Friday Facts #234 - Office pictures

[Xterminator]

But where do kovarex and slpwnd work?
Do they have a fancy CEO office?

Or maybe they got relegated to the server room too.

[Bilka]

But where do kovarex and slpwnd work?
Do they have a fancy CEO office?

Or maybe they got relegated to the server room too.

Kovarex sits at the desk on the right in the windows room, and Tomas sits at the desk on the left in the mac/linux room

[Theanderblast]

Interesting that the whiteboard text is in English, not Czech. Are there enough non-Czech speakers there that the language generally used is English?

[Phantum]

I actually don't agree at all with making the landmines always visible, I'd rather see something more akin to having an upgrade for the radars that allows them to detect landmines within their radius of vision. It would add an extra level of importance to the radar, and make it more difficult for people who are attacking to use them.

[juliejayne]

I actually greatly enjoyed this Friday Facts! Always nice to see some "behind the scenes" pictures of the office and the team. Hopefully the new larger office works out well. I look forward to seeing it!

It's great the PvP event was mentioned here. I think there is a lot of potential for Factorio PvP challenges or production challenges even if that isn't the main focus (and it shouldn't be). Some changes to things to balance it out is really good. The landmine change helps a bit, but honestly it was still nearly impossible for me to spot the landmine thanks to the ground doodads and foliage. I guess the player could just turn those off though.

Landmines are not OP in themselves.... the issue was that they were sprinkled like confetti throughout an enemy base. The most OP item was the PDL of Anti. These personal lasers were faster and more powerful that static lasers... illogical.

I disagree and agree. Landmines were pretty OP because they were so cheap and easy to throw down and were completely invisible. Like sure, the PLD wrecked the players initially, but then even after they drove Anti out they couldn't rebuild because it was just a constant death loop from landmines. Made it really unfun to play.
I do agree though the PLD for PvP is super overpowered as it is now. Not only does it fire faster and do more damage (I think?) than the actual laser turret, but you are able to use it really early even with portable solar panels and some batteries. If a fusion reactor had been required, Anti's strat would not have been nearly as overwhelmingly powerful. Or if it didn't 1 or 2 shot you.

Fair enough, but simply making landmines a little bit visible, will not help... in the midst of a decimated base, in battle, you haven't got time to peer closely to find a mine. Better that they are restricted to defense only.

[credomane]

15 landmines by my count

Edit
Spoiler image with landmine positons.

I can confirm. I cheated though. Loaded it into GIMP and did a quick Value Invert, Invert, Value Invert. The results.

[DanGio]

MojoD also posted a nice video of Saturday's battle, mixing his and cl0wnt0wn pov
https://youtu.be/VQcLZri3zjo

[Fishling]

Instead of showing all landmines in an area, maybe only a certain percentage of them should be made visible as in the picture. So, you can tell if a minefield is in the area if you are alert, but can't necessarily tell how dense it is and walk around all of them.

I am also curious if they can be detected by holding a dense blueprint like solar panels over the ground (or attempting to place ghosts).

[Ojelle]

Where is Kovarex his office?

[MasterBuilder]

What about: When placing landmines, there's a 1/25 chance that landmine will be visible to other forces?
I'm not sure of the exact number, but doing it like this in the prototype would make it moddable too.

[AssaultRaven]

Holy frack, that commentator's new follower animation is obnoxious.

[DaveMcW]

How about showing enemy landmines randomly offset from their actual location. So you can see where the minefields are, but you can't dodge them easily.

[Jon8RFC]

Is it just me, or does it seem like the last couple of weeks have had more user-reported bug fixes than usual? Was an incentive given, now that we know an office move is happening?

"If the bug reports daily average to just one page by the time we move, we'll have a big, catered food party and family and friends are invited."

Maybe I'm over-analyzing!

