Friday Facts #160 - Playtesting

[Mehve]

I'm not sure why there is so much resistance toward the concept of electric boilers. They would be a simple and space/resource-efficient way of storing solar electricity. For example, considering the attached image -

In this situation, the coal boilers could be replaced with electric boilers hooked up to a solar grid; the water input would be gated by a small pump that only activates when there is excess solar power - e.g., when a connected accumulator is full. The output is gated (via a delay switch) to only produce electricity when the accumulator (connected to the main power grid) drops below 10%, and it shuts down after the accumulator goes above 15% for a while. Ideally, the priority of electric boilers would be lower than other things, but with the correct gating that's not really necessary. As for the delay switch in the image, it consists of 2 boxes, some belts, and 4 inserters; the red-wire inserter activates at <10%, green-wire at >15%, and the power switch allows power through when the box is not full (<20 blocks). You can adjust the delay by changing the number of blocks in the box.

I don't think there's a lot of resistance, but the majority of items in Factorio have both simple uses and advanced uses, which is generally the sign of good game design. Whereas an electric boiler lacks the former, making it something of a niche item. Furthermore, I haven't seen any suggestion of NEW gameplay, merely it's possibility of helping to substitute for an accumulator while taking less space (in a game that can offers an infinite amount). That doesn't make for a good vanilla addition, I don't think.

[equitime77]

Some more really good ideas.

Can you add me to the people wanting Robot Army in game. Factorio is about automation, cant get any more automated than robot army and this will help protect the train tracks in large worlds for instance.

I also like the idea of a basic run about robot for very early game etc.

No to items merging.

Yes to a dlc or whatever for space exploration as somebody mentioned. This would fit the theme of learning as you go as you learn what you need to get a rocket then you can expand this into space.

[factoriouzr]

+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

I thought you could already do that, or maybe only to request container (which has same effect)?

Every time I've tried it, it doesn't do anything. To requester works and its' great, I use it all the time, but I use the fast or stack inserters to limit how much of a product is made, eg. 4000 green circuits. This is beneficial with robots because I just copy and paste the factory with blueprints to increase production, but overall the item is still limited to 4000 for eg. To do the filtering I set <item> < <x> as a filter condition. It would be nice If I could copy and paste from a factory to the inserter and it would set both item in the condition part and the item in the filter part. Then the user can clear one if they don't want it or leave it as it will still work in most situations. Clearing is much faster then clicking the filter box and then finding the right tab, then finding the entity in the list and selecting it (as an example). Not sure if search works in this gui, but it's still faster to right click then to type or search for the entity.

For that matter we should be able to copy from an inserter to a factory and the factory should set the recipe from the inserter's item in the condtion part if one is set, else do nothing.

[factoriouzr]

Merging items based on remaining health is a bad idea. What happens when two high-tier items reach the merge state?
In theory you could build two highest-tier buildings (nuclear power plants) damage each to under 50% HP, and then "lose" one of the two of them mysteriously due to item merging.

You could definitely expect lots of false bug reports from newbies "Biters attacked my 10 boiler setup and i picked it up, and now i only have 7 boilers!" with item merging.

I think the best approach is to stack all items of the same type but have each item still remember it's actual accurate HP, and on the stack of items, display the average health of all items in the stack. If there is a health bar, then there is at least one damaged entity, if there isn't then all are in full health.

The player can hold a wrench in their inventory and hold on the stack, and each item will be repaired in some order (the order doesn't really matter, it's not like there is a repair pack shortage).

To complement this, allow for a personal roboport mod to repair in player's inventory, or just allow construction robots to repair in player's inventory by default.

Also in a Friday facts I think kovarex or another developer mentioned that they will have repair buildings or some other way to repair damaged structures. This was many many Friday facts ago, so not sure what happened to that idea.

[Keks]

+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

I thought you could already do that, or maybe only to request container (which has same effect)?

