What would you want to see in a Factorio RTS mod?

[kyranzor]

This is a crosspost from the reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... o_rts_mod/
For those without Reddit, you can put your thoughts here. I appreciate any input! I'm keen to make this a reality. I'm also building a mod team to plan and implement all this, message me if you are interested.

I am compiling notes and my own thoughts about what kind of RTS style functionality and gameplay mechanics I'd like in a Factorio RTS mod, and I thought I'd extend the question to you guys - the potential 'users' of this mod. Since making the Robot Army mod I've always wanted to take the RTS concepts further, and I've been getting that itch again lately.

I envision playing Factorio in the God Controller mode (no character), and building a base in an RTS style similar to some of the old classics like Red Alert. The other alternative way is to have a character, and resemble more like Total Annihilation in the concepts/mechanics (this is most similar to the current Factorio gameplay).

In the "god controller"/free floating camera with universal control, I see the general RTS mechanics being such that you can place buildings anywhere, but there needs to be a limiting factor for influence/control - such as what we get with the Robot Logistics build range from Robo ports. In fact, it might be that the RTS mechanics for buildings simply leverage that entirely - all building is done with starter robo port and construction bots (or equivalents, maybe land based units and burner tech style).

In the Avatar/character based control method, I imagine that things would remain basically the same as Factorio currently plays in terms of building within the player's small radius of the character, or remotely with bots/map view etc. But with the RTS units providing 'contruction' units which can be commanded and are mobile enough to move out into the wilderness and build stuff from a limited GUI button array of buildings, drawing from some pool of resources or stockpiles.

There needs to be some building -> unit -> building feedback cycle for growth, there needs to be a reason for the players to expand and explore with the units - resources are a good enough incentive so that's already a thing in Vanilla Factorio.

There needs to be more influence from the enemy - biters need to be improved as part of this mod, or as an add-on mod, or additional enemy factions/types need to be introduced and randomly spawn in chunks just like the biters. This will help the world become more 'alive' as well.

The enemy needs to grow - and become a threat. Consume resource nodes, and compete for the resources along with the player. But somehow, not totally destroy the player's computer with excessive AI handling or insanely unchecked growth.

The obvious mechanics like mouse-based selection and commanding of units, building of units from production buildings, and common tasks like setting units to defend, patrol, move, and attack move, are all necessary features.

Potential for a city-building-esque mechanic is in here - for example the military population must be supported by a proportionally sized civilian population. Build habitats and automate production of food/upkeep costs. Could leverage farming/supplies mods for this mechanic. Civilians can be represented simply - i.e just the player model armed with a pistol, who wander around and are not controllable (or maybe they are, to move out of the way for buildings?) but will attempt to defend themselves if attacked. If civilian population falls too low due to starvation/upkeep failure, military units could revolt/defect and become hostile.

Random events in the world could happen to spice things up - enemy mercenary soldiers in a drop pod land at random locations and move to attack nearest, or set up a little basecamp and call in more dudes..

Friendly bases could pop up, and radio for help - possibilities of trade stations built nearby to exchange goods, technology, or manpower/militia forces on the borders (encourages player exploration).

With good unit design and balancing vs Biters and vs other units/factory defences, could end up a really neat PvP scenario/mod as well..

Need ideas for how things can scale up appropriately to suite Factorio - how to control player growth with unit power/population? How can the enemy be scaled up properly to remain a threat? What additional aggro factors other than pollution could be introduced?

TL:DR Please share your thoughts on RTS mod design/mechanics/theories and how they would work for Factorio to make an awesome RTS experience within the framework Factorio provides (massive scale, unlimited world size etc).

[eradicator]

First and of utmost importance: Total Annihilation is not a character-based RTS. The commander is just a (pretty well armed) free builder unit :p. Same as every other RTS starts you with some sort of free builder unit. Which would probably also be required for a mod like this.

Here's a few things that i think almost every RTS has, but are very different from factorio:

1) Resource Teleportation:
All resources are teleported around the base. Some games teleport them directly from the source, others need a worker to bring them to a building that's built close to the source. But you never have to worry about resource transport after they're in your "account". This is probably the most difficult thing you need to solve. Easy resource management is a fundamental part of every RTS in order to focus the player attention on other aspects of the game. (Remember player attention is the most limited resource.). Even city-builder-like games like "The settlers" or "Anno" that have partial resource transport, have the transport as such fully logistically automated so the player only has to build generic "roads" to enable transport, but the player does not manage any aspect of how things are transported.

2) Limited Map Size:
All RTS games have a limited map size to make it clear when a "round" ends, and when the enemy is defeated. Often destroying a specific unique object (world wonder, town center, etc) triggers the win condition. Factorio is unlimted by default, but i think the two things could be merged by dividing the map into "regions". In the beginning you're limited to one region, until you purge all biters from that region. Next you can chose the next region you want to conquer and the loop starts again. A region could be something like 16x16 chunks, thus the map becomes an infinite chess board. Though it might be interesting to experiment with exponentially expanding the region size. I.e you start in the middle of a 3x3 block of 9 regions, each region might be 500 tiles wide, so the whole block is 1500*1500. Once you conquire all 9 regions the loop starts again, and your current owned land becomes the new block size, so in the new 3x3 each region is 1500².

