Feedback 0.9

[slpwnd]

Ok, so the 0.9 has been with us for the weekend. There are many problems and bugs, but that was expected and we are working on it. We are quite interested in a general feeling you guys have from the update. Especially from the oil industry. So if you have played the game during the weekend and got far enough then let us know what you think. Namely (but not only ):

• Does the oil industry make the game more interesting / fun or do you think it is actually change for the worse?
• Do you think the new intermediate products are well balanced or is there too many / too little of them / what would you change?
• Is there something that really annoys you regarding the oil industry?

[immerhungrig]

I played the new version for some hours and I like the new oil industry and it is very interesting to use it. The only thing that is very annoying is that you can't prevent pipes next to each other from connecting. The other problem are pipes with 0.0 of a liquid that need to be replaced to use them for another liquid.

[ray4ever]

Generally I really like the added complexity of the game with the addition of the oil industry. But i think a few changes/adjustment are needed to make it fun/more easy to use. My suggestions can be found here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =16&t=2344

The only big thing now missing is something for the very late game which is keeping you playing and playing and playing...

[slpwnd]

Generally I really like the added complexity of the game with the addition of the oil industry. But i think a few changes/adjustment are needed to make it fun/more easy to use. My suggestions can be found here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =16&t=2344

Thanks, that is a nice and comprehensive list there.

[Coolthulhu]

New fluid stuff is lots of fun, but most of it is unfortunately relatively short-lived.
Bad:

• Pretty much all you do with fluids other than water or crude oil is piping them into chemical plants. They're too universal.
• The most annoying thing is that pipes always connect to each other. I had to add lots of pipe-to-ground shenanigans just to prevent it. Ability to manually (dis)connect pipes would easily fix it.
• Currently both heavy and light oil are mostly just used to fuel steam engines as solids. It would be cool to feed boilers non-solid fuel and have a line of boilers share a single non-solid fuel input.
• I don't like being forced to build the entire industry just for few items. When I just want to make an omelette, I am forced too to research "Universe" first. I'd like an expensive shortcut to produce things like say, advanced circuits for quadruple price.
• Fluids in pipes don't interact at all.

Good:

• I love that oil yield never drops below 10%. It means you can never "starve" totally, but will still need to grab new sources if you wish to do anything serious.
• Mixed feelings about fixed input-output locations. Mostly positive, though. They add limitations to otherwise relatively free-form system.
• Barrel storage. Nice idea and still can be improved in a million of ways. A bit too unrealistic when used to make chests store more oil than tanks, but gameplay > realism
• Pumps are cool. Pressure is cool. Not very useful for regular applications, but tanks that don't just "suck up" stuff but store it at a given pressure look like an elegant solution where I only expected a simple one.
• New grafix. Pretty, animated, alive.

[liq3]

I think the oil industry is great! The more complexity in this game the better! My favourite part of this game is trying to build good factories despite how complicated recipes are. So the more complicated, the more fun it is for me! And the oil industry definitely achieved that.

So far I'm finding it a different beast to the standard assembler automation. Since pipes connect it's much harder to make it compact, so you have to decide between simplicity which seems like it'll result in large facilities, or crazy pipe schemes to get it small. Which I think is a great choice to give the player (and a choice I very much like having). And the difficulty of transporting it adds another layer of depth too! I think it's great.

@Coolthulhu: I don't think there's a problem being able to make heavy/light oil into solid fuels. You have a choice between oil products, or using it as a secondary power source to coal, which I'm totally fine with.

I don't like being forced to build the entire industry just for few items. When I just want to make an omelette, I am forced too to research "Universe" first. I'd like an expensive shortcut to produce things like say, advanced circuits for quadruple price.

Once again I don't agree. You only need 3 techs, (Oil Gathering, Oil Processing, and Plastics) which cost total 200 red/green science packs to make advanced circuits, and then 3 buildings, a pump, processing plant and chemical plant. And you really only need one of each if you're just doing advanced circuits. It's not that much. ;p And you're gonna use all this stuff for the rest of the game too anyway!

I mostly agree with all your "good" points.

[Balthazar]

One thing that irritates me is that processing units are made in chemical plants, which forces them to be made in the same cluster as everything else oil related, since you can't move the refinery outputs. Can we get a universal liquid recipe for adding and extracting from barrels?

[CherryKiss]

am sure I'll have some genuine feedback at some point but.....

BRING BACK "Research Complete!" girl! how dare you take her from us!

[Darthlawsuit]

I haven't gotten to use the oil industry yet so I cannot comment on that. What I have found to be really great is the new graphics, biomes, and water generation. I have had some really great looking maps, massive seas that never seems to end, but many of those had really bad resource distribution. It seems like I have less control over the map generation than I did before.

