Friday Facts #427 - Combat Balancing & Space Age LAN

[BrainlessTeddy]

That is actually nice that you removed the stone poop. It was kinda annoying at times.
Also that is a great looking LAN Party.

[GregoriusT]

One thing to keep in mind about personal laser defense is quality armor/spidertrons have bigger inventories, up to 14x14 for armor and 10x14 for spidertrons. Plus, the "new" fusion reactors are over 3x as strong as the existing one. Instead of one reactor supplying 3 fully upgraded PLDs, it can supply 10.

So in effect, power armor mk 2 goes from 3 fusion reactors supplying 2.25 MW for 9 PLD (with some space left over; you could fit some batteries for a 10th PLD if you didn't mind it running out of power from time to time) to 4 fusion reactors supplying 10 MW for 33 PLD if they're normal quality, or 2 fusion reactors supplying 13.5 MW for 41 PLD if legendary. For spidertrons the effect is even stronger because the inventory bonus is proportionately more.

In other words, even with this nerf, you can still fit more personal lasering on your person than ever before, and that's without considering the potential increased range and/or power from legendary laser defenses themselves.

The question is, does quality affect Damage Output of Personal Lasers, or does it merely increase Range?

[mikehendi]

TLDR: 3500 hp biter bases won't make combat more difficult or fun, just more tedious, boring and drawn-out.

First of all, thanks for getting rid of the scattered stray stones, that's a great change. Now on to the combat changes,

The difficulty in fighting large nests comes mostly from the defending worm type and spawned enemy type. If you can get rid of the initial swarm of behemoths accumulating in the first 10 seconds or so, and manage to dodge the worms enough, you are strong enough to clean up the nest.

The task won't become more difficult, just more time-consuming, which is exactly what the post-rocket-launch-lategame doesn't need. Why make the cleanup process (after the initial difficulty spike of the attack) more tedious and boring, right at the moment where you'll need to start clearing large amounts of land for mega-projects? As you describe yourself, it is currently very fun to be able to tear through nests in the absolute latest-game era, despite the behemoth worm/spitter/biter combo remaining a small threat due to the stacking acid slowdown effect. These changes take that fun away, AND make the process take multiple times the amount of time. IMO, the balance is just right as it is.


The personal laser defenses already are auto-nerfed at higher evolution. They get distracted firing at tanky behemoth biters and spitters which makes them target the squishy nests much less. (On a sidenote, I do not understand why (while nerfing personal engagement) artillery needs to be buffed in this train of thought)

Please consider even on default settings, the enemy base spawn rate and size far away from spawn becomes very high, covering lots of the land in biter bases, so:

I hope you'll do a playtest where you'll clear out enough land for a solar farm which can support a couple thousand science per minute (far away from spawn, in behemoth worm territory where the nests have become dense). Do it once with the current balance, and once with the new balance, then register how many hours of grinding each scenario took, and how much fun it was to execute. I hope you'll consider reverting the changes afterwards.

[MEOWMI]

Wow, those are quite radical combat changes. My main worry here is just the fact that the game really does not need to become any more difficult than it currently is. Yes, experienced players may appreciate a challenge, but this is meant for all players, and I'd rather have the default settings be more on the easy side. Yes, lasers are kind of too powerful, even on a casual level, but that's only in comparison to other weapons, not really in comparison to enemies. On that note though, I do like the changes to cannons, robots and rockets.

(Remember, this is about the non-expansion game. That also means the quality mechanic is not as important for these considerations.)

Some longer thoughts:

Biter bases are so much more challenging with these changes. To begin with, their only weak point so far has been the nests themselves, but now you won't even have that option. Presently, the main challenge with enemies is only slightly in the combat itself, and much more importantly, in the logistics of ammo and weaponry, as well as the challenge of managing your own time as the engineer. In the mid-late game, it would kind of suck if being there "in person" no longer really had as much of an impact, and that you had to rely on artillery or flamer turret creep instead, or that it always required nukes.

Speaking of which, were there any changes to nukes? The area of effect damage from nukes already has problems killing behemoth biters with a similar HP pool, and I wonder if nests don't become much more durable against them too now. Also I kind of feel like personal lasers should have more range if they're this much weaker (nest HP, nest resistance, worm HP, laser base damage). Up until now, the main huge downside that lasers have is their range, and even something like mass speed + laser Spidertrons was still always worse than mass speed + rocket Spidertrons, even when you consider the fact that the shorter laser range meant you could manipulate them to focus fire on nests. The proposed changes also mean that the engineer becomes a lot more vulnerable, since something like 10 behemoth biters would take a long time to kill with lasers (uranium rounds + machine gun helps but only slightly).

