Development and Discussion

[Molay]

Kingarthur any chance you can make angel compatible with the new uranium-like ore Bob introduced? I.e. preventing it from spawning, allowing it to be refined in some way from the basic saphirite/rubyte/etc... ores? It sticks out like a sore thumb sadly.

[Zyrconia]

I've had quite a bit of fun trying to make work the disabled parts of Angel's Industries !
(AFAIK, like for Pyanodon, the idea was to get rid of dependencies on bob's mods entirely, not just for Refining...)

Yeah, don't really want that. While there is a lot of "fluff" in Bob's, I consider the ores, advanced power and the modules a must have for any play-through.

Oh yeah, I completely forgot about Bob's Electronics. That is the heart and blood of progression in B+A.

Anyway, back on topic.

It may be nostalgia, but I consider the prime B+A experience the one we had in 0.15. That is the one I would like to go back to, only updated.

0.16 was in some areas better, some new features, some better balancing, more options.

0.17 is the one last time I checked that completely broke apart, with things no longer being properly integrated.

What I would like to see is:
- A fully integrated Angel's Refining, supporting all the necessary ores for electronics and science.
- Smelting options for all of them. (this is pretty much done)
- A good balance pass on wooden boards, paper, farming, algae.
- A trimming pass: there are just a bit too any buildings.

With these I feel like Angel's would be up for Factorio version 1.0.

[BlueTemplar]

So, what did you find wrong with 0.16 ?

[ukezi]

So, what did you find wrong with 0.16 ?

Also for 0.17
For me the balancing in Bio is not good at all. Some of the recipes are atrociously slow in comparison (especially the wooden boards), the tiers are not enough better for how complicated they are. Some variants are just plain better then others.

[Zyrconia]

So, what did you find wrong with 0.16 ?

Balancing vs. complexity was in many places seriously off.

Some early game (pre-blue science, which is incredibly "hard" to get in a fully automated and sustainable way, but there are some good temporary shortcuts that will last you hours) was also off.

Sorry, my memory is not good enough to tell of the top of my head what was wrong, but wooden boards, algae (to a higher degree) in general and even iron production on a death world were off.

I'm not saying things were that bad, but sometimes you would end up with a "mini" mega base just to feed solar panels and ammo, where 75% of the megabase was boards related stuff. This is particularly hard to pinpoint since if I remember correctly, 0.16 greatly improved some recipes related to wooden boards while introducing other which were not worth it.

And when it came to farming, we had 3 tech trees, like desert, temperate and something else, and only one was balanced.

The next time I play test, I'm going to build a setup that has 6-10 low tier assemblers, all consuming a constant but relatively low amount of BEBs and I'm 99% sure the setup will be unreasonably large for the wooden boards and this only if you use the best of Bioprocessing, the recipes with the best yield. Compared to the wooden boards, the rest is just fine. But if you go with Bob's Greenhouses, which I like to avoid, since we are playing Angel's after all, getting that wood becomes exponentially easier.

I think I still have a 0.16 install somewhere and can double check my memory vs. existing bases.

And I'm installing 0.17 right now to play test some stuff...

[Zyrconia]

Started my playtesting.

First question: with bob's on, what should we do about thorium? I did not play with Thorium before so I'm not sure how big its impact is.

Is it OK if we mine for it instead of refining?

[BlueTemplar]

I didn't get to the point when I can use thorium yet in my 0.16 games. I've enabled it as a ground ore in BobDiggity, but for even more ore variety (as well as sulphur, cobalt, &c.)

Sorry, my memory is not good enough to tell of the top of my head what was wrong, but wooden boards, algae (to a higher degree) in general and even iron production on a death world were off.

I can only think about the sorting trap where basic smelting after sorting is worse than direct smelting.
Maybe this is about angel disabling bob's cheap steel smelting ?

The next time I play test, I'm going to build a setup that has 6-10 low tier assemblers, all consuming a constant but relatively low amount of BEBs and I'm 99% sure the setup will be unreasonably large for the wooden boards and this only if you use the best of Bioprocessing, the recipes with the best yield.

Uh, I have a different experience, in 0.16 trees are IMHO a bit too good compared to farming/paper. (And in Sea Block - which might have different balance though - I got to high tech science powering my whole base on a single tree !)

And when it came to farming, we had 3 tech trees, like desert, temperate and something else, and only one was balanced.

And swamp. I've helmoded them quite a bit, and I don't remember any of them feel completely useless ? (Of course, with so many of them, some are likely to end up better than others !) The biter crystal powder on the other hand...

[ukezi]

Regarding seablocks, trees were strong in 0.16 but the introduction of the saw blades in 0.17 nerfed that hard enough for power. Now it's only the way to make wooden boards because the algae way is gigantic.

[danyax]

Any chance Angels pack will be updated to 0.18? Or we have to stay with 0.17 client?

[Dregre]

Any chance Angels pack will be updated to 0.18? Or we have to stay with 0.17 client?