3) Builder units:
I don't remember how command and conquer does this... could you just build anywhere? Many RTS have some sort of builder vehicle that needs to get very close to the construction area. A vehicle with a roboport might be a fitting equivalent for factorio. But the main question is again resource teleportation. In RTS games you "pay" for a building, sometimes having to bring raw resources to the building site. But in factorio you preassemble all buildings. So either you need to invent a global "building buffer" from which they're magically taken (RTS style), or you keep the need to transport them to all building sites (binding a large portion of player attention to the logistics of building transport.)

4) Singular resources:
Factorio requires you to build 50~200+ mines for each ore field, while normal RTS games usually only require one building. Especially if you want the player to fight with biters over resource locations you should think about making harvesting them simpler. I liked Total Annihilation's "income rate based" economy. Everything is infinite, but you need so much of it that building expensive units is unfeasible without sufficient resource generators.

Also what game is the civilians/revolts thing from? I don't remember any RTS with such a mechanic. I don't think revolts would fill well, though some sort of "unit limit", whatever it's based on, is also a classic RTS feature.

The main thing you need to clarify for yourself is: How much time should the player spend on doing what?

[kyranzor]

Thanks for your input, lots of great thoughts going on there.

I agree that TA is not character-based, you simply have a unique and powerful builder unit who also happens to be a walking win/loss condition at the same time.

With the "sandbox" scenario and the God Controller, Factorio becomes that kind of game, but with a few quirks. you still have inventory and can place stuff directly as a player. The "Brave new world" mod/scenario makes it so you can't place anything yourself and you cannot interact directly with the world and you have to rely on bots to do everything, so it's a good starting point for looking at these gameplay mechanics changes.

I'm okay with keeping the factorio style character-focused gameplay, because with radar mode the user can quickly go and look at and deal with remote affairs with significantly greater speed than walking there, and also do combat without having to be there with the help of this RTS mod i'm working on.

Games like Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation still keep easily 50% of player focus on economics and scounting/expansion - because if you fall behind your opponents, you will get overrun quickly.

1) I agree with you that this is a big challenge.. I can't think of a pathfinding/UPS friendly way that isn't also heavily restrictive/negates the point of a mobile constructor rather than just plonking down a long line of roboports. My current plan for the prototype mod is to have a global stockpile which is a special storage building/chest/warehouse which you put the items you want to be available for field-construction into it, and the mobile constructor checks the inventory of that global stockpile to determine if it can successfully revive the ghost nearby it. There is a minor logistics challenge, largely removed once the player gets full flying robot capabilities and a nice logistics network setup, where you still need to build and input stuff into the constructor special boxes.

2) This is a lower priority issue for the mod, and is controllable by the players (like the classic ribbon world concepts) to their liking. If there is an RTS scenario for PvP which uses a pre-made map of a limited size, that would be fine. Very traditional. Or perhaps people can use the mod which takes a random gen map and does a mirror of all N,S,E,W quadrants to make the map symmetrical, thus hopefully making the game more balanced if PvP. If it's a PvE experience, I doubt people will care too much. These kinds of special scenarios I think will be better for community members to add as scenarios depending on how much additional scripting support or mod interface they need there could be add-ons for the mod to support 'zone control' and add special buildings and logic in for them.

3) Yes the earlier C&C games had a very simple money resource -> build anywhere mechanic. later on, like in C&C Generals, they started using construction units that needed to be adjacent to the building site and had their own build lists etc. if i make a vehicle with its own inventory and has an equipment grid and bolt-ed on roboport with its own compliment of bots, this is also a very valid way of implementing a construction unit, and follows along very closely the Factorio gameplay style/mechanics. The user would have to make the vehicle drive up to a resupply depot area, insert all the cargo you think it might want to build in the field, and then command it to drive out into the unknown, able to place down any of teh things it has in its own inventory. If it dies, you lose all the loot, which is actually a pretty neat idea. I'd have to dissect the AAI Mod for automated transport vehicles and see how Earendel did them as commandable and yet still 'vehicle' objects.

My current mod prototype has a constructor unit which looks around nearby for ghosts, and checks if they are in buildable, and if in build range. If buildable but not in range, they move towards it and check again later when closer. If close enough they build it, and it subtracts the item from the global stockpile inventory (just items in a warehouse building). This appears to work really well in my testing just the other day, i'm quite happy with it.

4) I think for PvP games the resource rates, or the costs of things needs to be reduces to speed up the gameplay and reduce how many of each things are needed to get progress. For a PvE or singleplayer experience the game can be largely unchanged in this regard.