That aspect of balance is also ignoring the subject of player turrets, so to just briefly outline the current situation there: Laser turrets are stronger than gun turrets, both in damage and range and setup, be it turret creep or pure base defense. Flamer turrets are hilariously much more powerful still, only hindered by their need for a wall (and the potential existence of behemoth worms). Mind you, I still think the current base game is well balanced, despite the potential for improving balance and gameplay depth.

[Haisom]

I like most of these changes. The only one I have a gripe about is the personal laser defense. They were already bad in spidertrons, now they are useless. The laser defense is the only automatically firing weapon option for your character. It almost feels like it won't be worth it now. What's wrong with feeling powerful late game? I really enjoyed it.

[GregoriusT]

I just realized Quality Artillery Shells can also deal more Damage, if the Explosives Research is not enough/applying.

HOWEVER, this would ONLY work if you got the Expansion, making the non-expansion vanilla gameplay worse in the process. Please make sure that the original Gameplay does not get nerfed to hell without any other way to improve it other than buying the Expansion, incentivising people to buy the Expansion because Vanilla got nerfed too much, would be quite the reason for people to quit the Game alltogether.

Same for Personal Laser Defense.

[KuuLightwing]

I just realized Quality Artillery Shells can also deal more Damage, if the Explosives Research is not enough/applying.

HOWEVER, this would ONLY work if you got the Expansion, making the non-expansion vanilla gameplay worse in the process. Please make sure that the original Gameplay does not get nerfed to hell without any other way to improve it other than buying the Expansion, incentivising people to buy the Expansion because Vanilla got nerfed too much, would be quite the reason for people to quit the Base Game alltogether.

"Optional" mechanic BTW.

But to be frank even with access to quality is probably better to just use two normal shells cause it will be fewer resources. Still annoying to use tho.

[GregoriusT]

But to be frank even with access to quality is probably better to just use two normal shells cause it will be fewer resources. Still annoying to use tho.

That is if Artillery Autotargeting works well with 2 Shells, which it honestly does not right now.

Also Quality Artillery Shells are technically not much more expensive, if you just make sure to use Quality Ingredients to make them directly.

[Madman666]

In conjunction with hive hp and worm laser resist buffs, PLDs are pretty much thrown into the bin. Honestly, can't bring myself to like that at all even despite the fact that quality will probably buffs the weapon dps. Quality should not be necessary to efficiently clear biters...

It seems like a lot of these changes were made to incentivize the player to use explosives more, but aside from already powerful artillery, they re rather expensive and inefficient at dealing with massive biter crowds (and thats what you re dealing with most of the time while clearing biters - crowds).

Overall as it was said before me, it will bring tedium, rather than fun, since you ll have to spend more time hitting same thing, instead of blasting a cluster of hives and proceeding to design yet another factory wing. So i really hope it will be an optional change, which you ll be able to tweak in game's settings.

[jgilmore42]

Yeah, I see a lot of panic about the PLD nerf, especially in combo with the nest HP boost.

And I can't help but feel that this change is aimed specifically at players like me. I've never really used combat robots for anything at all. PLD doesn't require restocking on ANYTHING, is just a little bit further up the tech tree, and there's just no reason NOT to.

I'll note that I also never use gun turrets after I have access to (and enough production of) laser turrets. Why would I bother with the logistics? And automating the production? To the point that I'll just supply my gun turrets manually, as building the infrastructure to supply them automatically is pointless as I'll be replacing them with lasers ASAP. (Which is of course WHY I replace them with laser ASAP too.)

But that's kinda the point, isn't it? A good enjoyable game has multiple ways to do it, which are fairly balanced in the pros and cons. With PLD overshadowing combat robots, and everything else, to such a degree, why would you use anything else? Ever? Except MAYBE some rockets mid game, just for the longer reach to destroy those annoying largest size worms.

So as much as I dislike the idea, I have to agree that SOMETHING is needed.