Every time I've tried it, it doesn't do anything. To requester works and its' great, I use it all the time, but I use the fast or stack inserters to limit how much of a product is made, eg. 4000 green circuits. This is beneficial with robots because I just copy and paste the factory with blueprints to increase production, but overall the item is still limited to 4000 for eg. To do the filtering I set <item> < <x> as a filter condition. It would be nice If I could copy and paste from a factory to the inserter and it would set both item in the condition part and the item in the filter part. Then the user can clear one if they don't want it or leave it as it will still work in most situations. Clearing is much faster then clicking the filter box and then finding the right tab, then finding the entity in the list and selecting it (as an example). Not sure if search works in this gui, but it's still faster to right click then to type or search for the entity.

For that matter we should be able to copy from an inserter to a factory and the factory should set the recipe from the inserter's item in the condtion part if one is set, else do nothing.

If you have the actual Item in your hand:
left clicking a request field will request one stack of that item.
left clicking a Filter field will set the filter to that Item (The exception to this are wagons and your Hotbar there it's middle mouse instead of left mouse, because left mouse would place the item instead of setting a Filter).
So you don't have to search for the item in the tabs only your Inventory, it's not perfect but maybe that helps a little.

[factoriouzr]

It's nice that they've focused on the mechanics so much in this game and have removed a lot of tedium.

But I think at least one person there should start focusing on the rest of the game. The game only has 2 biomes and they don't contain any different resources (only the trees look slightly different in desert and there's less of them).

There is only 1 enemy faction (the biters) and only 3 enemy types (biters, spitters and worms). Even the evolution system is limited to a few stages.

The world is infinite but there's no point to exploring it if everything is the same. And there's no point to different research paths if everything is the same.

Other games solve this problem by having different biomes and different rare resources limited to (or more common in) different biomes. Of course different biomes also feature unique terrain (such as impassable mountains), and often different wildlife (sometimes neutral and sometimes agressive).

There are often remnants of ruined civilizations lost to time and possibly ancient technologies.

Give us a reason to explore. A reason to make use of all the other parts of the game. A reason to research a particular line of tech or use a specific weapon based upon our starting location or which enemies are nearby.

Give us a reason to play the game more than once and take advantage of all the mechanics you've lovingly polished over time.

Games which I feel do level design well are:
Minecraft (biomes, ruins, unlock new areas through tech )
Civilization (biomes, ruins, rare resources, enemy variance, research choices based upon all of the above)
Rimworld (the best ruins - would like to see these type of ruins in factorio)
X3:TC/AP (not procedural but still features many of the above options)
Mount and Blade (the map is quite dull but different areas do produce different resources like X3, and the different enemy factions do make the game a lot more dynamic like Civ)

I also think biters and biter difficulty need to be improved. We need more biter variety, we need harder biters and a way to set the biter difficulty when creating a game, we need bigger armies and more concurrent attacks.

I also agree that we need more variation in biomes. Having some unique resources in different biomes is a cool idea, but it has to be implemented very carefully because this could get annoying. Perhaps have rare resources in different biomes, but allow the player to craft those rare resources from other common materials or products, just make it cost more.

[SaberCherry]

I don't think there's a lot of resistance, but the majority of items in Factorio have both simple uses and advanced uses, which is generally the sign of good game design. Whereas an electric boiler lacks the former, making it something of a niche item. Furthermore, I haven't seen any suggestion of NEW gameplay, merely it's possibility of helping to substitute for an accumulator while taking less space (in a game that can offers an infinite amount). That doesn't make for a good vanilla addition, I don't think.

That's a good point, though I'd like to note that a normal boiler also only has a single use.

[factoriouzr]

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.

Agree with this too!, God I miss the individual curved rail and straight rail. Every time I'm laying out a complex intersection or station, trying to design a new blueprint, the rail planner has no bloody idea what I'm actually trying to do! Especially a frustration is in places where it's ambiguous where to put a corner, e.g. you want to add an S curve to switch tracks in one place on a vertical line, the rail planner will decide that you actually want it one tile down, or up, so you have to cancel, move the start point one tile down, or up, and try again. I'm constantly guessing exactly which tile the curved piece will start in without being able to see the curved piece, and then making the shortest turn possible so that I can, in essence, just place the curved piece on it's own anyway. SO FRUSTRATING! please give us both options, manual and auto.

