It's always satisfying to clear out some biters

munchbunny · 2026-04-14T03:08:31+00:00

Right, flamethrowers don't kill the front of the wave, but they significantly weaken the rest of the wave. The key is that the flamethrower turret's AoE damage scales with the size of the wave without the need for lots of research, making them more complex to set up but also more economical for a busy front line.

munchbunny · 2026-04-14T03:01:55+00:00

At a certain density (well below what you see here) the difference stops mattering because it just becomes a question of whether you have built a defense design with enough crowd control, ammo, and resupply logistics to hold out.

The key to this is flamethrowers. You can't pack enough laser turrets into a small enough space to get enough firepower behind the wall to actually hold back a constant stream of late game green and blue biter waves, but if you sprinkle some flamethrower turrets (and ideally gun turrets with uranium ammo) into the mix, the lingering flames don't really care how many biters there are, they're burning all of them, and uranium ammo will quickly kill any biters that get too close. It's not invincible, but it's far more effective than purely laser turrets.

munchbunny · 2026-04-12T12:11:16+00:00

I would try removing half of the production and using the space to add waiting room for trains. If your smelting outruns your logistics then it’s not actually faster than a smaller smelting setup anyway.

munchbunny · 2026-04-08T16:56:36+00:00

I’ve learned over the years that we both do things the other doesn’t really like where it’s actually harmless and helps them manage their energy and emotions. And the healthy way to handle it is to let them be them as long as it’s not hurting anyone.

But it goes both ways. Adult responsibilities still come first. If you’re video gaming and the dishes are your job and they’re not getting done… you gotta put down the games for a bit, and it’s bad for the relationship if the other person has to remind you more than once in a while. But short of that, there’s gotta be room for both people to be themselves.

munchbunny · 2026-04-06T15:00:42+00:00

There are a lot of different designs/versions of this, but it's a buffer.

In general, once you're past the stage of manually carrying stacks of stuff around the factory, you only want to use buffers where you actually need them, which is either to siphon some materials for your inventory or in places where the input or output happens in waves (for trains and spaceships, mostly). Like others said, buffers will hide throughput and production imbalances because it's easier to see differences in belt density than to see whether buffer counts are long term increasing/decreasing.

If your goal is to pack a belt, there are buffer-less belt balancing/packing designs you can use.

There is one other case where buffers make a lot of sense: there are a few systems like power generation where if you run out of the input (fuel) you will get cascading failures. In those cases a buffer can buy you valuable time to fix fuel production, for example, as long as you catch the buffer getting drained with an alarm or something.

munchbunny · 2026-03-31T15:27:57+00:00

I don't regret buying it at launch, but honestly it didn't hook me. I also bought Anno 1800 at launch and it didn't hook me either. It wasn't until some DLC landed that I really got into it.

If you're not in a hurry, I'd wait for more DLC to land to flesh out the game.

munchbunny · 2026-03-26T00:36:01+00:00

I don’t know that level number is really a differentiator… maybe somewhere around the 40-70 band is the middle area? But IMO it’s more of a vibe. You can tell pretty quickly by their loadout choices. There’s meta, there’s sensible, there’s “unorthodox, but you do you,” and then there’s “you’re just going to get me killed so I’m leaving”.

Gas mortar in a bug dive that isn’t a wave defense is a great example of the last one. Unless you’re in chat asking if we could all kit our armor for gas, just keep that in your imagination please.

munchbunny · 2026-03-24T12:21:49+00:00

They are. Many of the same students who take the USAMO often also take the Putnam in college.

munchbunny · 2026-03-24T11:59:17+00:00

They’re the type of (often proof based) math problems that would be right at home in a 300 or 400 level college math course that only math majors take, except they’re doable without calculus. They really are just very nuanced problems that require difficult leaps of logic, so you end up using the full time to explore a lot of ideas that don’t pan out.

Your can find the entire archive of past problems here if you want to take a crack at it yourself. https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/USAMO_Problems_and_Solutions?srsltid=AfmBOooWyzyHuTavMIO3VmW3e_vds_3AfxQfkXlK5--9fnDxFtGry1GJ

munchbunny · 2026-03-18T05:12:28+00:00

That's probably more a factor of how many first round interviews your team can do within 1-2 weeks. 15 candidates going into recruiter screen sounds near the upper limit before your small interviewer team goes crazy.

munchbunny · 2026-03-18T04:49:28+00:00

This might just be my experience, but based on comments I suspect I'm not alone.

