Pollution is counter-intuitive?

[Valrandir]

The OP read as:

"I'm a carebear who refuse to admit it. I don't want to deal with biters, but I want to play with default settings to feel like the real deal. Therefore pollution is bad"

/thread

[Ranakastrasz]

The OP read as:

"I'm a carebear who refuse to admit it. I don't want to deal with biters, but I want to play with default settings to feel like the real deal. Therefore pollution is bad"

/thread

No, just no. While amusing, that is entirely inaccurate.
-------

I think Pollution is an OK mechanic but doesn't really feel... nessesary? Well Designed? Theme-wise, I see it as, Pollution exists, and wrecks the environment. You can reduce it, but that is expensive and you need to pollute a lot first. Mirrors real life, with coal-fired plants being used for ages, and we are trying to develop "Green" technology to deal with it. Also, it pisses the biters off.


I can't really point at a gameplay-wise purpose, just a thematic purpose. Biters are messy as is.

[Syrchalis]

The OP read as:

"I'm a carebear who refuse to admit it. I don't want to deal with biters, but I want to play with default settings to feel like the real deal. Therefore pollution is bad"

/thread

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=49041

I want biters to be a lot harder and attack constantly without needing pollution to trigger them.

But hey, make retarded assumptions based on nothing, will definitely improve your life. I even said in this thread that they are a joke several times, but I guess if one wants to make an argument they just ignore anything that goes against it.

[Syrchalis]

Show me a game where you are actually in threat of DYING to biters.

Easy.

You mentioned X-COM: Enemy Unknown, a game I'm not familiar with. However, I am familiar with Xenonauts, X-COM: UFO Defense (the original from 1994), X-COM Apocalypse, and X-COM: Interceptor (an abomination similar in both gameplay and reasons why to No Man's Sky.) These games have a progression in the enemies somewhat similar to that of Factorio, but it's only the calendar that ticks it along, slower on lower difficulty levels and faster on higher ones. If you get ahead of it, the game gets easier, but if you get behind it, the game gets harder, and can even get impossible if you fall too far behind because it is hard to recover from losing battles in these games (character ranks, equipment, ships, and even entire bases being lost when missions fail.)

Based on your big comment, it sounds almost like Factorio isn't the game you're looking for, and you'd rather be playing Halo 5 c/w social match making hidden ranks most reviewers consider an absolute abomination. I'm mentioning Halo 5 because it also seems like you've missed the basic point of Factorio: base building for rocket scientists. The appeal of Factorio is the design aspect that makes you really think about what you're doing, and as such it is not an RTS, RPG, or shooter. The problems that you have with Factorio (and X-COM) are the problems that I have with everything else turned into pluses, and it's pretty obvious that I'm not the only one.

I'm of the opinion that Factorio's biggest plus is an almost open-source-like ability to mod away any gameplay balance or quality of life complaint you might have. If you like brainfood base-building, but want more of a challenge with the enemies, you can add Hardcorio (good standalone, doesn't play very well with other mods), and Bob's Enemies sans Bob's Warfare (the latter gives you the tools to deal with the former, and they are crazy hard with just the vanilla equipment.)

Efficiency modules require resource to build. ... Those resourses could alternatively be spent building more/better combat capabilities.Neither is decidely better than the other. Thus it is a good mechanic.

Usually, one is clearly better than the other, but which one depends on the difficulty settings and mods, and usually requires experience and/or analysis to figure out if you're not making it obvious like with the Rail World preset. That makes Factorio awesome. Muddy Mountains has a serious problem: I'm playing a mod pack that makes 0.15 vanilla Death World preset look like a tutorial level, and part of the reason is because biter hive expansion is so aggressive. The bugs are literally at their most dangerous ever: it being 0.14, I can't even turn it down without typing and/or installing code (not that I would since it defeats the point of Muddy Mountains.) I have Bob's Modules installed, which means pollution cleaning effect is available once I have the mod pack's equivalent of red circuits. But there's still a problem: if the bugs expand into territory I've secured, but not well enough to prevent them from dropping by and making a new outpost, I need to kill those spawners in defense, and that's an epigenetic advance. That means that I need to wall them off to stop the evolution factor increasing just from defending my territory, and all enabled resources (I disabled stone because it's a huge waste product from two of the mods) are set to the lowest frequency. That would be impossible without some serious gear for fighting biters, so I have Bob's Warfare (along with Bob's Enemies), Additional Turrets, Ion Cannons, and Modular Armor Revamp.