I'm a little surprised to see people complaining about that, I thought it was an amazing improvement over all of the manual rotating. I have noticed the "where is it gonna curve" problem though, maybe right click to back up 1 rail would help?

+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

+1 to this, too. Always want to set the requester chest to x10 resources needed for a recipe on fast recipes.

Yes! This! I always end up manually adding a couple 0s on to all the requested items.

Rail building:
I am also surprised, I thought the rail building was extremely annoying to the point That I rarely bothered with trains. I hated manually rotation the tracks and trying to line them up to go where I wanted. I'm glad there is no curved rail piece.

As a suggestion to the people who don't like the new system, have you tried rotating the end rail piece while in rail building mode? That has worked for me on many instances. Also if you can see that you have enough room to build the track in the way you want, but the autobuilder doesn't do what you want, I found that often times I can just build half of the track in one go, then do the other half in another operation. That way if the rail builder goes in weird directions, you can force it to go where you want part way on the track then when you finish the track it might get the right path for the second half.

requester chests:
I do the same thing, that's why I think this should be part of the base game.

[factoriouzr]

Isn't this game about automation? I would absolutely love the war to be automatable too, by creating robot armies that we can send to attack the enemy! It would really be useful for the PvP mode too.

Setting a delay for turrets is a great idea to avoid turret creeping! But I also think that there should be better military technologies, because to my mind, they are currently not enough powerful.

I personally don't like the idea of merging items because I don't want to loose some without being able to choose. I'm not really happy with the rail tool either, it's inconvenient when trying to precisely place small pieces of rails, a manual alternative would be nice.

I hope that you also will make technologies for water in this version. For the space exploration, instead of making an extension pack, you could make a second game but cheaper for people who bought the first one.

I agree about more military technology and automating army warfare. This is a game about automation after all. Also if you nerf offensive options, give us better ones.

[floodo1]

Another thing for gameplay:
The only mod I consider to be vital for my enjoyment of the game is the Long Reach mod. It just smooths out gameplay a ton. You might increase the radius at which you can interact with things in the base game.

I've been playing a lot of vanilla multiplayer and also single player with Long Reach ... to me it feels like the vanilla reach is too short, but being able to zoom out and interact with everything on screen feels like it's a bit much. Therefore, in the vanilla game I would like to see the current radius increased but not set to the maximum (let users download a mod for that) (-8

[nevniv]

Merging items with different health:
Please do not. Could you instead add a mechanic to allow pocket repairs? Maybe it's a module in the armor, maybe it's a research that just enables the capability, but rather than potentially losing items because of picking them up unfixed, allow them to be fixed while an item.

+1, I was just coming to suggest the same thing. Even without pocket repairs, I would prefer to keep the existing system over the proposed merging.

Everything else looks great! I'm really looking forward to trying 0.15, especially with the new science packs.

I agree with these two. Some way to auto-repair my inventory is definitely preferred over auto-merge causing item loss for some of us.

[imaytag]

I agree with others who suggest that science packs should only use raw materials or intermediate products as ingredients (though military science packs using ammo or something makes sense and production using assemblers maybe). I think it makes thematic sense as research being done on ways to use the various 'parts' to make machines or upgrades. Also would be cool if there was a correlation between the ingredients of the science packs used and the ingredients of the items unlocked by the research.

[Antaios]

Rail building:
I am also surprised, I thought the rail building was extremely annoying to the point That I rarely bothered with trains. I hated manually rotation the tracks and trying to line them up to go where I wanted. I'm glad there is no curved rail piece.

As a suggestion to the people who don't like the new system, have you tried rotating the end rail piece while in rail building mode? That has worked for me on many instances. Also if you can see that you have enough room to build the track in the way you want, but the autobuilder doesn't do what you want, I found that often times I can just build half of the track in one go, then do the other half in another operation. That way if the rail builder goes in weird directions, you can force it to go where you want part way on the track then when you finish the track it might get the right path for the second half.

