Questions regarding design decisions

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ray4ever
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Questions regarding design decisions

Post by ray4ever »

While I was playing factorio yesterday (and was thinking about gameplay balance) it came to my mind that it is currently somewhat "hard" to give balancing feedback to some aspects of the game as I'm not sure about the design philosophy of the devs regarding certain aspects. Mainly I have two questions:

1. Are "easy" production chains wanted?
As of now I'm not sure if the devs want to go for "odd" relative production values meaning that you will always produce more or a little bit less than necessary for a perfect fit (electric mining drills are a tiny bit to slow to fully saturate a electric furnace for example) or if they want to have clear chains like in the Anno series (3 copper cable assemblers for 2 circuit assemblers). Or is it suppose to be mixture between these two design philosophies?

2. In what situations are inserters, belts, logistic bots and trains supposed to be used for transportation?
While it is somewhat clear that inserters are "best" if you have to transfer one good from one assembler to the other it is not completely clear when the other transportation types are supposed to be used. Especially when to you prefer belts over logistic bots? Or do you expect that belts are replaced in the mid/late game with logistic bots?

Maybe some of you (or even a dev) have some more insight on these topics.

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ssilk
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Re: Questions regarding design decisions

Post by ssilk »

To #1: we hat that discussion lately: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=2679

Some things are very "even". But the pure mass of recipes results in small shiftings or latest, when you use modules, the whole balance shifts.

To #2: this is a difficult question. There is a wiki-article https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... ch_case%3F
But in every new version that changes a bit. I think the first part of the article hits it best.
But nowadays I would say:

- belts for everything within 200-400 tiles (1-2 radar size) and for continuous mass transports, like the smelting, mining etc, because they are so cheap. You need to think in parallelization when you want to do mass transports with them (parallel belts). Avoid blue belts (express) because they are so expensive, use the faster belts only in dense areas, when it is really needed.

- logistic bots for complicated stuff. Bring the ingredients to the start of a production chain (which makes it by belts). Handle the above targeted "odd" values. Reduce complication. Use as train station or storage. Replacing them as flying belts is in my eyes too expensive and results in situations, where you can loose some bots, because they cannot be recharged. Bots are high tech and you can replace your whole production logistic with them, but it isn't recommended.

- trains should be used (currently) for masses of transports over longs distances. There are different philosophies how it can be done, but take in account that they need some space and it depends very strong on the settings of your game, if you really need it. But besides that I can say, trains are very fun, once they are builded. It's some kind of release, when your first transport comes in.
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syneris
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Re: Questions regarding design decisions

Post by syneris »

1) The recipes (craft time, assembler speed, quantities) are all available to the player, unlike my experiences with anno where the chains are small, specific , and usually does not have any cross-dependency. You can create a theoretical production chain to maximize the output of your factory. The problem with this is many things are produced extremely fast given the materials, causing huge chains. You'd need an extreme setup to run every end product at 100% constantly, which you could do if you choose.
So yes, chains are exact given enough precision; however, the average player will likely not run their factory at full scale. There is enough chaos brought in by the availability of resources, player preferences (bots/ammo), and others that it becomes a mixture of both philosophies except for those with the passion and patience to calculate it all. Cross-dependency of products allows trading specialization and speed for more manageable designs, but is more dependent on the logistics aspect (not talking about bots).

2) I see this as personal preference and a matter of scale. Logistics bots are great for some products with complex chains, but are too slow for others (like copper cables) unless you specialize in them and invest in large quantities (plus research). Trains are good for long distances and/or large quantities, but need a lot of space and aren't as efficient with small quantities. Belts are comparatively cheap, have more freedom than rail, and have no maintenance costs. I've been playing a game without using belts, only trains (until blue packs), and setting up even the simple chains was quite the challenge. I certainly won't take belts for granted on my next map.

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Re: Questions regarding design decisions

Post by tralala »

Given that Factorio is at least partially a puzzle game where you try to get all pieces into place there should be a perfect solution. It should be hard to reach but it should be there. There should always be an integer number of miners/smelters/assemblers to run one assembler for a specific product at full capacity. Maybe it requires a module here and there but there should be a solution. I feel that to be in the spirit of the game.

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Re: Questions regarding design decisions

Post by ssilk »

Theoretically this is correct. But practically there are the time you need to bring the things from here to the next assembly.
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