Friday Facts #224 - Bots versus belts

[WarpZone]

If there's anyone that has created a toxic, hostile environment, it's you. This was idle thinking, a thought experiment, Twinsen's own personal rant about fun and designing things to be fun. You are the one that immediately went hyperbolic with the arguments and insisting that your fun is being threatened because a dev made a blog post about design elegance and how elegant Factorio would be. They repeatedly point out that they won't remove bots.

You keep escalating this "conflict" more and more for no reason. Now you're demanding that a guy who made a blog post that offends you must be fired and he must be causing a full-scale war in the dev team and that we are one spark away from Factorio team self-destructing and disbanding, erasing Factorio from existence. Again, because of an academic blog post.

You are a nice crystallization of why we only ever get PR bullcrap from dev teams and everything is in corp-speak. Because the moment a dev says something that slightly offends your sensibilities, rather than just saying "That's stupid, please no", you decide to explode, insulting the dev team, threatening to spearhead boycotts and causing a PR smear campaign unless your demands are met, over that tiny perceived slight that may not even exist. This attitude pretty much ensures that no dev will ever post anything interesting again and worst of all, would rather not discuss any ideas whatsoever with the player base, if this is the reaction they'll have to expect. After all, what would be the use?

I'll just again point out that they are not going to remove bots. Please just calm down and understand that.

It's precisely because of the behavior of worse devs that I can't trust even the good devs like Factorio's. They do this all the time. They act like they care about their players, maybe they even DO care about their players at first. But eventually, whether for art or for money, they decide to hurt their players. This is the way things are now. No developer is safe, no publisher can be trusted, nothing is sacred anymore.

You think I like being this unhinged? You think I don't realize this is making me a pariah in the community!? I'm speaking up because nobody else is! This happens all the time in video games, and if we stand idly by and let it keep happening, they're just going to keep making the game worse and worse and worse with every patch until it's this overcomplicated confusing thing nobody can sit down and actually play.

It's not even about the bots for me anymore, it's everything. Every single nerf and tweak pushing the base game further and further away from the gameplay experience I first fell in love with. It's part of a pattern and it keeps happening! Subnautica, Rimworld, Starbound, Don't Starve, Robocraft, Homeworld... even friggin' Slime Rancher, of all things. As soon as a player figures out how to beat the game, they go "hey you're not playing it right" and they change the laws of physics so that your tricks don't work anymore. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the powers that be arbitrarily deciding that I'm not allowed to succeed!

*sigh*

I should quit this thread. I just keep getting angrier and angrier and it's not helping anybody, is it? The team's gonna do whatever they're gonna do. All I'm doing is bringing down the rest of you guys. You're all living in the happy safe fun little imaginary world where corporations make good decisions, office politics don't exist and devlogs exist to inform the players, not influence them.

I sincerely wish you guys were right. But there's just too much past experience screaming at me 24/7 that you aren't.

[5thHorseman]

Developer #1: We need to figure out bot / belt balance.
Developer #2: We should ask the community what they think.
Developer #1: No. When we ask opinions we get hundreds of answers and end up with a worse situation than we started with.
Developer #2: Yeah. The community only really hashes things out and comes to solid conclusions when there's some sort of divisive controversy.
Developer #3: Hey. Why don't we offhandedly imply we're going to remove bots entirely?
Developer #1: That's...
Developer #2: ...brilliant!

[meganothing]

While the pitfall of building stupid by new players is real, does it really require us to drop the only endgame logistic system off because people who don't like optimising their factories won't optimise their factories?

If you want to hear my opinion, definitely not. But it is worth some effort looking for ways to achieve both goals, i.e. keeping logistic bots AND making them unsuitable for trivial solutions. If that's not possible, fine, but if nobody looks, for sure nobody will find a way

I also don't think making logistics bots more expensive in any way is a solution.

...
Fear of discussion comes from dev going out of their way to say (to the effect of) "Hey, not doing it right now at least, but wouldn't it be cooler if this game had no logistic bots or if they were nerfed to belt level?". How do you think the situation would evolve if the reaction to that would be just "meh"? Strong reaction to potentially devastating situation, should dev decide that people don't really care about bots that much.

I throw back that question: How do you think the situation would evolve if the reaction to that would be just "No, definitely no, because ..."?