It's more that instead of placing the pieces of the rail exactly where I know I want them, I have to try and figure out how to get the rail placer to understand exactly where I want the rail pieces, which introduces frustration. It constantly feels like I'm on the verge of a mis-click that will result in some random squiggly mess, and I'm constantly adjusting the start point or cancelling with q because I just needed to reset the thing. When using the rail planner, to me, it just feels like I'm constantly fumbling about, whereas with the individual pieces, I know exactly what I want, and exactly how to put it there, bam, done.

rotating the end piece and laying the track section by section help me build the rail the way I want it, yes, but it's still me trying to force the planner into doing things it doesn't seem to want to do. I can get the rail planner to lay (almost, if I start in the right place) exactly what I want, by moving 1-2 rails forward at a time, but at that point I'd rather just have the individual pieces back. It also doesn't help when I want to edit sections of track to add in something small, it sucks not having access to the underlying pieces that actually make up the track.


I don't see why it would be a big deal to just allow us to lay individual track pieces again, as well as having the rail planner.

It actually would've been neat if the rail planner was similar to the blueprint tool or deconstruct tool from the beginning, a small research to get a planner tool that aids in laying large sections of mostly straight rail.

[AndrolGenhald]

Rail building:
I am also surprised, I thought the rail building was extremely annoying to the point That I rarely bothered with trains. I hated manually rotation the tracks and trying to line them up to go where I wanted. I'm glad there is no curved rail piece.

As a suggestion to the people who don't like the new system, have you tried rotating the end rail piece while in rail building mode? That has worked for me on many instances. Also if you can see that you have enough room to build the track in the way you want, but the autobuilder doesn't do what you want, I found that often times I can just build half of the track in one go, then do the other half in another operation. That way if the rail builder goes in weird directions, you can force it to go where you want part way on the track then when you finish the track it might get the right path for the second half.

It's more that instead of placing the pieces of the rail exactly where I know I want them, I have to try and figure out how to get the rail placer to understand exactly where I want the rail pieces, which introduces frustration. It constantly feels like I'm on the verge of a mis-click that will result in some random squiggly mess, and I'm constantly adjusting the start point or cancelling with q because I just needed to reset the thing. When using the rail planner, to me, it just feels like I'm constantly fumbling about, whereas with the individual pieces, I know exactly what I want, and exactly how to put it there, bam, done.

rotating the end piece and laying the track section by section help me build the rail the way I want it, yes, but it's still me trying to force the planner into doing things it doesn't seem to want to do. I can get the rail planner to lay (almost, if I start in the right place) exactly what I want, by moving 1-2 rails forward at a time, but at that point I'd rather just have the individual pieces back. It also doesn't help when I want to edit sections of track to add in something small, it sucks not having access to the underlying pieces that actually make up the track.


I don't see why it would be a big deal to just allow us to lay individual track pieces again, as well as having the rail planner.

It actually would've been neat if the rail planner was similar to the blueprint tool or deconstruct tool from the beginning, a small research to get a planner tool that aids in laying large sections of mostly straight rail.

Have you tried using normal left click instead of shift left click so you place the rail yourself instead of placing ghosts? It limits the length of the planned rail, and I've found that using that and doing 1 curve at a time avoids most of the issues. Perhaps adding a tutorial like they mentioned would help a lot, it's not the most intuitive to figure out.

Edit: Re-reading that I realize it may sound a little condescending, I'm honestly not trying to call you an idiot or anything, just making a suggestion.

