Landfill needs a change. 20 Stone for 1 tile? Ridiculous!

[Mur]

Isn't the whole point of this forum to talk about balance? Yes I understand -I- Can mod the game but if I can show that the end values are crazy high the devs can understand that their values can be tweaked and it will be better in the end.

[gabberworld]

if we talk about landfill vs water then in reality water wins, so i think 20 stones for landfill is a cheap price,

that's what i think about balance for landfill

[5thHorseman]

Isn't the whole point of this forum to talk about balance? Yes I understand -I- Can mod the game but if I can show that the end values are crazy high the devs can understand that their values can be tweaked and it will be better in the end.

Absolutely. You and I disagree on what the correct number is, and the developers and I agree.

I flat out do not think that making a landfill cheaper is a good move. I'd be more comfortable with it being more expensive seeing as you can get hundreds of stone from a single land tile and not even use that land up.

[dog80]

when it is so ridicoulus why don't you already make a mod that makes this change...

[Mur]

In my opinion the whole point of the game is to fill out a puzzle. Water is a good part of that puzzle in the start but at the end I don't understand why it should be a blocker anymore. Water at the end of the game acts as a wall to the biters so actually giving us cheaper landfill makes things more difficult (gameplay wise) if we just clear away lakes.

I think that currently landfill is around 4x the price it should be because I always though of landfill as a 2x2 grid (even when you select it it shows a 2x2 grid) but it actually only fills a 1x1 grid. Changing the cost to reflect this would mean a landfill would cost 5 per which it would make my 13,000 landfill project from 260,000 stone down to 65,000 which seems super reasonable. Hell it could be a bit more than 5 per but 20 per is just way too high.

[BlueTemplar]

I always though of landfill as a 2x2 grid (even when you select it it shows a 2x2 grid) but it actually only fills a 1x1 grid.

What?
You might be confusing with how it looks like with the fancy water borders ?
(Hint : try turning the debug setting show-raw-tile-transitions on.)
(Also, you can change brush size with +/-...)

[EpicSlayer7666]

i think the problem is no one agreed on how 1 stone = in volumetric size... so this makes it quite a hard judgement. Landfill is the most costly recipe of stone, undeniable, but "What is a stone?"

depending on the resource density you play on 20 might be inexpensive or could be extreme. considering 1 brick is = 1 meter square tile and shallow water is 1/2 meter deep and deep water is 3 meter deep then, not many brick tiles worth of stone should do. takes 2 stone for one brick, making 2 stones cut in half for it, so 1 stone = 1 meter volumetric or some thing... then 4 stones would fill shallow water and 24 for deep water... things ends up rounded a lot here...

so at first glance i too feel it is ridiculous but in the end we do not know the worth of one stone's volumetric or a water tile be it shallow or deep. i put my own interpretation but others might have different ones. and to use many land fill would make it hard to do since many "states" of filled would need to exists...

the QUICK FIX is to make it 10 stones for a land fill, and a deep water becomes a shallow with 1 fill and a land fill's tile (grass_1 in 0.16) with a second. this could be done easy. (at least compared to adding like 5 states of filled water tiles and remembering their states in the save tile raising the size...)

[Oktokolo]

the QUICK FIX is to make it 10 stones for a land fill, and a deep water becomes a shallow with 1 fill and a land fill's tile (grass_1 in 0.16) with a second. this could be done easy. (at least compared to adding like 5 states of filled water tiles and remembering their states in the save tile raising the size...)

The implementation of five intermediate states would probably be the same as for the initial and final states: They woud just be tiles.
As the engine already knows how to remember tiles, the cost is in making the definitions and sprites for the new tiles and their transitions.

That said: I would use a landfill-mod wich works as proposed (deep -> shallow -> land), without changing the price of landfill (effectively doubling the price for fully filling deep water).

[EpicSlayer7666]

the QUICK FIX is to make it 10 stones for a land fill, and a deep water becomes a shallow with 1 fill and a land fill's tile (grass_1 in 0.16) with a second. this could be done easy. (at least compared to adding like 5 states of filled water tiles and remembering their states in the save tile raising the size...)

The implementation of five intermediate states would probably be the same as for the initial and final states: They woud just be tiles.
As the engine already knows how to remember tiles, the cost is in making the definitions and sprites for the new tiles and their transitions.

That said: I would use a landfill-mod wich works as proposed (deep -> shallow -> land), without changing the price of landfill (effectively doubling the price for fully filling deep water).

in that i was considering it more like if they added meta data to the tile instead of adding 5 new tiles to switch from and to in a certain order... that would be way better than meta data when i think about it. also if the OP never puts stone at maximum value, then he would naturally run out most of the time. (i run out with it at max but i excessively wall off every thing... so i start with a big square but i end up adding more walls in and out as i expand... i probably have 30% of the base made of walls! lol (would probably be less than 5% for a normal square i guess... i wall like this was a RTS...)

