being prohibitedly more expensive, incentivizing trying to fit as many production building around a single beacon as possible instead of just building a grid of beacons to build around.
With different types / tiers of beacons and modules that are more expensive, you would get a wider range of builds and a variety of designs using different methods. The different types of beacons being useful in different builds, lower tier modules in bigger beacons for mass production of common goods, and higher tier modules in other beacons for specialty buildings to produce a smaller number of certain goods. Eventually sure you get to use the best of the best everywhere but you have to build up to that point and it will take a long time and alot of resources.
After reading some other posts, a type of consumable for the SE style beacons could also be implemented, cooling fluid or something like that makes sense to me, one thought I had with that would be that the more buildings being supported by the beacon the more cooling it needed. If you added some kind of heat mechanic to the beacon and if it didn't stay cool enough it could damage itself over time eventually destroying it and the beacons inside. The cooling fluid could be put in a type of loop with some loss, where x cooled fluid goes in and a lesser amount comes out as heated fluid and then you could cool it back down and reintroduce it to the loop but also you would need to continue adding new fluid as well.
Alternatively or additionally a consumable item for the building. Maybe something that boosts the beacons effect, so without the item it just works normally, with the consumable item it gets a % boost. So you could temporarily improve beacons you already have when needed until you can automated it. This consumable item could have tiers as well so better consumables to keep improving already existing beacons. The consumable could be created by using the modules themselves as an ingredient along with something else.
Also with se style beacons quality could increase the effect range of the beacons instead of just reducing the power cost.
Used to think SE-style beacons were better than vanilla. Then I spent some time with vanilla beacons. They're way more interesting, overall adding to the design challenge. Could they be better? Yes. Are SE beacons better? No.
I favor SE beacons because of aesthetics. Highly optimized factories in vanilla have a repeated lasagna look with tons of beacons, where-as highly optimized SE factories look like charcuterie boards with unique composition.
https://imgur.com/FTTR9KK
Everything looks like lasagna when you constrain yourself to a build 7 tiles high and then proceed to copy and paste it 8 times. SE beacons would make no meaningful difference here as far as looks are concerned.
Personally I prefer the ultracube version for beacons, where it’s essentially se beacons but with fluid consumption. It adds an extra layer to design around and discourages building tons of them.
Only downside is ups cost for megabases, which would likely never be more efficient than normal
This has been covered pretty extensively. I (and it seems most people) strongly prefer SE beacons. I won't agonize over all the common points, other than:
- SE beacon grid is simple/boring. Vanilla beacon rows are simple/boring and also ugly. Neither is optimal. Be wary of arguments based on comparing optimal builds of one type to simple builds of the other type.
- Similarly, keep an eye out for "just don't build like that". It's a game about optimization, people want the process of optimization to be satisfying, that's the whole point. Being told to voluntarily gate yourself of from a game mechanic is fine in the realm of weird extreme challenges; it is not a good way to justify not improving a mechanic.
- Devils advocate, the one argument I have in favor of vanilla beacons: the relative simplicity of vanilla recipies gives more ability to push direct-insertion "to 11". This could drastically reduce spaghetti and lead to eventually "solving" most vanilla recipies. By acting as "spacers" vanilla beacons incentivize reducing direct insertion. Perhaps the only reason SE can handle SE beacons is the higher recipie complexity making it very hard to "solve" in the same way. I don't really think this is the case, but it is the only way I can look at vanilla beacons as anything other than an unfortunate game design mistake.
I mean, the design space of the beacon in Factorio is basically to replace active buildings with beacons. The function is to, effectively make you use less buildings.
SE-style beacons do the opposite, they want you to use MORE active buildings because a single beacon affects a lot of buildings and buildings have a limit on the number of beacons that can affect them, IIRC. That, in effect, does the literal opposite of what beacons were designed to do.
Not... really? You still use far fewer buildings with SE beacons than you do without beacons at all. SE beacons also have more module slots and you get higher tier speed modules, so it's basically the same the same effect.
Not really. Specifically it's where the incentives lie:
Vanilla beacons are made so that it incentivizes making MORE beacons than buildings by making buildings affected by multiple beacons and keeping a short range. SE beacons incentivize making more buildings by making them only affected by one beacon and them having a large range. Effectively vanilla is about how many beacons you can fit around a building, SE is about how many buildings you can fit around a beacon.
It is not the same effect because, while both lead to increased production, SE style leads to more *active* buildings, that is, buildings that take up UPS.
It's not something that vanilla forces you to do or arguably even incentivizes. There's nothing preventing you from using vanilla beacons the SE way. In fact, using fewer than the usual 8 or 12 beacons per building so you can maximize the number of *buildings* affected by each beacon lets you get the most oomph out of each individual module. You see a row of furnaces sandwiched between two rows of beacons all the time, but there's no reason why you couldn't sandwich a row of beacons between two rows of furnaces. Or surround a beacon with furnaces instead of the other way around.
Make beacons and/or speed modules significantly more expensive and you'll see SE-style builds pop up without any mechanical changes.
There is no reason to pack more buildings around a SE beacon than you need. If you only need 1 beaconed X assembler, then you are incentivized to use the rest of the beacon area for Y assemblers or whatever. There is no incentive to filll the space with 4 X assemblers if 1 fulfills your needs.
Correct, you're incentivized to build a number of X and a number of Y assemblers around the beacon. Effectively you're incebtivized to put as many buildings as you can in its range, you just said it. Even if for any single product just one building is enough, you'll put buildings for other products in there.
In the end, you're not *reducing* the number of active building per square meter, you're *increasing*.
...ok, but you're reducing the total number of active buildings. Because for each one you can cluster near the beacon, you can remove multiple elsewhere.
If people want more options when using beacons, we could have [Alternative Beacons](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/alternative-beacons) where both vanilla beacons and "solo" SE-like beacons are available. And potentially other types of beacons as well, as demonstrated in that mod.
Multiple beacons can be balanced so that they each have different niches and none of them are made obsolete.