Removing the requirement to supply ammo to turrets is the BIGGEST reason to go with lasers. I suppose that it does remove some of the "fun" (in the dwarven sense here) from the game, as logistics is what it's all about.

Might I suggest that rebalancing gun turrets vs. laser turrets is also needed? There really should be a reward for going through all the effort to automate ammunition supply to remote bases etc. Boost gun turret damage or range? Make the damage increasing researches for non-laser weapons more effective than for laser weapons, making end-game laser damage nerfed without affecting mid-game? Something is needed there IMHO.

[usafphoenix]

Not sure if evolution factor determining spawner health is the best solution.

I think i'd perhaps be a better method to derive health of the spawners SOLELY from the number of spawners DESTROYED. This would mean, even if you "start late" in destroying spawners, they won't all be at max-health and impossibly difficult.

While destroying biter bases remains the largest contributor to evolution factor, the mere fact that TIME plays a role makes me feel that only the number of biter bases destroyed should be used for determining the increase in spawner health.

My first thought was to make it something like every biter base destroyed increases base_health by 1%, so irregardless of the evolution factor of the biters spawned, the spawners health would reach max health once 1000 spawners have been destroyed. This could even be adjusted in settings to make this particular aspect of the game more or less challenging: "100 spawners to reach max health" or "2000 spawners to reach max health"

[JackTheSpades]

I don't know how to feel about personal laser turrets being nerfed.
On one hand I can see why since personal armor filled with PLTs while riding a spider tron with defenses is quite overpowered.
On the other hand laser damage is one of the researches that becomes stupidly expensive too fast.

In general my main problem with combat is how expensive the infinite research gets. Looking at a mega base I have to chose between one more damage upgrade to lasers (70% of base damage means like 14 damage for stationary ones) or I could get 10 more levels of mining productivity.

[Fefrost]

Really excited for Space Age! So in the meantime here´s my little roboport-rant.
There were multiple times (especially in the space exploration satellite-view) when I tried to place roboports like you would powerpoles. Just hold leftclick and drag the cursor along the line you want the roboports to be placed.
When you do this with powerpoles they automatically are placed perfectly where they fit. Why doesn´t this work for roboports?

Roboports are also a little confusing the first time you build them. Having to connect the red box isn´t that intuitive. The yellow line kind of helps, but it only shows up for built roboports and not for ghosts. Why? Also I think the yellow line between roboports shold turn green once you have the "perfect" distance like it will for belts.

[usafphoenix]

Another thought i had on the PLD issue:

Yeah, currently, it's TRIVIAL to throw a bunch of PLDs in a power suit and ROLL through biter territory. With quality making things even better, it becomes even MORE trivial, so overall, I think some adjustments need to be made.

One solution could be making biter bases 50% resistant to lasers while not making the biters themselves able to shrug it off so easily. Because completely nerfing the PLDs will just mean...they don't get used....at all. That's not really a good "fix" it just makes something that's been in the game....more-crappy.

Make certain types of biters more sensitive to lasers whilst other types of biters could be practically immune to them... this could provide a solution to the issue and force a more robust/multi-faceted approach to combat, rather than it being a binary solution of "lasers are either too good, or crappy and not worthwhile."

Reminded on the issues surrounding the shotgun....kinda crappy as a self defense weapon, but actually pretty decent at tackling nests currently.
An approach that says: okay, lasers are REALLY good in scenario A, B, or C....but won't help you at all in scenarios D, E, or F....i think is a better solution to simply : "lasers suck now. they're 1/3rd as good as they used to be".


Edit: After some math, it looks like with the introduction of quality: the legendary PLD will be approx. 83% the power our current PLDs have, so, actually---when looked at from that angle, it's ...maybe not so bad? (even with the potentially 10x beefier spawners)

But It's really hard to tell without doing some playtesting myself


Edit 2: It's easy to look at a 66% nerf and be like "well...lasers are shit now" but to forget about the impact of research, quality, and other tools we'll have at our disposal ....for the disposal of the native species. So.... I guess....i just DONT KNOW if these changes all combined will make it better or not. But I hope so

[sicksock]

"Nothing too groundbreaking"
- 10x spawner HP
- stronger worms
- 66% damage nerf to personal laser! (I pray this is actually only a a 33% nerf)
- combat robot buffs - pointless, need rework
- 2x artillery dmg. Ok message received. Don't clear nests personally. Use arty.

