Factorio Forums

I was playing around with poison capsules and realized that they can be used for insanely fast, cheap and simple tree removal. 1 Capsule clears a 20 tile diameter hole in a forest in under 30 seconds, with no negative effects. I believe that this is quite unbalanced, as the two more common ways to clear trees require either mid-late game bots or a flamethrower that uses tons of oil, is uncontrollable, leaves behind some random trees, damages the player and releases TONS of pollution (albeit fun).

I say the capsules should make a lot of pollution, since they are POISONESS after all. If a big biter will die while exposed to the stuff, it should do something to the environment as well. This will incentivise not just spamming hundreds of capsules on every enemy base and make their use for tree clearing less ideal. I also think that if you want players not to use the capsules and instead burn down the trees, the capsules could only take the trees down to a low health, not killing them, so the player still has to come around after and finish them off with a violent sneeze.

Great game as always! Thanks for bothering to take your fans opinions on Factorio's development. It will take the game from excellent to incrediblerific!

Grenades clear out forests pretty fast.

The first change I think would be helpful is to make it so poison capsules cause pollution. Seems pretty obvious that the biters would hate poisonous green gas even more than they hate industrial pollution.

It would also be nice if there were an upgrade for the damage. Maybe make it so upgraded poison capsules cause some amount of damage to spawners, or just make it so they last longer or do more damage per second after being upgraded.

Causing pollution would make sense flavour-wise, but I think to actually make a difference it would need to be enough to make affected spawners produce more enemies. That would make it an extremely concentrated pollution-producer compared to other stuff in the game. It also indirectly nerfs the use of poison capsules to clear trees, which is something the capsules can be good for because they won't damage nearby machines.

As far as power goes, they're already very potent against worms in the early to mid game when you're using a car or tank. That I think is their niche, they're less useful against biters and spitters, but I don't think they really need a buff.

What does the pollution help with?
Do the biters get angry at the poison mist and run into it?

I think adding pollution would help realism. If biters care about clouds of industrial byproducts, surely they should care about concentrated forms of those gases applied directly to their nests.

The indirect nerfing of using poison gas as tree removal can be balanced by making the canisters stronger with more research. Granted they are already pretty effective, but for big worms you have to throw a couple, run away, and wait a minute or so before the worm is dead. Perhaps there could be upgrades where you just need to throw one and the worm dies in a short while.

Also, if you're intentionally killing entire forests with poison gas, once again, realism demands that the tree hugging hippies should get a little angry about it.

Just to clarify, I don't want the base poison capsules to be stronger than they are. I would like it to be possible to research "poison +20%" the same way you can research "physical projectile +20%". It could affect slowdown capsules as well. Even if there aren't other weapons in the base game which take advantage of that, mods could add poison land mines, poison artillery shells, etc.