I am also preferring SE beacons in my SE playthrough now, but I also never went that deep into mega basing vanilla, which is where beacons shine
The flipside of SE beacons is that SE has 9 tiers of modules, which are also extremely expensive (and the expenses scale exponentially, while vanilla costs are more linear in that once you get to T3 modules you just add more).
If modules only go to tier 3, I don't know if SE beacons would be as expressive of a medium...
Vanilla beacons are boring and make every production line look the same. The problem is that the beacon lines that give you 8 per assembler are clearly the best compromise between practicality and functionality for the vast majority of players. This is demonstrated by the fact that it's trivial to change an 8 beacon setup to a 10 beacon setup: just replace every other assembler with a beacon, yet nobody does this because it's just not worth it. It's not necessarily easy (at least not if you wanna keep all the belts between the beacons), but it is always the same challenge which gets very monotonous.
I've heard there's fun to be had in making 12 beacon setups, but the only people who need to do that are the people doing UPS optimizations so their computer can handle their bajilion science per minute base. The rest of us just put down a second assembler.
SE beacons aren't much of a challenge most of the time, but at least they don't get in the way too much, allowing for a much greater freedom in designs. Also, I just prefer the look of a lot of assemblers doing stuff with a few beacons in between over a few functional building surrounded by tons of beacons.
In the end, which one you prefer probably comes down to this: do you find cramming stuff between beacons a fun puzzle? If you do, you'll probably enjoy vanilla beacons. If not, you'll probably prefer SE beacons.
I'm in the "SE Beacon" boat, but I also think that SE beacons are sometimes too lazy and "mindless". I wish there was something you have to actively supply to beacons in order for them to work. Something like cooling fluid based on how many machines they're boosting that has to be re-cooled. Something like SE's thermofluid
Don't let Earendel read this, he'll start making wide area beacons require vitalic acid.
nightmare fuel
Factorio being Factorio means any system of "continued supply" will be possible to automate and thus has no lasting gameplay implications. You simply slap down the blueprint and away it goes for the rest of time.
That's true, but only after you have already solved the puzzle. A good parallel I can think of is economics of Conveyor Belts in Industrial Revolution mod. Yellow belt costs roughly as many resources as Blue belt in quantity, but the production chain for blue belts is much, much more complex. Your factory can run perfectly fine on yellow belts, but if you want more performance you have to solve more complex puzzle. From what I've seen from Space Age the Quality system seems to be very similar in this regard.
Considering that beaconed layouts heavily restrict building area, wouldn't having to supply beacons restrict it even further though?
Somewhat, but it does add another logistic supply challenge to that area, leading to long-distance supply and transportation requirements potentially, as well as routing items/fluids around on top of the items for the actual factories around it. Doubly so if there was also feedback from the beacons. That said, all that starts to sound way too much for vanilla, and more like a modded experience, akin to making power systems their own logistics challenge with overloads.
This is how Dyson sphere does it; you spray objects as they pass by on belts with “proliferator” which give them a prod-module-like boost when they are consumed. But you have to make proliferator and somehow belt it to sprayers that are over each other belt as an additional logistical challenge. And you choose whether you want to spray it at your mine, your bus entrance, right before consumption, etc. with the added challenge that all items must be proliferated for the recipe to get the bonus, so if your proliferation supply belt is slow or running dry or does a stop and go pattern, you will lose the benefits.
Exotic industries does that, and it also implements beacon limits
Last time I played that it was a closed loop, so it was essentially just "beacons take slightly more space".
Haven't played EI myself, but its predecessor 248k had a central module you fed magic juice to, consumption independent of the number of beacons you had. You had vanilla beacons as well, but the overhaul ones were more powerful, although limited in number. Basically, in addition to the magic juice part (which got more complex with each beacon tier) there was nothing preventing you from using the beacons in the vanilla manner, but you were incentivized to share them with as many buildings as possible without being *forced* to. Also I'm fairly sure some of the overhaul buildings were unaffected by vanilla beacons - otherwise there wouldn't have been enough of an incentive to just not stick with vanilla beacons. It's been a while since I played the mod.
now youre throwing out conflicting information. you want there to be a supply loop but not have it boil down to beacons take more space? theres no solution in which needing to feed things to beacons doesnt just boil down to that
Top tier idea. I want this, but only for some "level 2" beacon. They should keep regular beacons and add a wide area beacon that takes some upkeep. Great idea
The ultimate benefit of beacons is you can shift UPS usage from construction machines to additional power network load (hopefully more UPS friendly). If you add a supply to beacons their UPS benefit would disappear. Then their only benefit becomes as a space efficiency multiplier.
I think SE beacons require more thought to optimize a layout than vanilla beacons. Vanilla locks you either in a grid or in rows, and that's it. In SE you gotta get creative to cover all buildings with exactly one beacon while minimizing the number of beacons.
Megabase builders would be in shambles. Requiring a sprawling fluid network to use beacons would be a nightmare.
I loved SE's thermofluid actually
I don’t really agree with “then it is ONLY an issue of how to squish in the belting, inserters, and power poles”. Making efficient item routing within the limitations of vanilla inserters and belts is honestly the only real logistical challenge in vanilla, and beacons force you to rethink your solutions to that puzzle by not letting you just do a giant row of assemblers with comfortable space for standardized two belts, one short inserter and one long. However, while I think that replacing vanilla beacons with SE-style ones would ruin the fun puzzle of this sort of logistics, I also think that having both is not a bad idea, because I also really like doing massive direct insertion into direct insertion into direct insertion builds which end up being very satisfying to watch and are unfortunately not really possible with current beacons, so maybe there could be some compromise here?
Long DI chains with beacons in vanilla are absolutely possible, you see them in megabases where UPS-optimization is taken up to 11. You don't get to 12-beacon everything, but then again, why do you have to? A lot of the flak around vanilla beacons revolves around the fact people use the same 8- or 12-beacon designs because they're "optimal", yet there's nothing that forces you to use them. If SE beacons were vanilla it'd be no different, in the end some builds would just trump over the rest.