You can't change pollution triggering attacks in the options. You cannot give them proper evolution either.

Oops, that's the oldest difficulty setting in Factorio, better known as "peaceful mode". That's another bit of text that makes me think you've missed the point of Factorio.

A related PSA for all who might be reading this: Factorio is not a death world survival game, and if that's what you're looking for, save your money for Don't Starve, The Long Dark, or SubNautica. You can't even mod Factorio into a death world survival game, and I know this because I have modded Factorio into the closest thing to it. I'm building huge factories just to make enough ammunition to survive and develop the next tier of weaponry before the bugs advance to the next tier of nasty spitters and biters. It still doesn't have that feel of death-just-around-the-corner I get in Don't Starve and The Long Dark (or even Minecraft.) If that's what you're looking for, Factorio is definitely not your game.

Honestly, you entirely misinterpreted my point and failed at understanding it.

1. What you posted is a game with 66 mods. Try showing me a vanilla setup that is actually challenging on the enemy side. You can't because the enemies have zero tricks up their sleeves and it's just about you building enough defense to not get steamrolled, but with no real lose condition.

2. I say MULTIPLE times that Factorio is about base-building and that it's the main focus of the game (Can people here even read my post first?). BUT does that mean combat needs to be stupid, boring, easy, tedious? NO, definitely not. Right now it's all these things. Just look at the offensive side. You get tons of tools to deal with biters and none of them is really necessary. You can literally pick your poison and kill biters. They balanced these tools well, but that alone was not helping. It just gave you more options. However, why would you ever use these options? There is nothing the enemies have that make a certain option the answer.

Basically: You have tool A, B, C, D, E, F - but you only have ONE enemy type A. The best tool for that job is tool C. Why would you EVER use A, B, D, E or F if not for trying them out or for lulz? No reason - one type is superior and that is used, end. Any decent combat makes you adapt to a certain degree. As a not-combat-focused game Factorio SHOULD NOT make you adapt like crazy and spend hours building defense or make taking out spawners a 30 minute campaign of carnage. But it shouldn't be the bland binary tedious combat that it is now.

3. Peaceful mode IS NOT that - it just means they don't attack first. After you attack first they will still act normally. What should be the case is that they attack you NO MATTER WHAT. Pollution not in the equation.

4. Efficiency modules - seems to me like you two don't use them, but you're trying to speak for everyone. Everyone I know uses them, so yeah, clearly neither absolute is true. Efficiency 1 cost VERY little and provide indefinite energy reduction on buildings that will run for hours and hours. They are most definitely worth it. Mining outposts get a MASSIVE decrease to their footprint so they will basically never get attacked. Many buildings will never use other modules, so might as well throw them in there. Plus you get tons and tons of efficiency 1 before you get your first speed/productivity 3.

My problem with them is that you build them for EITHER of the effects, but you get the other for free. It would make a lot more sense if you had energy-reducing modules AND pollution reducing modules separately. Are they innately underpowered compared to speed/productivity? Yes, but that is a separate problem.

5. Delwack - with what you say I can actually agree. You seem to have understood as the only person here where I'm going with this.
But I think what you're saying shouldn't be the goal. I think there should be an option to choose "Easy, Medium, Hard" and Easy and Medium should be more about the logistics side, while Hard should ALSO be about the logistics, but if you fail to do so, you actually lose the game.

