Version 0.17.4

[CDarklock]

the amount of bugs one would expect from that setup

In 0.17?

Or are you using your 0.16 expectations?

[Asterix]

the amount of bugs one would expect from that setup

In 0.17?

Or are you using your 0.16 expectations?

Either, really: I went back to the tutorial armed with my foreknowledge of how the scenario works, and set up something about 20 times more polluting. Won without a hitch, and the waves were actually smaller.

The problem is, the tutorial doesn't base its waves on the amount of pollution, but on how close you are to winning, which means a conservative player trying to reduce pollution is going to get absolutely destroyed. Instead, you should (apparently) set up tons of (highly polluting) miner/furnace pairs. as well as chained coal miners. This results in a high throughput of base resources, that can be fed to assembly machines without needing lots of electricity (since you are using no electric miners), and doesn't affect the size or frequency of the attacks like it would in freeplay.

This has three negative effects:

- It arguably teaches the plaer the wrong lesson. "Go big soon" is not a good recipe in freeplay at the moment.
- It fails to teach players about important game mechanics (pollution and evolution).
- It makes the tutorial have the wrong slant - a horror/survival/fighting kind of strategy game rather than the unique mix Factorio actually is.

Worst of all, at the end of all this I didn't even get a sense of accomplishment. I beat the tutorial. Yay me.

[Asterix]

the amount of bugs one would expect from that setup

In 0.17?

Or are you using your 0.16 expectations?

Either, really:

To clarify: I always played a very conservative, low-pollution style, which means I expect I won't see much of a difference in freeplay: the bug fix increasing the strength of the enemy attacks shouldn't really affect me much, since my pollution was already very low by the time it reached the bug spawners.

I will, eventually, start a proper 0.17 freeplay game and see if that is entirely true, but high pollution wasn't the thing that did me in during the tutorial - rather the opposite.

[ChrislyBear]

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but is it possible to make the Hanzi (the chinese logograms) less bold? They are really overwhelming in the server list.

Edit: Maybe they're Japanese kanji, I don't know.

20190303143614_1.jpg (427.16 KiB) Viewed 5311 times

[CDarklock]

The problem is, the tutorial doesn't base its waves on the amount of pollution, but on how close you are to winning

It absolutely does base waves on pollution. Pollution drives biter production in the campaign, and the amount of pollution per unit is reduced as research progresses. It's basically ( pollution * research * C ).

As opposed to the freeplay situation, where it's just ( pollution * C ). The campaign varies C, just like they made green science 150 packs instead of 75. But it's still the same mechanic.

which means a conservative player trying to reduce pollution is going to get absolutely destroyed.

O RLY

minimal.png (728.92 KiB) Viewed 5310 times

That base has a pollution rating of 27 after I pull down the assemblers and start research. My kill count at the end? 62. Granted, it took... a long time.

finished.png (32.21 KiB) Viewed 5310 times

But given what I know now... I could do it faster. I ended that campaign with hundreds of resources sitting there idle, just in case, that I didn't actually need to gather. I don't think I actually need turret speed, which means 300 science packs don't need to be spent. And while I did have electric drills and inserters, I didn't need or use those either. That's another 150 research I don't need to do. The only thing I need over and above what the campaign actively forces... is walls. And honestly, I don't think I really needed those either. In the end, I had one slightly damaged wall, which basically means only one biter made it there.

EDIT: I can also honestly say that 50 hours of the campaign has taught me more about this game than 200 hours in freeplay.

[Schallfalke]

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but is it possible to make the Hanzi (the chinese logograms) less bold? They are really overwhelming in the server list.

Edit: Maybe they're Japanese kanji, I don't know.

20190303143614_1.jpg

I know these languages so I could say.
There are both Japanese and simplified Chinese characters in your screenshot.
And I admit that the font size mismatch makes them really ugly. Description of my mods also have these characters, and they look bad in 0.17 current style.
Hope the devs have time to fine-tune these after fixing the more critical bugs.

EDIT:
I am giving an example here:
Locale: English, Deutsch, 正體中文, 简体中文, العربية, Беларуская, Български, Català, Čeština, Dansk, Ελληνικά, Español, Eesti, Suomi, Français, עברית, Magyar, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Lietuvių, Latviešu, Nederlands, Norsk, Polski, Português Brasileiro, Português, Română, Русский, Svenska, ไทย, Türkçe, Українська
Compared to in-game mod description:

Mulitilingual text.png (47.09 KiB) Viewed 5275 times

As you can see here, matching font size prevent any awful feeling like in your screenshot.

[BlueTemplar]

BTW, do "Cyrillic" (Indo-Arabian) numbers still look different from "Latin" (Indo-Arabian) numbers ? (They did in 0.16...)

[Philip017]

Not sure if this is the right area, mods please feel free to move if not.

