Friday Facts #304 - Small bugs; Big changes

[Arin]

I believe that someone has already written this, nevertheless I will add my post.
Requiring a chemical research package for laser turrets is an incredibly bad idea. At the moment, in order to protect your base with laser turrets, it takes only 3 hours from the start (with having fun) and one yellow iron line, one steel and half copper, which allows beat beatters in an arms race. In the screenshot (without mods, the cliffs are turned off), the base created in this way in 6 hours is demonstrated. Pushing the laser turrets so far can lead to the fact that on most standard maps it will be impossible to skip the stage with the massive building up of bullet turrets, which will lead to much worse results in the arms race, which will lead to significant time costs for building even simple bases. Simplifying the creation of robots does not help in any way. However, these are just guesses, it will be possible to say for sure only after the corresponding update has been released.
Offtopic: can something better be done with a production research package? Now for its creation requires the tripling of iron production.

[Adamo]

But what that ethane (C2) is itself typically made from ? Not from the lighter distilled hydrocarbons - propane (C3) & butane (C4) ?

In real life, ethane is a large component of natural gas, and this is where we get most of it. It can also be separated from crude petroleum, but we don't do that much in real life since natural gas is so abundant. Since we don't have natural gas in the game, and I don't think it's a good idea to start introducing a lot of intermediate petroleum distillates, I suggest the most-balanced solution is to simply allow the chemical plant to use the petroleum directly to make plastic. However, one could certainly argue that the plastic should be made from a petroleum distillate, and I think that's what the "petroleum gas" fluid currently in the game was meant to represent. On the grand scale of the new proposals, though, I think using the petroleum directly in the chemical plant to make plastic is the most sensible choice.

[BlueTemplar]

Pushing the laser turrets so far can lead to the fact that on most standard maps it will be impossible to skip the stage with the massive building up of bullet turrets, which will lead to much worse results in the arms race, which will lead to significant time costs for building even simple bases.

I'd rather say that it will require that the players use Flame Turrets instead of just skipping them ?

[ownlyme]

Thanks for mentioning, but if you do implement the glowing beams into the base game there's 1 more thing you need to fix:
When a turret fires multiple beams at the same target, their random targeting points in the hitbox don't match, that's why i made the glow-beam always target the center of the hitbox, which is usually no problem, except when the turrets shoot at huge targets, such as biter nests.

[mergele]

Kovarex was convinced by members of the forum to add someway to use the obstacle avoidance mode of the rail planner. Now when planning a rail path, holding CTRL will make it use the obstacle avoidance ghost planning.

Thanks Kovarex!

[CaveGrinder]

I also have some mixed feelings about basic oil processing,
i mean yes something should be done about it, but raw oil to petroleum seems not ideal.
with 1700h ingame i am not really in a position to judge the new player experience but can of course share my thoughts

raw oil to heavy plus early cracking seems better but has its own problems.
in particular i think a decent amount of the playerbase would skip advanced oil processing.
since oil is endless, doubling the pumpjacks and refineries is much easier (or at least straight-forward) than
learning how to balance the outputs (especially considering that now the piping is
a lot easier, and that balancing needs some space too)

my recommendation would be (After typing: This is actually very similar to Adamo's proposal above; i approached it only from gameplay perspective without chemistry knowledge):
add natural gas a a resource, collected by pump jacks
add a chemical-plant (or refinery?) recipe: natural gas -> petroleum gas
delete recipe petroleum gas -> solid fuel
(optional: think if cracking light to gas is needed now)
(optional: think if refining raw oil still needs to produce gas at all)
(leave everything else as is)

With this, the player can get familiar with fluids when building up for plastic and batteries with gas, without getting stuck
once the player feels ready to tackle lubricant or solid fuel for the chemical science, or wants a flamethrower, they can approach oil
at first they can convert both light and heavy to solid fuel. later they can crack excess heavy to light.
in general this keeps a need to learn the basics of the circuit network, but it reduces the puzzle complexity
- crack heavy to light in case that light is empty and heavy is full
- treat gas from raw oil purely as an output and setup a priority over the natural gas processing
(Before there was a need to balance 3/4 things, now there are only 2 things to balance against each other)

[Oktokolo]

Me too dislikes the basic oil recipe change. I recommend removing basic oil processing from the game. Instead, vanilla should include flare stacks so we can deal with the clogging problem in the most humanly way possible (just turn into pollution what is not needed right now) until cracking and circuits are researched.

[Adamo]

This is actually very similar to Adamo's proposal above;

I think one of the underlying gameplay aspects here implied in both our posts, and I forgot to mention this in my first post, is that once we have oil going into the refinery just to produce petroleum gas out of it, it's like: what's the point? What is the refinery even doing, here? It's just distilling the rest into the air, right? So why not just do that in the chemical plant? The refinery is for separation.

[Arin]

Pushing the laser turrets so far can lead to the fact that on most standard maps it will be impossible to skip the stage with the massive building up of bullet turrets, which will lead to much worse results in the arms race, which will lead to significant time costs for building even simple bases.

