In regard to megabases, which will provide the best throughput?
And which will provide the best game performance?
#Robots vs Belts - Throughput and performance
muted zephyr
safe radish
Robots have best per tile throughput. Belts have the best performance per unit throughput.
This is because belts simplify the calculations for moving a lot of products on a single transport lane while each active robot needs to be updated individually. 1 transport lane being updated can move 22.5 items per second over potentially infinite distance at the complexity of O(1). With robots, each robot needs to be update and can only move up to 4 (or was it 3?) items per trip needing O(N) robots to achive 22.5 items per second where N is a factor of distance.
Robots work very well for high throughput over very short distances. I think at least 1 super science megabase heavily uses robots. As soon as the distances are no longer a few tiles, belts easilly win out performance wise.
muted zephyr
This is exactly the detailed answer I wanted, thank you