By saying you have to amplify your reaction so that it is noticed, everyone else has to amplify their reaction too. Flame wars start this way. Do we want a forum full of drama queens and fear mongers ?

This, in no way, is comparable to having creative mode active on default game (granted that's not quite what you said), logistic networks are not in game until you have practically finished it. You really need to aim for them to get a logistic robot base before a rocket.

The original post is not from me, I just found the anecdote GenBOOM told, how he got interested in Factorio, not really applicable. If you get interested in skiing because you see some expert shooting down a mountain, you usually still start at the beginners hill before you try the mountain.

By the way, I built my first logistic bot base exactly to operate the rocket production. Yes, it is already a later development, but it is well before rocket science in the pipeline, just compare the research costs.

[Tin reaper]

The real problem is beacons.

To make belts more effective, remove beacons from the game. Add in higher level assemblers.

Ie mk 4:craft speed 3. 8 module slots
Mk 5: crsft speed 5 16 module slots.
N.b made up numbers

At the moment, the only posible way to feesable feed a gully beacon/module assembler is via bot. Trying to use belts just doest work.

As a side note look at what productivity mods affect. Mabey chsnge them to affect more end products too.

[Jon8RFC]

You could limit a chest to allow a certain number of bots consecutively, but please, ONLY if you also limit sending bots by "reserving usage slots", in a manner consistent with how trains "reserve" a segment of rails. The last thing anybody wants is for 10k iron requested, and 2.5k bots rush out, with 2.4k bots idling in queue, wasted, when they could be used for other requests.

I like the stacked belts idea as well. Not layered belts, but layered items where a stack of 4 items can be in one spot. Make it interesting and make a splitter capable of managing that be only on the blue level, and require 20x gears of a normal blue splitter plus a blue chip. If it's fed into a normal splitter, then the stack drops down as each bottom item is processed.

[CLion]

dont nerf the bots to much, just make belts better (after introducing bots in the techtree)

how about finally adding the belt loader (the one without textures), or make stackable belts

or pneumatic tube "belts", in which the items go and special output inserters that pick items from the pneumatic tube stream
compression issues would be obsolete for the tube belt and it would go really fast, but could only go so far before the pressure (and therefore speed) sags (kinda like fluid behaviour)

[BillH]

I don't think bots need to be changed at all. "Belts are more fun than bots" FOR SOME. For me, I've upgraded my base over time to a 2K SPM megabase, and what keeps me coming back is the challenge of optimizing my train network to feed the beast and getting my bots to work optimally for each factory setup. I ripped all the belts out of my game long ago and they're sitting in a box ('cause I can't quite bring myself to machinegun 2.4K of express belts). It's your game, and you already have my money so you can do what you want, but if bot changes are made that prevent the ability to create megabases I won't be playing anymore.

[Chromatix]

Hi,

I've try to go through this thread to find out if there has been a similar suggestion to this, but couldn't find any. If there is one, please disregard mine post.

I agree with the developers. Every game, I want to like bots and use them, but when I start to setup my base based on belts, they just don't fit in. However, when i thinking about removing bots from the game (or their logistic aspect), i feel there has been a huge effort in developing them, which makes it really hard to make.

So I suggest... don't remove bots, but creatively restrict their use. Well, what this smart ass idea actually means, you can say. I suggest using logistic robots the say way they are used now (and maybe rename them as "cargo" or "delivery" bots), but from the perspective of efficient gameplay, make them intentionally suitable for megastructure constructions as little flying construction workers.

What the hell is a megastructure? Well, lets suppose you want to build a building, which is bigger than a 3x3 sized assembly machine. How do you do that? Easy, you just plonk the massive amount of resources into the assembly machine and wait a while. In few seconds, it spits out the 6x6(? not sure here) rocket silo. It is kinda odd, but ok. But suppose you want to build really really huge structure, how do you do it? But... but sir, we don't have any bigger structures than that... We do, we have a modular nuclear plant for instance. The problem is, it is modular and you build it from few different blocks by hand or by construction bots. In this sense i feel that construction bots are kinda op, because not only they construct, they also deliver. But they don't deliver resources for the site, from which they would build the actual building, they deliver finished product and only place it on the spot. So, what if we had logistic bots for delivery purposes of the material to the construction site and construction bots for actual construction? Why on earth would I want game mechanic like this, when I conveniently can build anything in assembly machines and instantaneously place it on the ground by the type of bots already staying in the game? Well, I don't know... fun? Maybe?

