Friday Facts #309 - Controversial opinions

[LDJ]

I'm a relatively new (about 100 hours playtime) player to Factorio. Just wanted to leave my point of view.

Biters could be a nice way to teach the player that it may not be the best idea to create pollution all over the place / map / planet.
From the biter perspective the player is the intruding alien that destroys their homes and poison their land. And if they try to fight the intruder off they get killed! What a massacre! This attitude of the game made me almost stop to playing it, as i consider this a massive problem which we all face in our own world!
I know that Factorio is about factory building and optimizing, but maybe it can also offer another optimization goal than "build bigger and faster"!
It would be great to support a play style where you still achieve your goal, but keep the environment (mostly) intact.

My way to cope with biters is to try to preserve as much as possible of the environment in order to contain the pollution cloud(s). This way the biters wont have to attack my installations.
As the biters expand (if you don't turn it off) there is a constant thread from them until you have a working perimeter defense to keep the expansion parties at bay.
Thus my factory will (most likely) be tiny against other players setups and i still do kill a lot of biters (mainly on mining outposts), but i think that i will also get my rocket into space.

I think that the biters aggressiveness should increase with the amount of pollution they absorb. Currently the biters just evolve faster if they absorb pollution, so it becomes harder to fight them. But as far as i've seen it does not change their behavior.

• In the beginning the biters could be neutral against the player and it's installations.

• They become more aggressive when they have to absorb pollution.

• They could start to attack even passive structures (power poles, rails, etc.) if the pollution is too high.

• The attacks should reduce again when the pollution reduces.

... just a few ideas. I'm sure you have a lot of yourself. I just wanted to give you an impression of what i would consider a nice way, without changing the way the game works too much.

I really like the engineering aspect of the game, but a bit of lore would be nice too. The game has the potential to give such feedback to the player.
And if a player don't like it and want to focus on building, they can turn off biters.

[wlfbck]

Anything which is in-progress when you mine a furnace or assembling machine is lost

I'm sorry but this change needs to be reverted in the base game. Yes i could use the mod blabla, but this encourages and incredibly unfun playstyle where you take out the mats first, wait for it to finish crafting and then mine the furnace/assembler. I played enough games where it works like this; it sucks big time and is negative fun.

[Hiladdar]

I'm a relatively new (about 100 hours playtime) player to Factorio. Just wanted to leave my point of view.

...

I think that the biters aggressiveness should increase with the amount of pollution they absorb. Currently the biters just evolve faster if they absorb pollution, so it becomes harder to fight them. But as far as i've seen it does not change their behavior.

• In the beginning the biters could be neutral against the player and it's installations.

• They become more aggressive when they have to absorb pollution.

• They could start to attack even passive structures (power poles, rails, etc.) if the pollution is too high.

• The attacks should reduce again when the pollution reduces.

... just a few ideas. I'm sure you have a lot of yourself. I just wanted to give you an impression of what i would consider a nice way, without changing the way the game works too much.

I really like the engineering aspect of the game, but a bit of lore would be nice too. The game has the potential to give such feedback to the player.
And if a player don't like it and want to focus on building, they can turn off biters.

I like your insight LD!

I do something like that, but fiddling with the start up settings for pollution, biter expansion and aggressiveness. Consider taking a look at some of the pollution based mods out there, they might tweak the game the way you like, presenting you with a challenge more focused on pollution management while expanding your base.

Hiladdar

[TheoMarque]

About belts useless in late game - maybe add higher tier for belts & inserters like direct input/output from belts to container to copete overpowered bots?

[rhynex]

• They could start to attack even passive structures (power poles, rails, etc.) if the pollution is too high.