"We also changed a few things with offensive player combat, nothing in particular, just trying to make it more fun"
There's no world where clearing nests with 10x more hp, nerfed lasers, stronger worms and mandatory combat robots is more fun.

I'm hoping that the new weapons from the other planets will pick up the slack... or else we're seeing the "helldivers 2" approach to pve balance...

[adam_bise]

Shotguns, Cannon shells, rockets, and combat robots have been needing a bump for ages, especially shotguns. Glad to see personal lasers nerfed as well. Thanks for this.

I never did like evolution factor. I wish evolution factor was removed and pollution used instead.

I also think spawners absorb too much pollution by default, and the diffusion ratio is slightly too slow. These cause a situation where only biters in the first ring of nests around your base attack you. And even if you intentionally make rediculous amounts of pollution, it doesn't spread beyond maybe the first one or two ring of nests.

[Sphinx]

I have already played factorio many times. With many opponents, with stronger opponents, with mods,...
For me, clearing away enemies has become rather annoying. Simply because she is no longer a danger, but I still have to gain the space to expand. That's why I now switch off opponents or greatly reduce them in the options.
So I'm curious to test how it plays now. And if something annoys me too much, I can change it with the options. Or there is 100% a mod for it.

[PaszaVonPomiot]

If spawners evolve beyond what we've already seen make it look like they evolved more.

[Ranakastrasz]

Health being mutable? Neat.

No flamethrower nerf?
And nothing about turrets double dipping either.

Shotguns being viable is good. Tho not sure if personal laser nerf was really needed.

[Byrnorthil]

Seeing all the negative feedback about the PLD nerf I feel like I need to weigh in on the opposite side. I was not at all expecting such a massive nerf, but I think it's an absolutely necessary change that opens up a lot more freedom for optimal play. Consider the following:

- PLDs require zero resources to fire. I've seen posts on here and Reddit complaining "resource-agnostic combat is dead" and I'm thinking... yeah it should be? Combat should require a working production line just like every other aspect of the game, but in 1.1 it's entirely possible, dare I say even optimal to kill everything for free.
- PLDs are automatic, meaning they require zero brainpower to use. I had a lapse in judgment during the fight and got myself flanked like an idiot? Lmao, no I didn't, PLD took care of it for me before I even registered it.
- Unlike every handheld weapon in the game, PLDs confer zero movement speed penalty. To be perfectly honest, players losing movement control not only from acid but also their own attacks is the part about Factorio combat I dislike the most, by far. Before seeing the Pentapod post, I was rather hoping offensive combat was going to get a more substantial makeover (base defense is fine as is, flamer cheese aside). But, I can see limited movement is a core part of the combat design and the Pentapod post only further cemented it, so we've gotta learn to play around it. Except, PLDs completely ignore the movement penalty for attacking. Risk? Tactical positioning? What's that? Kiting go brrrr.
- Most importantly however, PLDs are usable in vehicles, and in vehicles, there is zero tradeoff to filling your entire grid with them (minus batteries). The tank is already extremely powerful without help, but when you can slap 9 lasers (in only mk I power armor...) on top, well...

Notice the common theme? PLDs have zero cost to using them. Free is strong, but more importantly, free doesn't require a careful build, tactical planning, or moment-to-moment skill to make it work. This wouldn't be a terrible problem if PLDs were a purely defensive item like energy shields are, but they have the capability to out-DPS the entire rest of your kit on top of all that. With just the chemical science (damage and speed 1-4) necessary to unlock it, a lot of combat becomes "I walk/drive into the biters and they all die", i.e., boring. I just cleared out a bunch of nests at that tech level, the one PLD i was wearing was enough to keep enemies off my back and allow me to focus down the worm+nests, I could have been wearing between 3-5 more, but I didn't, because I wanted to have to try.

I'm hoping to see some more diverse strategies/playstyles get used and maybe even become optimal, at least in mid-game. Make no mistake, PLDs are still going to be the standard in endgame on account of being free and brainless (especially with quality), but I think the time in which combat requires thought and skill is going to be extended significantly by the nerf. Glad to see shotgun buff, though I'm not sure whether it also applies to the piercing shells? Would still like to see a turret deployment time implemented to make pocket turrets less optimal, but I'm not complaining, and I'm looking forward to the Space Age experience very much.