[CherryKiss]

my first genuine complaint: I really dislike the thin dark green trees...which are near invisible even during daytime against dirt terrain I find I am hunting for shadows of the trees which are slightly easier for me to spot.

[Garm]

Research:

- I don't mind having separate research for storage, but having separate researches for procurement and processing is too much. at least allow some basic recipies as soon as player can pump the oil and then let players research for more efficient recipes later in similar fashion as oil processing.

Structures:

- Please if possible make inputs ubiquitous or allow players to manually decide which input takes what liquid. Inability to place pipes together is bothersome as is.

- Complexity looks fine as long as you start from scratch, converting old bases is a daunting task indeed.

Storage:

- Liquid tanks should be all about volume and speed. They need to be better than barrels in all regards when it comes to high throughput. Barrels should be fine for small specific tasks: car refueling, pinpoint movement via drones etc. when player wants to build big liquid tanks should be obvious choice.

Future suggestions:

I hope this is just first half of liquid update there are many more necessary things missing:

- water cranes
- rail tanks
- liquid boilers
- heaters? (e.g. Sulphur is usually transported in molten form on railroads)

These things are most important at the moment, any possible new liquids should come after.

Future suggestions

[syneris]

Before logistic bots: Setting up for blues was a nightmare. Advanced circuits needing copper cables, circuits, and plastic didn't give me much freedom. Getting smart inserters, batteries, steel, and advanced circuits to blue assemblies was another headache. I rebuilt my entire layout from scratch twice during this phase and it was still ugly, constrictive, confusing, and slow. Advanced circuits also take way too long to produce when they have such a high demand. I had some trouble disposing of light and heavy oil in order for the refineries to produce the needed petroleum.

After logistic bots: There appears to be a good separation between the needs for iron and copper. There is less stress to run both metals by every factory. On the strictly iron side you mainly have steel, inserters, engine, and sulfur. The copper is primarily going towards cables (for both circuits) and maybe piercing bullets. Circuits in the middle is now flown by bots (along with steel, batteries, plastics) to the places that need them.

Productivity was nerfed to uselessness. At max, you save just under 25% in resources; however, it costs you over half the speed, almost 4 times the power, and insane amounts of pollution (increased by the power usage as well as another +150%).

[Odion]

First of all i would like to thank you all for putting effort to improve the game

Here my thoughts about new oil industry.

I like the general idea of getting heavy,light oil and gas from crude oil, so i wouldn't like to see any change there however i don't like the ability to convert oils into solid fuel to feed boilers. That makes coal obsolete.
What can be done about it? well boilers can be configured or upgraded(to high pressure steam engine) so they can accept either kind of oil or coal or even gas as fuel source since all of the petroleum products are highly combustible (they don't produce same amount of energy though).

About light oil. well it has no use in game except becoming solid fuel which i don't like at all. It can be converted into jet fuel or used as is to feed turbines to produce energy? or used in high pressure boilers to produce more energy? or used in cargo / fighting aircraft in future? possibilites are endless

One last thing about lubricant. I think it should be produced in rafinery / chemical plant and then barreled. The engine blocks and electric engine should be produced in our good ol' assembly machines since they have only one purpose... to Assemble.

those are my humble thoughts about oil industry i didn't have much time to fully test other changes like blueprints or so but i like the new graphics and general direction of the game heading to.

My highest regards.

-Odion.

[Zourin]

-Map generation needs tweaks. Serious Tweaks. Tree prisons, biter nest prisons (medium/large nests near player spawn), Oceans consuming more than half the starting 'safe zone', and starting locations lacking critical starting resources abound more often than not. Map scumming by necessity is getting bad. You can't win this map:

Win Me

-Biter Spawner Defender respawn rate needs to be severely toned down. Instant respawns are no fun, and neither is having to offensive-tower every nest.
-Boiler Power Consumption is more than twice that of Furnaces and Radar? I can melt steel with half that, and i'm just heating water!
-Oil Gathering should include the Refinery and Chemical Plant to be at least functionally useful.
-5 Steel is steep for a mere oil barrel
-Productivity chips do more harm than good all around. Why the hate for a bit of material efficiency?
-Land Mines recipe requiring steel is overkill for a one-off weapon.
-

[immibis]

Maybe the "non-chemical" liquid-using recipes could be moved to yet another assembling machine that is like the current chemical reactor.
The new machine would fill/empty barrels, make engines and handle other recipes that use liquids as input (but aren't about refining the liquids).
The chemical reactor would only handle liquid refining (including some recipes with solid outputs or other solid inputs).