...player don't like it and want to focus on building, they can turn off biters.

without biters game is too bland.

with biters attacking your outpost transportation (power pole and rail), it is too annoying because game does not offer a solution currently. there is no way to defend the outposts other than every outpost capable of defending itself (which is almost impossible) or securing a huge!! area with walls. consider that oil is far away from starting point. biters attack your rails or power pole. your outpost becomes cheese for biters and you will not understand it at all (you must keep an eye on the red cross warning at bottom at all times). game is supposed to offer automation solutions for repairing but it does not (dont tell me bots, they even pushed it far away in tech tree). they say bots are overpowered but actually they are underpowered for this type of tasks. engineer must go and repair the rail or power pole. there is no automated way of repairing a power pole or rail which are critical parts of your factory

those behavior changes are too drastical on game play. devs must offer an automated way of fixing stuff then (which I doubt we shall ever receive).

You need to retire the we can not change it now, people are already used to it argument, if you genuinely believe a change makes the game better, not changing it is wrong.

this is stupid. it makes game better perhaps but you lose a lot of things just because of the change.
every change comes with an impact and reaction. define "better" here because those changes can bite back seriously and they might end up "worse" in the end. there are times you should not change things to make things better because the change's impact is huge.

* impact: most of the options presented here are game changers and I doubt if they can be modded back. every mod introduce a hit on game at various steps. no one but devs can say if mods are optimized and in professional quality or not. maps are going to be broken, they have to be redesigned since game has new and "better" rules now. game offers no backward compatibility for people who are used to and not want to accept the change (install mods yea, what a solution!). AND game declared those features when selling me this game. game is "better" for you but not for me. after the change I shall own something I never wanted to buy and never shall play/support anymore.
* reaction: game market offers other solutions to such problems. people are shifting focus to elsewhere. or maybe opposite shall happen, who knows. maybe additional one million copies shall be sold. that is a huge risk I would say. since devs brought these ideas, they have plans obviously. they shall take the risk it seems.
* probability of above to happen: impact is obvious, it shall definitely happen. wube offers no option in game, they point to mods. reaction is something I exaggerated but it is not zero. risk is high I would say. now, should we really retire the "people are used to it, we should not change" argument?

one additional problem I see, people are hyped about some changes. it is likely that devs shall say "ok we are going forward with this and that" because most people liked it and game is "better", right? what happens to others who are against it because they think otherwise? I doubt if game shall offer an alternate because with change "it is better".

[DudebroPyro]

I agree with your statement: "Satisfactory was a massive disappointment" but its graphically well done.

Is it really? To me it looks like a pretty average UE game. Not a bad one by any means, but nothing exceptionally stellar either.

game is supposed to offer automation solutions for repairing but it does not (dont tell me bots, they even pushed it far away in tech tree). they say bots are overpowered but actually they are underpowered for this type of tasks. engineer must go and repair the rail or power pole. there is no automated way of repairing a power pole or rail which are critical parts of your factory

This is actually a very good point. Even in the late-mid game, when technologies are unlocked and material cost of bots and even roboports isn't a factor, bots are slow enough that building huge logistics networks to defend rail lines is simply not practically possible. You'd need to build a full supply line all the way along the rail, with regular stops for a supply train to drop off repair materials (including roboports!) into storage chests - and that for every rail line going off to every outpost.
The alternative would be to wall off a huge area, provided terrain generation allows it (e.g. increase water frequency to make a swamp world full of bottlenecks) or you are willing to build a ginormous wall, but clearing areas of biters isn't easily automatable either. And by the end-end game where you have a train ready loaded with a few thousand artillery shells with some good range upgrades, and some blueprints you can stamp down to automatically explore in some direction and annihilate all biters before stamping down some more blueprints to order a few dozen thousand robots to build a multi-km long wall while tearing down your old one in that direction - well, at that point it doesn't actually really matter what exactly biters are attracted to.

[3trip]

We have a rocket assembly building, why not have one for vehicles? OP talked about RTS's vehicle construction buildings as a standard to look to, I would like to see automated vehicle construction and armies of tanks as well.

but you need more than just a factory for that, the large swarms of empty tanks sitting around are useless. You will need an AI control module or something to add to the tank, so you can DO something with the army of tanks you're building.

