Friday Facts #160 - Playtesting

[aubergine18]

Also hoping that some sort of cliff-like terrain can make it in to 0.15 or 0.16

viewtopic.php?f=80&t=12771

I think that would add a lot to gameplay, particularly in peaceful and SP modes. Could potentially be done as autoplace option, as terrain elevation is already part of the map generation process - maybe there's some clever way to determine where distinct contour lines appear and put cliffs along them?

[Andrzejef]

I'll start with the very beginning. I too made a new playthrough (or continued a previous one anyway)...
1) ...and I'm not really happy with rail planner tool (or current rail creation process). I do appreciate the notion, but still, I'd rather be able to craft and place curved rails myself too, especially that the tool mostly makes some strange rail loops that makes the process rather annoying.
2) I am in love with blueprint edit function, so I don't have to clear whole thing if I accidentaly picked wrong icon.
3) Flamethrower is love, flamethrower is life (well, un-life, but who's counting... )
4) Logistics is a must have.
5) Interactive tips & tricks and advanced tutorial is a good, very good idea, especially something that explains rail signals mechanics or logic network. Still, they should be toggleable (default on) in settings, and have easy access to them apart from game conditions (like collective tutorial library accessible from main menu).
6) I like the train color tool, but I'd like to see some presets apart from sliders, and when I have 2 locos on one train (so it can go both directions), so they both change color when I edit either of them.
7) Train rename would be nice too, alongside with labeling each viewport in train tracking window.
8) Filling water with dirt is fine, but what about the other way (digging channels in dirt)?
9) Train positioning preview on placing new train stop should either display only it's own train positioning (with toggle on showing others), or should color it differently, because with more complex stations, the positionings are unreadable.
10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not.

What I found strange, is that putting item directly at spliter (via inserter) tends to randomly either activate or not activate it at all (meaning depending on spliter, it will either always work with given spliter, or never work for that spliter).

[Daid]

5) Interactive tips & tricks and advanced tutorial is a good, very good idea, especially something that explains rail signals mechanics or logic network. Still, they should be toggleable (default on) in settings, and have easy access to them apart from game conditions (like collective tutorial library accessible from main menu).

I think the campaign falls short on this area. It dumps you in a map with a partial rail setup and then fails to explain anything on how to setup automated trains. While up to that point, everything is served in easy to follow and easy to handle chunks.

The robots and especially the personal robot port are also two of those things that I failed to understand initially. I thought the personal robotport was bugged the first time I tried to use it.

[alexzzzz]

Map

20160822213741_1.jpg (355.33 KiB) Viewed 8551 times

It took me several days, a week maybe, to clean up the whole area from all the biters. I'm a bit scared of the moment when I will have to expand farther. Not sure the artillery train will help much to destroy nests that are far from railroads.

Since we are going to have nuclear power, may I ask for atomic bombs?

[Mehve]

Please don't implement auto-merging. I'll grant that playstyles differ, but whenever I was in the situation of having multiple stacks of damaged items, 9/10 times the object was a turret. And the varying degrees of damage occurred because I was doing a turret creep. Which you apparently want to remove. Auto in-inventory repair, as mentioned in previous posts, sounds awesome though.

8) Filling water with dirt is fine, but what about the other way (digging channels in dirt)?

Since biters are incapable of crossing water, the ability to create water would be completely broken, making it possible to totally isolate yourself from enemies and limit their expansion. There's a Waterfill mod that was recently updated to 0.14, if you really need something. Land terraforming doesn't have the same issues, since at worst, you're just making it easier for the biters to reach your stuff.

10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not.

Since there is currently no application for boilers EXCEPT for heating up liquid to make electricity, an electricity-powered boiler would be roughly analogous to a solar-powered flashlight.

[Fatmice]

I do not like the proposed item merging. Two 49% item should not merged into one 98% item. Instead, the item should stack with their % preserved with only the top item (the last item added to the stack) shown. So here is an example of such a stack of turrets = {0.28,0.5,1,1,1,0.4,0.97}. This stack has 7 turrets, with the last item being shown has having 97% health. The stack has the behavior of first in last out. If you feed this stack to an assembler, it won't know what to do with it since the top item is damaged. You will have to deploy all of the turrets in a stack and repair them fully before you can feed a stack of them to an assembler. Inventory sorting should be modified to sort only according to the last item in the stack.

[hansinator]

10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not.

Since there is currently no application for boilers EXCEPT for heating up liquid to make electricity, an electricity-powered boiler would be roughly analogous to a solar-powered flashlight.