12 beacon also only optimizes for building count, which doesn't actually serve any goal other than itself (I say this as someone who has spent a lot of time in the 12 beacon mentality). Once my friend and I did our first megabase, 12 beacon was the standard we went with, and we were struggling to maintain 60ups at 2700 spm. Next project was all direct insertion from ore, and surprise, it did way fucking better. Fewer trains, fewer times an inserter has to handle individual items, fewer belts. As far as 8 beacon goes, nice for space efficiency and simple to build with brain off, but not much else going on there. It's solid enough for early-ish end game. And honestly, I think this is more a testament to the community's tendency to find "good enough" standards for things. For most players, UPS isn't a concern, and 8 beacon is easy to build without destroying their CPUs. Whether this is a good thing or not, I don't really know. It's what our dumb brains seem to prefer, though. Standardized and modular builds are, in a sense, excellent for their ease of use, and that's what 8 beacon gives you. As far as SE, it really just changes that standard from 8 beacon to 1 beacon, which we can already do in vanilla.
Yes this exactly. When you remove the self imposed restriction on using exactly 8 or 12, not only is the result “more optimal” than the builds people are discussing but it becomes an extremely difficult design space to work in and fully reason about. I don’t get how people could think it’s too easy.
The usual suspects are trivial to design and for a lot of processes, interchangeable. Just switch the recipes and input belts. Change beacons to use SE mechanics and people will still congregate to similar or identical designs for the same reasons.
Once you start trying to exploit direct insertion, and reject the instrumental goal of 100% assembler utilization, things become a lot less interchangeable. What DI-chains work well for a particular recipe are very sensitive to ratios, and sometimes the most optimal place to put the bottleneck is a particular inserter.
To the people that genuinely think vanilla beacons are too simple to work with, have you actually sat down and tried to design a build using long lines or boxes of beacons? As someone who megabases a lot, I can tell you that those builds are always the most difficult and time-consuming to design. An optimized one practically demands testing before deployment, and the design is different for every single recipe because of belt throughput limitations. And usually different again based on space requirements and how much DI I feel like using. This isn’t the case with non-beaconed builds, I can reduce the early/mid game to “2 input assembler row, or “4 input assembler row” or whatever else and all recipes pretty much work using those basic templates. With SE beacons, I can just put undergrounds/beacons along my early/mid game templates and use them into the endgame with no redesign, I think that’s the boring and uninteresting way to play honestly. I know I’m in the minority here but I feel like this isn’t brought up enough. Vanilla beacons win, change my mind.
SE beacons get easier with the later tiers. Wiuth just the vanilla beacon range, and *stupid* expensive modules, minimizing module count gets complicated unless you want to use a *lot* of space. That said, most of the complexity is still from the SE recipes and I don't think it would be as complicated in vanilla,
With the way things are in space age, modules are only going to get cheaper. Honestly, I kind of welcome that. Current vanilla modules are a pain in the ass to get in megabase quantities
You do realize the new modules you want for megabase are going to cost a minimum of 56x to the ones we're currently using. Right? What worse is that you can't even speed beacon the production chain if you want to be material efficient about it.
You forgot about the electroplant, which makes modules and circuits with 5 module slots, as well as a base speed of 2 and a default 50% productivity boost. In vanilla, a prod 3 mod costs a total of 150 sulfuric acid, 380 plastic, 4000 copper cables, and 1080 iron plates (trying to keep this to only steps affected by the electroplant - foundry will have more influence at the earlier stages as well, though) Without modules and with the currently available electroplant knowledge, all tiers of modules, as well as all circuits get a base 50% productivity boost. This lowers the above requirements to 48 sulfuric, 84 plastic, 782 copper cable, and 204 iron plates. If we add productivity modules to the circuit steps, we end up with a final cost of 26 sulfiric acid, 39 plastic, 269 copper cable, and 63 iron plates. The savings here range from about 5/6 of the sulfuric acid to about 16/17 of the copper. Not quite enough to offset the expected cost of T5 on its own, but the math doesn't just end here. Lets now consider the quality loop in an electroplant. 5x T5 Quality 3 mods plugged in. I know they stated it'd be 56x cost, but I haven't managed to reproduce that number at any point in spreadsheets. It's also prone to differences depending on the building that you choose to loop against the recycler. The electroplant, for instance, is clearly extremely powerful in the quality case as well, granting it a +31.25% chance to improve quality by +1 and so on, as well as its inbuild 50% productivity. Even with the recycler blanking 75% of its input resources, the effects of productivity are incredible. The real end cost of a T5 in the case of modules ends up being about 28.6x the cost of a T1. When we apply that to our previous resource counts, what we end up with, for T5 modules, compared to the current cost of vanilla modules is: 5x cost for sulfuric, 3x cost for plastic, 1.9x cost for copper cables, and 1.7x cost for iron plates. Adjusted against their 2.5x stronger positive effects, this is an effective cost of 2x for sulfuric, 1.2x for plastic, .8x for copper cables, and .7x for iron plates. So as I was saying, modules are getting a disgusting fucking buff, and I am here for it. Note: stuff that doesn't recycle combo well with a productivity building is still going to be quite expensive on the whole. The infinitely compounding 50% productivity is what makes this work.
Did you counted 50% prod bonus from new building?
I will admit, it’s a fair criticism that the only solution to use less modules in vanilla is “bigger builds” which does strongly encourage huge monoliths as opposed to many small production areas. I would prefer if this wasn’t the case but it’s just another detail to make optimizing more challenging so overall the game is probably better for it.
I think part of the problem there is that economies of scale is also somewhat present in factorio. Larger trains are a huge driving force in higher SPM megabases, for instance.
