Inserter item stack size bonus

[Ninoffmaniak]

I clock around 2000 h in this game by now having 10+ 100h+ factories and played every possible combination of mods difficulties challenges and I think this is biggest balance problem with game right now.
Problem is with research inserters and robots can carry 5 items at time while picking items from belt you can do only 1 at time and as game progress you are forced more and more to stop using belts. Lets say you trying to build your green circuit factory need to build monster factory with 6 lines of express belts and and if you want everything ruining at 100% capacity you need balance belt inputs and having huge stash (50 000+) of plates so you dont get starved. Or you just spam blueprint with factory requester provider 2 inserters and pole and spray 500 robots and you all set. To that you can say but robots are expensive they cost lot of power. When you hit one size belts get more expensive more complicated taking more size are harder to balance and longer to build. Chest inserter chest inserter chest inserter setup start getting better then belts. Even with mods and super fast belts you still can only pick 1 items from belt.
Balance wise trains should be best long distance bulk cargo, robots short distance complicated recipes and extremely short distance great throughput. And belts should have place in late game not only on start.
My suggestion is set all to 1 item only give opinion for extra fast inserts belts and robots but at 10x times cost if people wont to use big expensive stuff.
Even from logic perspective 1 crane picking 5 items only from chests is weird.
ps. 2. biggest balance problem with game is once you have automated accumulator solar panel production you stop caring for power 100%. you just spam blueprints where ever you want and dont care because biters wont attack it. 10 MW 1000 MW it is same you just spam it somewhere where it will not be in way .

[ssilk]

True words.

First about solar. Yes, it is overpowered. Solar has on the long run too much advantages.
But it would loos a lot of that, if it won't work not so super reliable as now. This is my idea about it:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=6181

For me, that is the solution to this problem.


To the inserters/belts: I think we need to come from a completely different view.

My idea for that - not really concrete/complete yet - is, that we need a new game mechanics, I call it "packing/boxing".

This is in general, that you can put a number of items into something and vice versa. You may need a box or something else (or nothing) when packing and you get the packed stuff back plus the box (or something else, or nothing) when unpacking.

Now, if you put that new item on a belt, you transport much more items than yet. If then this unpacking can be done also by the assembly, and/or outputs a packed item, it would be really change many things. Now add also the idea, that those packed items cannot use the stacksize bonus. Nor can use the logistic stack bonus. That would solve also this type of problem (ok, it would open up some others)...

One more idea: There may be different forms of packing, which are more or less optimal for the type of transport you plan. I think for example, that it might be easier, to transport iron ore in pelets (100 ore = 1 pellet, 50 pelets per stack possible), instead of putting it into boxes (only 50 iron ore per box, only 10 per stack).

But that type of balancing is complex.

[bobingabout]

I think the main issue with the belts is that objects can only exist in the world as single items. In your inventory, or "Pocket" you can get 50 or 100 in the stack, but as soon as you try and put them down, you make a whole field of junk on the floor.
This could easilly have been seen in the older versions when mining a full box, the contents would "Spill" everywhere.

What if items in the world could retain a stack size? This way, when an inserter tries to pull a stack of items from a factory, and place it on the belt, it can grab a whole stack upto it's stack size limit (which is maxed out at 5 currently) and place that stack on the belt as a single object. This way, you can potentially carry 5 times as much stuff on a belt than you can now.
Though if you produce 1 at a time, you'll still end up with belts containing stacks of 1.
This can partially be "fixed" by allowing you to increase the stack size of an item in the world, if you try and place an item on top of it, the stack increases. It could then be possible for the item on the belt to have a stack of 100 if the belt had jammed for a moment, and the inserter was just placing lots of the item on the same stack.

For example, look in the changes to Terraria on the 1.2 release. Most stack sizes were increased to a limit of 999, as well as items in the world sucking into each other to create larger stacks if they were stack compatable.
I'm not sugesting they suck into each other in factorio, just that placing items on an existing item, or stack of items, will incrase it's stack.

This will of course require a little change in the world item entity object code to add a stack size for such items.



As for Solar... (looking at Ssilk's link) You make them less reliable, it just means people either make more panels, or make more accumulators to compensate for the lack of input. An accumulator bank that can power your base for a day and a half, instead of only overnight, and twice as many solar panels than needed to charge them... it's just more solar panel spam basically.
Make them more expensive, they just take longer to build. Make them give less power, again, you just build more of them, it still doesn't solve the problem.

Once you have free energy (solar) rather than powered energy (coal/fuelblocks for steam) then you'll be willing to pay more for the infinite free energy.

Other solutions:
Other types of "free" energy, like wind, or tide power, that are also unreliable would offer alternatives to solar.
Make biters choose a threat based on something other than "It's hurting me" or Polution, EG, Have a tag on the entity that says something like... "bonus_threat_rating=2" or whatever scale you want to use, therefore when the biters decide what to attack, they'll consider solar panels, or accumulators, which will fix that "They never get destroyed, so I don't need to protect them" problem.

[ssilk]

What if items in the world could retain a stack size? This way, when an inserter tries to pull a stack of items from a factory, and place it on the belt, it can grab a whole stack upto it's stack size limit (which is maxed out at 5 currently) and place that stack on the belt as a single object. This way, you can potentially carry 5 times as much stuff on a belt than you can now.