[aeros1]

is an MK2 roboport too much to ask? Now I'm dropping 10 of them at high-throughput area's just because they can't recharge the delivery-bots fast enough and even then they're all covered in circles with dozens of bots waiting to recharge

Modular roboports from bob's mods. Those are great.(have separate chests for more robots and charging pads for better charging) Though would like separate transmission power acting like poles but for roboport modules, and other modules like construction and logistic area transmitters required to stay at some range from pole. Would also allow to control robots in some way not to fly off on biter nests if they forced to follow the poles or stay in logistic/construction area as much as possible. Maybe MK2 transmission poles allowing robots to travel inside poles. Always liked idea of units running along wires from universe at war xD.
Also is it possible to make train signals work in same way blueprint book works unifying it to train signal, and with shift mouse wheel change signal type. For now both chain and block signals have same recipes and it could help with signal placement. If such compatibility would be allowed for sevaral items for mods it could be also usefull, for some mods like ones featuring different priorities in powering steam engines.
Thought a bit and add: shift mouse wheel selection also might work with curved rails when someone wants to place them specifically

[aeros1]

After reading a guy proposing electric boiler I got better idea can tier 2 boiler accept as fuel flamable liquids like raw oil, petrolium gas, havy oil, light oil, or liquid fuel, basically any liquid having fuel energy value.

[V453000]

Sounds great, all these changes!

Although I am missing one important annoyance: when you hover the cursor over a chest, you can see the content of the entire logistic network. Unless you have too many different kinds of items. Please fix this, then my factorio experience will be perfect .

You can solve this by hooking a roboport to a combinator which only takes 1 value you care about, and looking at the output. But yeah, it is an issue.

[factoriouzr]

The game took me 46 hours to finish.

No Spoon achievement for you then

The overall feeling was, that we shouldn't add much to the game content anymore or it will become too complex and big for the newcomers.

So does this mean you aren't going to double the types of science packs any more ? Told you it wasn't needed.

This means, that when we add nuclear power, dirty mining, and a few little things, that will be it for the vanilla part of the game.

The best way to improve the game as I see it, is to minimise the annoying parts of the gameplay.

You are going to remove combat ?

Decrease the bounding box of burner mining drills,chemical plants and pumpjacks so walking in between them is possible.

No that big a deal either way. Might not be worth the effort.

Increase stack sizes of belts,walls and pipes from 50 to 100, this is mainly for the later stage of the game with personal roboports, where making train stations and expansions meant having not enough of belts and walls way too often.

Nice.

Decrease crafting time of some items (engines and pumpjacks 20->10, advanced circuits 8->6)

Not that big a problem and the variation actually adds some interest to the game. I would advise against this, but I'm not going to cry over it.

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

Yes please.

Change the oil so the minimum yield is dependent on the starting yield so better fields are also better later on.
There are more oil fields (compared to 0.13) which is a good change, but setting them up is quite a chore for big ones, so having fewer of them with higher yield would be better.

Not a big issue, I doubt the change is worth the effort.

MK2 personal roboport is a must, as the limit of 10 robots per roboport is not enough in later stages of the game when building bigger setups.

YES !

Concrete shouldn't be blue science (green only)
The electric furnace should be somewhat cheaper. (Especially when it is used in science packs now)

Not an issue for me..

Shift click (ghost placement) should go through trees and rocks as blueprints with shift do.

Yes please.

Enhancement to the belt building mechanics, so building by dragging makes continuous belt.

Also I suggest improvements to belt upgrading.

Limit turret creep as it is way too powerful now (especially with personal roboport) with a turret activation time. As it makes the expansion harder, the resource growth from the center should be higher.

Be careful with this, turret creep is not the fault of the turrets, its because the combat in this game is awful. Some prominent youtubers already turn off biters because they think biters are naff - thats not the biters fault either, it the combat overall that sucks. If you eliminate turret creep experienced players might just turn down biters and noobies might play another game entirely. Of course the new flamethrower helps, so please don't nerf it.

Merging items with different health. - We didn't do the item merging, as we didn't want the player lose his precious items as two 49% items would merge into one, which would prevent the player from repairing both for just a few repair. In reality, I feel that the annoyance of having 8 different stacks of laser turrets/walls in my inventory is not worth the rare possibility of losing an item or two.

You don't need to help turret creepers that much

MK2 version of boiler and steam engine. It is going to be a must with the nuclear power, but it should be usable with conventional coal power generation as well.

I'm not looking forward to nuclear power, I don't think the game needs it.