[CherryKiss]

I was dismayed to find myself neighbor to a MASSIVE thick forest, despite setting the map for bare minimum forests (would have set it zero if I didn't need a wood for the first power pole!) after setting water to minimum as well, I was surprised to have sizeable water around my starting area too. Made me wonder if map setting actually work, or maybe they work but not for the starting area? I'm not sure.

At least I did have all resources in my starting area. Currently rushing laser turrets so I can break out when I need to find more iron....

[dusho]

- as mentioned by other people here, making engines in chemical plant was unexpected and maybe better option would be assembly machine with barreled lubricant
- all the pipes are making it really hard to walk and I'm getting stuck in every bloody pipe, discussion on that here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=2321
- having fixed outputs from oil refinery takes some getting use to
- pipes connecting to neighboring ones automatically, here maybe use same approach as with belts - have some T junctions as belts have splitters
- research seems to be split too much (would reduce number of technologies but also make possible to keep research progress from canceled research when switching to other one - currently it just starts at 0 again)
Otherwise it's a nice addition and also fun to play with..

[Zourin]

Longer underground segmentation for underground belts and pipes would be a godsend. Even if a tech doubled their length, that would open up a lot of pathing and collision (car/player) issues.

Refined fluids should be able to be packed and shipped like crude, since refineries have a mandatory triple-output. Reduce the cost of barrels to 1 steel. Allow the production of engines in a factory using barreled lubricant, and remove the pipe ingredient. For all the trouble of having to make the damn lubricant, needing pipe on top of steel and gears is overkill.

[tbarros]

After roughly 4 hours into game, got into oil and got completly lost on what to do and how to lay out my factory.

first i got a bit frustrated that you cannot gather oil earlier (you can make steel 30 mins into game but cant gather oil until 4h later?)
second the recipe changes made me quite happy but again only after i got into the oil bit. (why circuits are metal on metal while advance circuits have some rubber?) would it be possible to have this earlier in game to? (thinking on IC2)

also is it me or the game seems a bit more difficult? lots of big worms spawning nearby and to advance i need to turtle-tower-crawl... which i had a tank or mech.

[Calico]

Disclaimer: The freeplay game i had over the weekend has a total of over 25 hours for this weekend. Yeah, this game is a time machine. Went from Friday to monday without even noticing.

Overly i'm quite happy with the 0.9 build, it looks a lot better. Oil Industry, after some time getting used to the "you need to get rid of all the oil products" princible, is actually quite fun. I like the concept of having a ressource that cannot deplete, but will only produce minimal amounts of ressources in the long run... not having to move the entire industry because the ressoures run out, instead transporting barrels back to the old oil complex to make more oil products. I like the new woods and map spawning, although it's obvious that there still needs a more accesible starter area (with less dense woods and water).

Things to improve:

- Oil research could use a bit of streamlining
- Oil Tanks need to be a LOT better, atleast triple the storage, if not even higher. I build quite a few of them only to find the converting excess oil into solid fuel makes storing a lot easier then with tanks (which are a lot bigger and store a lot less then chests).
- We still need more ways to produce electricity, especially when there is no water close by. Wind Power (which could help getting rid of those electric engines), better energy storage and some Solid Fuel burning Power Plant that doesn't need water.
- Map Generation needs a few tweaks, especially for the starter area. Starting in a dense wood isn't fun.
- Some Bug fixes (logistic bots not delivering some requested ressources to chests, inserters stopping to work although ressources are needed and available, etc). Most of them are rare bugs, but can be hard to find if the entire factory comes to halt because of them.
- Biters/Combat still need a lot of tweaking. Bad Pathfinding, insta-respawns, etc. Fighting them always starts very hard and becomes boring late game. Needs a overall better balance, a bit easier in the start, a bit harder late game.

Biggest Point:

- Obviously we need more things to do with Light Oil and to some degree also Heavy Oil (in this case it's the products). The need to get rid of all oil products without having a proper use or demand is the biggest problem right now, imho.

In my weekend game i had 2K of electric engines stored, since they aren't very useful unless you need about a zillion logistic bots. I also had more then 20K of Solid Fuel Blocks stored in chests, inspite the usage in 28 boilers and 20 furnaces. I did my best to burn it useful, but ended up storing most of it. This leads to quite a bit of tedious micromanagement, hampering the production of the few goods that have a steady demand throughout the entire game (Batteries, Processing Units and Plastic).

Electric engines need more uses. Light oil Fuel Blocks replace coal the instant you have them and burn a lot less faster, leading to massive backlog. Might be best to just reduce the amout of energy they generate, until a better solution can be found. Or another type of Power Plant, maybe less efficient then the Steam Engines but without the need for water. I dunno, i guess you already have plans.

Thank you very much for releasing 0.9.0 a bit early, i think it's mostly stable and with a few tweaks should be good.