Friday Facts #409 - Diminishing beacons

[Kinson25]

Any buffs to Advanced Oil to offset the 25% nerf to 16 beacons builds?

Higher Quality machines and modules.

[CyberCider]

The problem is that, as I understand it, the solution to all quality production is to just do the exact same recycle loop over and over, for every item in the mall.

What makes you think this is how it will work? You think a recycling loop for a beacon, and a recycling loop for an assembly machine 3 will be the same? That’s like saying green circuits and engine units are both made by the exact same blueprint. Different items have different crafting times and amounts of unique inputs, which will require the blueprint to be adapted. And telescopic recipes like inserters are much more complicated to recycle this way, too.

Quality recycling is actually a countermeasure to the copy pasted bot operated malls you dislike so much. The reason those malls work is because they don’t need to be fast, optimal, or very productive, because there’s no reason to produce that many buildings that fast. Quality gives us that reason, and encourages players to optimize the crafting of finished products, which will lead to specialized and unique designs for this previously neglected area of the game.

Besides, repeatedly recycling the finished item is only one approach to quality. There are people theorizing about many different quality strategies, and we will only really know which one is the “best” when 2.0 comes out and we can thoroughly test it.

[Illiander42]

we will only really know which one is the “best” when 2.0 comes out and we can thoroughly test it.

We can test it already. Some madlad back-ported quality to 1.1.

[IronCartographer]

Beautifully done. Meaningful tradeoffs bounded by carefully considered utility curves. Excellent!

[Alsadius]

But I think the part I'm most looking forward to is having a "campaign" feel to it, where there's a large set of related challenges before you get to the end, without it being the Godzilla-sized monster that is something like Space Exploration. I keep thinking I'd kind of like to try SE, but I'd probably finish a Space Age run first, even when I can't start it for like six months yet. Plus, an official product is almost always going to be smoother and better-balanced than a mod, even a really good mod like that one.

This might be one of the main reasons I am not excited about these changes. I don't play a lot of games with campaigns or story modes, and whenever I do, I tend to press whatever button will make me skip it. To me, factorio is a puzzle about logistics, not so much "space adventures".

I don't mean "campaign" here to refer to an overarching plotline or anything RPG-like of that nature. I just mean a grander scale, a longer sequence of challenges.

We can test it already. Some madlad back-ported quality to 1.1.

Wait, really? Is this a mod I can download? I'd be curious to try it.
Edit: Is it this one? https://mods.factorio.com/mod/janky-quality

[Braxus]

Hello,

Normaly, i am super fine with your direction but not this time.
Your FFF title is "Diminishing beacons", and finaly we have "let go to more Beacons".

In my point of vue, the 8 beacons setup must be nerfed or will remain. With 106% compare to 1.1 there is no change.
In a mass production goal, you may incite to build more and you have the best for that "quality".

In a idéal way, each quality rank may unlock (maintain 1.1 ratio) something.
I focus on 2 new beacons by rank.

With a Base ratio like 2.5 (over 3), the 1.1 rate is maintain utils 6 Beacons 102% and 88% at 8 beacons => player want qualité beacons
With +15% on unco : ratio is 102% at 8 => quality is rewarded old basic beacons setup works
With +30% on rare : ratio is 103% at 10 =>New setup unlock
With +45% on Epic : ratio is 105% at 12 (and 101% at 13) => All 1.1 setup unlock
With +100% on Leg : ratio is 125% at 16 the base FFF plan => New setup available.

Thank you again for your great job.

PS : i apologize for my english

[Edriel]

Thanks to the guys who answered me.

Anyway I still think this is not a solution neither in terms of "interesting layouts" nor in terms of proper improvements from the vanilla version.

All I see here is a buff in the early stages and a nerf to the late/endgame which is fine by itself and by me, but as I previously said if the devs' purpose was to solve layouts problems and the "spam" of beacons everywhere, this change solves nothing.

