Friday Facts #183 - Aiming for the release date

[vanatteveldt]

Yeah, I think starting level would be a great box, I would say a "quick start" button that gives you automation and a small selection of starting stuff so you can skip the first 15 minutes of the game... Maybe also add an advanced start that makes you start with a personal logistics setup so you can immediately start using blueprints?

[CaptainHook]

I soo love the map zoom into the world feature. But being able to place blueprints would seem a bit over powered I think. But as someone has already mentioned before me, unlocking it when you launch your first satellite would make so much sense. Or at least making it high tier research.

[FatMcK]

Come on, i don't want to wait anymore!

Well, if you do not deliver .. I just started making my own Factorio .. in Excel with VBA!

Code: Select all

Option Explicit

Sub FactorioForExcel()

    'Start coding here!

End Sub

Someone has a clue where to start and how to create animated cells?

[Nathadir]

I just started making my own Factorio .. in Excel with VBA!

God I hate iterators in VBA

[Weresmilodon]

Since there is time to work on some small things, here's a couple of player comfort items:

Firstly, on the mouse-over infopanel, can we please have consumption/production per minute? There are so many things that affect production-speed that trying to calculate them all gets downright nasty in some cases, especially with mods. I see player with thousands of hours still make mistakes, or not caring due to the complexity, nevermind new players. It would be so much nicer to see per minute statistics.

Related (sort of) Secondly, When copying from assembler, or other machine to an requester chest, could the number please be dependant on consumption per minute? Getting a set multiplier of the recipe works for slower recipes, but fast ones need a lot more resources. Maybe also add a setting for the time multiplier in the options menu.

Thirdly, When copying from assembler or similar to a requester chest, please do so additively, so using a chest for two or more machines with different recipes would not require adding all the items for all but one recipe manually. Possibly something like clicking adds the items once per click? That would be easy for recipes that might share consumables.

[seabeegamer]

For balancing hand crafting vs. automation, maybe something that you could do is make it more expensive to hand craft. Much like in real life you have "home-made" projects that usually result in wasted material or "Screw-ups." So say your character has to use two gear wheels vs. one in the crafting of a red science packs because he/she is using hand tools vs. precision robotics. Also, increase the craft times of hand crafted items. It makes sense that making something by hand is not nearly as efficient as a machine doing it. Things like that would push players to automation to save on time and resources. Not sure how hard that would be to change but I think it would be better than completely revamping all of the crafts, at least from a players standpoint.

[Adil]

I have mixed feelings about that map view, surely it sounds sooo progressive, yet it takes away the feeling of the big world.

Right now you are a single human on an alien planet. You can not be everywhere at a same time. So you automate things so that they can go on without you. There's a certain charm in a thousands tiles away outposts being seen as a bunch of colored dots on radar

wrapped into a ring of red triangles

.
Currently there are mods that provide the remote viewing but in those some effort is required from the player at first.
At the current cost of radar, it sounds somewhat cheap to have an hd view of the whole world.

Same goes for remote building, surely, the roboport and radar would be already required to build stuff from the map, but maybe some additional building should provide the coverage area in which you can build remotely?

p.s. Will there be any modding possibilities of this feature?

[DOSorDIE]

The Zoom Feature what you search have Supreme Commander!
Zoom from the Tank in Full Screen to the whole map only with you mouse wheel.
Have a look at it!

And when you look at the Game ... the Arty is that what i real missing in Factorio.
Then can i automate the killing of the biters too!
But you must feed it with a lot of amunition.

Here a video from the zoom from Youtube.
https://youtu.be/T4ZJzOEOLnE

[SockPuppet]

I really like the turret range option display thing, yet it makes me wonder how effective it is in the current way.

When would you use the turret overlay? For me it would be:
- to check if I have any gaps at construction time
- to check if biters are about to break through
- to check if biters have broken through somewhere

The first and third are covered by the current display, but by the time the third happens, it's already too late. My defenses have failed. I need to know beforehand.

The second is actually the one I would use the turret display the most for, but there currently is no way to distinguish that on the current map. So, two suggestions:

1. Change the turret overlay to be like pollution: More turrent coverage = Brighter color. Any destroyed turrets in a range would be immediately visible, and a weakened area shows up on the map.
2. Change the color of the turret based on its kill count / 'amount fired in the last N minutes'. From green-to-red, as from low-to-high number of kills/shots (in the last N minutes). This way I get an idea what part of my base is under constant attack, and I need to focus on that.

The first suggestion is the most valuable for me. The other is nice-to-have. What do you think?

[Armentia]

I have mixed feelings about that map view, surely it sounds sooo progressive, yet it takes away the feeling of the big world.
...
At the current cost of radar, it sounds somewhat cheap to have an hd view of the whole world.
...

Perhaps only have the HD map view in [connected] roboport range, if you're also in the roboport range. I feel like that's suitably late-game, and also reduces some of the god-mode feel of it.

[Jürgen Erhard]

"less than two weeks is improbable."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[Green_Baron]

Looking forward to the changes on .15. I'd rather wait a bit longer and enjoy uninterrupted play.

Factorio is one nice waste of time. Even the cat is fascinated by all the movement on the screen

[Zavian]

Firstly I'm sad to see that you are now only planning two version of recipes. I understand why you don't want a simplified version, but you could do a normal (equal to what we have now/what you have planned for 0.15), intermediate (a small step up) and an advanced/'complex' version of recipes.

I'd like to second the comment by Nagapito

First, increasing recipe costs does not make something more challenging, makes it more grindy! Challenge and fun comes from complexity not from having to harvest the double of the resources to progress. That is just grind.