Give it time. There's definitely a few changes that broke things from my own quick and dirty attempt at updating it. For now, stay at 0.17 and check on the mod page for when an update comes out.

[Molay]

Are you sure the mod is in the process of being updated? I think Angel is now living the fatherly life of lack-of-sleep and lack-of-time, and I'm really not sure who is now in charge. There's mentions here and there of people having access to the mod, but I've yet to see any changes or improvements being made. I hope Angel's is not left to die, it was the greatest mod for me. But I'm really unclear as to what the current situation even is. Can someone elaborate as to what we can expect? Is someone continuing minimal-maintenance, to keep the mod working as factorio is updated? Is someone working on overhauling the bio part of Angels to be a bit more in tune with the rest? Is someone working on incorporating Bobs new additions as they come, most aggravating being the giant Thorium Ore patches we are now getting?

The thorium, which has been in it for months and never fixed, leads me to believe Angels is no longer maintained at all, and I suspect nobody has really been put in charge to do anything? It seems disordered, as to what is the future of the mod. Some clarity might help the community understand what is going on, and perhaps clarity could also help those in charge now to realize they are allowed to make changes and improvements? Feels like Angel's is in limbo

[kingarthur]

Are you sure the mod is in the process of being updated? I think Angel is now living the fatherly life of lack-of-sleep and lack-of-time, and I'm really not sure who is now in charge. There's mentions here and there of people having access to the mod, but I've yet to see any changes or improvements being made. I hope Angel's is not left to die, it was the greatest mod for me. But I'm really unclear as to what the current situation even is. Can someone elaborate as to what we can expect? Is someone continuing minimal-maintenance, to keep the mod working as factorio is updated? Is someone working on overhauling the bio part of Angels to be a bit more in tune with the rest? Is someone working on incorporating Bobs new additions as they come, most aggravating being the giant Thorium Ore patches we are now getting?

The thorium, which has been in it for months and never fixed, leads me to believe Angels is no longer maintained at all, and I suspect nobody has really been put in charge to do anything? It seems disordered, as to what is the future of the mod. Some clarity might help the community understand what is going on, and perhaps clarity could also help those in charge now to realize they are allowed to make changes and improvements? Feels like Angel's is in limbo

literally currently talking to him at the time of posting. i have plans and i cant speak for the others its not dead and itll get its needed attention soon now that hes getting us all setup to keep doing work going forward

[valneq]

literally currently talking to him at the time of posting. i have plans and i cant speak for the others its not dead and itll get its needed attention soon now that hes getting us all setup to keep doing work going forward

This is great news!

[Boeng01]

This is definetely good news, thanks for the response.

[Molay]

Thanks kingarthur! The lack of information while things are not yet decided is understandable. I'm happy to hear there's talk going on behind the scenes, and that the mods future development is indeed a certainty just needing some final coordination.

Thank you. Please keep us in the loop when things are sorted out if you don't mind

Cheers

[evandy]

literally currently talking to him at the time of posting. i have plans and i cant speak for the others its not dead and itll get its needed attention soon now that hes getting us all setup to keep doing work going forward

This is great news!

Concur! The lack of info that things were in work behind the scenes was worrisome. Thank you for sharing

[lovely_santa]

Thanks kingarthur! The lack of information while things are not yet decided is understandable. I'm happy to hear there's talk going on behind the scenes, and that the mods future development is indeed a certainty just needing some final coordination.

Thank you. Please keep us in the loop when things are sorted out if you don't mind

Cheers

As a result of the discussions last night:

Arch666Angel is still in charge of his mods, but due to IRL he won't be actively working on them anymore (at least for now, until further notice). Instead, we (elaborated later in this post) keep these mods community driven. This means that we're open for suggestions, changes, pointing out bugs from the community, this happens in the usual place: the usual forum thread or create an issue on the github page. You can also find us on discord.

The mods themselves will be updated by us, meaning Angel himself when he feels like it, together with kingarthur, pezzawinkle, thevirtualcrew and me (lovely_santa). We have permissions to push to his github and on the mod portal.

I hope this clears things up for everyone, and yes, we are working on making it compatible with 0.18 as we speak, you can always check our progress on github if you're in doubt about what we're doing with the mods or where progress is leading to.

Kind regards
lovely_santa

[Molay]

That is fantastic news! I believe I'm speaking for many more than myself when I say we're eagerly looking forward towards the update and the other work you guys are doing to keep this mod alive.

Best of luck to the four of you, and courage to Angel who's facing the challenges of fatherhood

Cheers

[tpatm]

Yeah this is one of the extremely rare occations I'd like to press a like button on the internet

[danyax]

Yeah this is one of the extremely rare occations I'd like to press a like button on the internet

Same for me, i have less than 10 posts on forum but more than 3000 hours on A&B. Can’t imagine factorio without Angel mods and level of depth it brings. Thanks to the brave team of supporters!