Factorio Forums

I just finished my first .9.1 game and had a blast. I’ll wait for .9.2 or later before starting a new game.

I tried to make the game challenging. I started in a desert with hardly any trees and low resources. I thought I had the bitters on as hard as they can go, but I re-started the map a few times and I wonder if the settings changed, since they were hard, but not as hard as I expected. It took me 24 hours to finish, without trying to rush and still learning all the new features.

Here are my thoughts after this game. Some of them might be simple to implement, others not possible.


Game Setup:
1. Evolution scale. I’d like to see some difficulty settings, besides the bitter nest size and frequency. Would it be possible to add in an evolution rate setting? (I think that’s what it called.) How fast the bugs grow and how far away that starts to happen.

2. Fog-of-War. Radar Mk1 will show the surrounding terrain and resources, but not bitter nests, radar Mk2 will show biters.

3. Map Seed you can enter and share.

4. Iron-man. Can’t save, but on exit. So don't die, it's permanent.

5. New game modes: Most of these will have to be scenario based, so that the resources and map stay the same. Including user created maps with a rating system. All with leader-boards.
a. Survival game – waves of biters come in and get worse as time goes by. How long can you survive before dying, and you will die.
b. Mining challenge. See who can mine the most resources in a set time or first to mine x amount of a certain resource.


Game Feature:
1. Lights seem totally useless to me. Take inspiration from the movie Pitch Black. So make the dark more dark and lights better. Also, your character does not start with a light, but you start by chopping a tree and creating a torch. This will later upgrade with tech to create a flash light with bigger and brighter light around character, with possible further upgrades. If it’s dark, there might be bat like creatures that attach your equipment causing damage over time. Would take a lot of nights to actually destroy anything. Possibly illumination globes to follow you later on.

2. New Bitters/Bugs. Think of the movie Starship Troopers for inspiration here.
a. Acid Sprayers. Slow and heavy armored, that sprays large sections of your walls with acid that melts the regular stone walls. You would have the ability to upgrade your walls to Reinforced Walls with a lot of steel.
b. A Queen at larger bitter bases. They don’t leave the bases, but protect it.
c. Diggers. If a base gets large enough it could spread by “digging” to a new location. So there could pop-up a bunch of bugs in your base if you leave a large base too close to your own base
d. Flying bitters. Only around large bases. They are drawn to attach electric poles. So be careful when tower creeping…
e. Bats, as mentioned with lights, they so small amounts of damage to areas of your base that's not lit.
f. Some types of bitters should have acid blood, like in the movie Aliens. This will be on the ground for a while causing damage to you or your car.

End Game:
1. I must say, I love this game, but the final 10 min counter was extremely disappointing. I saw slightly more attacks. But no biter even breached my walls that I had from the start. The only reason I can think of is that I wiped out nests around me to get the resources to research the final tech. Building the Missile defense should be terrifying!! You should be well defended and count the seconds down to victory or defeat! This should be scaled up 100x from where it’s now in the game. The main reason for my new bugs above it to make this last 10 min countdown terrifying. Imaging a horde of all those storming you…please, please make this harder or a setting to be able to do it.


2. Post-game summary. I’d like to see how many resources I used. How much wood was chopped, iron, copper & stone mined and oil pumped.


Keep up the good work!
P.S. Make the game Beta vs. Alpha. That might help you sales and it’s in good enough shape.

I like your ideas.

Hope the developers read it too!

This nice suggestions should be posted as separated ideas in suggestions-board.

Iron man: Cant save, but on exit.

Do you mean that death is for ever?
Maybe as a hardcore gamemode but no for the normal game

other ideas are cool

TheSAguy wrote: Game Feature:
1. Lights seem totally useless to me. Take inspiration from the movie Pitch Black. So make the dark more dark and lights better. Also, your character does not start with a light, but you start by chopping a tree and creating a torch. This will later upgrade with tech to create a flash light with bigger and brighter light around character, with possible further upgrades. If it’s dark, there might be bat like creatures that attach your equipment causing damage over time. Would take a lot of nights to actually destroy anything. Possibly illumination globes to follow you later on.