First off, the changes to 17 add ALOT of nice items, and i really appreciate everything you have added and all the hard work you have put into the game to make it that much better!

new tool bar:
loving the equipment toggles, and the new driving mechanic where the robots do not mindlessly pop out while i'm driving away. the new tool bar you can customize to any number you want, but my preferred choice is 1, however the blueprint bar next to it is 2 slots high even if i only have one item in it. i have decided that 4 is all i need/want, and it would be nice if i could have it also be 1 bar high, with mods we may want more heights as well, i would like to suggest making this adjustable as well, perhaps with the number of tool bars listed you also have the same number of blueprint bars:

toolbar.jpg (12.62 KiB) Viewed 5170 times

new item counts:
i love that the tool bar shows all the item numbers of how many of that item i have, but when i'm building i am looking at the hand count, so constantly thinking how many do i have again? it would be so nice if my hand ALSO showed exactly how many i had in my inventory (or maybe optionally so) i was thinking also it was a bug that my hand was not showing the whole item count, and then saw Klonan shoot down the bug report with 'not a bug' saying that the hand still shows only stack sizes, i would really appreciate a reconsideration regarding this please.

hand.jpg (6.66 KiB) Viewed 5170 times

Stacks in the cursor are still normal stacks

the new worms:
Wow they are powerful, chew through my robots so easily, 2 hits and dead, my robots carry so many repair packs that when they die i find myself with having none. i would like to suggest my robots get some acid resistance, or make them only carry one repair pack at a time. previously my robots could take some hits and i rarely lost them. now i find myself having to carry 2 stacks of robots and 3 stacks of repair kits to deal with a handfull of bases. at least the acid isn't detrimental to my gun turrets. but if they shoot my car, look out because it will not live through it. IMO the acid sticks around for way to long, really now i have cleared the entire base and some acid is still clinging to my turrets. i find myself turning off my roboports just to keep the robots from killing themselves. and just let the cheap turrets die taking their ammo if i see them under attack. thank goodness for fast transfer. the new sounds they make are quite creepy and if i get close i will definitely know it.

blue printing landfill/cliff charges:
WOW loving this! now if only we could shift click on water and get the robots to lay some landfill instead of me having to do that first. but really loving the ability to blueprint landfill! shift click blueprints where cliffs are does work and i do appreciate this addition quite alot too!

train ui changes:
these are better than before, i do so much love to see what path my train has chosen to travel from station to station. and i can see if there is a problem easier with this new design, i spent many an hour trying to figure out why sometimes my train would not go to the station, or would not return even though it got there fine. so big thanks for a job well done here.

science changes:
not sure i love them, but i will get used to them i guess, steel is gona be eaten alot more heavily than previously, will have to make more! more items to add to my buss i will have everything on there now. new problems to solve, once i get it right i can enjoy my new blueprints. the names, finally they have proper names, probably still call them by their color, but thats just as good imo.

new robot death sounds:
at first i didn't get what these new sounds were, and i turned off the alerts sound mainly because in multiplayer it's all i ever hear constant robot beeping. so hearing my robots die was a good notification, although the rate at which they die now is pitiful.

robot working range:
i still would like it if my robots would do the work near me first and work their way out away from me, with factorio becoming more multi-threaded, i don't see why pushing the robot scheduler to another thread and even if it takes 180 ticks to process where to send my robots out to, it would save me 3 seconds waiting for them to fly so far away then back before i can move closer to the next thing to build, so moving all the work to another thread seems like a good idea.

thanks again for all the hard work

[tk0421]

I cannot find where to bind keys to the new quickbar gui?

started looking to bind the personal roboport and exoskeleton toggles, only to find none.

while i'm on the subject of the controls interface: tabs for each section might be better, one giant page that just keeps scrolling kindof makes it too easy to just skip past what i'm actually searching for.

[Deathbagel]

Just going to reply to this thread with some minor feedback myself (since it looks like this thread is pinned?).

First I want to say that the new toolbar, trains UI, and other interface changes are excellent - the game feels way cleaner and satisfying than ever!
I do agree with the point OP made about item counts - the way the new toolbar is it seems more intuitive for the hand count to represent total items.

My other point is that while the new toolbar is great once you get how to use it (and makes things way easier mid-late game!), I found it a little confusing at first especially having not played in a while. One aspect is that I almost never assigned empty toolbar spots by left-clicking on the tiles in the early game, while it feels increasingly useful as I progress. I think this is because choosing from a list of *all* the many inventory items in the game feels overwhelming when you're just starting out and only have access to a tiny fraction of them.

My suggestion then is to make an option (I think ideally in the toolbar UI rather than settings menu), possibly enabled by default, that restricts possible item choice for toolbar slots to currently available (researched) items. Having all the items available from the start is great for experienced players familiar with all (or most) of the game's items, but it seems possibly overwhelming for a new player just trying to get comfortable with the toolbar system. (I'm not a new player myself but rusty.. and never actually beaten the game despite >200 hrs in it lol).

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged standalone 0.17.4 feedback topic into 0.17.4 release topic.

[HornetSV]

The ghost opcion for me is amazing, you can still working when yo don't have more items in your inventary, but I think you can improve it by not let you put the ghost unless you press shift key, unifing the way you put ghost with or without inventory, that will be more intuitive, especially for new user like me.

thanks, and sorry for putting the sugestion here, continue the wonderfull job.

[Asterix]

which means a conservative player trying to reduce pollution is going to get absolutely destroyed.

