How and When to Use
For long distances conveyor belts may be worthwhile, or if you get tired of the crazy behavior of the push carts.
Rails can have a higher throughput over the same area because each cart holds many items. If you use the packager building and load the railcars with crates it goes up even more. Since each cart holds lots of one item, it is easier to mix a stream of goods on one line but most importantly the carts don’t get backed up if there is no place to offload one of those different items on the same track. Say you have Veggie Stew and Fertilizer that need to take the same route, but your fertilizer destination is full, your fertilizer will back up the flow of stew. (Nobody wants fertilzer in their stew!) With carts they’ll keep going around the loop and the stew train will keep working and delivering even of the fertilizer is not actually able to drop anything off.
Good points about easily mixing goods, and not backing up the line. But even to mix goods, we only really need a merger logic block with the appropriate ratio to prevent excess goods from backing up.
The carrying capacity of carts can be crazy high, especially since they take no time to load or unload – not only you can mix and match recources, but with enough cars you can be 5-10x more efficient than belts. They pair well with silos, e.g. a farm chutes grapes and sugar into two silos, grapes and sugar are transported into silos next to a kitchen and are belted into the kitchen – if the farm and kitchen are fully staffed you get a lot of jam. Add another farm adjecent to the rail with tomatoes, carrots and potatoes and you get vegetable stew. Add two barns near the kitchen to store sugar, grapes, tomatoes, potatoes and carrots – > in the end you get a set up with 5 different basic foods and 2 gourmet foods, all functioning with a single two-space-wide, cheap rail with carts. Same could be applied to trains.
Yes, you can do everything with belts only and if that’s what is fun for you, then by all means continue to play the game the way that’s fun for you.
I find not current use, they are slower, due to not getting any road bonus. They last n9ot long enough until better tech replaces them, and I have not yet figured out how to “guide” them when empty. at leats if I could ake multiple factories deliver to the kitchen they might have use.
Btw. I think the same can be said about boat transport – you can do it with belts if you want to.