Friday Facts #129 - The late game

[MeduSalem]

• Resource generation tweaks:
  Seems pretty much like most games with endless maps do it because of how the increasing distance becomes more time consuming. I wouldn't make the patches bigger though, but just increase the yield.
• Long term mining drills:
  YES to the Dirty Ore. More resources, infrastructure and production cycles to fiddle around with is always a good thing to keep the player some more busy in a fun way. The better it also helps alleviate some of the repetitive expansion tasks.

My approach would be underground mining:

Once the surface is depleted the mining drills stop to work, but with a research upgrade they might continue working there. So it would make sense to leave the outpost intact until you can examine the underground.

About late game mining, there's actually a simple way to make it less troublesome: have a higher tier mining drill with a large extraction zone around them so you don't have to relocate those that have ore depleted just under them. You put some over the deposit and leave them be, all or most of them will work until the whole deposit is empty. Some mods have implemented this. Not that I wouldn't like in addition the "dirty ore to process" mechanism you've described, of course :p

I somehow wanted to suggest "Range Modules" for quite some time now, which would influence how far the mining drill can reach out, which could also be used in Roboports, Gun/Laser Turrets and so on at the cost of consuming more energy the more area is covered or something

My way for resources - endless-resources mod, make the ore infinite, just like oil - weaker over time. You still have to expand and make new outposts, but there is no need to destroy old ones. I cant play without it anymore coz of depleted mines.

That could also be an approach to deal with the problem, make them work like Oil patches! If the yield of the mining site is slowly degrading over time then it gives enough reason to expand and create new outposts, but it also gives a reason to leave existing outposts where they are as they still add up to the sum.

I would definitely combine the "decreasing yield" with the Dirty Ore concept. The less the yield, the more dirty ore you have to deal with. Maybe even combine it with some underground mining concepts or whatever.

• About resource sinks:
  It would be quite good to have some resource sinks. Endless upgrades might come in handy BUT it might also cause major imbalance because of how the game world itself doesn't scale with the upgrades (like for example the Biters not becoming any stronger)

There have to be more ways to get rid of resources in general, because once you surpassed launching your first rocket there is no real reason to go on, like has been discussed multiple times already. It doesn't have to be as sophisticated as the Space Plaftorms (which requires a lot of work and time) but if there are valid chances to dump resources into something they should be brought up.

• Upgrade to Smoke:
  Put those nasty Smoke visuals on the Boilers instead of the Steam Engines! And make near to white, almost transparent smoke come out of the Steam Engines... xD

[canidae]

As for the mines, as others have mentioned, I too think it should work more like oil patches. Resource density decrease over time, making the miners produce less over time. Never really run out, but rather become so inefficient that you'd rather find a new spot. This could be combined with more rich patches further away from the starting location. If that's not a strong enough incentive to find new patches, it could even be an idea to make the miners require more energy as the resource density drops.

As for research, I'd like it to be stretched out more. You can get a lot of advanced stuff to build within a short time, when starting a new game I'd like to be stuck with slow conveyor belts and simple assembling machines for some time before I have robots flying all over the place. Once you've automated red (and green) science packs, research goes so fast that the "pick a new research" almost becomes a nuisance. Granted, this can be fixed by marathon mods or just by building fewer assemblers/labs. Building fewer assemblers/labs seems to go against the spirit of the game, though.

[GeoStyx]

What ever happened to the HD textures?

Have you seen WaiTex? viewtopic.php?f=96&t=13142

[Neotix]

I'm not so optimistic about changes because:
- adding new mining drill only move stagnancy, not erase it. We only will be able to manage more mine sites at once but still we will have to destroy and rebuilt them. Basically nothing really change.
Maybe instead of adding that mining drills, add some kind of deep mining with searching underground deposits. Look at Star Wars Galaxies. They used noise texture to generate underground resources and players had to serach areas to find them (the best spots could be under enemy bases). That underground resources could be infinite with decreasing ratio like crude oil. In that way you will force players to explore and expand, not moving mining sites from one deposit to another. Of course that entire idea with dirty ore and additional processing would also work with that.