[Alsadius]

If you want to optimize for one specific thing (be it low UPS, low power draw, high productivity per unit input, high productivity per unit area, whatever), there will always be one specific design that's optimal, or sometimes one family of designs.

But in the real world, and in real Factorio games (at least, before you reach the very deep endgame), there's never just one thing to optimize for. You need to consider construction costs, and land area, and design simplicity, and expandability, and energy use, and more. Not all of those will be major factors (and some will be very minor in some cases), but they're all there. So changing the tradeoffs will change the optimal design for a range of circumstances. Maybe it won't change everything, but it doesn't need to. It's okay if your furnace stacks still look the same, or if that one tiny patch of uranium you're relying on for power gets speed-beaconed the same way as before, or if your rocket silo is still a 20-beacon design. You'll change up other things instead.

[dragon_gawain]

Beacons!

[Néomorphos]

Hi

I think these changes won't change anything to how i will play the game. In my endgame base (160hrs in) i spam trains and lines of assemblers surrounded by an always similar set of beacons. I am not yet to the point where placing beacons is a chore but it starts to feel boring.

In this regard, i think the criticisim some here said is very justified, these changes might modify the game a bit for those who are extremely far in the game, building UPS-efficient megafactories and such. But for me who finished the game a few times and play the endgame without going crazy nuts on a 1000hrs+ save, i don't think this is significant.

I think you should take also a look into the problem of beacons gameplay being repetitive largely before reaching the UPS-optimized ultra-endgame factories.

A few people have pointed towards solutions that i think are interesting, notably the large area beacon with a limit to how many beacons a single machine can accept. It makes for a very interesting challenge, fitting everything in a given shape. This reintroduces constraints to build around, as the lack of constraints is one of the elements making the endgame repetitive (the other one being the lack of novelty, but with Space Age I think you have shown solutions for that)

[Néomorphos]

In addition to my last message, as beacons only accept speed and efficiency modules, there might be an interesting idea in having speed-only compatible beacons and efficiency-only compatible beacons with different areas of effect

[NotRexButCaesar]

I personally like these changes. I saw rumors online about beacon changes and was worried that they be essentially a nerf to make beacons undesirable: I like that this is primarily a buff of few-beacon desings instead of a change to force people away from many-beacon designs.

[Karamel]

FYU for a moment there I was confused and wondered "why do those regular inserters unload that fast?" Then I realized that they're actually bulk inserters, however they looked the same-ish from farther away due to the orange color.

[zebiko]

I really do not like beacons. Conceptually, they are weird and nonsensical. They emit an aura buff to machines around them, which is just way too out there for me.

Beacons also ruin module build diversity. All beacon setups have blue speed modules in beacons and red productivity modules in machines. It's the best setup every time. Without the beacons, I use all the different modules in various configurations depending on parameters, optimizing production. It's much more interesting and engaging than any beacon setup.

I do play without beacons, but beacons are too powerful, and causes my factories to be way too big without them to reach the same production rates. And there are no beacon removal mods, but there are mods to change recipes, which I have used to compensate for not using beacons.

Obviously beacons cannot be removed from the game, but I wish the developers will address this problem. I would rather have modules be expanded more, to modify the machines in more clever ways, and offer options to opt out of beacon use in later stages of the game.

Also, I'm not hating because I have played the game for many, many hours, and love it. It's like crack in a good way, but it does have some sour bits to it. And I wanted to voice my experience with this mechanic, in hopes to improve the experience more in Factorio.


PS. Not sure if those new assembly machines in the last clip on the post were shown before or not, but they make me a little nauseous looking at them spin. It might be a motion sickness for me (similar feeling when reading in a moving car) and hope there is an option to disable the spinning.

[ofca]

Becons!