A lot of people like myself enjoy the combat. It adds a sense of challenge and makes the game deeper. I want options to make the biters harder and add more types of bitters and different and improved AI.

We should have a slider and a few dropdowns to set difficulty of biters. For eg. a setting for how frequently biters attack. A setting for how much larger or smaller you want the forces to be for each attack then the default. A setting for how many cuncurrent attacks max you can have. We need more interesting biter bases.

I realize not all people like biters, but those already have peaceful mode. There should be an option though to turn off biters completely and there should always be a way to craft alien artifacts without killing biters, such as for example by making auto biter farms, or just plain crafting the alien artifacts but we definitely need better biters and more ways to adjust the difficulty of the biters for those of us that enjoy the challenge.

[factoriouzr]

As for removing turret creep: put "siege worms" in biter bases that have huge range and damage and will target structures.

I don't think eliminating turret creep is the solution. The combat needs improvement in this game. More biters, more variety, more interesting biter bases. More tools for the player to deal with them. More player combat units. Ways to send out AI attack units from player base to destroy biters.

Adding an artilery train is cool, but what about laser turret trains, what about logistics wagons?

What about improving the existing player vehicles like the car and tank? What about new vehicles that shoot lasers (perhaps the spider walker that was shown)? What about vehicles for the player with longer range? What about artilery turrets? Seems strange to have a train capable of artilery fire but no building that is capable of it.

[factoriouzr]

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.

Might sound so. Indeed the point are not the boilers, but the storing of the hot water in tanks.
See https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?tit ... r_in_tanks

A completely filled tank with water at 100 degrees stores 212 Megajoules! This is the equivalent to 42 Basic accumulators, but the tank needs only 3x3 tiles of space. This way you can store much more energy in a much smaller place: 23.5 MJ / Tile vs. 1.2 MJ / Tile

I don't know, if that is really up to date, but if not it should not have changed too much. Also eventually interesting: https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?tit ... r_in_tanks

And this becomes much more interesting with nuclear energy (and other energy creation ideas: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=31440 ) : Players wants some energy storage.
See below "Storing energy" in viewtopic.php?f=80&t=31440 . There are more, but I just linked the most actual ones.

You need also to know, that solar panels are one of the most discussed subjects about balancing: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=18613 Solar panels less of a no-brainer

There are many ideas about making storage much more important. See viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342 Events (Environmental Disasters and Weather) / Biome-Types
And in discussions around nuclear energy there is a lot of agreement, that nuclear energy should be "slow" in the way, how fast it reacts to changes in power usage. This means: you need fast storage of energy.

So to conclude it: Electric boilers to create hot water is in my eyes a good idea to have some kind of "emergency energy backup". [And AFAIK such boilers needs to be implemented into the game, cause it cannot be modded easily: Implementations based on the current boilers would eat up too much CPU; you need some Lua-Script that shifts the consumed energy (by a accumulator-entity or so) into the boiler.]

But I don't want to hide: Another direction to store energy (also quite interesting) would be producing for example ethanol out of the air (CO2 + H2O + Power --> CH2 (methylen-group) + some O2 , air-cleaning and producing pre-products for oil and fuel , I mention this only, cause this is currently researches in reality and the results are really promising).

And we don't need to mix this up: Energy production is in my eyes a cool thing, when we speak about different speeds in availability. Every kind of energy should have their pros and cons. Hot water for example is - correctly built - very fast available, nuclear energy should be in my eyes much slower.

It will literally not work. That kind of contraption shouldn't even start. It's literally this.

Hehe... Well, the boilers have of course the same priority-level as accumulators, so that the don't consume energy, when not enough energy available. And more complex switching: Use circuits and power-switches.

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 ).

Well, also my opinon.
There is this big subject, which needs (in my opinion) to be known to understand the relations to other fields:

viewtopic.php?f=80&t=4682 Planning (Signs, Cloning, Ghosts, Blueprinting and more...).