As crazy as it may seems, this exact mechanic we already had in one well designed game. When I was little younger, and Factorio didn't exist, I've been nerding out in Pharaoh - old building strategy game. The game was in some sense quite similar to Factorio actually. You placed instantaneously most of the buildings, but when you wanted to construct a monument - pyramid, obelisk, or mausoleum, you had to use common workers (analogy of suggested delivery bots) to get the material to the construction site and then use construction workers, which added stones to the building, or sculptured statues from them. This mechanic was quite trivial and specific to endgame gameplay, but watching the construction site growing was the most favorite aspect of the game for me. I don't suggest you should copy Pharaoh, but you get the idea. For really really massive structure, we could use this new construction mechanic and use logistics bots as delivery workers, since you couldn't be able to snake in a belt, since no room for that, you couldn't be able to hand in the material by an inserter, because it has not enough reach, and you can't use construction bots, coz they are busy constructing and they are too little and agile and don't have the power to carry 20 steel beams at once. Construction bots just fly around and weld everything (in my mind ).

Ye, this is all very nice, but we don't have any megastructures to build, you may say. True, but I suppose developers are not done with the game and they can come up with some sort of new end game goal / building / whatever, to spend this massive amounts of resources. Infinity research is great, but is that it? I would like to actually go to space! Personally! Or make a fusion reactor (not the pocket one). And if this type of megastructure mechanic is in the game, we can use it to redesign/extend nuclear plants, smelteries, etc.

I understand you want to have everything modular, built from basic blocks and snake through the belts. I love this aspect of the game. But when you have 50k plates/min smeltery, it's kinda pointless insisting on modularity of 40th lane of furnaces. If you can make 5k/min single furnace building, more compact, but insanely expensive and hard to build - this would make a new, actually interesting goal for me. I could start taking apart my furnaces-based modular smeltery and replace it by more powerful, more compact and more expensive megastructure smelteries.

Last statement summarizing it all:
Don't remove mechanics (logistic bots) from the game, come up with new ones (megastructures), which can effectively use them.

Just.. say what you think.

[lottery248]

as a pro-robot player, i have had mentioned that i am not amused at all to remove, nerf an/or penalise the bot users, i have gotten a probably better solution:
i don't sure if this would be efficient, at least this will be more balanced than nerfing the bots severely affecting the bot users.

which i would suggest to give more benefit to the belts, by raising their speed from something like 40/3 80/3 and 40, to 20 40 60 respectively. for the express conveyor belt, lower the material needed of iron gear wheel side per one from 80 to 20, because the number needed as of now is pretty ridiculous. and for the current movement speed of belts are still slow for mass transportation (example: i have been crafting the blue circuit from the green and red circuit using the blue belts to transport both, however could only favour up to 3 assemblers to craft them up due to delay of green circuit, and the production speed of it is faster than how fast blue belts are at single line) or stack inserters at the maximum stack size(12).

give belts to underground thing, maximum length to be longer by at least 20% or something, so that the overlapping will be easier.


for side of all bots, double the battery capacity and avoid charging unless they either have none of the task demanded or the energy available is none (which means bot's energy must be dropped to 0 joules before it goes to charging when on task), but no changes to power consumption. so they will need to consume twice of time and energy to recharge when they are completely our of energy as well as queuing time, but they are doubled of working time for its multitaskng.

on second suggestion to bots, all bots crafted are (or should be) initially empty of battery (virgin robot), therefore if they are first time to serve the logistic network or blueprint, they will have to be charged to full, at slow movement to the roboport, before they are eligible to begin their task. then return a normal logistic/construction robot as they have their task completed and fully charged, in that case they do not need to charge as soon as the bots are placed and they are working at normal speed (ie they begin the work immediately if they get task to do as soon as they are placed on).

[Jarin]

Developer #1: We need to figure out bot / belt balance.
Developer #2: We should ask the community what they think.
Developer #1: No. When we ask opinions we get hundreds of answers and end up with a worse situation than we started with.
Developer #2: Yeah. The community only really hashes things out and comes to solid conclusions when there's some sort of divisive controversy.
Developer #3: Hey. Why don't we offhandedly imply we're going to remove bots entirely?
Developer #1: That's...
Developer #2: ...brilliant!