- infinite research as item sink is easiest end the most boring solution. It also change nothing (click on research, play until research finish, click next one...). In fact researching is the most boring element of the game.
Instead I would suggest something like Homeworld mod viewtopic.php?f=32&t=13282&hilit=homeworld or something similar i posted long ago viewtopic.php?f=6&t=13219

[AmbulatoryCortex]

Regarding trains, why not just make train max speed affected significantly less by the number of wagons its pulling? Then we'd be able to build giant steel snakes instead of the tiny things we use now.

[Xipheas]

Late game:

Thematically, once your base is at a certain point, where you can control the aliens and launch a rocket, is that not a good time for your fellow humans to begin to land and colonise the planet?

Your role then would be to build the cities they require, supply the goods they need, and keep the aliens at bay.

Plenty of late game material there!

Keep up the great work.

[irbork]

I would love to see some concept of mining robots. They would leave roboport to the nearest resource and mine robot_stack_size x 5 and put this into available storage.
The most appealing thing in this concept is that I would not feel so bad building over small random ore noise since later bots will find and mine it for me

[GeoStyx]

As for the mines, as others have mentioned, I too think it should work more like oil patches. Resource density decrease over time, making the miners produce less over time. Never really run out, but rather become so inefficient that you'd rather find a new spot. This could be combined with more rich patches further away from the starting location. If that's not a strong enough incentive to find new patches, it could even be an idea to make the miners require more energy as the resource density drops.

I disagree. IRL oil does refill overtime don't they? [1] So having it drip a little makes since ingame.
But iron being an infinite resource makes zero sense to me. This games isn't about realism obviously, but making them infinite seems really boring to me. I prefer the ideas in the post.

[1] http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-Gener ... elves.html

[TimmPure]

Dirty ore sounds good to me .

As for the infinite research, I'd advise doing linear advantages with exponential research costs, just from a balancing perspective.

[production]

A friend of mine thinks that all resources should be like oil -- instead of having a finite number and running out, a mine just gets slower and slower over time.

For example you could rename the resource's "starting value" as "richness", then each ore deposit has a depletion multiplier (a multiplier to time required to mine the next unit of ore from that square) that increases exponentially over time. The depletion multiplier starts at 1000 (corresponding to current normal mining speed) and goes up 1% (with compounding) every time 1% of the richness is mined (the richness value doesn't change, it just tells you how quickly the 1% penalties accumulate). So you still have rich/poor squares, and initially each mine would run at the same speed as currently, the difference is how quickly the squares they mine accumulate those compounding depletion penalties (which increase the time, thus power+pollution, per resource). With this numbers, when the amount of resources extracted is n * 70% of the richness, you'll be mining at speed 1 / 2^n.

[Arduin]

• Resource generation tweaks:
  My approach would be underground mining:
  
  Once the surface is depleted the mining drills stop to work, but with a research upgrade they might continue working there. So it would make sense to leave the outpost intact until you can examine the underground.

Underground Mining sounds like a really big YES to me. Upgraded Mining Drills, maybe even a thing like a big bucket excavator to get down to the precious stuff (more energy cost, higher pollution)? And there you get these mentioned dirty ores, maybe even additional stone so you have to fiddle a bit around to filter that out?

[Zeblote]

What ever happened to the HD textures?

Have you seen WaiTex? viewtopic.php?f=96&t=13142

Yes, but these are upscaled from the original ones. For example, look at this blurry thing:



Compared to one rendered at 2x resolution:



Honestly, it's night and day difference.

Another example from that topic:



It most likely took a lot of effort to create these from the low res sprites, but in my opinion it wasn't worth it.

[sillyfly]

I think all of these are great ideas, and I just can't wait to see them implemented

Looking forward to 0.13 and further versions!

[Aranian]

I like those ideas.
My current factory has researched everything and sits mostly idle while I move stuff around and otherwise optimize in preparation for potentially building a megabase. Even the trains are not running currently.

I also agree with the red and green science projects running out too soon and the packs being a bit cheap and less complex than blue. One could also consider making purple science require additional materials as it's quite a letdown after getting blue science to run properly. Though I can't tell without checking if there are some products not used in blue packs (or below) that don't require alien science first. Might have to move a few things around.