[LiquidInsight]

I am seeing a lot of replies claiming that "the" meta is strictly 12 beacon builds, and that these changes don't affect the meta. That's incorrect: if you're building big, ups-optimized bases, direct insertion is king. That requires unusual beacon layouts, with (sometimes) twelve beacons on the bottleneck machine, but often only eleven or ten. Check out builds by eg flame-sla. The new beacons have diminishing returns, and will make even crazier direct insertion builds viable. Everyone claiming 12 beacon is optimal is working off bad information -- it's just the easiest and laziest way to to minimize machines, but not necessarily optimize ups.

[morsk]

I am seeing a lot of replies claiming that "the" meta is strictly 12 beacon builds, and that these changes don't affect the meta. That's incorrect: if you're building big, ups-optimized bases, direct insertion is king. That requires unusual beacon layouts, with (sometimes) twelve beacons on the bottleneck machine, but often only eleven or ten. Check out builds by eg flame-sla. The new beacons have diminishing returns, and will make even crazier direct insertion builds viable. Everyone claiming 12 beacon is optimal is working off bad information -- it's just the easiest and laziest way to to minimize machines, but not necessarily optimize ups.

I still doubt it changes much. The FFF has a graph, and there's a slight curve instead of a straight line. Maybe a few more builds will be 10-beacon instead of 12, but anything past 4-beacon is already terrible, stealing all the space from belt layouts. Anything past 8-beacon explodes into huge beacon:machine ratios. (8-beacon is 1:1. 12-beacon is 4:1 or worse.) A few more 10-beacon isn't the kind of change I care about.

I have no suggestions to actually fix things, because it would be a nerf and I don't think they'll do it. At best they could create a 2nd, competing system of beaconing that isn't ugly, and make them incompatible with each other. But this is almost the same as telling people to use a mod.

[LuxSublima]

"Space Exploration speed runners"

Having started Space Exploration runs a few times, enjoyed it, yet come nowhere near completing it, that's a phrase I never thought I'd read. Then again, Factorio players should never be underestimated.

I love the changes, and I'm really hyped to have read this phrase:

"[approaching] feature complete"

[spacedog]

So far, the changes you've been making have been fundamentally additive to the base game. This one makes breaking changes to existing game mechanics. You're smart people, so I'm sure you realized this, but I'd be really curious to hear a bit more about why you still felt it was worth boiling this ocean.

Top of mind concerns:

• This will completely break a subset of existing savegames that relied on specific production ratios to work correctly. These are things people put a lot of time and effort into. Since it's easy to revert to the old behavior by simply changing a LUA table, please include an option for this directly in the game rather than requiring people to go find an appropriate mod. (And enable it automatically when importing old saves.)

• There are a lot of existing blueprints in the wild that will also be broken. (You're essentially killing all the "1K SPM" blueprints and similarly complex things.) This is going to cause a ton of confusion for people finding long-abandoned blueprints on the web and then not understanding why some don't work right in the game. This is probably another good reason to have a "1.1 beacon behavior" toggle somewhere in the settings. Maybe even add something to any 2.0 blueprint strings containing beacons that indicates they were designed for the new beacon behavior (which older blueprints wouldn't have) so you can at least pop up a warning/error message.

I also 100% agree with others that this is going to essentially require the use of online tools/calculators to use in an optimal way. Most people did this anyway, but it was still trivially achievable by hand. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I guess we'll see.

[iestynne]

Instead of making the effect transmission to be the square root of the beacon count, why not just make it to be the quotient (not sure if it is the right word) of the beacon count, so that
1 beacon = 100% effect
2 beacons = 50% effect from each beacon, i.e. the same as placing 1 beacon
3 beacons = 33.333% effect from each beacon, i.e. still the same as placing 1 beacon
Beacon Overload, but without the problem of making the machines completely inactive.

This is my favorite suggestion from this thread.

It keeps mental arithmetic simple.

It works with the existing Lua-table implementation.

It has the advantages of the Space Exploration approach, without the disadvantages.

All it needs is a suitable buff to the maximum effect of a single beacon.