Yeah, I thought that was rather amusing, myself.

Regardless, what we need (IMHO) is more flexibility for belts and inserters. Nothing so complex as has been added in mods (though I do love being able to grab and drop anywhere in a 3 square radius), but something to allow more creativity in design than we have right now. People like me push to using bots more late-game because the belt logistics become frustrating towards endgame. We can't all be belt wizards.

[xng]

I would love for Factorio to have a Classic Mode where Flying Robots only build and does some player logistics, maybe bringing robots up earlier in the tech tree, and a Megabase Mode where Flying Robots can do anything but late in the tech tree.

[rldml]

Regardless, what we need (IMHO) is more flexibility for belts and inserters. Nothing so complex as has been added in mods (though I do love being able to grab and drop anywhere in a 3 square radius), but something to allow more creativity in design than we have right now. People like me push to using bots more late-game because the belt logistics become frustrating towards endgame. We can't all be belt wizards.

I agree to that. For example, i need a lane sorter for belts. The splitter-based solutions doesn't work for me (i tried several times to build it without success, even with the gifs on reddit) for unknown reasons.

And an extendable belt balancer would be nice either. Yeah i know, you can build belt balancers just with belts, undergrounds and splitters, but to be honest (and i believe i'm not the only one here): for all balancers above 4x4 i just do a search for blueprints in the web and import them to my game. Long story short: Belt balancing is some kind of complexity a lot of players remove from the game without any thoughts about it.

Greetings, Ronny

[Lextreme]

Am I the only one who actually kind of likes it the way it is?
Belt and bots seem to be pretty well thought out, so I would focus more on other aspects of the game.
I think that forcing players to use belts really is going to make the game less interesting for a lot of people.
Part of the beauty of Factorio lies in the option to choose wich one you prefer.
I see a lot of people here who actively avoid bots and this seems to be the correct solution.
The power of choice.

That being said, you guys haven't dissapointed yet.
So I might be looking at this the wrong way.

[seePyou]

Why does the game need to be bots OR belts? Reading up on the threads here, I see that people that dislike the bots do not use them and are happier for it. So problem solved; if you don't like the bots, don't use them. But do not remove an aspect of the game that so many people want to use. Imagine if our position was reversed and someone else was the developer and you loved belts, and that developer said "We believe that belts are boring and tedious to deploy, so we will be driving forward with the clearly more fun way of bots from the start. In order for the game to not be too unbalanced though, the player will be able to have one construction bot from the start and raise this through research." Would this development be something you favored?
Bottom line, there are two ways of playing the game, with bots, or without, and it seems to be pretty easy to play without if people do not want to use them. So what's the harm in keeping bots exactly as they are? Do not re-invent the wheel, please, nor should you nerf or enhance anything.

[greaman]

but if bot changes are made that prevent the ability to create megabases I won't be playing anymore.

That would probably an overaction as there will for sure be a mod fixing it...

however, there are several decisions fixed by mods even provided by Devs which make me wonder how consistent decision making regarding changes is.

Just to quote the factorio web site:

Use your imagination to design your factory, combine simple elements into ingenious structures, apply management skills to keep it working and finally protect it from the creatures who don't really like you.

What we don't read here: your factorio has to be set up with belts.
What we do read here: use your imagination. (meaning: there have to be various options to do so)

Equally to nerfing bots you could just get somebody providing a mod disabling/nerfing them if people like to play without them.

[greaman]

Why does the game need to be bots OR belts? Reading up on the threads here, I see that people that dislike the bots do not use them and are happier for it. So problem solved; if you don't like the bots, don't use them. But do not remove an aspect of the game that so many people want to use.

Exactly.

I use both, and I wouldn't want to miss belts nor bots.

As for the creativity and belt magic aspect: with the introduction of exchangable blueprints anybody can copy any layout from reddit/pastebin/... if you want to copy a 1k SPM base - if you want to do so. There is not really a puzzle to be solved. So what's the point?