I'd rather say that it will require that the players use Flame Turrets instead of just skipping them ?

At first glance, this does not help much. Fire turrets cannot even be used as a temporary substitute for laser over long distances due to the use of fuel (and because of the forest fires), so they will be used to protect the base. So, during the transition to the chemical research packages, the bitters will have time to build quite a lot of bases on nearest resources, which will have to be cleaned into the cost of evolution factor. Which leads to the complication of the arms race. (Compared to the current state of the technology tree). However, I repeat, it's just my fears. Perhaps after the update I will find a solution during the game. I hope it will be enough to optimize the construction of the base for the rapid production of chemical packages.

[Philip017]

basic oil processing.....

well for starters, i would run some of my refineries on basic all game long specifically because they produce more heavy oil for lube. necessary when building blue belts later in the game.

i do like that the water side is closed now and i can build my entire setup instead of having to omit the water connection because trying to feed water into the crude input fails, and visa versa if connected incorrectly and switching to advanced. this has me wondering why even bother with basic, there is no reason to even have it with these changes, only an annoyance hurdle.

the suggestion of leaving it as is, and alowing flare stacks seems interesting, but i would bottle the unneeded or turn it into solid, previously i would place several tanks with some pipes in between, so later once i have cracking, i would remove the pipes, and pump the excess back into the system to be cracked, then remove the tanks.

next anyone learning to play the game is going to make solid from gas, and once set up they are going to forget about it and make inefficient solid for the remainder of the game. possibly complaining about it in the mean time. perhaps leave it as is and remove the solid from gas recipe, and instead add flare stacks?

when starting i need solid for science and i also burn some in trains/car/boilers, using circuits to control the logic to burn it in boilers if i have too much. if i get busy between the time making electric engines and advanced circuits, even though true, that advanced oil is almost always my first blue research, but with the necessity for solid in blue science, and with this chance i must use gas to make solid to make blue science, making it a necessity to place a temporary setup for solid from gas, instead of building the entire setup once, with these changes i would now have to build it twice.

so in all, not a fan of only getting gas from basic , but for simplicity i like the change to only having crude input from one side. the suggestion of having natural gas wells that would allow direct natural to petrol is an interesting theory.

as for the flame ammo, i never used the flame thrower, but i know people that would take the gas and turn the heavy and light into flame ammo.

haha yeah that inserter glitch is annoying, i swap the basic for a fast which solves the problem. I've always had issues with the basic inserter on faster belts, so upgrading to red and blue belts necessitates fast inserters. perhaps this fix will address it and allow basic inserters to take from faster belts.

as far as moving worker robots behind blue science, i always push that out very early because i want to see the ghosts of what was previously there when something gets destroyed, blue science comes 6+ hours in the game for me, where i have ghosts with in 1.5 hrs. not happy with this change, i think you had this planned all along with the gimmicky remnants that you added, not a fan of them, still prefer the actual ghost, hence the push for worker robots so early, even if i cant make them yet. i might just command in worker robots research complete at the start with a few other commands i run to enjoy the game better with this change.

as far as logistics robots are concerned, until i have the logistics system researched i never bother producing them. why, well because until the logistics system is researched, they can only service me, and until i have yellow science and a bunch of logistics request slots available, i would have to constantly switch what i want delivered/taken away, so since i know where everything is i just run over to the box it's in and pick it up. once i have the requester chests i can build with them and make the base compact and request what i want at that point.

as for the laser turrets moved to chemical science, well i never used them till then anyway because of the number of batteries needed, usually don't use them till i have nuke power or a massive solar system because they soak down serious power. auto fill is a requirement mod for me, although i think fill4me is what the current one is called. so manual turrets work just fine. of course i go out and clear all the bases in my pollution zone instead of letting them rage at my base all day long.

now the worker robots seriously need some acid resistance because they get killed so quickly by the worms/spitters, i have to remember to turn off my personal roboports before plopping down my turrets, or usually loose several robots trying to save one turret. also the robots definitely need to only hold one repair pack at a time, i haven't found a way to limit my robots from taking several, because when they die, they take the ones they were holding with them, if they dropped to the ground i think that would be better, at least then i wouldn't have to walk around with 3 stacks of repair packs because the robots die so quick and take all the repair packs with them making the problem worse.

anyway my two cents on the topic at hand, thanks again for all you guys do.

[kovarex]

I'm not sure if it was communicated correctly.
Advanced oil processing is going to be used not only because the need of lubricant in later stages (not so much later if you want robots), but mainly because of it being vastly more efficient. Without productivity modules it is 100% more efficient, with productivity modules, it is even more. This will be a motivation especially when oil shortage tends to be quite pressing problem in the mid game.
Having the option of having simplistic but very unefficient solution compared to something more complex and efficient sounds like very factorio-like gameplay mechanics.

Based on it, the only real change for veteran players this will make is the phase between basic processing and advanced processing, which is usually quite short.