Unless you use solar to store hot water in tanks.

[Koub]

I love all what I read in this FFF (or at least most of it ^^).
I'd love an ability to use construction bots (or alike) at early stages of the game. Even just being able to lay blueprints and make them built at arm-reach automatically, as you get through ghost buildings would be super neat.
Also copy-pasting and cut-pasting sections of the base, like when you realize you've misaligned a whole bloc of your factory by one tile, and you have to tear ir down to rebuild it by hand (because, well, robots are blue science y'know ).

[alexzzzz]

10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not.

Since there is currently no application for boilers EXCEPT for heating up liquid to make electricity, an electricity-powered boiler would be roughly analogous to a solar-powered flashlight.

Unless you use solar to store hot water in tanks.

Electric boilers will consume more energy that can be generated from the heated water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion

[irbork]

Many nice changes on the list.
It would be convenient if you figure out a way to place ghost of an entity without necessity to have it in the inventory. Kind of like grabbing it from crafting menu with ctrl+LMB or MMB.

[Kyralessa]

I like most of the ideas, and don't mind some of the others, but I agree with what others have said, that "merging" damaged items would be weird and wouldn't seem to fit the spirit of the game.

I'd rather see it be easier to repair something in inventory. I should be able to select on my repair kit, then hold the right mouse button on the item in my inventory, just like I'd repair it if it were placed on the map.

As for the other ideas, I particularly like:

• Bounding box decrease
• Increased stack sizes of belts, walls, pipes
• Earlier personal construction robots
• MK2 personal roboport

I'm cool with paying for an expansion game down the road; I agree with a lot of others here that once I thoroughly explored Factorio, I found the price I paid embarrassingly low. Sight-unseen, I'd pay for the expansion now, because I have confidence in it based on the quality of the base game.

I do hope you'll look at improving the "story" part of the game. The current campaign is enjoyable and does the job of teaching the mechanics, but I feel like the game could benefit from a more elaborate story and more varied goals. It would be relatively simple to also increase replayability by giving the campaign multiple difficulty levels by increasing biter activity, reducing ore yields, etc.

Probably my favorite mission in the existing campaign was the one where you discover the biter-destroyed base and have to restore it to functionality, replacing belts, rebuilding train tracks to the remote outposts, and so forth. I think more missions along these lines would be a good start.

(Least favorite mission? The following one, where you have to basically kamikaze through the alien waves. I felt like I couldn't afford to set up any sort of production given my limited resources, so I just repeatedly barreled through until I managed to make it once.)

Just brainstorming a bit, I could see missions where you have to:

• Build trains to bring lots of stone back to your base, in order to build landfill to reach a certain place across the ocean
• Build a highway between a couple of points, defending against biters on the way
• Transport specific and distinctive items from one point to another, building the train line to do so and keeping it safe
• Build MK2 armor filled with exoskeletons, for the purpose of making a mad dash through biter territory to an end goal
• Use a personal roboport to travel across the map toward a goal, using inventory given at the outset to overcome obstacles, and then cleaning it up for the next obstacle with a deconstruction planner
• Build a certain item or set of items with unusual restrictions, such as no belts, or only long-handed inserters.
• Build a transport rail system between multiple points (no goods transport; just a double-headed train that makes a series of stops)
• Set up a complex liquid-transport system, starting from on initial fixed positions of various oil-based products.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the game continues to develop!

[daniel34]

> Figure some way to have low level personal construction robots earlier in the game.

I've seen this suggestion today: Human blueprinting

The player should place buildings like construction robots if in range and available. Mainly to use the blueprint's mechanic before you've got mobile roboports and so on. Blueprinting shouldn't be researched though.

I can imagine a small roboport built into every armor (or the player itself) that can only place entities within the player's reach and has a robot limit of about 5 or 10. So that when you build a middle-sized blueprint (25x25 tiles) and run around within the area the bots slowly build the whole blueprint. It should also be possible somehow to disable this behavior.

[chris13524]

Great ideas here! I'd like to see a recycler for those lower-tiered items. Instead of merging items, I'd like to see a repairing system for your inventory that would use repair packs and slowly repair the items in the inventory. Something could be similar for a building that repairs things as well, there would need to be a circuit condition to retrieve damaged items then...

Also, with the expansion pack. I think it would be neat if you would win the game with the rocket (currently), and then you would continue on to your next "major" goal. For example, the space platform or whatever. So regular players would play to the rocket, and be done. But more advanced players would continue to the space platform. More "major" goals could be made, but I can't think of any atm.

[Hunter0000]

10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not.