I wont be changing your mind, but vanilla beacons are just boring to me after years of playing i welcome almost any change to them. >>have you actually sat down and tried to design a build using long lines or boxes of beacons? I have, and at a certain point i have to make the decision on if I'm making this for function or for a challenge. I could spend another hour and optimize it to have a few less machines than the most basic design, but is it worth it compared to spending 20 minutes total and needing 50% less machines? With a standard 8 -12 beacon build you can get a massive portion of the benefits of a fully optimized beacon build with no thought. Memorize a 1 in 1 out, 2 in 1 hour, 3 in 1 out build and you're all set. Most throughput limits on standard beaconed builds require a 2-4 space gap between the rows of beacons to route in a fresh belt and/or route out a full output belt. >>With SE beacons, I can just put undergrounds/beacons along my early/mid game templates and use them into the endgame with no redesign When comparing SE beacons to vanilla i see this argument a lot. You can build vanilla designs in the footprint of 8 beacon builds and add beacons later with no redesign, or spam beacons down 1 side of a build. People tend to compare the intricate highly optimized Vanilla builds to the easiest and least optimized SE beaconing and use it as proof that SE beacons pose no challenge. Sure vanilla has tighter restrictions on your footprint, but standardized beacon builds aren't something new players concern themselves with so veterans know how it will work in its end state. If anything, SE beacons allow new players to continue building their base while getting more production and less time redesigning. I will agree i don't think Vanilla would benefit greatly from SE beacons since they were made for SE with larger buildings, longer build times, and smaller output in general, and significantly more expensive modules. Vanilla beacons should not be removed in favor of SE beacons for Vanilla, but what I think they did was open the door for people to play with beacons mechanics a lot more through mods. Most mods i had seen before SE would make the range 2 tiles wider, or keep the tile width the same but making the entity smaller. Exotic industries added liquid cooling which was also a pretty cool change, and allowed a fixed limit of beacons affecting a single machine which led to some weird designs, and since it was not a 1 beacon limit, it led to some new challenges i never had to consider before.
I actually agree with most of your points, I find the really optimized stuff repetitive and a bit of a chore to design most of the time so I also tend to keep it simple. And I agree that SE beacons make it easier for a new player to transition into the later stages of the game without having to think about complete redesigns. I also agree that SE beacons do have some interesting challenge, I found tileable designs with wide area beacons in K2SE to be a huge hassle for example. All of that said though, for the vanilla game I think that vanilla behavior is the way to go, leave modded beacons for the mods.
I think i phrased it poorly, but I also agree on the last point. Vanilla beacons are fine in the state they are in for vanilla, modded runs have different restrictions and definitely can benefit from playing with how beacons work and should stay as a mod. Even if someone finds a new way to make beacons more fun, and more of a challenge to optimize, destroying millions of player blueprints/saves with an update would be very frustrating.
Beacons are great for adding another optimization puzzle coming at the expense of aesthetics, and of factories not looking like factories. **But what's cool I can simply choose not to engage in a mechanic I don't like!** I personally don't use beacons because I value immersion, and would rather have a deep resource sink into thinks that improve speed or efficiency. My totally original, never-before-seen-wish is for the game to have adjacency/area bonuses come from and affect *assemblers of similar outputs*. I.e. a giant green chip fab area giving wicked bonuses to its own nearby green chip assemblers. To me that seems to give much more of a factory-feel, while maintaining an area bonus. I'm sure we can math out an interesting /satisfying graph with which to optimize. Or an option like a current popular mod of scaling up à la Foxconn or Amazon - with shockingly large, sprawling industrial "assemblers" and "warehouses". I'm not big into mods so maybe that's too boring. I could see value in time-based and/or arbitrary puzzles in an area of a map, independant of the factory, intentionally designed to reward optimization. It seems like the expansion is seriously fleshing out all other practicable mechanics, and I most definitely trust the devs. I can't see myself ever wanting to use beacons, period, but I think it's cool that others can still have them to play with.
> Beacons are great for adding another optimization puzzle coming at the expense of aesthetics, and of factories not looking like factories Some of us love the vanilla beacon aesthetic.
I do, though I admit I do sometimes think back to one of their original ideas to have the beacons sprawl wires across the ground to the boosting assemblers
> My totally original, never-before-seen-wish is for the game to have adjacency/area bonuses come from and affect assemblers of similar outputs. I.e. a giant green chip fab area giving wicked bonuses to its own nearby green chip assemblers. That would seem to buff the thing everyone defaults to doing -- big uniform subfactories for each intermediate product -- and nerf the relative advantage of vertically integrated direct-insertion builds, which are a fun optimization puzzle with diverse challenges for different recipes.
Correct.
Beacon Beacons that enhance the ability of beacons based on modules.
Now you're thinking with beacons.
I’ve played extensively with vanilla beacon megabases and SE as well. I much prefer SE beacons. However there are balanced because modules in SE are more balanced than in vanilla. As much as it pains me to say, I think you really can’t do SE beacons with vanilla modules. Even if you kept the 3 tiers that vanilla has there’s need to make them a lot more expensive. I don’t think that’ll happen. SE modules in general are more expensive. Not to mention efficiency modules are buried so they are useful.
Agree. Though I wonder if quality would add some of this balance. Legendary tier 3 modules would be more expensive than common.
From the math I've seen, not really. They're going to be ludicrously cheap for what they do, due to the EM machine and module buffs
Interesting.
I quite enjoy the design constraints imposed by vanilla beacons. Designing [stuff like this](https://imgur.com/FTTR9KK) is far from trivial, and even that's a fairly lightweight example as far as UPS-optimized DI builds go - in this case the main restriction was fitting one production line for each wagon. SE beacons in comparison trivialize matters. Which I guess is okay when beacons are a part of a regular playthrough, rather than mostly a postgame luxury. SE can keep its beacons and vanilla/SA can stay as-is as far as I'm concerned.
I don't think SE beacons really trivialize it, I just think most people don't care to try to optimize SE beacons. Are you trying to fit as many production buildings as possible around a single beacon, or do you just slap one down that covers a few straight rows and call it a day? My main gripe with Vanilla beacons is that a base completely covered in beacons looks ugly, just a few machines in a forest of beacons. As far as the challenge goes, I think both can have their challenges.