[SHiRKiT]

My toughts are: you are the best devs out there. Period.

[EraYaN]

Especially on rail worlds there will be so much oil, just doubling all the refineries will be much easier than dealing with Adv Oil Processing after this change.

[mcdjfp]

For me the issue isn't the change. It is the fact that it does not seem to solve the underlying problem currently triggered by basic oil processing. It simply delays it to advanced oil processing, with more things going on and a more complex set of demands meet. Demands that hit all at once as advanced oil would be the only way to get light and heavy oil instead of gradually as advanced (heavy oil gets a use once lubricant turns up).

Plus it is a bit surprising considering the somewhat recent changes to wood/raw wood.

Everything other than basic oil processing and the resulting technology changes sounds good though.

[bman212121]

Without productivity modules it is 100% more efficient

100% more efficient how? Like 2x the amount of petroleum gas for the same amount of crude? Is that before or after you factor in petroleum gas you get from cracking both the heavy and light oil?

Even if it's double the amount of petroleum gas, I'm not really sure it's worth the resource trade off. No need to bother with offshore pumps, piping for water, no need to worry about balancing setups for cracking excess fluids, etc. You can basically throw 95% of the complexity of oil out the window and just spam pump jacks into refineries to get gas.

I don't agree at all that going to advanced for an oil shortage makes sense in this new model. There is a ton more work to set that up than just throwing down some extra pump jacks to meet the demands. You're basically talking about throwing down a couple extra pieces of track (Which you'll end up using regardless) and making an extra stop on a train route. Problem solved with the oil shortage, and no need to rebalance and handle complicated cracking setups. Just bring in more crude, and copy / paste your row of refineries. You're losing 3 full sets of pipes by not needing them for heavy, light, and water. The underground pipes are probably the biggest bottleneck to making large oil setups currently.

[mrudat]

I think that what would be most nifty is to have a fractionating column powered by heat, and a heat-producer that burns all oils.

To bootstrap, you burn crude, then later you burn any product you don't want; basically using the burner as a flare stack. Perhaps also a low-temp heat exchanger?

Later still, with cracking, you only burn the residuals, and use everything else, which I think is the usual way to do it.

[ERJHolton]

I'm not keen on the oil processing changes for two reasons:

• Postponing the complexity spike does no favours to the player. It's still going to hit at Advanced Oil, and probably worse as newer players will likely have built for the basic recipe, and will be blindsided by the substantial extra space consumed for Advanced's piping needs. This will require them to substantially rebuild their oil, and I suspect will lead to more quitting out of frustration than the initial learning curve around oil. Especially when you take into account...
• The substantial change to gameplay progression caused by delaying bots for several hours. Seriously, there's a reason mods like Nanobots and Construction Drones exist. Once you've placed your first 10,000 belts by hand, you're kind of over it, and would much rather be focused on the design aspect of the game rather than handplacing entities.

[Oktokolo]

I'm not sure if it was communicated correctly.

If the problem to solve was that you can't have a fully automated refinery setup wich works indefinitely before advanced oil processin - then no, it isn't a communication problem.
Whenever any production step generates byproducts there has to be a fully automatable way of dealing with them. Such a way should be available at the time, the byproduct might accumulate to a problem.

Humans always had and still have the excess byproduct problem. But there always was an easy solution to this, wich is still used today: Bury, dump or burn the excess. Factorio misses the concept of explicit disposal. It is an essential concept of human civilization and deserves to be included in every game wich models polution.

Flare stacks solve both issues:
They allow everyone to get a first refinery setup wich does work indefinitely before advanced oil processing is available and needed circuit network skills have been aquired.
And they add the missing concept of explicit disposal to vanilla adding a lot to the dieselpunk feeling.

[Adamo]

I think that what would be most nifty is to have a fractionating column powered by heat, and a heat-producer that burns all oils.

I made a mod that does this, and pretty well. It's not listed on the portal, but it is finished. Message me.

[factoriouzr]

I'm not keen on the oil processing changes for two reasons:

• Postponing the complexity spike does no favours to the player. It's still going to hit at Advanced Oil, and probably worse as newer players will likely have built for the basic recipe, and will be blindsided by the substantial extra space consumed for Advanced's piping needs. This will require them to substantially rebuild their oil, and I suspect will lead to more quitting out of frustration than the initial learning curve around oil. Especially when you take into account...
• The substantial change to gameplay progression caused by delaying bots for several hours. Seriously, there's a reason mods like Nanobots and Construction Drones exist. Once you've placed your first 10,000 belts by hand, you're kind of over it, and would much rather be focused on the design aspect of the game rather than handplacing entities.

I agree with this.

I use a mod to add early regular bots and personal bots to my games as I'm tired of the manual boring work to set up factories. I want to use the blueprints that I developed through my previous playthroughs and not manually repeat the same design for the thousand's time. I also am over manually placing buildings and belts. For me the game is all about the survival aspect and the design and refinement. It's not about repetitive actions. You should have moved robots earlier in the game not later .