To me if you want to have different recipes then they should be different in some significant way, not just a similar list of ingredients with the advanced version just being more expensive. This is an opportunity to add interesting new variations of existing recipes, and enhance replay value by making us build a production line that is different in some way, not just a bigger/longer/hungrier version of normal difficulty. This doesn't necessarily have to be a completely different recipe.

For example you could change inserters so that instead of needing iron plate, they take iron bars instead, or iron plate and iron bars. Or they could require a burner inserter + iron bars + copper wire + green circuits. Note the objective of the changes here. On standard difficulty a normal inserter needed for green science is green circuits, iron pate, iron gears. If you already have a green circuit production line then that is just 2 assemblers, and the craft time is perfect for direct insertion. A more complex recipe along with some craft time changes and that could become a significantly more interesting to build assembly line of 6-8 or more assemblers.

You can also change craft time, such that direct insertion in a one to one arrangement is less common. (If inserters need one gear each, and inserters require 1.5 craft time, then one gear assembler could feed 3 inserters assemblers. Or you could set craft time such that you need 3 gear assemblers to feed each inserter assembler. Both options could lead to more interesting setups than one assembler direct feeding one assembler). The more complex recipes could also take longer. This way a factory for an advanced/complex playthrough should be significantly different, and probably larger and more complex, than a factory for a normal playthrough. Done well changes like that should make a playthrough on a different recipe complexity level feel different and hopefully provide a fresh and interesting set of layout challenges.

Things like simply substituting steel for iron is not an interesting change. If you have one layout, you basically have the other layout. The most significant part of that change is you need to produce more steel, which probably just makes the thing more expensive. Way more interesting is to require that we add an extra assembler or two to preprocess some of the iron into iron bars/gears/pipes instead. Ideally you should be adding ingredients (or substituting ingredients) with other ingredients that require additional work to preprocess, rather just using more expensive ingredients or just increasing the cost of an existing recipe.

I will also mention the rocket parts. They are late game content, yet have pretty simple recipes. They could easily benefit from significantly more complex recipes, possibly requiring more than 4 ingredients, and hence requiring the use of assembly machine 3. When playing with more difficult recipes, you could also redo those recipes entirely.

To me just making normal and advanced recipes for the same product, and having the 'advanced' version simply use basically the same resources, except in larger quantities (or more expensive variants) is missing an opportunity to add fresh challenges for more variety and replay value. At the very least consider changing craft times such that we need to reconsider production ratios. If the objective of the different recipes is simply to make a longer, but more grindy game, then that could be far more simply implemented by just increasing tech research costs. This feels like a missed opportunity.

[leoch]

Being able to control trains directly from the "map" view would be a great improvement, removing the main need for the "fat controller" mod.

Tweakable resource/difficulty settings: can you add a setting to map generation controlling strength of sunlight (i.e. power from solar panels)? They feel rather cheaty now. Playing with only 10% of the power from solar would be interesting I think.

[vanatteveldt]

Factorio is one nice waste of time. Even the cat is fascinated by all the movement on the screen

Our cat always tries to catch the trains

[Keks]

Strategic Zoom!! You are just sooo awesome!!

[RobertTerwilliger]

We are considering whether it should be possible or not to build ghosts, blueprints and use deconstruction planner from the map

Please, don't implement it. I don't want Factorio to become regular strategy game with upside-down view.
Factorio is unique not only in what we can do, but also in how we do it - regardless of how huge your base will be, you will always be there by yourself. The factory runs solely to serve a person, not player serves the factory - that is what does personal presense gives.

When you want to expand - you go and search, not building radars in all directions.
When natives attack - you jump into train/tank/car and charge to problematic area, not just looking at map, ordering to build more turrets.
You do everything personally.
Please don't take away this valuable feature.

[Darkas]

We are considering whether it should be possible or not to build ghosts, blueprints and use deconstruction planner from the map

Please, don't implement it. I don't want Factorio to become regular strategy game with upside-down view.
Factorio is unique not only in what we can do, but also in how we do it - regardless of how huge your base will be, you will always be there by yourself. The factory runs solely to serve a person, not player serves the factory - that is what does personal presense gives.

When you want to expand - you go and search, not building radars in all directions.
When natives attack - you jump into train/tank/car and charge to problematic area, not just looking at map, ordering to build more turrets.
You do everything personally.
Please don't take away this valuable feature.

I disagree. You still need to have roboport coverage to build anything, so depending on your setup, you need your robots to haul stuff over huge distances, or you need to get things there by other means. The radars also take time to build using blueprints, so expanding is considerably quicker with a personal roboport. I'd love to have something like the recursive blueprints in vanilla in combination with this feature though, to be able to have an automatically expanding base where you can then just commision mines and other things using the map view. That's close to the dream of a fully self building factory.

[quyxkh]

Tweakable resource/difficulty settings: can you add a setting to map generation controlling strength of sunlight (i.e. power from solar panels)? They feel rather cheaty now. Playing with only 10% of the power from solar would be interesting I think.

Stuff like that's easy to fix yourself, edit {Factorio/}data/base/prototypes/entity/entities.lua and change 60kW to whatever you want. 20kW feels a bit brutal, that might be what you want. 6kW? AAAAaaaaaaauggggghghhhhhhh!! I found the setting with just grep -Ri solar in data/base.

[Avezo]

Regarding map zoom - consider adding research increasing radar range and/or scan speed to this then.

Regarding nuclear power - heat 'pipes' idea is just bad, what is it supposed to resemble? Steam pipes are already a 'heat carrying' pipes. Please, I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but comapre this implementation of nuclear power to what was mentioned at the beginning with cooling towers, closed water cycles and so on...

Regarding oil trains - I'm interested what's the problem with this? I've seen addons working fine (I think?) doing exactly this.

My biggest expectations from this are belt optimization and oil trains. Simply because beltless factories are boring and barreling is too annoying.