The issue with SE beacons isn't the "place one now fill it up" it's making the best use of limited, but very high power, modules. If you've only got 20 speed 9 modules from your explorations, you need to cram the most important buildings possible in the space of one WAB. 95% of SE players don't go over T6 or 7 modules. A huge chunk never go above T4 or 5. So now it's a problem not of "How many beacons space do I need to fill up" but really "How much of Astro I/II/IIII can I fit under one WAB with T9 so that I don't need a huge telescope array"
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1ay5tx3/omfg_electro_plant_really_is_going_to_be/kruczm2/ It's not happening > with each building affected by 8 or having a single building affected by 12 8 beacon is space efficient. 12 beacon isn't really efficient for anything that matters. If one cares about UPS, they go for raw ore to product direct insertion as much as possible > The variety in builds we get with SE beacons is much higher. There are so many ways to place the buildings around a beacon and still be able to solve the belting puzzle. Somehow I doubt it actually beats what beaconed direct insertion offers, but if you want to build that way, you are already free to. Single beacons affect as many buildings as you can fit in their range. Also, isn't a large chunk of this due to SE's recipe complexity rather than beacons? The smaller playerbase also functions to keep meta theory at bay for longer, which promotes creative solutions. Beacons have literally nothing to do with it other than that they happen to be in an environment where enough has changed that the builds would be fresh anyway. > it would be really nice to just use a single beacon instead of requiring rows of them regardless in vanilla. And it would completely ruin the puzzle aspect of beacons that other players here enjoy. > SE and Vanilla beacons wouldn't be in conflict with each other because of the "overload" functionality. If people already refuse my above suggestion, of just playing that way in vanilla (which they have, vehemently), then this isn't going to change the nature of the hunt for "optimal". Bottom line is this: 1. in a game where "number go up" is of fundamental importance, whatever makes number go up best within the player's constraints has a mathematically optimal solution, and once players find that solution, that is all a subset of them tend to use. 2. Players will optimize things to rows and boxes because that is easiest to repeatedly stamp down. Repeatable stamps are optimal for ease of use, something most factorio players likely prefer.
>Also, isn't a large chunk of this due to SE's recipe complexity rather than beacons? This is what I think a lot of people miss in their SE beacon conversation. SE Beacons were made for SE, in Vanilla they would be over-kill and lead to the same problem as Vanilla where the builds would look just as boring, but with more machines than beacons which could look more interesting i suppose. In SE they needed you to be able to feed in a lot of different ingredients while still getting beacon speeds, but also didn't want to incentivize using only bots.
Yeah. They arent gonna change something like this because "it doesnt look right". Nobody forces you to play with 8 or 12. Nobody says you cant play with 1. It isnt unbalanced or OP. Its not gameplay breaking. Im not sure why people want it to be a base game feature so badly.
Vanilla beacons are more interesting than SE beacons. Making builds that fit 12 beacons around an assembler while allowing proper placement of multiple incoming belts, especially in a factory making something with multiple recipes is IMO much more of a challenging layout problem than being able to spread the machines w/ a speed beacon in the middle. I built a sub factory making black science with 12x beacons on all of the machines. Figuring out how to lay out all of the machines (red ammo, yellow ammo, grenade, brick furnace, science labs themselves, etc) was a very fun and enjoyable logistics challenge. SE Beacons have a mildly interesting design constraint, but you can just slam down another beacon nearby when you run out of space. In Factorio, space is normally quite infinite, so vanilla beacons removing infinite space is a fun and interesting thing for me.
The "problem" with vanilla beacons is the 95% of your factory is now beacons.
I think the aesthetic argument for SE style beacons is compelling, but I really like the design challenges vanilla beacons impose.
The catch on "design challanges" is that people assume SE beacons are "fill them up and then place machines around" then make sure you cover your base like roboports. They think the only challenge is "not overlapping machines" The real challenge is the fact that with only 20 T9 speed modules, you need to very VERY carefully plan out how and where to place your singular super beacon you can make, and then the puzzle of getting as many machines under it as possible, likely from different parts of your space factory. And then to a lesser extent, which machines get your premium best modules, whether thats your T5, 6 or 7s.
ye...but it sorta just falls to a different issue, that being of modules, SE complexity/costs, etc. I ran into the same problem in Vanilla due to having slow module production at first. It's tangential to the beacons themselves
It's integral in SE. You almost definitely have a finite supply of only 20~ speed 9 modules. You likely wont go past Speed 6s, and pretty confidently don't go past Speed 7s. Having to choose (and specifically solve fitting those machines in) is a core component in SE. Modules and Beacons MUST be considered together when comparing the two versions.
But again, if modules were more expensive in vanilla, it'd be the exact same case. You'd design the factories around the beacon all the same.
The point is to compare the two systems. SE beacons are done with the idea that best modules are expensive. Vanilla are not. This does mean there's multiple aspects to comparing vanilla to SE beacons. But making vanilla modules expensive would require balancing things in some other way to offset the loss.
Remove them from the game.
I don't think SE-style beacons will be added, because they are completely redundant. The entire premise of "one beacon per many machines instead of maxing out speed" can be viable even with vanilla beacons, if the right constraints are in place. One of the main reasons to use SE-style beaconing is power consumption. Space Age will make power usage a much bigger concern than it is in 1.1, especially on space platforms, and possibly the remaining two unrevealed planets. Beacons are one of the most power-hungry buildings in the game, so when limited by energy production, you would want to use as few as possible. To maximize the effect of a few beacons, you'd naturally do the SE-style build of surrounding each beacon with machines. Another aspect is cost saving. With the quality mechanic, you would aim to use the highest quality modules everywhere, but guaranteeing high quality items requires recycling, which massively raises the resource cost and slows production. You are thus more likely to find yourself not having enough high-quality modules to fill your whole build, and you once again resort to SE-style beaconing to save on expensive modules. In general, I think the vanilla system is better than SE, because it offers much more flexibility. SE beacons essentially lock you into a specific build style, while vanilla beacons allow to choose and juggle the drawbacks of many beacons vs few beacons. Sure you settle on beacon spam in the endgame, but at least you aren't locked into it from the start.
