How's the pvp in the game?

[FrodoOf9Fingers]

Hey all,

I'm planning to do some factorio this comung summer as a team building exercise. I'm somewhat considering player vs player, but not sure how it plays out typically. When do players typically find each other? Are you driving tanks, cars, or neither? Are turrets effective defense? Are land mines visible? Do you typically get to roboports before fighting begins? Once fighting starts, is it typically one sided and game ending?

Lastly, any mods that help improve the experience?

Thanks!

[8BitToaster]

Hey, from my experience I've only played multiplayer co-op with friends working together, but we have had our fair share of shooting each other so I'll try to answer some questions.

There is this one pre-set scenario where there are teams and first to launch a rocket wins, but you spawn close by and can run to others bases to try to kill them instead of launching the rocket. For the vehicles, well, since everyone starts out with a base vein it's all about setting up a factory as fast as possible to maybe craft more weapons or vehicles to shoot people or defend with. It's more about knowing how and when to expand then straight-up fighting.

Depending on what types of turrets you want, yes, they can work in certain situations. For a base defense, the gun turrets won't do a ton, but they're better than just getting steamrolled due to having no defense. Later forms of turrets though can pack a huge punch and be threatening to others if they don't have a good strategy.

Landmines can easily one-shot a small or medium enemy or an unarmored player. When you place it down it has a 2-second "arming" period, but after that, it goes underground and is invisible to the enemy. Once underground it can only be destroyed by enemies if they use an area weapon such as grenades or flamethrower.

If you have a certain allotted time for a truce rule you could probably get to roboports before fighting, but you can probably easily die before that happens.

As I don't have Pvp experience I can't say the fighting won't be onesided, but it probably will seem a bit similar to Starcraft. In the beginning, everyone is trying to be as efficient as possible and build an army then you'll attack each other or save up more while defending. The person with the better strategy or mechanical gameplay wins due to either planning out when and where to use turrets or landmine placement, or whatnot.

If your team is new to factorio, I don't know if mods would be more or less confusing, so I have no ones to mention as usually beginners to the game just use plain vanilla mode. I think it's on the game runs fine for a fun PVP or strategy game.

Anyways, I suggest you try it out, and maybe just boot up a game with a few people to try it out before you do it with the whole team.

Good luck!

[Bauer]

It can be fun to play pvp but this is clearly not factorio's strength.

Firstly (and to keep the Starcraft analogy), it's prone to cheese strategies, e.g. rush to grenades and do havoc in the opponents base.
Secondly, the side that strikes first wins.

I did a few 1v1 and 2v2. This has nothing to do with classical factorio. Just focuss on grenades and go to the other base. In a 2v2, it is enough that one of the two goes to the other base. The damage you can do (take out power, randomly destroy belts, etc.) takes ages to repair. And with grenades you fight off the other player while destroying the base at the same time. If the other side has just bullets, they're dead. If it turns into a grenade vs. granade battle, the base is toast after the fight.

And also similar to Starcraft, someone with 100 hrs into the game will annihilate a newby and will be annihilated without knowing how by someone with 1000 hrs.

The conclusion is that you cannot afford building a base. To reach Military 2, you need about 200 red science packs and 20 green ones. With about 20 steam drills, 4 labs, 5 assemblers, 1 radar, 1 boiler, 1 steam engine, a couple of power poles you are ready to strike at the 10 minute mark. Remember to craft the grenades on the way to your opponent.

The theme of factorio is automation. Since weapons and ammunition costs basically nothing compared to the typical infrastruture of a base, it doesn't make a lot of sense to build a large base. Which perverts the theme of factorio.

Conclusion:
Either you live with turning factorio into a micro battle
or you add a never attack rule, set the parties very very far appart with very strong aliens between them, or the like.

[quyxkh]

I wonder whether setting pvp on extreme settings, where if you don't team up to handle the early onslaughts you all die, could be made playable.

[FrodoOf9Fingers]

Part of me wants to make a mod to help out. Say, PVP can only occur on a seperate surface, but that surface has some awesome benefit.

Or make non-combat buildings immune to players, but there is a flag in each base you can capture for a reward (science packs?)

Maybe implement a catch up feature of some sort.

[lost]

You can simply put the starting bases far enough so that discovering them in the early game would be impractical. A mod, that would make automobile a late game only item would go a long way to give and require participants to do base building.

[Qon]

It can be fun to play pvp but this is clearly not factorio's strength.

With a map where the teams are separated by impassable water, artillery will be the only way to fight. This should force players to go much further in the tech tree. It's not a pvp fight battle as much as a pvp building battle really though since first to reach artilery just wins. But it does play to the strengths of Factorio so could work.

[blazespinnaker]

Yeah, you definitely want to give teams time to tech up and build. This can be done with truce, distance, and/or forcing teams to land bridge across water.

Necropost, but wth, I like necroposts.

[vjbone]

We did PvP 2 years ago, it was fun(for me at least, I won ) 4 teams, 10 players, 6 rounds with different scenarios. Yes PvP mod when you need kill enemy team is not very fun, granade, tank rush... So we did 2 rounds for production score, one to kill most biters, first to launch rocket.
Now there is pretty balanced biterbattle scenario
You can have fun but you need set rules before start or you will get full blacklist

[PunkSkeleton]

There is indirect PvP in the form of Biter Battles. I am taking part in Biter Battles Championship league that is just nearing its end:
https://bbchampions.org/
Some VoD, one of the shorter games: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1288209758?t=0h13m49s