EDIT: also i always double on walls (2 thick at all time.)

[Oktokolo]

also if the OP never puts stone at maximum value, then he would naturally run out most of the time. (i run out with it at max but i excessively wall off every thing... so i start with a big square but i end up adding more walls in and out as i expand... i probably have 30% of the base made of walls! lol (would probably be less than 5% for a normal square i guess... i wall like this was a RTS...)

EDIT: also i always double on walls (2 thick at all time.)

I got some protips for not running out of stone without maxing the settings:
#1: Outside RedMew's Diggy scenario, you actually don't have to build walls everywhere. There are no cave-ins in vanilla (took me a while to recognize that too).
#2: Even on non-maxed settings, there almost always is more than one stone patch on the map. You just have to find it before your starter patch runs out.
#3: If a biter can chew through N tiles of stone wall, it will also happily chew through N+1 tiles of stone wall. If you make sure, that the biters can't chew though a stone wall of one tile thickness, that wall is well defended and adding more thickness is just a waste of stone. Therefore the ideal wall thickness is one (plus an empty tile behind, because larger biters have an attack range of two tiles).
#4: When not playing a Water World, you don't actually need to use any lanfill to get to space science most of the time.

[BlueTemplar]

If you use flame turrets, you need 3 tiles to be safe from fire. So 2 walls thick...
Also, 2 walls thick gives you time to react when a wall is destroyed (increase with distance).

[EpicSlayer7666]

If you use flame turrets, you need 3 tiles to be safe from fire. So 2 walls thick...
Also, 2 walls thick gives you time to react when a wall is destroyed (increase with distance).

Exactly that, time to react... with bots, you can give them walls and repair packs but before that, if your fire power is not good enough, when you find out, you get a second wall to beef up the turrets and repair... otherwise they will get in and break the more expensive stuff...

i also thought they were capable of finding open spaces to get in from but i guess the devs did not get to that on the A.I. side of things.

heck up till last month, i though Spawners absorbing pollution was the mechanics used to increase the evolution, i used to hide in trees... turns out it is right out of the machine, no matter if pollution reaches a Spawner... (i wish the lua function "on_Spawner_Pollution_Absorb()" would get exposed to us because the "on_Spawn" happens without pollution as well.)

[Zool]

What about alternative recipes that allow you to use:
- 10 stone + 10 coal
- 10 stone + 10 iron ore
- 10 stone + 10 copper ore

still realistic, and a good sink for temporary ressource unbalance (too little stone and too much copper?)

[Honktown]

Stone probably needed to be rebalanced in general. Haven't see how it affects .17 science since now you need railroads, but it was always the least-used resource, next to wood. (only ten bricks per electric furnace for what? two production packs?) Then you go to make refined concrete, and just burn through all of it.

In most games you need little to no landfill. In other games people make it the emphasis and you need all of it. Don't think there's any real way to have it both ways.

[Koub]

Stone [...] was always the least-used resource

It is, but map generation also places accorgingly less stone than the others.

[Honktown]

Stone [...] was always the least-used resource

It is, but map generation also places accorgingly less stone than the others.

Interesting, never noticed that. Maybe map generation could generate larger amounts of stone near water (if it doesn't already) to... encourage players on how to use it. Would make it a little more balanced on when it's more useful versus when it's not.

[Koub]

That's not how it works. Resources are placed. And water goes where terrain has lowest elevation, up to the level corresponding to mapgen settings.

[BlueTemplar]

I though that it was the other way around ? Or does the 0.17 algorithm make a second pass to move resources from underwater to the shore ?

[Koub]

Yeah You're right, I didn't mean it to be chronological, but it sounded that anyway.
Terrain is processed
Then water is placed logically according to geodesics
Then resources are placed, according to resource placement algorithm - and map settings, and moved if they end-up in water.
The explanations are here :
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-258

[valneq]

[…] and moved if they end-up in water.

This applies only to resource patches in starting area, according to the linked FFF. And I am pretty sure this does not happen for resources far away.

You sometimes find very small quantities of a resources next to water. This looks as if the resource patch happened to be mostly inside water, and only the resources for tiles on land are actually generated, resulting in irregulary small resource patches. This happens randomly and therefore should average out in general. But you can get very unlucky if you increase water frequency or size to extreme values. Then a single resource could become locally rare because its location happens to be in water frequently, and you need to explore quite far to actually find it. But this is a side effect of extreme settings.

Imagine having just lots of water with only small amounts of land. If all the resources were always moved from water to land, you end up with maps that consist of mainly water while the little land is largely covered with resources. The current 0.17 map generator does not do that.

And it is very good that it does not do that. The generic ore placement and the generic water placement should stay completely uncorrelated in order for the sliders to allow for control. Otherwise, the sliders have cross-effects that make them difficult to understand.

The starting area is a different story: as explained in the linked FFF, the starting area is more predictable to reduce early-game frustration.