I like the idea of having outposts that need to be defended/supplied. Currently I just push the aliens back far enough to not have to expect constant attacks and then leave some "buildings" (electric poles in my case) so the aliens never return to bother me. The added complexity of processing/filtering the ore sounds good as well.
Maybe only running factories prevent biter expansion?

And while it would be quite a gamechanger it might make sense to introduce another resource that is not found right at the starting base. As it currently stands there is little incentive to venture from the starting location, as there (or nearby) are enough resources to finish the game, even on medium settings all around.

I've played with mods that do the stuff mentioned (or something similar) and quite enjoyed it.

[Tev]

Yes! To almost everything.

1) robot count isn't even close to endless. I want like 5-10 more tiers, because I always produce shitton of polution and those swarms of behemoth biters are quite big challenge to measly 134 destroyers. And turret creep is super boring.

2) give us some bonuses from launching rockets, or tie some research technologies to it. Rockets are expensive, fun to watch launching, and would be great motivation for large scale production.

[Xterminator]

Awesome FF, I always love the ones that talk about future improvements and new features.

Now for my feedback on the idea:
I like both ideas for the mining changes. Making the resources richer the farther from spawn you get is great, but I also thing the patches should just be more spread out in general like RSO does. Currently in vanilla gameplay there are patches everywhere and I feel doesn't encourage trains enough.
The new type of drill and dirty ore sounds pretty awesome. I think it would be a pretty good addition because it would require some different type of infrastructure to clean the ore rather than the same old setup for every smelting area. I so quite like the idea of underground mining too though that several have mentioned. That could add a whole demnsion to the game.

As for the research, I think increasing the cost of some green research wouldn't be too bad to try and smooth out the transition to blue science. However, I very much dislike the idea having nearly infinite research for things later on. I think it is a somewhat viable fix, but by far the simplest and would possibly just make things more boring. Especially for something like infinite laser damage it would make the enemies almost a complete non-factor once you get enough researches of it done.

Now I think adding a few tiers of stuff could be good. Like perhaps a couple more levels of furnace upgrades, maybe another belt upgrade research, and perhaps upgrades to trains or something. Nothing infinite but just more advanced versions of machinery. Would give people more things to play around with later on.

[spreadsheeticus]

Increasing backpack size would be awesome, but concerned that might be gamebreaking.
Could additional backpack space be an optional equipment slot, or a specific series of upgrades, so that there would have to be a tradeoff?

[ssilk]

Want to mention: There is a very actual suggestion about that subject: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21216 Endless ore patches

[Jonathan88]

Love the smoke!

[wwdragon]

1) I like the idea that resources get more plentiful, the farther out we are from spawn.

2) Dirty ore is a BAD IDEA.
Just make later tier mining drills cover more area and be more efficient, thereby giving more ore from the same source.

I've seen this whole dirty ore thing done in minecraft mods on several occasions and it just amounts to a bunch more boring things that need to be automated and I could've done without.

3) Green circuits more expensive is BAD!
I think you guys missed the point there; the blue circuits are too expensive.
The upgrade cards are MASSIVELY too expensive, requiring redundant levels of chips to make!
These two things together are what cause the in-game economy to crash for several hours and for the game to get boring.

4) Infinite subjective research is a bad idea; the current massive number of bot followers already goes WAY to high in number. (it should cap out at about 20)

If you want to make more research, how about providing research for things that don't exist yet, like range of weapons?
Most of the weapon ranges in the game right now are too short; only the laser gun has anything I'd consider even moderate range; MOAR range!

'How bout another tier of tank and jeep?
Second tier tank requires high tech and has a gatling laser for anti infantry and a plasma cannon for main gun, the latter of which has a large aoe.
Second tier jeep, while tougher, would mostly just be a lot faster and able to flatten trees, like the tank can for the purpose of easy access to bases without trains.

5) More cargo space in trains is a good idea.
ps. how do we assign specific spaces to only one item or was that person using a mod?