Since there is currently no application for boilers EXCEPT for heating up liquid to make electricity, an electricity-powered boiler would be roughly analogous to a solar-powered flashlight.

Unless you use solar to store hot water in tanks.

Electric boilers will consume more energy that can be generated from the heated water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion

The point is to use hot water to store energy (generated by solar) to be used at night via boilers. This is an alternative to using mass amounts of accumulators that's easy to mix into a fuel-fired supply.

[Mehve]

10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not.

Since there is currently no application for boilers EXCEPT for heating up liquid to make electricity, an electricity-powered boiler would be roughly analogous to a solar-powered flashlight.

Unless you use solar to store hot water in tanks.

Electric boilers will consume more energy that can be generated from the heated water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion

They would, yes. But on second thought, it's still an arguably valid option. I can't recall where, but I believe the math can be found that indicates that storage tanks full of hot water + the necessary steam engines have a higher energy density then accumulators do. But by the same token, the option doesn't actually do anything that accumulators don't do far more simply, so I can't see the devs wanting to introduce it to vanilla Factorio.

[LazyLoneLion]

Please-please-please...make blueprints green science too! With saved to disk blueprint book.
Would be great even without constr.bots at all !

[MrGrim]

I'll start with the very beginning. I too made a new playthrough (or continued a previous one anyway)...
1) ...and I'm not really happy with rail planner tool (or current rail creation process). I do appreciate the notion, but still, I'd rather be able to craft and place curved rails myself too, especially that the tool mostly makes some strange rail loops that makes the process rather annoying.

I really have no strong desire one way or the other to see the return of the manual curved rail, but I think you might be using the rail planner wrong. It only produces outrageous loops if you're asking it to path to places that require them, such as trying to move a straight section of track down one tile, trying to make a curve tighter than is possible, not using shift and forcing it to path around rocks and trees, or if other structures are in the way such as poles, lights signals, etc. Manually placeable curved rails won't make these designs possible, either. You'd still have the same limitations.

[RobEVO]

Launching a rocket really should do *something*

Maybe just make all of the currently explored area visible all the time instead of just being visible as the radar hits it? Even something small that makes it seem worth it beyond just "finishing" would be cool.

[rolfl]

A small improvement that would make using modules a whole lot easier, would be to have some form of shortcut that allows you to swap modules in assemblers/furnaces/etc.

You can Ctrl-click an assembler while holding modules, and that will install them (or upgrade them), but you can't uninstall them, or replace one module type with another.

It would be great, for example, if Ctrl-right-click would uninstall modules from an assembler/furnace, etc.

Or, perhaps i have been missing something obvious...

Additionally, adding circuit logic to read a rocket silo's progress, and also a launch-control, would be REALLY nice.

[factoriouzr]

+trains should not be the only artilery options implemented. Implement RTS type command and control of army units and general search and destroy in radius around factory options (like mentioned in previous friday facts).
+Item merging should be done by type and each item in the stack should still store it's own HP, we should not lose items. Ie. all items of type "Laser Turret" should auto stack in all cases regardless of HP. Losing items seems like a step in the wrong direction. Repairing should be done by display the average health of all items in the stack and the bar will disappear when all items are fully repaired. Pocket repair should be implemented as well.
+allow auto repair or items in inventory, I don't want to lose items and also allow stacking items in factories (eg. using average health) so that damaged items can be stacked in factories that require 2 of them to build one item. If inserter puts in a fully repaired object, then tries to put in a damaged object, the factory will permanently stop.
+what about improving biter AI and biter types before calling the game feature complete. This was mentioned in previous Friday facts
+what about an aggressive setting for biters to control difficulty right from the start of the game?
+what about balancing biter difficulty and attack frequency and force size and scaling better over the course of the game so they get harder? Multiple attacks, better biters, more concurrent attacks?
+we should be able to set up factories and pick the good produced before the research is done (eg. while the research is going, I want to pave ahead and get the factories ready). Just make it the same as selecting a filter on an inserter or tollbelt. Right now all items even if they are not researched can be picked for inserter filters and tollbelt filters. Factory filters should be done this way too. This way all would be consistent as well
+we should be able to copy and paste from a factory to an inserter and it should set the filter to the same good as being produced by the factory
+we should be able to multiply the requester chest items requested via buttons in the GUI like (x2, x10, x100) and the default on copying from a factory to a requester chest should be exactly enough goods to produce 1 item, that way we have easy controls to set the number we want via the multiplication buttons
+logistics trash slots should default to 0 items if that item is not being requested, or the number being requested if it is being requested