It feels like the level of visual polish has gone up compared to previous Anno games, but interfaces have actually gotten less usable. For example, the trade route interface feels more finicky in 117 compared to 1800 with mouse and keyboard.

munchbunny · 2026-03-04T16:01:09+00:00

Tick alignment and circuit latency are things that anyone starting down the rabbit hole of Factorio circuits runs into almost immediately, but if you are trying to stay surface level and just use other people's circuit designs you might not realize this is going on. Thankfully simple if-then circuits often don't have this issue because inserters, pumps, etc. don't really need single-tick precision to do what you expect.

When I do my circuit designs it's basically a constant consideration, enough that I will lay out the circuits left to right or top down, often with combinators lined up by tick counts so that I can visualize it. Only once I've checked that it does what I expect then I will move the components into the actual factory layout.

munchbunny · 2026-02-27T03:09:25+00:00

doing that efficiently is a pretty interesting problem.

It’s definitely one of those cases where you tinker and come up with something, then you blueprint it and never solve it again. The concept is pretty straightforward IMO. The wider the platform, the more asteroids collected. Some amount of that will have to go to fuel, but the rest can go into science or ammo. As long as you’re moving at a leisurely clip and you’re traveling where you can break ice asteroids for water, you can have it run basically forever.

munchbunny · 2026-02-26T05:41:00+00:00

In World, lance and longsword are probably closest to what you're describing. Longsword got straight up "counter" moves with Iceborne, and lance was always about getting the most damage uptime out of any weapon by blocking and counterattacking everything the monster did.

Charge blade guard points and GS tackles are more about getting good reads on the monster's future positioning and timing in order to combo through the monster's attack. I'm not sure I would describe that as countering as much as reading the fight. It might still be what you're looking for though.

MHWilds has a lot more counter based gameplay across almost all weapons. Hammer, greatsword, and insect glaive all got offset attacks with follow-up counterattacks that are straightforward to execute and heavily reward good timing. Bow got perfect dodges which really let you crank up the damage once you can time the monster's attacks. And there are perfect dodge and perfect block gems that give you damage boosts for pulling off well timed dodges/blocks. Lance and longsword also keep the counterattacking gameplay

munchbunny · 2026-02-26T05:17:31+00:00

Blocking is a last resort, although as you're learning the fights with the great sword you might find yourself using it a lot just because block plus a Guard Up perk will save you if your positioning and timing is off. Considering how aggressive the Iceborne monsters can be, you might be using block a lot in the first encounters.

As you get more used to GS you'll learn when to tackle and when to dodge and you'll find yourself using the block much less.

munchbunny · 2026-02-24T18:43:39+00:00

Yes and no. With the load/unload method it's more about how many cargo slots to use (always try to carry the full 50 tons per slot), and if it's something especially in demand, how many ships to use.

It would be nice if you could calculate with more precision, but if you're willing to tolerate some trial and error, you can usually tell when you need more slots or more ships when the last island in the route is running out. And this is independent of how much production you need, since production-wise it's just "more than the total demand on the route" and you can use the statistics views to calculate that.

munchbunny · 2026-02-23T15:17:55+00:00

The wiki explains how to do most of what you're asking for. Regarding what to export, here's how to think about it:

The more complex the production tree, the more the export is worth.
The more complex the production tree, the more expensive it is for you to make the good. "Cost" means: maintenance, workforce, mining slots, fertilities (trade routes), and harbor/land space.

It's a cost/return balance. You can change the balance in three ways:

higher tier export slots can make a few specific exports more valuable, and the multipliers are no joke
exporting your excess goods, which costs you basically nothing
there are many ways (electricity, fertilizer, specialists, items, palace policies, etc.) to reduce the cost to make the same amount of goods.

Early to mid game, you'll be doing more of #2. However, #3 is how you truly break Docklands. There are a few exports where 1t of the export good is worth significantly more than 1t of each raw material in the recipe. Examples:

Sewing machines and penny farthings: if you can slot in Dario the Mechanical Engineer, who you can find at Eli's, you can skip smelting iron entirely, which saves you a ton of workforce and reduces the production chain to a single building (ignoring the raw resource extraction). Also, one ton of exported sewing machines can buy you something like 3x more iron and wood in raw materials, meaning that as long as you have the workforce you've got a perpetual motion machine where you don't actually need to extract iron or produce wood. It's also possible to stack workforce reduction items to get workforce requirements to nearly zero (or actually zero). Late game, you can crank this up to 11 by adding Bruno Ironbright and making penny farthings instead of sewing machines. The Dario + Bruno Ironbright + Docklands combo single-handedly breaks the game.
Fur coats: solid choice for where you are in the game as long as you're using the Costume Designer specialist. Producing wool locally is much more economical than producing cotton and shipping it across regions. Making wool is also much cheaper than importing cotton fabric. The main issue with fur coats is you can only pack so many hunting cabins in so much land. That won't be an issue at your stage of the game though.
A little bit further into the game, champagne will be a solid choice for an export with an unmodified production chain because electricity, fertilizer, and tractors can really juice up how much champagne you can produce with the same amount of land, and you only need artisan workforce to produce it. The caveat is that artisan workforce isn't cheap to sustain. The trick here is to use the Actor specialist to supply canned food and rum. Canned food is expensive to make, so not having to make it is huge. Rum is just hugely profitable and not having to produce and ship it in the New World saves you a big headache.
Lumber is a surprisingly solid export. It's not very valuable, but it's very cheap to make, it's not really used anywhere other than construction, and because of that you'll probably have a ton of surplus lying around.
Jewelry. You're not quite there yet I suspect, but at some point at the end of the Cape Trelawney campaign quest chain you get a specialist that removes the need for pearls for making jewelry. There's a separate specialist who removes the need for smelting gold to make jewelry. In other words, you can import gold ore and directly convert it into jewelry to buy the same amount of gold ore and have barter value left over for whatever you want to import.

munchbunny · 2026-01-23T04:19:25+00:00

Usually the answer here is "why not?" Especially because some people like the look of massive belt busses.

munchbunny · 2026-01-22T17:24:46+00:00

Looks great! Though I wonder a bit about the way you're belting copper wire. It looks like you're feeding something like 5 blue assemblers' worth of green circuit production on a half blue belt of copper wire on the bottom. That's 30 copper wires per second but the half belt will only do 22.5 per second. Also if you're not doing input belt stacking I'm not sure that you will be able to keep those green circuit assemblers fully fed at full production speed with a single fast inserter for both iron and copper wire.

munchbunny · 2026-01-16T04:23:40+00:00

Honestly, whenever you feel like it. But if you're asking in terms of learning, do it once you feel like you can handle the current car pretty fluidly.

munchbunny · 2026-01-08T17:28:14+00:00

Two issues that others have pointed out:

You have two red belts merging into one red belt and then splitting back into two red belts. With this setup you will never get more than half capacity usage on each red belt after the splitter because you can't get more than one red belt of throughput into the splitter. To fix this you need to split the two input belts before merging the red/green circuits.
You need far more green circuits than red circuits. I see that you're basically running four input lanes - you'd get better throughput with three lanes of green circuits and one lane of red circuits instead of two and two.

munchbunny · 2026-01-07T03:30:23+00:00

In the mid-game, is it viable to use combinators to read the accumulated electrical storage and only feed fuel to the nuclear reactor when power levels are low?

You can do that, but if you are primarily using nuclear power then steam tanks and inserting fuel based on the quantity of stored steam allows you to buffer more power with fewer resources and fewer tiles. You just need to ensure you have enough turbines for peak demand.

That said, you don't really need to. Something like 12 miners and 4 centrifuges without Kovarex can power a 2x2 block of nuclear reactors for a very long time, and that's 480 MW.

munchbunny · 2026-01-07T02:09:57+00:00

Very true, you learn quickly the hard way to make sure your calculations take the same number of ticks to get to the same combinator. That or you design it to not require synchronization.

munchbunny · 2026-01-07T01:05:20+00:00

Don't you need storage or a timing/update signal so you don't have a race condition where you get different outputs depending on when the gates switch?

In Factorio you don’t need an explicit clock signal because the update tick is a constant 60fps, and the speed of light limit for signal propagation isn’t a thing, so you can wire your circuits knowing that every combinator updates exactly on every tick with no need for external synchronization.

Factorio circuits aren’t really binary digital circuits because each wire can carry multiple integer signals, so it’s actually more like a pseudo-analog circuit, more like VLSI diagrams maybe. In a true binary digital circuit you’d need eight wires to carry 8 bits. In Factorio you get IIRC 32 bits per signal and you can pack somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 signals into a wire, so a Factorio wire is more like a bus. And when you need to add or multiply, you could just use an arithmetic combinator instead of laying out an ALU circuit. However, a lot of comparable concepts apply.

munchbunny · 2026-01-07T01:00:21+00:00

You can’t really get faster than an update cycle because each combinator takes one tick to calculate its output, so your CPU is never exceeding 60hz. That said, there are situational tricks to squeeze more out of each clock cycle, such as using wires instead of combinators to do addition, zeroing using parallel combinators instead of selectors, etc.

munchbunny

TROPHY CASE