My issue with the current situation is that you can just ignore defense even in pretty nasty maps - you will lose buildings here and there, but you will never die to an attack. The ONLY REASON anyone EVER builds ANY defense or bothers with the logistics is that it's less tedious (or it can actually be fun) than constantly rebuilding the 10 thingies the biters destroyed. The game not punishing you just makes it feel less justified to bother with defense - for easy/medium I think that would be fine, as I said above, but for a hard setting that just doesn't cut it.

6. I actually played a mod that makes biters attack you relentlessly in waves and it's pretty damn hard - to be honest, it was poorly designed and balanced, but I still had a completely new and fun experience in Factorio. Base Building was still the primary thing, but you needed to keep up with defense at ALL STAGES and could not neglect it in any way, or you would get overrun. Something like that needs careful tweaking and player options to adjust the exact difficulty, but it would add much more depth to Factorio without adding any complexity.

[featherwinglove]

Honestly, you entirely misinterpreted my point and failed at understanding it.

My point is that you seem to have misinterpreted Factorio and failed at understanding it. One thing is, I'm not sure why you didn't snip my post when quoting me. It's silly to do that without responding to the individual points in line. It's a matter of putting "/quote" and "quote" where you'd like to respond to something specific. (Could someone more familiar with phpBB point out the escape character for me so I can include the brackets next time?)

Basically: You have tool A, B, C, D, E, F - but you only have ONE enemy type A.

That doesn't describe vanilla very well. Part of the reason I mod is due to a distinct lack of variety in the weapons, not just the enemies. There are only two turrets, two kinds of armed vehicles, and most of the modular armor equipment sucks. Wube has been improving things, fortunately, but the truth is that it is hard to get beyond basic base building without mods, and even then, the biters are never the main point of the game.

3. Peaceful mode IS NOT that - it just means they don't attack first. After you attack first they will still act normally. What should be the case is that they attack you NO MATTER WHAT. Pollution not in the equation.

You don't seem to have played peaceful mode. The biters do not revert to standard behaviour with one attack. Once you kill off all the ones who are angry with you, the rest leave you alone just fine. As for "NO MATTER WHAT", just don't turn off expansion. They come rather infrequently in that mode, but they are a big pain when they do. If you don't like how often they come, you can crank that up in 0.15 without even modding.

4. Efficiency modules...

Not sure why you went off about that, since modules don't seem all that relevant. I almost never use efficiency modules not so much because they're not useful, but because I don't need them. By that phase of a vanilla game, I generally carpet so much real estate with solar panels and batteries that the pollution doesn't reach the biters, and I have so much power to spare that I can put productivity modules in everything I can and speed modules everywhere else (save pumpjacks, which always get the speed modules.) In Muddy Mountains, I have Bob's Modules installed and cranked up (i.e. that means I'll eventually be using the infamous god modules.)

My issue with the current situation is that you can just ignore defense even in pretty nasty maps...

I haven't had any myself, since I don't ignore defense, but with not much searching, you can find megabase Youtubers who get pretty salty when their rocket-per-minute epic build grinds to a halt because one small biter got through and took out one power pole or one length of conveyor. Granted, the most common approach is to blast so many biters away around the edge of the base that the rest are too far away for their chunks to stay loaded. I believe that approach is most consistent with Factorio's personality, but it doesn't need to be that way. Heck, as far as lose conditions go, all you need to do is go AFK for a few hours. Way back when (and shit, am I seriously about to give away my age? ), I left the SNES on with SimCity running, turned off the TV and went to school. Came back to find my 200k metropolis had burned completely away, except for the occasional patch of road or building that got missed by the fire. The messages indicated that it was all due to a single plane crash. I didn't have enough information to confirm, but what happened was the economy oscillated and sagged to the point where the fire department's funding was cut off. The treasury balance indicated that it came back long before the plane crashed, but the funding is not restored automatically in these circumstances. I would call my city being reduced to an apocalyptic waste by one Cessna losing the game, even if I didn't get a "Game Over" screen. Contrast where a lucky shot from a giant worm gives me that in Factorio, and the only thing that I've lost is the player character and the time since the last autosave plus facepalm lag. We're talking about the sort of games where the end point is set by the human playing the game, not by the game itself. From here, that seems to be your biggest gripe.