5) regarding civilians and revolts - this is not from any particular game, just something to try and tie in factorio 'supply' mechanics and some form of upkeep to prevent the player from just endlessly pumping out units (more of a rate limiter than an actual cap). The pool of civilians are used as an auxiliary recruitment cost for troops. Troop requires 1 spare civilian in the total pool of civs, plus the 'equipment bundle' of guns and armour etc that represents the unit cost for deployment.
Civilians need a food input to spawn more of them, so you have to produce enough, and insert them into the houses etc..

enemy players can attack the unit housing, to slow down the ability for the other player to spawn more troops until their civ population recovers.

I'd like to think that in multiplayer PvP games where there are also teams of players working on the same 'factory' at the same time, that one could be more of a military leader and the other focus more on economics. The military player conducts raids and maybe expands out to new resource patches (killing any biters nearby at the same time, to gain more ground), while the economy player prepares trains and loads up the construction warehouses so the military expansion player can build outputs remotely, to dig in until proper railway transport is set up.

[eradicator]

I agree that TA is not character-based, you simply have a unique and powerful builder unit who also happens to be a walking win/loss condition at the same time.

My point was also that the win/loss commander condition is entirely optional. I never used that. And with mods you can build commander-equivalent units anyway. Which made the original commander a very nice distraction weapon due to it's d-gun and built-in nuke :p

If it dies, you lose all the loot, which is actually a pretty neat idea.

"loosing lots of stuff if you make a mistake" is pretty much the opposite of factorio-style. The devs have stated multiple times that the game is designed to not punish the player for "wrong" decisions (as far as possible). I.e. by allowing to place down and pick up buildings as often as you want. Where most other games apply a resource loss penalty on deconstruction. At the very least there should be a mechanic to recover the lost items.

Also the constructor having to actually drive to the stockpile before being able to build something sounds like a major slowdown. Also i'm not sure how fun the implied restrictions on factory design are there. Because you'd be forced to have "easy" paths for the vehicles to reach the stockpile while at the same time having to attempt to block the "difficult" paths to it. But that is a general problem of AI-pathing...


Nonetheless looking forward to how it all turns out ofc ;).

[kyranzor]

if the mobile construction vehicle has to be loaded up with items and it can only place them like with roboport, then if enemies find and destroy your vehicle then all the contents could either be destroyed, or spill out onto the ground. I think that's a cool mechanic that while punishing the first player, the second guy is rewarded with all the items that they can then pick up and use on their own vehicle. It creates more tension and tactics.

The current alternative which i'm using is the global stockpile, there is a lot less to lose by just send out a couple of construction units and spawning buildings out in the middle of nowhere, if they get attacked it's very little lost.

The pathing in the game and large factories means I'd never want to entertain having to make a unit go to the logicistics building to 'get' the item first before building it. screw that! haha

[eradicator]

if the mobile construction vehicle has to be loaded up with items and it can only place them like with roboport, then if enemies find and destroy your vehicle then all the contents could either be destroyed, or spill out onto the ground. I think that's a cool mechanic that while punishing the first player, the second guy is rewarded with all the items that they can then pick up and use on their own vehicle. It creates more tension and tactics.

Well. You said you wanted to make an RTS mod and not an RTT mod. While those two genres do share some common factors i think they have a very different target audience / player experience. Recently tactic games seem to be more popular (because rounds are shorter?), C&C was scale-wise somewhat of a hybrid. Supreme Commander (and TA with mods) simply made you throw huge amounts of units around and didnt require you to care about individual unit tactics. Given that pathfinding in factorio is pretty basic tactics might be a better choice.

TL;DR: If you can loose or win huge amounts of items (that you potentially haven't even researched yet!) then managing the path of construction vehicles nessecerily will occupy a significantly larger part of the player attention than if not. (Gurellia tactics, diversion maneuvers, etcpp.)

[kyranzor]

I definitely don't want too much baby-sitting and micro-management of units, I'd prefer users spent more time similar to a TA/Supcom game, in economy and larger-scale operations/strategy. I didn't know there was a category of games called Real Time Tactics (RTT) in addition to the classical RTS style. I feel like Company of Heroes and Dawn of War were those kinds of games - map control and heavy squad/abilities micro and very little base building/economy management (other than the map control aspect).

I need to balance/design the mod game 'flow' so that the resource nodes are the most important, and the more production/second you can get, the more likely you are to win. Be that with progressively more powerful units (tech tree style) or just tech/damage scaling in general combined with good use of strategies to get the upper hand. Harassment of enemy supply lines and outposts or even finding and striking at their main base is all good stuff players could do. I wouldn't mind a win-condition building/HQ kind of thing, or a 'commander' unit VIP.

The tech tree style of factorio helps a bit, because there can be some serious 'siege' style units that are locked in the upper tech trees, which as we all know can take a while to get to, and a lot of resources dedicated to science packs.

With blueprints and lots of mobile construction units, I imagine the map will quickly become dotted with firebases and obstructions and big gun-walls of doom. I am pretty excited to see it actually.

[foodfactorio]

hi kyranzor, have you ever played Harvest Massive Encounter?
something like that, would be really cool with factorio

[andy84]

Are you still working on that?