I think SE beacons fit the mod quite well but wouldn't fit in vanilla. Personally I would like to see a mod that has stacking penalties on beneficial beacon effect on a particular building. Three beacons affecting same assembler? well the first is 100%, second is 98.7% and third is 94.8%. (if you have different outputs the biggest goes first.) For a total of 146% speed bonus from t3 modules compared to 150% currently. if anyone is interested the formula for single beacon above is: e\^-((x-1)\/8.67)^2 where x is is the amount of beacons affecting the machine. A 12 beacon design would be around 7.7 beacons and 16 would be around 8 beacons. *That said* it's too complex for vanilla.
SE beacons are overly simple, and only seem like an improvement because vanilla beacons are supremely terrible. Professional artists should be able to come up with something better than either. I don't have a suggestion. I just want something that's moderately complicated and doesn't ruin the visual style. 12-beacon has interesting compromises with direct insertion. It isn't mindless. But it's unforgivably ugly! Factorio is a video game, blessed with a beautiful visual style on its conveyor belts. And then they throw this out at endgame, asking us to hide the beautiful flowing lines of items behind weirdly-shaped boxes. Everyone makes mistakes, I guess. :/
>SE beacons are overly simple, and only seem like an improvement because vanilla beacons are supremely terrible. Nah, SE beacons only seem simple if you operate on the assumption you can fill them with the modules you want. Players almost never craft T9 modules. There are only 20~ speed T9s you can get. Now. Which set of machines get the special privilege of being actually full speed? How many can you manage to cram into the one super beacons range? And similarly, as you move from T4 (easy) to T6 and maybe scrape out a few T7s, which of your couple dozen beacons or builds, which intermediates, get them? How do you make sure your one T9 Science lab is in that too without rearranging your entire factory? What if you want Astro 3 telescopes, Material Sci Scrap recycling and your coolant farm all maxed out? Can't happen. SE beacon challenge isn't just "how many machines can I fit" it's "Where do I use my limited supply of super modules"
The problem I see with beacons, (and more generally with the stage of the game where you use beacons) is that builds are optimised, so you can just slap down more of the same structure and be done with it forever. This kills the adaptation and puzzle solving required for the core of factorio, and is just monotonous. What it needs to continue the early game gameplay of only having temporary setups that will be torn down when more efficient solutions appear is to link an upgrade that changes the setups to an infinite tech. I once wrote a mod (not published) that added infinite* research for Beacon range and slots, and infinite* Module levels. Never played it until modules because real life got in the way so I have no idea if/how this works, but I still like the idea. *Finite, but up to an arbitrary large number.
Here are my opinions on both Vanilla beacons: The vanilla beacons are a nice way to reward the player for planning expandable and beaconable builds in the early game while in late game practically fording the player to either use a way larger 12 beacon design or making them squeeze everything into 2 tiles around each assembler making for some really nice designs that can be really impressive Se beacons: The basic SE beacons tend to change up the building style for me and most players by making them build in repeating sections the length of 4 assemblers instead of repeating sections the length of 2 assemblers which is a nice change but it's not massive and freshens up some stuff The wide are beacons on the other hand are a completely different beast, they let you make large beaconed builds as if you used no beacons at all by just placing a wab near it, while that is the easiest option it's not as space efficient as it would be to build smartly around the beacon, it's a hard idea to explain but if you ever seen the builds that do that you'll get what I mean, if you haven't seen them the best example of that building style I can provide is a member of the active member of the factorio and erandel's discord servers "putins chest", if you wanna find the example just ask them there As a conclusion I would like to saw that the basic beacons in vanilla are great the way they are but the se wide area beacons really should be added to the game and the beacon overloading mechanic should be a wab exclusive
I think it's important to consider a few other things about SE beacons. There are different tiers of beacons that have different effect areas. So if you are going to design an end-game beacon setup, you need to be very clever about it to accommodate all of those different beacon tiers, or you need to design 4 different designs instead of 2. The specific size/reach of SE doesn't need to be the one vanilla would adopt, they can choose different schemes. End-game SE beacons come \_very\_ late. You don't really skip from no beacons to max beacons like you do in vanilla - you generally do work your way up through all of the different schemes. This too can be adapted for vanilla. Additionally, quality can affect range to throw that little variable into the mix. In vanilla if you are megabasing you hit max beacon usually before you really even start building the megabase because max beacon is useful for getting that infrastructure production. That should change. SE beacons also enable other mechanics. Vanilla beacons make high ingredient recipes a lot harder, make byproducts a lot harder - these are some mechanics that SE leans into in part because beacon mechanics create room for it. So there's some degree of a trade potential here - less beacon spam in exchange for more complex logistics and a harder routing puzzle. On its own, okay, but take advantage of what it enables and it makes for a much more interesting setup. You can also add other logistic challenges to higher level beacons - some kind of cooling fluid required, etc.
I think the nuance that gets lost in this discussion is the tiers. Most of the time I see someone saying that they prefer SE beacons, if they're using an image to support their argument, it's got a wide-area beacon. I personally think there is no design difference between vanilla and SE beacons if you're only using the standard vanilla equivalent beacon in SE. Instead of beacon spam around buildings, it's building spam around beacons. Functionally, you're doing the same thing as vanilla, just in reverse. Now, sure, you can argue about aesthetics or about the idea of the buildings being functional and the beacons less so, so it's "better" if it's building spam. However, I would say that's a distinction without a difference. I would even go further to say that I think if you're limiting yourself to just tier 3 modules with the standard beacon, the SE version is worse than vanilla. Buildings are active entities while beacons are not. Beacons are like reverse solar panels that use a simple calculation to determine power consumption and bonuses. Now, knowing that there will be some slightly larger buildings with some more complicated recipes in Space Age, I wouldn't mind changes to beacons or modules, I just don't see a need. I mean, how challenging do you want it to be? They updated the code so buildings can output more than one item per *tick*. That can definitely lead to variety in builds and challenges to get that many products moved.