Think of the logistics required for an army, it would be such a resource sink! army building would be a glorious endgame.

[wobbycarly]

We have a rocket assembly building, why not have one for vehicles? OP talked about RTS's vehicle construction buildings as a standard to look to, I would like to see automated vehicle construction and armies of tanks as well.

but you need more than just a factory for that, the large swarms of empty tanks sitting around are useless. You will need an AI control module or something to add to the tank, so you can DO something with the army of tanks you're building.

Think of the logistics required for an army, it would be such a resource sink! army building would be a glorious endgame.

Have a look at the AAI mod. Nilaus is playing it in his Space Exploration series and you might find it appeals.

[paxaurius]

"If you had a Kovarex enrichment process running with 40 Uranium 235 and you mine the centrifuge the game deletes all 40 of the Uranium 235 and you're left with nothing."

Ahhh! That explains what happened to all that Uranium when I moved my centrifuge...... I thought I was going crazy ... thanks for the explanation. Will have to be more careful in the future.

[pato]

i dont play this game to make 1RPM.

i play this game because i want to genocide alien races and conquer their planet.

i dont build big science factories

i build HUGE ammo and landmine complexes

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=73611


i want more diverse enemies.

Only biters and spitters is really really boring
We have Gun Turrets, Laser Turrets, Flame Turrets, Artillery Turrets, Landmines, Grenades, 3 Capsule Robots, Rockets, Tanks, Nuclear Warheads....
plz give Biters some love finally (and i dont mean fancy graphics)


Gun Turrets, Laser Turrets, Flame Turrets, Artillery Turrets, Landmines, Grenades, 3 Capsule Robots, Rockets, Tanks, Nuclear Warheads....
but Factorio is not a combat game...
but Combat doesnt have its own inventory tab...
and there are no 80 different combat related researches...
we dont want you to have fun combat...
you must build megabases...
nono factorio is not a combat game

[Ecen]

Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature: I think import/export is a good feature to have in the game proper, but perhaps it should be "hidden" a bit. For me, building up and improving my own blueprint library is a very nice slow progression that spans multiple worlds and can continue as long as I want it to. I have however imported belt balancers, and I'm so happy I didn't have to reinvent or reconstruct the 16-to-16 balancer from a video tutorial somewhere.

Weapons shouldn't lock on: Shotguns doesn't lock on?! Well that explains why I've thought they were so rubbish and unreliable for anything but clearing trees... xD I've always liked weapons locking on, but a reworked combat system with satisfying shooting could probably heighten the gameplay experience too. Shooting would need more effects to visualize range, spread, etc. though.

Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses: I'd like that, at least from the mid-game onwards! However, I don't think having to defend passive structures would be so great since it seems that would further dis-incentivize building small outposts connected by rail rather than just clearing everything in a growing radius around your starting base. Me and a friend usually build separate bases, specialize our production, and then trade using a railway, but just building that railway is already very tough work in early to mid game.

Miners shouldn't output directly to belts: I think it's cool that they do output directly. Perhaps some other structure could use that mechanic too. When going through quite a few ore fields in long games, I'm just glad there is one item less I have to carry around 2 stacks of.

Robots should take up space and time: I think it would be reasonable if robots were not the optimal (un-)loader since they are so versatile. Robots having a delay when about to unload or build seems very reasonable. Instead of taking space, what if only one bot could access an inventory at a time, and loading from non-player inventories had a delay too? Would that introduce too many extra calculations?

Power-user hotkeys, "I believe it is alright for a game to have power-user controls that are not bound to any keys by default.": To this I agree completely.

[Unknow0059]

It's hard to remove such a powerful tool now, since it's oh-so-tempting to import that nice blueprint book with belt balancers, so you don't have to deal with designing those complex things yourself. Until a different consensus is reached, the tool will stay in game. But I urge players to restrain themselves from adding too many blueprints to their library that are not their own (or their friend's).