That doesn't change the gameplay. It's just bigger, faster, stronger, better than yet. Cannot be a good target.
Well, with what I want, this is of course one possible solution, and maybe for some items useful. But what I really think that it is new, is to handle also the boxes or whatever. If you ever played with oil barrels you might understand: The handling of the empty barrls becomes as important as that of the full.
But there are many, many subversions of this behavior and what I would like is, that there is an active support for that type of gaming, so that modders can try and find good ways.

This can partially be "fixed" by allowing you to increase the stack size of an item in the world, if you try and place an item on top of it, the stack increases. It could then be possible for the item on the belt to have a stack of 100 if the belt had jammed for a moment, and the inserter was just placing lots of the item on the same stack.

Also an interesting idea... I would like to see that, too.

As for Solar... (looking at Ssilk's link) You make them less reliable, it just means people either make more panels, or make more accumulators to compensate for the lack of input. An accumulator bank that can power your base for a day and a half, instead of only overnight, and twice as many solar panels than needed to charge them... it's just more solar panel spam basically.
Make them more expensive, they just take longer to build. Make them give less power, again, you just build more of them, it still doesn't solve the problem.

No, you cannot built just more solar, That is much too expensive, if you cannot estimate, how long an eclipse, or just a rainy day, may take.
You need to go to alternative energy systems then! And/Or you need to make active powerswitching: Turn unneeded power off.

Once you have free energy (solar) rather than powered energy (coal/fuelblocks for steam) then you'll be willing to pay more for the infinite free energy.

And there is nothing wrong with it...

Other types of "free" energy, like wind, or tide power, that are also unreliable would offer alternatives to solar.
Make biters choose a threat based on something other than "It's hurting me" or Polution, EG, Have a tag on the entity that says something like... "bonus_threat_rating=2" or whatever scale you want to use, therefore when the biters decide what to attack, they'll consider solar panels, or accumulators, which will fix that "They never get destroyed, so I don't need to protect them" problem.

If you have enough power/resources to build so many, you have also enough to protect that.

[Nagshell]

Hm, about orginal problem. Solution already exists - there are like 3 different Boxing mods, that let you use belts much more efficient (but robots also) and they all have different drawbacks. In short: They are like oil barrels, but for items.

About solar power issue. Problem is not about how free this energy is, it's about how plain gameplay is with them.
Smallest balance change possible is adding pollution to accumulators.

[SirRichie]

I agree Nagshell, you can fix most of the problem with mods.
However, I very much support the original case. The reason is that discussions about balancing are -to me- about the core game, that is, without any mods. The reason is that I think it is a desirable goal to build a game that is very well balanced out-of-the-box and does not to be modded for good balancing. While experienced users will probably not mind (there are mods, right?), new players or those who simply do not care about mods profit from improving on the balancing.

[Mengmoshu]

The problem with balance discussion is that there isn't any definitive model of a player and their approaches to every problem in the game.

I struggle to keep my factory powered while I'm getting enough solar panels produced to spam them in most of my play throughs. Then I struggle to get enough accumulators to stay powered through the night. Then I realize I've got 3 to 30 times the power I need all the time. But I don't care because by then I'm kept busy expanding my resource gathering because my ore patches are running out, or my oil wells have dried up, or I'm busy gathering artifacts for research, or I'm building whatever silly superproject I set out on this time, or I'm re-tooling my rail network, or...

Basically I've discovered that with my play style (and it's flaws) solar with accumulators is the only option that frees up enough of my time to do something other than manage my power system.

The other example I've got is Bentham (Mangledpork Gaming on Youtube). He usually spams efficiency modules and uses solars while trying to keep biters out of his (usually small) pollution cloud. But he also tends to only expand his power just enough to bring it back up to current demand, and then build a bunch of new power hungry production.

Kovarex and crew have a pretty formidable task ahead of them to produce something that is "balance out of the box" for even a small majority of players. It's also been my observation so far on the internet that the most likely people to speak up about balance in non-competitive games think things are too easy. So a lot of discussion starts from a proposal to make something harder. I personally find most of the difficulty in Factorio to be just right, though combat without turret creep or a maxed out powersuit is usually too hard to be fun for me.

I do agree that balance should be good for new players, and old hands can use mods to adjust the game for their play style. I do exactly that with Minecraft and Elder Scrolls games.

[SirRichie]

I agree with most things you say.
However, I think we need to make the distinction between overall and relative balance. Overall balance is what you talked about, the game being generally too hard or easy, combat being too challenging, etc.

What Ninoffmaniak meant is the relative imbalance between inserters, belts, bots, etc. The stack size of inserters creates a ridiculously high throughput when using inserters, which is just off compared to the rest of the transport methods.

[Mengmoshu]

Ah, yeah. I got distracted from the primary point of the thread (Inserters, not "free" energy).

After sleeping on it my thought is that reducing the number of inserter stack size bonuses to 2 or 3 (3 or 4 items at once), and allowing it to apply with belts and empty tiles would get the relative balance (you could call it consistency) without significantly impacting overall balance. Initially I was against letting the stack size apply to belts because it didn't match my intuitions about belts. I've actually worked around conveyor systems a bit, so I've got some preconceptions about them. On further thought there are plenty of conveyor system that don't work like the ones I used, and would reasonably allow piling/stacking.