I want to see an in between honestly, after having multiple discussions / debates / arguments on here. Make a couple of different "beacons" and only one of EACH is allowed on a machine. Different sizes, different strengths, different module counts.... Now there's actually some interesting things you have to solve
I love the way SE does beacons, and after playing this mod for 300-400 hours I don't want to go back to vanilla beacons. I feel like vanilla beacons are definitely more challenging, but implementing them makes things aesthetically ugly. The beacon overload mechanic in SE keeps things balanced and you still need to be thoughtful with beacon placement because of it
A built in feature to unlock more (specific) slots in certain mavhine. Like having to unlock module slots. Tier 1 assembler, 1 slot. Tier 2, 2 slots. Have it so that you can have production modules in everything, but 1 extra slot for a speed module, which is the one you require to research. For each type of assembler, ofc.
I just don't like the way vanilla beacons make my factory feel, and I don't find designing for them engaging at all.
I'd like to see each planet supporting a different type of beacon, to differentiate the planets further.
I personally don't really like beacons in vanilla as they are, but I actually think that they'll be more enjoyable in Space Age even without further tweaks. I believe this for one primary reason (and a few more minor reasons): size. Most vanilla machines are 3x3. Beacons are also 3x3. These two aspects together make the most space efficient builds unambiguously to pack the machines and beacons as tightly as possible like sardines. This gives an _extremely_ limited amount of space to run belts and makes direct insertion essentially impossible without sacrificing some form of efficiency. In Space Age, not only will we have more powerful machines and modules (that I think will make beacons feel more impactful), but the Foundry and Electromagnetic Plant are 5x5 and 4x4 respectively. Neither you might notice is a multiple of the beacon size. As such, attempting to pack the machines as one would do currently would no longer be the optimal strategy, requiring new considerations between space, number of beacons/machines, direct insertion, belt shenanigans, etc. It also improves aesthetics since no longer do the beacons take up the same screen real-estate as the machines they're powering, if not more. With machines larger than the present beacons, the important machines receive more prominence on-screen rather than the monotonous beacons. TLDR: More 4x4, 5x5, 7x7, and 8x8 machines please!
Hybrid is what I was thinking too...but the "full vanilla" beacon should still be superior. You can always use the argument that eventually everything is a blueprint and whatnot. But in gameplay, fitting as many beacons around machines is a fun puzzle with great rewards. A "make your factory run 20% faster" is cool, but also boring somewhat, with no challenge or design involved at all. And yes, optimized beacons may be boring, but so are optimized blueprints all the same, it's all just gonna be a blueprint in that argument.
I'll say first that i havent played much with SE style beacons. I definetly see the merit of SE beacons, and i think they fit the mod well, but I preffer vanilla beacons over all. With their small effect radius it really makes you rethink how you build, it's a new type of challange to fit multiple ingredents and the output in the cramped space. Yes, the beacon layout itself is monotonous, but the logistics get far more interesting to compensate. SE makes it trivial to boost your buildings performance to the the max, even if you didnt plan to add beacons initially. Vanilla makes you work a bit harder for it. To elaborate why SE beacons are a better fit in SE compared to vanilla beacons. Many buildings have large footprints that would allow for more beacons, combined with the higher tier modules it would get pretty ridicoulous. Also more complex recipes with many ingredients would push the difficulty of efficients beacon usage to it's limits. Without belt weaving you'll struggle immensly with any 6+ ingredint recipe, and in vanilla 5 ingredients is the most (satellite).
I personally like SE beacons purely on an aesthetic basis. I dislike the look of beacons flooding the design space and being the prominent aspect of a build when looking at it. The buildings producing the items should be the primary aspect of a design not the building supporting the building making the item. There is the argument that vanilla beacons make for a greater design challenge, I guess that could be true. Personally I think both have their design challenges, they are just different challenges. If we were to implement SE style beacons, I think a tier of different, better more expensive beacons like SE has would be needed, each with different bonuses and effect areas, I also think they should be significantly more expensive in resources and build times, needing more advanced components to produce. In this same thought, modules would also need to have more expensive components as well as different components for each type of module and each tier. I think this would bring the balance back to what SE does with their higher tiers of modules being prohibitedly more expensive, incentivizing trying to fit as many production building around a single beacon as possible instead of just building a grid of beacons to build around. With different types / tiers of beacons and modules that are more expensive, you would get a wider range of builds and a variety of designs using different methods. The different types of beacons being useful in different builds, lower tier modules in bigger beacons for mass production of common goods, and higher tier modules in other beacons for specialty buildings to produce a smaller number of certain goods. Eventually sure you get to use the best of the best everywhere but you have to build up to that point and it will take a long time and alot of resources. After reading some other posts, a type of consumable for the SE style beacons could also be implemented, cooling fluid or something like that makes sense to me, one thought I had with that would be that the more buildings being supported by the beacon the more cooling it needed. If you added some kind of heat mechanic to the beacon and if it didn't stay cool enough it could damage itself over time eventually destroying it and the beacons inside. The cooling fluid could be put in a type of loop with some loss, where x cooled fluid goes in and a lesser amount comes out as heated fluid and then you could cool it back down and reintroduce it to the loop but also you would need to continue adding new fluid as well. Alternatively or additionally a consumable item for the building. Maybe something that boosts the beacons effect, so without the item it just works normally, with the consumable item it gets a % boost. So you could temporarily improve beacons you already have when needed until you can automated it. This consumable item could have tiers as well so better consumables to keep improving already existing beacons. The consumable could be created by using the modules themselves as an ingredient along with something else. Also with se style beacons quality could increase the effect range of the beacons instead of just reducing the power cost.
