Yandersen wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2019 7:13 pm
Argh, no, I can't just quit slamming the door with angry face seeing devs stuffing customers' opinions down their asses while doing whatever they want with the game. Factorio is just too good to abandon it out of childish offense. Plus the ugly oil-for-dummies-patch proposed for today actually postponed, so I assume the bell was heard. Somewhat...
I read a significant part of this thread, thought over things proposed. I am a somewhat an experienced player (3 month, 666 game hours, multiple game starts, few finished, many mods tried). And I remember my first experiences and troubles. So let me share some conclusions and ideas I came up with considering all that. I really hope the devs will hear this and consider. Note that my suggestions will be based on the current state of the game ignoring the proposed patch changes.
At first, yes, the problem with oil wall for beginners is real, totally agree. But dumbing it down like the target patch proposed is not the best way to address that problem. There are multiple factors that contribute to that issue and it would be wiser to try smaller solutions first than going straight with the hammer like devs were going to. So let's dissect the nature of the issue, shall we?
Blue science pack. Red and green can be obtained quickly and easily - it is a matter of adding a couple of assembling machines and connecting few belts. Little effort and the science goes. No brainer, small time investment to get the goal achieved. But when it comes to blue science, suddenly we get a long chain of new things requiring A LOT of time investment before any actual progress made toward the goal (blue science pack). Long time taking tasks
with no intermediate rewards kills the fun. That are the factors that contribute to it:
1) Oil deposit is too far away from the base. That is the first brick in the wall. The player is forced to leave the area of comfort (safety of the base) and establish an independent outpost. Probably he will have to craft a dozen of solar panels for that, which kinda takes time. But without laser turrets the base can not be left by itself. The distractions force the player to go back and forth, prolonging the time spent on things. Time goes, actual progress is small, fun dies slowly, player loses interest. Plus at this point the beginner player probably had no reasons to learn train concepts, but now he is forced to, considering the distance. Another delay for the progression. Most probably he will quickly craft a car and start going back and forth like a delivery guy - a repetitive task which is also no fun.
So my first suggestion is to give a small oil deposit in the starting area, so the player will be able to focus solely on learning oil processing without much distractions on forced side tasks.
2) I built pumpjack to get the crude oil. There is no much use for that. Well, it is raw material, so that is OK. But then I build a refinery to turn the crude oil and get 3 new liquid products! Guess what? None of them gives me cookie either! Let me check the recipes... Hm, PG->plastic, plastic->red circuits; PG/LO/HO->Solid fuel... Oh, engines too... Good, at least, I have one assembling machine where I crafted a few for my car... Wait, what are the crafting times?! Oh no, my small camp will not fit that many machines... Fuck this, I need a break!
Do you see the second brick in the wall here? The player spent a lot of time just to establish the first far outpost to get his hands on crude oil, which is of no much use even refined, and now he realizes that his nice small walled lovely house is too small and need to be rebuilt, enlarged to fit hundred more machines. Another big step he is not even ready to take, which is also no fun in the process. If the player is patient enough, he will have to go with tedious manual deconstruction/construction process, since there are no robots yet. No fun at all. Plus many more gun turrets to protect longer perimeter, extra ammo requirement to cover... The goal seem to be further and further away and no cookies along the way.
So here are my suggestions:
a) Let boilers and locomotives accept liquid fuels - crude oil, heavy oil, light oil, petroleum gas. Totally realistic. Makes immediate use of the refined products. A first cookie right away - small injection of fun to keep up the mood. It also solves fluid backup problem until cracking tech comes - whatever product you don't need, burn it for electricity or fuel the trains.
b) Add diesel electric generators which run on light oil. And the according tech with R&G science pack - the tech that is available after the basic oil processing. The crafting should have few engines in the recipe. The diesel e-power should be considerably more space-efficient compared to the steam power plants to encourage the player to switch to it, which will force him to setup engine production chain which will later be used for blue science pack production.
c) Decrease the crafting time for red circuits or remove/replace them in blue science pack recipe. The space needed for the refineries, tanks, pipes mess, plastic block and huge red circuits block itself is huge suddenly grown cancer tumor to the small beginner's base already and it's parts don't even give much cookies, if independently looked over at each. I cautiously suggest to replace red circuits along with engines with diesel generators in blue science pack recipe (diesel generator+solid fuel->chemical science pack). In this case, obviously, it will lock the blue science pack tech behind diesel generators tech.
3) Piping mess. It is a fun as a new type of puzzle when the oil processing skeleton is set up initially, but when it comes to the point when production rate goes up, the fun puzzle turns into a mess and frustrating time-killer, especially for the OCD players. So...
a) I suggest to significantly speed up the production rate of the oil refinery, so there will be no need to build ridiculously long arrays of those. A single oil refinery should be able to process the crude oil collected from multiple oil deposit sites. This will also encourage the beginner player to build single refinery at the base rather than at the oil deposit site and use trains for the delivery from other sites further on.
b) For the basic oil processing the water input should be marked, even if the water is not included in the recipe. The beginners tend to connect both crude oil inputs, so when the advanced version comes this creates the confusion when the player tries to change the recipe and gets the message about mixing fluids.
4) Fluid backup problem. As many said, it is a problem mostly because there is no apparent visual indication of that problem. I suggest to introduce a hint popup message when this problem happens first time with the link to tutorial explaining that concept and showing ways how to address it. As for the visual indication, the building with multiple outputs experiencing single output backup may just blink red.
---
I know there are many more alternatives, and a lot to add, but I believe the suggestions above if introduced will help a lot to alleviate the problems the beginners are faced with when go to the oil processing stage, but I think it will also frustrate the old customers base much less than the changes expected in the upcoming patch. Modders, please link this post to the devs to ensure they see it.