Disagree that it's "hard to remove such a powerful tool now". The crux of the argument is that it's tempting and bad to use such an overpowered feature. I only played 50h of the game, but belt balancers don't look hard to replicate, nor to learn how to make, nor how they work.
Basically, if you really think it's that bad, just remove it - if your only reason for keeping it is "but the nice belt balancer blueprint book...", then... that sounds like an excuse. You can argue there's a problem for if you wanna keep your own blueprint books and such, but that's what cloud saving is for.

Miners shouldn't output directly to belts wheybags

Wow. I agree so much with that. Be consistent, either make everything else special, or stop the miners from being special. I say that, but going to inserters would be annoying; I just like the idea of consistency. Honestly, I've kind of always hated inserters because I can't choose where they'll pick up and where they'll go - which I can do with BELTS and it's a good aspect of the way Miners are now.

Items should have volume and mass TOGoS

I love that idea of buildings have to be built in place. Quickly replaceable logistic systems would have to implemented for early and mid game though - before you get bots to do it for you. A slower ground bot could work. Laying down belts yourself would just ruin the point; then you might as well just have it preassembled like we already have.

[Oktokolo]

@new suggestion: I would love to use factorio with my students - but the whole fighting part is a no go for educational use with my 12-18 years aged students.

The game is fully playable with the natives disabled.
There still would be combat stuff wich might be used by players to do PvP though. But making a mod removing all weapon/ammo recipes and combat-only research should be trivial to do (it would just delete stuff in data stage).

[Ringkeeper]

want to give my opinion:

Inserters: don't care much, i'm not the guy that calculates the output to the item, more the slap-more-stuff-down-don't-care-of-overproduction , so inserter chasing items is something i can live with.

Blueprints: blueprints itself are awsome. Don't want to spend hours in every game to repeat the same layout that proofed to be working. I'm (together with me wife) a player that builds big, building 300+ trainstations by hand is a no go.
And yes, we import blueprints , why not? If someone found a nice/working layout for a complex problem, why should i reinvent the wheel? Specially after 1000 hours already spend.

Biters: in multiplayer with my wife we have biters off. She doesn't like the combat and wants to focus on building. Even in multiplayer it is easier to deal with them, as you can split tasks and don't have to do everything alone like in Singleplayer.
If i play Singleplayer i play with biters till a certain point. After that biters are just a annoying function. Even with mods like bigger radar and nuclear artillery shells i need hours to clear a space for the next expansion of the base, as there are too many biters/nests. That's not fun. With the vanilla radar and artillery i would go nuts.

Miners: also in RL big miners use belts to transport stuff, soooo, why use inserters which would increase UPS problems?

Boilers: without the ability to chain boilers you would need WAAAY more space and pipes.... don't think thats fun. Rather explain it in tutorials how they work?

Pipes: yes please. I never cared about viscosity, throughput, distance , temp, whatever-else-gets-calculated with pipes. Does enough come out at the end? No, ok, second pipeline. Now? No? OK, another one, maybe a pump inbetween. I welcome every change that reduces UPS .... if you need 1 TW of power, nuclear-reactor-chaining because heat pipes need tooo much UPS is not a good looking solution. Reason why i use late game Mods for electricity.....

Adventure mode: yes please, something to discover is always nice. Mountains? Yes please, IF we get tunnels.... in big bases my trains need already 15-30min to reach outposts. So either tunnels or fast trains are a must then.

Robots: big factories reach the limit of belts quit fast, so either bigger belts would be needed or robots....