Read the points about "Cloning", that is a technique which is relevant BEFORE blueprints are available. The basic principle with cloning (it's just a name, replace it with anything you like) is, that the player is able to copy a (small) areas and paste it anywhere in reach. It's not told, how to place objects, it could be some kind of "magic" or kind of robots, or you need to use "capsules"; I don't know, the details are not relevant here.

What's relevant? Well, that mentioned subject is quite old. In my eyes it should work currently like so:
- Copy/paste should work from begin on with ghosts. Meaning: You can currently place single ghosts. I see no problem to place multiple ghosts at once. That is also a super useful-planing tool for multiplayer.
- Some research and items are needed to have the ability for ghost-placing: You place a ghost and if you come near enough to that ghost and holding a tool and have the right items, it is placed.
- I think also blueprints before you have construction bots is a good idea. With the stored blueprints in the blueprint-books from former game, you can improve early game a lot. I think creating such books, that enable fast early game for example, would keep many players engaged. In my opinion this can become the same "level of fun" as mods already have.
- Some research might increase the radius of this tool. And when I speak about a tool: Perhaps it's not a tool, it's robot-capsules, that work for a minute until destroyed. Again: The "How" is not relevant yet.

+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

I thought you could already do that, or maybe only to request container (which has same effect)?

Indeed you can do both.

personally I think a Pause toggle for personal Logistics slots, Personal trash slots and your Personal roboport sending out construction Bots and Actinng as a Provider chest would be nice.

There are a lot more suggestions: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=20566 Changes for the Personal Roboport
One of them are such a switch. Another one was, that the bots don't wait for orders and get lost (e.g when driving train). I don't know, how much of the issues are currently fixed, but with each version it was better.

There is only 1 enemy faction (the biters) and only 3 enemy types (biters, spitters and worms). Even the evolution system is limited to a few stages.

There are a lot of ideas: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=3440 Enemy Variations / Enemy Variety / New Enemies / Boss

I think the favorites are:
- Underground enemies, that dig tunnels and they suddenly appear in the middle of your base
- Thieve enemies, that steal your produces items.
Both is difficult to implement and I don't think this will come before 1.0.
But at this point I like always also to point to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=3440 What do biters do in their spare time? (Pheromone pathfind)
which might be a way to become completely different (and unforeseeable) behavior.

The world is infinite but there's no point to exploring it if everything is the same. And there's no point to different research paths if everything is the same.

Indeed. The current world-generator does in my eyes a very good job, but compared to other games we need to create 50-100 times bigger maps, which results (cause area has x and y direction) in 2500 - 10,000 bigger areas. A map-editor is only of limited use with that sizes (create a small production site). :/
There is this subject: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=13022 World Generation / Map Generator / Game Modes / Scenarios / Biomes
which describes a way to autogenerate worlds, composed out of layers of worlds and chooing the right "layers", like photoshop.[/quote]


Regarding the earlier roboport:
I'm all for this, and I agree we should have blueprints pretty much right from the beginning of the game. Along the lines of auto placing items if you are close to them, another option is to give the player 1 single construction bot that they always have that does this task without the personal roboport. Perhaps it's too much work and not worth it, but it would allow you to more reasonably tweak or perhaps add research for increasing the range of placement. That way the player isn't placing objects half a screen away. Again, this isn't a must but I think it's cooler to see a robot place the building and allow range extension then allow range extension and the building just appears farther from the player. Again probably not worth it to implement but would be cool.

Regarding copying to inserters:
No you can't do both. I just tested it again in 0.14.13 and you Can't copy from a factory and paste on an inserter and have it set the filter in the condition when a fast inserter is connected to the logistics network.

Regarding biters:
Biters definitely need more variety, better AI, more interesting bases, more options to adjust their difficulty at the start of the game: number of concurrent attacks, how much bigger their forces get, etc. However Biters that bypass all your defenses and appear in the middle of your base, i'm not a fan of. That will just result in messy factories with laser turrets everywhere. Flying biters are a better way to deal with this in my opinion by also adding anti air turrets and options because it allows for variety without being cheap and just bypassing all the defenses the player spend time and resources building since the flyers would still have to path from their base to yours and actually travel that distance.