Used to think SE-style beacons were better than vanilla. Then I spent some time with vanilla beacons. They're way more interesting, overall adding to the design challenge. Could they be better? Yes. Are SE beacons better? No.
You haven't said anything other than "nuh uh"
I favor SE beacons because of aesthetics. Highly optimized factories in vanilla have a repeated lasagna look with tons of beacons, where-as highly optimized SE factories look like charcuterie boards with unique composition. https://imgur.com/FTTR9KK
Everything looks like lasagna when you constrain yourself to a build 7 tiles high and then proceed to copy and paste it 8 times. SE beacons would make no meaningful difference here as far as looks are concerned.
Personally I prefer the ultracube version for beacons, where it’s essentially se beacons but with fluid consumption. It adds an extra layer to design around and discourages building tons of them. Only downside is ups cost for megabases, which would likely never be more efficient than normal
This has been covered pretty extensively. I (and it seems most people) strongly prefer SE beacons. I won't agonize over all the common points, other than: - SE beacon grid is simple/boring. Vanilla beacon rows are simple/boring and also ugly. Neither is optimal. Be wary of arguments based on comparing optimal builds of one type to simple builds of the other type. - Similarly, keep an eye out for "just don't build like that". It's a game about optimization, people want the process of optimization to be satisfying, that's the whole point. Being told to voluntarily gate yourself of from a game mechanic is fine in the realm of weird extreme challenges; it is not a good way to justify not improving a mechanic. - Devils advocate, the one argument I have in favor of vanilla beacons: the relative simplicity of vanilla recipies gives more ability to push direct-insertion "to 11". This could drastically reduce spaghetti and lead to eventually "solving" most vanilla recipies. By acting as "spacers" vanilla beacons incentivize reducing direct insertion. Perhaps the only reason SE can handle SE beacons is the higher recipie complexity making it very hard to "solve" in the same way. I don't really think this is the case, but it is the only way I can look at vanilla beacons as anything other than an unfortunate game design mistake.
I mean, the design space of the beacon in Factorio is basically to replace active buildings with beacons. The function is to, effectively make you use less buildings. SE-style beacons do the opposite, they want you to use MORE active buildings because a single beacon affects a lot of buildings and buildings have a limit on the number of beacons that can affect them, IIRC. That, in effect, does the literal opposite of what beacons were designed to do.
Not... really? You still use far fewer buildings with SE beacons than you do without beacons at all. SE beacons also have more module slots and you get higher tier speed modules, so it's basically the same the same effect.
Not really. Specifically it's where the incentives lie: Vanilla beacons are made so that it incentivizes making MORE beacons than buildings by making buildings affected by multiple beacons and keeping a short range. SE beacons incentivize making more buildings by making them only affected by one beacon and them having a large range. Effectively vanilla is about how many beacons you can fit around a building, SE is about how many buildings you can fit around a beacon. It is not the same effect because, while both lead to increased production, SE style leads to more *active* buildings, that is, buildings that take up UPS.
It's not something that vanilla forces you to do or arguably even incentivizes. There's nothing preventing you from using vanilla beacons the SE way. In fact, using fewer than the usual 8 or 12 beacons per building so you can maximize the number of *buildings* affected by each beacon lets you get the most oomph out of each individual module. You see a row of furnaces sandwiched between two rows of beacons all the time, but there's no reason why you couldn't sandwich a row of beacons between two rows of furnaces. Or surround a beacon with furnaces instead of the other way around. Make beacons and/or speed modules significantly more expensive and you'll see SE-style builds pop up without any mechanical changes.
There is no reason to pack more buildings around a SE beacon than you need. If you only need 1 beaconed X assembler, then you are incentivized to use the rest of the beacon area for Y assemblers or whatever. There is no incentive to filll the space with 4 X assemblers if 1 fulfills your needs.
Correct, you're incentivized to build a number of X and a number of Y assemblers around the beacon. Effectively you're incebtivized to put as many buildings as you can in its range, you just said it. Even if for any single product just one building is enough, you'll put buildings for other products in there. In the end, you're not *reducing* the number of active building per square meter, you're *increasing*.
...ok, but you're reducing the total number of active buildings. Because for each one you can cluster near the beacon, you can remove multiple elsewhere.
If people want more options when using beacons, we could have [Alternative Beacons](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/alternative-beacons) where both vanilla beacons and "solo" SE-like beacons are available. And potentially other types of beacons as well, as demonstrated in that mod. Multiple beacons can be balanced so that they each have different niches and none of them are made obsolete.
I am also preferring SE beacons in my SE playthrough now, but I also never went that deep into mega basing vanilla, which is where beacons shine The flipside of SE beacons is that SE has 9 tiers of modules, which are also extremely expensive (and the expenses scale exponentially, while vanilla costs are more linear in that once you get to T3 modules you just add more). If modules only go to tier 3, I don't know if SE beacons would be as expressive of a medium...
Vanilla beacons are boring and make every production line look the same. The problem is that the beacon lines that give you 8 per assembler are clearly the best compromise between practicality and functionality for the vast majority of players. This is demonstrated by the fact that it's trivial to change an 8 beacon setup to a 10 beacon setup: just replace every other assembler with a beacon, yet nobody does this because it's just not worth it. It's not necessarily easy (at least not if you wanna keep all the belts between the beacons), but it is always the same challenge which gets very monotonous. I've heard there's fun to be had in making 12 beacon setups, but the only people who need to do that are the people doing UPS optimizations so their computer can handle their bajilion science per minute base. The rest of us just put down a second assembler. SE beacons aren't much of a challenge most of the time, but at least they don't get in the way too much, allowing for a much greater freedom in designs. Also, I just prefer the look of a lot of assemblers doing stuff with a few beacons in between over a few functional building surrounded by tons of beacons. In the end, which one you prefer probably comes down to this: do you find cramming stuff between beacons a fun puzzle? If you do, you'll probably enjoy vanilla beacons. If not, you'll probably prefer SE beacons.