O RLY


minimal.png


That base has a pollution rating of 27 after I pull down the assemblers and start research. My kill count at the end? 62. Granted, it took... a long time.


finished.png


But given what I know now... I could do it faster. I ended that campaign with hundreds of resources sitting there idle, just in case, that I didn't actually need to gather. I don't think I actually need turret speed, which means 300 science packs don't need to be spent. And while I did have electric drills and inserters, I didn't need or use those either. That's another 150 research I don't need to do. The only thing I need over and above what the campaign actively forces... is walls. And honestly, I don't think I really needed those either. In the end, I had one slightly damaged wall, which basically means only one biter made it there.

EDIT: I can also honestly say that 50 hours of the campaign has taught me more about this game than 200 hours in freeplay.

You called your image "minimal.jpg", which shows that you know exactly what you were doing.

Yes, an optimized minimalist player can build a tiny base that will attract very little attention from biters. Good to know, well done, that was a clever solution to this particular puzzle.

However.

*Normal* conservative (freeplay) gameplay doesn't mean harvesting thousands upon thousands of units of iron and copper and stone first and *then* starting your research: it is assumed that, during normal gameplay, you will have at least enough smelters running to feed your research production.

In campaign mode,that generates enough pollution to attract a significant amount of biters, which means you need some additional smelters to feed your defenses, which attracts even more attention, which requires more smelters, and so on.

This is a clever trick, and I used a similar one myself, but it's not, stricty speaking, a rebuttal to my assertion that a conservative player will get overrun in short order.

[CDarklock]

it is assumed that, during normal gameplay, you will have at least enough smelters running to feed your research production.

That would be the way I played the campaign the first time, when I didn't know anything about what was coming or when. I've talked extensively about that. I had a total of seven electric mining drills, six furnaces, two boilers, and four steam engines. I was running two labs off a daisy-chain from a single red science assembler, and had a double-thick wall on each side of the base, along with an initial six turrets.

During the course of the attacks, I tripled the number of turrets and doubled ammo production from two assemblers to four. I never took down my circuit production, but in retrospect I probably should have. I would have benefited from an autoloader, but I didn't want to build one, which was a mistake. I had too many turrets, they weren't placed optimally, and I was putting too much ammo in them - leaving some starved for ammo, while others had 50 magazines sitting in them doing nothing. Toward the end, I was pulling ammo out of the northern turrets to feed the southern turrets. In the final seconds of the scenario, six of my turrets ran out of ammo while I was reloading the ones on the other side, and I had to take out the biters who broke through with my pistol.

It was rough, but I finished.

doneshot.png (458.72 KiB) Viewed 4439 times

After going through the campaign eight times, five of them successfully and three of them deliberately broken with perverse activity (like chopping down all the trees and making over 100 wooden chests, so it became impossible to make power poles later), I am confident that anyone who is paying attention and trying to do a good job stands a reasonable chance of winning the scenario. If they don't, they will probably be able to identify what they did wrong and fix it by loading from a prior save.

But if you are grandstanding and showing off, you stand a solid chance of getting your arse handed to you. As is the case if you don't take it seriously, and think you can just skate through it because you totally know what you are doing. And in both cases, you should totally know exactly what you did wrong.

[Anson]

it is assumed that, during normal gameplay, you will have at least enough smelters running to feed your research production.

That would be the way I played the campaign the first time, when I didn't know anything about what was coming or when. ....

completely agree ... that intro mission was nice for a "veteran" (i once tested version 0.6 or 0.7, "invented" a main bus of 3 belts that connected all assemblers and that could do everything and thus was bored and quit, restarted and bought the game when 0.13 was about to be released and have 10k+ hours until now) because you had to learn something different, but it gives a completely false impression about what factorio really is for most players (maybe except those who play deathworld with maximum settings?), and it teaches the wrong things to new players (at least concerning preparation for normal freeplay).

so, what would i have learned from this mission if i wouldn't have known better ?

• factorio is a game about fighting (i finished the mission with 8k+ kills; greetings to Klonan :-)
• factorio is some kind of tower defense game
• most effective is to first not do too much and instead boringly collect resources for a long time
• buffer everything so that you later have enough when it is needed
• do everything manually to avoid pollution from assemblers and power generation
• do everything manually since there is no effective way to lay belts (lots of crossing resource chains and no undergrounds)
• once again buffer everything to later be able to reroute belts and collect/produce something different (since there are no undergrounds)
• all rumors about big factories and automation seem to be lies
• it is no "casual" game where you have time to think and plan ahead
• abilities required from users are quick reactions and running around, working manually at two or three fronts

TL/DR: i would have learned everything that factorio really is NOT and that in freeplay should (mostly) NOT be done.
and of course, apparently being a game about fight instead of automation and planning, i would not have bought it.
and if i would have bought it because of all the above, i would be utterly disappointed by the freeplay later.

ps: the intentions that the devs have stated are good (eg giving players a resource sink, showing conflicts between priorities, etc), but that is nothing to force on new players who have a first look at the game/demo to decide whether to buy it. maybe it would be very well suited for a second intro mission, but not for a first look where people should experience what factorio is about, like it is also shown in the trailers.