I keep getting the suspicion that up to a certain perimeter length, regular manual repairs and refilling with ammo takes less time than the time it takes to build these sorts of self-sustained defenses. And I also usually switch to lasers ASAP to avoid needing that kind of stuff (among other reason...

Simple arrays are fantastic for running super fast code, however most objects in factorio have to be added and removed in arbitrary ways. Working through an array is fast, but adding and removing elements is slow and only gets slower as the array grows. If an exploding item simply leaves the array s...

When it comes to programming, everyone is an expert! :lol: Such is the nature of internet forums. It's easy to open up task manager, look at any CPUs not running at 100%, and cry out "Look at those empty clocks! My game can go THAT much faster!". If only optimizing code was that easy. There was a pr...

A fuel wait simply isn't a terribly important condition. Train fuel consumption isn't very high, and train refueling is extremely fast. It takes a very special setup to have a train load or unload more slowly than it can refuel. As long as your train has at least one location in its route where it c...

GPU computing does not have the same abilities as CPU computing. Each new generation gets more stuff, but if it's not up to the whole task then it won't work.

The biggest factorio chokepoint revolves around memory access performance. Running more clones of factorio.exe would only multiply the amount of memory bandwidth that your PC requires. The synchronous nature of multiplayer requires that everyone runs the exact same simulation, so you can't truly dum...

It's also fair to say that the engineer would be wearing some form of ear protection in their factory. The heavy clang clang sound of a thousand machines will add up quickly, and any engineer without earplugs will quickly find themselves in trouble. The first types of sounds to get suppressed from e...

Audible feedback is very important for situational awareness, How much situational awareness does sound really need to provide? There's nothing in the factory that can really hurt you or fail in some catastrophic way. There can be one thing or a thousand moving things, and it doesn't really change ...

I'm going to throw my vote down for keeping most sounds in the theme of being comfy background noise. Factorio is neither a dedicated action game nor a sensory melting experience. The greatest challenges come from the player sitting back and going "hmm", which doesn't mix very well with stimulating ...

I'm wondering if the belts could have unique sounds based on their contents. So for example if a belt is filled with ore it would have a sound of dirty rumbling gravel. Higher tech items might cleaner sounds like tapping metal or plastic. I'm not a sound designer so I dunno how cute or clever it wou...

Storage automatically looks for storage chests with an item filter or a matching item to combine. Buffer chests do the same except more explicit, and remain lower priority than blue chests.

I mean, by that definition Supreme Commander (2007) is also a multi-threaded RTS. The video renderer ran separately from the main sim, and there were a handful of other bits and pieces on the side. I used to comment that it was a 2.5 core game, but the big bottleneck was clearly the main sim. There'...

A gigantic ammo belt looping around the base can get pretty messy, but a mini belt to feed guns around an outpost works just fine. Just keep in mind that the pollution cost of ammo is VERY high, so simply fighting off biters will create enough pollution to spawn even more biters. It's generally bett...

It sounds like it may be fun as a collection of game scenarios. I think a similar game mode already exists, where each round requires a certain pile of resources to progress.

Threading clearly implies a well of bottomless CPU potential and infinite UPS gains, at least to the ordinary person. Unfortunately, it isn't free. There is a meta cost of supporting algorithms that is inherent to threading, and one of big advantages of modern CPUs is they are optimized to pay a low...

The problem seems pretty straight forward. If the train station maxes out and hard caps, then the pathing for any other trains will break. Broken pathing causes trains to stop. Stopped trains ruin everyone's day. When does a station decide that it's full? Is it when the trains choose the station as ...

The idea of mini scenarios sounds like a good option. A lot of problems with a traditional campaign disappear with that approach. For example, continuity between scenarios is no longer important. Each scenario is a standalone project, so having overlaps in objectives or similar puzzles is okay. A no...

A big save file is basically a pile of blueprints ripe for the picking. If none of your games actually used those BPs, were they even worth anything?

I think it'd be fine if the "continue" button changed to a "reconnect" button if multiplayer was the last game played. For bonus points, the button can have a popup showing exactly what it thinks "continue/reconnect" thinks it's supposed to do. So if it's trying to reload a game it shows the game in...

Oh hey, are we talking about campaigns? Each of the two proposed approaches have their dilemmas. A huge problem with the growing world concept is that you may pick a factory design that works well in the early constrained stages, but gets completely ruined by future map growth. For example you might...