[Engimage]

Looking through that PvP I have to mark out several cool ideas:
- Radars should detect enemy mines and mark/tint them for you (to distinct them from your own ones)
- PLD needs some balance like lowering initial damage and making them effected by laser damage/rate of fire research. This way they won't be too OP right when you get them.
- Landmines should also be effected by grenade damage research with lower initial damage so that they won't oneshot players. Also I like the idea of adding stun to them for players but still they need their initial damage tuned down.
- Absolutely nuts that you can power your laser turrets from enemy power grid. Should definitely be removed.

And sure thing your office is awesome. I'd say styled in early 1900ths And your server room made me roll on the floor Was nice to see all of you having 2-3 monitors lol. Matrix is closer!

[Ghoulish]

Poor sindri and Ernestas - only 1 monitor - how do you get anything done!

[bobucles]

Cool thing with the PvP! It helps show the weapon balance in the game. A few things I noticed:
- Cannon shells pretty strong. They 1-shot just about everything including players.
- Rockets don't hurt tanks. The rocket launcher was always underwhelming but this really showed how sad it was.
- Land mines pretty good. Well of course. They're super cheap and deal big damage.
- PDLs instakill just about everything. 70 damage is good but I didn't expect it to be THAT good.
- No one using capsules at all.

Some ideas:
- Starcraft does a cool thing where vulture mines pop out of the ground and lunge their target. This system lets fewer mines cover more area without making the blast radius larger. It also gives players a chance to defend against the mine (which biters won't do!).
- The Starcraft widow mine has a warmup time that lets fast players retreat out of range, but vehicles lack that kind of agility. By the time a tank is tagged by a such a mine the vehicle inertia forces them into getting hit.
- A "long range" mine no longer needs to be friendly with other mines because they don't need to be used in dense clusters anymore.
- Try a damage type that is strong against biters but difficult to use against players. This gives a strong leverage point to balance PvP. So for example something with a high "flak" damage will ruin biter nests but struggle against player assets with high "flak" defense.
- Laser defense was likely ignored because "biters don't use lasers lol". Things change in PvP. Add laser defense to player assets.
- Try making capsules effective for things.
- Try letting players choose their respawn location within their territory. This will help prevent spawn camping.
- Try reducing points for low tech things like ore and give bonus points for non military production (making and using science).

[Gergely]

PDLs instakill just about everything. 70 damage is good but I didn't expect it to be THAT good.

What are PDLs?

[steinio]

https://wiki.factorio.com/Personal_laser_defense

PDL is the correct acronym

[bobucles]

Whoops. My homeworld is showing. I mean PLD of course
https://wiki.factorio.com/Personal_laser_defense

It's a fixed strength suit module that deals MASSIVE damage. Hits for 75 Laser, 3/s, and consumes 200KJ per shot. The player strategy was to pre charge their suit batteries with solar panels and then swap into a laser suit. It works inside the tank so 2-3 turrets will instagib players on foot.

Laser turrets are pretty nice against biters up to the mid and late stage evolution. They're a bit too energy hungry to help in early game and behemoths take so many shots they'll wipe out your energy supply. I think they should have their damage reduced and accept some portion of laser research. Something closer to 35-40 + half of laser research% would be peachy.


Edit: I'm curious about the idea of doing some kind of "shared research" system. When a player researches something then a percentage of that research gets unlocked for others. The main idea is to keep players from falling TOO far behind so for example if 3 players research tanks then it unlocks for everyone. It also means if multiple players are doing a research it will happen very quickly, and if someone doesn't research at all they'll still fall behind.

[AntiElitz]

As one of the Participants i can clearly say that landmines are not too op for the sake of defense, but attack only! I highly dislike the change of mines being partly visible everywhere. Instead i recommend the following:

1. Mines can not be placed on building to attack
2. Mines can be detected and become visible by a radar, so clearing you own area from mines in case of an attack is easy, but attacking is still dangerous
3. Don't allow Mine placing from inside vehicles

Keep in mind that attacking is superior over defense currently, so buffing defense in crucial. By making landmines visible to attackers, you do the opposite!