2. New Bitters/Bugs. Think of the movie Starship Troopers for inspiration here.
a. Acid Sprayers. Slow and heavy armored, that sprays large sections of your walls with acid that melts the regular stone walls. You would have the ability to upgrade your walls to Reinforced Walls with a lot of steel.
b. A Queen at larger bitter bases. They don’t leave the bases, but protect it.
c. Diggers. If a base gets large enough it could spread by “digging” to a new location. So there could pop-up a bunch of bugs in your base if you leave a large base too close to your own base
d. Flying bitters. Only around large bases. They are drawn to attach electric poles. So be careful when tower creeping…
e. Bats, as mentioned with lights, they so small amounts of damage to areas of your base that's not lit.
f. Some types of bitters should have acid blood, like in the movie Aliens. This will be on the ground for a while causing damage to you or your car.

End Game:
1. I must say, I love this game, but the final 10 min counter was extremely disappointing. I saw slightly more attacks. But no biter even breached my walls that I had from the start. The only reason I can think of is that I wiped out nests around me to get the resources to research the final tech. Building the Missile defense should be terrifying!! You should be well defended and count the seconds down to victory or defeat! This should be scaled up 100x from where it’s now in the game. The main reason for my new bugs above it to make this last 10 min countdown terrifying. Imaging a horde of all those storming you…please, please make this harder or a setting to be able to do it.

Know this should be in mod API but we need more access to monsters AI, so we can create monsters like this.
Also yet again, good work on the game keep going.

Liked your ideas! Some excellent thoughts! I do like the game as it is, and always look forward to changes and add-on's, but i like the idea of having them as an option.

The lights/torch thing is not really important in the beginning, since you wont get attacked until you start creating enough pollution, and that means you are already generating electricity.

New Biters are always welcome, as the technology and game balance rises to meet them. Although I always shun against the flyers, as you have to now cover for flyers, and unless the anti-flyer weapon has a wide range, its going to be a big distraction from keeping your base up - or going out to clear. Having a biter that will target poles would be a nightmare for all your defenses, as they could take out large section of your defenses when you are not there. So there would have to be some not so difficult way to protect them, like a mini-laser system upgrade that gets installed on the poles, but all this would be a lot for the devs.

Having the diggers means keeping a strong base defense on your expansions, so they should be vulnerable to turrets, because of the added electric cost of lasers you would need within the base expansion around all your items (trains/robos/radars/assembles etc..). The acid spray and queen are good ideas! Sound like you are influenced by Starship Troopers and aliens. You should also take a look at Warhammer's Tyranids, they use bio-toxins, organic ranged weapons with parasites and huge claws.

I really agree with the endgame idea. I have not reached that as of yet, but yea, they should increase as you get closer to the countdown, and really make it like you are just saved down to last few seconds! like constantly being pushed back to the center of the base at the end! Reminds of some of the missions on Starcraft1

There is one thing I would really like to see changed as soon as possible. This is the only thing I dont like about the game right now. That is the piping system for fluids. Please allow for longer underground pipes!! The insane tangle of bumps makes it so hard to move in the areas that have oil, and I am constantly hitting them and getting caught trying to navigate though that. It also causes large blocked off areas that mean getting stopped and having to go back out and around them. Its just really annoying to deal with that.

Making a pipe that can move beneath a section of refineries and chemlabs would really clean this up and make it so much more organized and manageable. I cant say the number of times I have mixed fluids and had to rebuild the whole section because I had so many of these pipes and they attached the wrong way. Or had to route pipes all the way around an area because there was no way to get it through an area already overgrown with pipes. And that only created more and more pipes to get tripped up on. It makes it very hard to expand fluids.

So please extend the underground pipe to at least 3 or 4 times its current length! even when having to drag pipes from water or oil sources that are really not far enough for a train would really help a lot! I wish you could do this for the next release!!

But thank you for providing this awesome game! It is such an original, fun and challenging game! It incorporates many features from games that I have come to like, and I am totally hooked!

ficolas wrote:

Iron man: Cant save, but on exit.

Do you mean that death is for ever?
Maybe as a hardcore gamemode but no for the normal game

other ideas are cool

Ironman is a feature some games provide, it is a choice as an option to game play, in the menu where you select the difficulty level. You never have to choose it, just like you never have to play hardcore.

I saw your Mod, it looks awesome!! I will definitely give it a go once I have played a number of times to completion and really get the game down. I like so many of the add ons you put in there, it really adds more depth to the game. Would love to see a new biter or two!

Great ideas! I really like the bat idea although it seems more of an annoyance than a real threat. I'd like to see stronger night enemies though, something to really be afraid of at night when your system is already stressed for lack of solar power if you don't prepare for it.

I’d like to hear from the dev’s what their plans are for future bitters and what it will take to open this up to mods.

Thanks,