[vampiricdust]

I've done the numbers. It's hard for robots, because you have to think about what you're measuring, but effectively the metric comes down to how many robots can you assign to a single roboport such that no robot will have to wait to charge. While the effective capacity of a robot is dependent on the distance it has to travel, it's linear with distance, which means that if you provide a consistent number of roboports per unit distance (which you have to do for belts as well), you get a constant number for the transit capacity per roboport.

When you do the numbers, a roboport can service about 50-60 robots, depending on research. At no research buffs, a roboport starts at providing about 4.2 blue belts of capacity. By the time you start the infinite research and you're rocking 240% robospeed and carrying capacity of 4, you're pushing 700 items/s with a single roboport, 17 or so blue belts. Replacing a block of belts with solid roboports has higher capacity, even with no research buffs, and it costs less per unit area if you ignore the robots. I haven't done the math to figure out the point at which adding the robots are cheaper, construction-cost wise, than belts, but it's probably lower than you're expecting.

It isn't lower than I am expecting. You're leaving out, like I did except solar panels, the extra power poles, extra costs of the special chests, and the cost of the extra power generation needed. 1 roboport charging 4 bots constantly will take 96 solar panels assuming no night cycle. That alone is another ~125.8 blue belts to add in. With a rough ideal ratio of accumulators, that is another ~17.3 blue belts per roboport for a full day/night cycle of charging. So that setup requires, with ~209 blue belts of bots means that setup costs about ~365.6 blue belts, 21.5 tiles long at 17 wide. At 4.2 blue capacity, they could be ~87 tiles long. So somewhere near the 240% mark do bots become better at moving stuff within the range of a roboport.

If we used yellow belts instead of blue, you could have made ~18k yellow belts. Which in your 17 blue belt capacity means about 51 yellow belts 352 tiles long, 7 times farther than a logistic network range. So again, belts are better, cheaper, and easier. Logistic bots are only good for builds in which adding more belts is not possible.

[iLubFactorio]

I think the whole bot issue breaks down to one thing:

You don't really have to manage them.
Oh and they are too cheap. But thats more easily fixed.

With belts you have to think first or regret it later (most of us probably experienced that a lot)
With logistic bots it is quite easy. It's only a question of scaling. If you don't have enough, then just build some more (with a bit more power and perhaps some bot-building capacity)

So why not introduce some way to manage them. Maybe managing priorities and limiting them to routes.

While belts are managed on the physical level (where you place them and in which direction) logistic bots are more on a logical level (where to get stuff from and where to put it). And all that is (quite extraordinarily) managed by the game itself. No real way to optimize/develop strategys there. You set the amounts in the requester chests and thats it.

In my opinion, thats where you should make changes. Make bots managable (changable behaviors, prioritize some goods) and limit them more (let them break down if they run out of power with the need to be retrieved), so they become more fun in themselves.


TL;DR I like the bots, but i want them more responsive to user choices.


just my 2 cents

[Koub]

I should quit this thread. I just keep getting angrier and angrier and it's not helping anybody, is it? The team's gonna do whatever they're gonna do. All I'm doing is bringing down the rest of you guys. You're all living in the happy safe fun little imaginary world where corporations make good decisions, office politics don't exist and devlogs exist to inform the players, not influence them

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You could also stop overreacting and start being constructive. You could stop stating for granted the bots willl be removed when the devs have explained it was an experiment of thought, and trust the devs instead of blaming them the way other sudios have done in the past.

[brunzenstein]

I should quit this thread. I just keep getting angrier and angrier and it's not helping anybody, is it? The team's gonna do whatever they're gonna do. All I'm doing is bringing down the rest of you guys. You're all living in the happy safe fun little imaginary world where corporations make good decisions, office politics don't exist and devlogs exist to inform the players, not influence them

viewtopic.php?f=38&t=56218&p=331777#p331777
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=56218&p=331846#p331846
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=56218&p=331929#p331929
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=56218&p=331975#p331975
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viewtopic.php?f=38&t=56218&p=332398#p332398
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viewtopic.php?f=38&t=56218&p=332538#p332538
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=56218&p=332546#p332546

You could also stop overreacting and start being constructive. You could stop stating for granted the bots willl be removed when the devs have explained it was an experiment of thought, and trust the devs instead of blaming them the way other sudios have done in the past.

Well said - chapeau!