Items: yes it's silly that you have trains in your pockets, but as you play WoW, check what you can have there in your pockets....... realism vs annoying players is a thin line. Just imagine you need to transport everything for an outpost with the train and then run hundreds of times between building and train so you can place 200 miners. Yeah, no....

return of ingredients: simple yes please

[michalus]

Inserters
I don't care much about the item chasing but in terms of their "accuracy" i think they should be precise enough to detect how many items fit in a cargo waggon and only grab that many, possibly ignoring their maximum stack size. The current behavior where they might insert leftover items causes many issues. Here are some example threads where the problem is described in different ways:
https://github.com/Yousei9/Logistic-Tra ... k/issues/7
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... ter_hands/
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... ing_after/
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=28102

Pipes
Leave it as complex as it is now. Otherwise you could remove the fluid waggons from the game as it would be much easier to build very long pipelines everyhwere, than to handle loading and unloading of the fluid waggons.
Maybe make an ingame indicator so players can see how the throughput of the pipe is reduced over distance. Currently its difficult to see if the throughput is low because distance or because there just isnt enough fluid.

Robots
Belts should be optimized for high throughput but low flexibility and robots should be optimized for high flexibility but have low throughput. This would give factory architects a meaningful choice which transport technology they want to use. Don't care how you implement it.

Return ingredients
Items should not be thrown away without asking for confirmation by the user. Also it makes no sonse for items to magically disapper into a black hole without leaving any trace.

[conn11]

Inserters: Loosing some more organic feel for such a minor factor in any calculation doesn’t seem worth it. Esspecially right now it punishes players for overstretching their power production.

Fluid System: making the current dynamic system has it unique challenge, the GUI should rather be improved or an adequate Tutorial introduced. I fear more newBOP aquivalent and less complexity will hurt the game in the long run. As stated before: maybe a more demanding and realistic electric system.

Return ingredients: yes should be done. The possible exploit seems absolutely minor.

Blueprint Library: I disagree, some players might not particularly like building certain aspects, so keeping increases potentially the playerbase. „Abusing“ it will still be possible if it would be removed. Maybe having it opt in, could balance it for servers.

Harder Biters: yes definitely, maybe also as intelligent biters option, like peaceful mode.

Adventure Mode: would be a very nice feature and would certainly increase playability to a more general audience. Having multiple Layers (caves, mountains), fog of war are nice features to increase drives to explore. Radars could be balanced by fog of war OR unveiling of the base layer only. Rewards could be single repices/items like the tank or nuclear warheads. For some possible Biter behavior alternating research, the classical Alien Artifacts and corresponding science pack from some special Biter entity (e.g. Queen) can have more impact in the main game. Seems like an perfect addition to 1.X to increase the longevity of the project.

Robots: I think rather than using computing power to nerf bots, it would be better to increase usability of belts and trains. For example there are quite many scenarios where high item throughput is required, but for space or complexity reasons trains are more of an overkill. A couple of years back there was a really nice suggestion about hanging carts.

Weapon looking: I think it’s currently fine balanced, maybe adding some weapons with no locking automatically would be nice. For example the rail gun from the editor, something like charge/ or plasma rifle, that tiers with the energy damage research

Miners output: it‘s a little bit different than other entities. There is absolutely no point and benefit to gain by changing that.

[mrvn]

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy ... where do I start.

I like inserters chasing items, it adds this unpredictability element to the game which makes the game less synthetic. It means there is always room to dig deeper and to try to figure out how things actually work and how to take advantage of that. In addition to that ... trying to make tick perfect is slippery slope; it would be hard to achieve, and hard to maintain.

I agree on blueprints ... I feel the Blueprint Library is our version of Diablo 3's Auction House. It sounded good on the paper, but it turned out that people are depending on BPL much more than we expected. It is kind of sad seeing people to cherish their blueprint libary more than actual save games. On the other, what is it to me to tell people how they should play a game, and it is super easy not to use the feature.

Combat ... the game is not about combat. It doesn't mean it should suck, but we shouldn't put much emphasis on it. Biters exist to put at least some time pressure on player, and limit expansion at least a little bit.

I think miners outputing directly to belts is nice, and I think it would be nice if the machanic was utilized by some other entities too (high tier smelters maybe?). Currently it feels like is so many games where a mechanic is introduced and then never used again.

