I haven't checked, but have they done anything about my personal balancing gripe: trains vs conveyors?
Now that they have faster conveyors and stacking, they've become quite viable for moving large quantities long distances. Which is fine, but it feels like the right way to do that should be trains. My thought is that quality wagons should be able to hold a lot more and quality trains should move a lot faster, and/or fast fusion trains.
Yes. Quality boosts storage for wagons and speed for trains. Also unloading is more compact due to inserter belt side selection.
I did a 1m eSPM base though, and I don’t think the totality of all of that would bring me back to trains. Belts are extremely reliable, and I have never managed to make trains so.
Trains don't need to be optimal, they just need to be viable. The fun makes them optimal. I think the quality, speed, and belt improvements did enough to return them to this balance (but I have not played, so I can't say myself).
For complex recipe graphs beyond vanilla train routing is also way more efficient. You get to reuse the same rail network, and sometimes not have to route dedicated belts for 6 low throuput ingredients from all over the map
I feel like a lot of the challenge in early Pyanodons is place-and-route and belt congestion. Unlocking trains feels amazing. They're definitely optimal for a lot of recipes in that mod I think
I haven't played the space expansion, but from old vanilla I only used trains for bringing ores to the main base. For rare low throughout recipies the flying bots (I forget the name for them) worked well, and towards the end of the game they got pretty fast as well.
As a longtime fan of trains in games like OpenTTD, it always felt like there wasn't enough of a focus on trains. Arguably this is something that Satisfactory did slightly better, there was more reason to use them there (that game certainly has other weaknesses though, and overall I prefer Factorio).
I agree they’ll be viable. They’re much harder to use but roughly equally good.
Also my late game experience is probably not representative of the phase just after victory where trains may have a slight edge - there could be a sweet spot there where the decoupling is worth it because you can horizontally scale through bottlenecks.
By the end I was using dedicated patches for each science so trains just get in the way.
I’ve wanted the ability to hang pipe or wire along elevated rail.
The right way to do that is trains. A fully compressed, stacked belt is 960/s, but a train can easily hit that throughput as well (and even exceed it). And they are much easier to set up across long distances than belts are.
A train can easily move more than 960/s, but the train isn't always moving. To actually exceed 960/s over time with trains gets some massive stations.
And a track is two spaces, thus two belts can fit. Even just blue belts gives 1440/s for the same space.
Your first item delivers a lot faster with trains, and when you're dealing with stuff that spoils the faster transit is a big benefit, but for the most part I find trains underwhelming other than on Fulgora where you don't really have a choice.
You can also fit multiple trains in that 2-wide space, though. The flexibility of a train network is pretty powerful.