I agree that old boilers worked nicer.

Inserters adjusting to pick up items makes sense. Chasing items they can't possibly catch less so.

1) I think it makes little sense for an inserter to look for an item when it starts to turn. But it should check for it some time in the turn so it can adjust the length already. Unless you have a modded inserter that takes longer to change the length than to turn. So the time when to start looking where to pick up an item has to be dynamic. Might save some time.

2) An inserter shouldn't chase items it can't catch. Instead keep looking for the next item already. Ignore other inserters in this. If the item can possibly be reached by an inserter than go for it. If two inserters go for the same item one will fail just like now. They aren't that smart to coordinate with each other. But smart enough to know when an item can't be reached. So on a blue belt when the inserter turns it won't target the item on the belt that will be long gone at the end of the turn. Instead it will target one 3 items earlier in the belt.

The code might be a bit complex because it has to consider belt speed, item density and weather the item might possibly stop because the belt backs up. But probably worth it. You access the belts and items once and figure out the first 2 items can never be cought. So the inserter targets the 3rd item and doesn't have to recalculate for the rest of the turn unless another inserter steals the item.

This would also solve a lot of the cases where a burner inserter chases items till it runs out of power. Also have burner inserters only pick up fuel if they are low. Not keep adding iron ore to a furnace because there is now fuel on the belt to pick up. With both of those a burner inserter could only run out of fuel if two inserters pick up from the same tile.


3) Importing/exporting blueprints

The blueprint library allows sharing blueprints between games. That takes care of a lot of import/export needs. I want to use the complex factory I designed last game in my current game. That's vital to QoL. But it is still far to easy to loose blueprints. So it's vital that one can export blueprints to external storage, even into git, and get them back into the game.

Or to transfer blueprints from different instances of the game. I have one directory with vanilla factorio. One with the an older version with seablock mods that I can't update without breaking the running game. One with latest version and so on. Import/export is the only way to share blueprints across the games.

As for moving blueprint import/export into a mod: I think that will change nothing. The people that want to import/export blueprints from the internet will simply install the mod and the same amount of trading will happen. All you managed is to piss of the people that play the game "correctly" and want to import/export a blueprint for whatever reason.

[Trebor]

+1 for the above post.

[meganothing]

As for moving blueprint import/export into a mod: I think that will change nothing. The people that want to import/export blueprints from the internet will simply install the mod and the same amount of trading will happen. All you managed is to piss of the people that play the game "correctly" and want to import/export a blueprint for whatever reason.

But that people are pissed because they need to install a mod shows exactly that the change would have an impact to trading! Because people who want it all easy have the same if not more reluctance to install a mod as well. And BOTH importer and exporter need to install the mod before they can trade.

It's not about making it impossible if someone really wants it. It is about making a hurdle big enough that most players will need a concious decision to activate it. If I learned one thing from EA it is that the majority of players seem to be very reluctant to install mods. Just look at how much changes to vanilla are discussed even when they are reversible through mods. Vanilla is a "sacred" state of the game.

[mrvn]

As for moving blueprint import/export into a mod: I think that will change nothing. The people that want to import/export blueprints from the internet will simply install the mod and the same amount of trading will happen. All you managed is to piss of the people that play the game "correctly" and want to import/export a blueprint for whatever reason.

But that people are pissed because they need to install a mod shows exactly that the change would have an impact to trading! Because people who want it all easy have the same if not more reluctance to install a mod as well. And BOTH importer and exporter need to install the mod before they can trade.

It's not about making it impossible if someone really wants it. It is about making a hurdle big enough that most players will need a concious decision to activate it. If I learned one thing from EA it is that the majority of players seem to be very reluctant to install mods. Just look at how much changes to vanilla are discussed even when they are reversible through mods. Vanilla is a "sacred" state of the game.

The people not trading but still needing import/export will be pissed.