[Nasabot]

I TOTALLY AGREE!

Pollution, as it is now, is very problematic. What I dislike most about pollution is, that in early game it leads to attacks from all sides. Usually, when you begin a game you have to spread somewhere out and this becomes very annoying as you are moving slow and constantly getting attacked from all sides. So you have to build a long wall which is very tedious to build without fast construction robots.

In my opionion the whole pollution system needs a rework:

1, Environment does not depollute as much (at least the depollution from tree should be constant. If they absorb 3500 Pollution in 10sec or 1sec should not matter->they die when they consumed their depollution value)
2, efficiency modules get changed to depollution modules (40%, 60%, 80%) or added as their own
3, removal of medium biter powerspike (changing biter armor or bullet damage.)
4, easier anticipation of attack direction, maybe with radars. Or gather points could be more obvious and straight forward

[makrom]

Really don't get what the general problem with pollution is supposed to be, for the most part, the current system makes perfect sense to me. What of the following is supposedly illogical?

• Aliens getting antagonized by pollution, causing them to attack
  Aliens reacting to pollution by developing towards a form where thy can better counteract the cause
  Trees soaking up pollution
  Grass and oceans soaking up more pollution than deserts
  Burning carbon based fuels causing tons of pollution, while alternative processes cause less

Whereas I see absolutely no logical reason for why the pure development level of a factory should have any influence on the aliens. Why should they care about arbitary things like belt speed?

In my current deathworld game, I had a phase where aliens were massively problematic, especially countering the armor of level 2 biters without laser turrets.
Currently, aliens aren't that much of a threat rather than a factor that has to be taken into account for many things. But to get to this stage is one of the very reason why the player is pushing forward through the tech tree and launches huge infrastructure projects.
Even though I have secured huge areas and pollution free power production, my beaconized mod 3 production buildings cause that much pollution that it spreads further than my fortified, causing constant attacks that are so severe that even a double walled defense wall with repair drone coverage and almost no spots that aren't in range of 16 fully researched (minus space research) laser turrets can't prevent losses.

[greep]

Well, most successful sandbox/survival games that are very long have difficulty drop off over time, it just seems to be what players want. It sucks losing a game 40 hours into it. That said, death worlds never drop off in difficulty until post-behemoth and increase over time due to the need to conquer space, so I feel like there's definitely options for whatever playstyle you like.

The only thing I definitely agree with is terrain having too much influence, deserts being a newbie death trap are a bit silly.

I TOTALLY AGREE!
3, removal of medium biter powerspike (changing biter armor or bullet damage.)
4, easier anticipation of attack direction, maybe with radars. Or gather points could be more obvious and straight forward

#3 already happened, standard bullet round damage went from 2->5, quadrupling their effectiveness against medium biters since they now pierce armor.
#4 I can see that, but on the other hand, this is what radars are for. Attacks come from wherever the closest nests are.

[HurkWurk]

i think a lot of people forget that factorio is far more a sandbox game than a RTS game.
sandbox games are not castle defense. they are sandbox. the idea is to play with your legos.

any redesign of biters that make you pay more attention to them than to your factory is counter to the concept of the game in general. if you want that kind of difficulty, play the wave survival mode. not general free play. or get one of the dozens of mods that radically change the game.

[featherwinglove]

I'm really having trouble understanding the complaint.

In my opionion the whole pollution system needs a rework:

In my opium, pollution isn't a problem

1, Environment does not depollute as much (at least the depollution from tree should be constant. If they absorb 3500 Pollution in 10sec or 1sec should not matter->they die when they consumed their depollution value)

This is adjustable in the 0.15 difficulty settings.

2, efficiency modules get changed to depollution modules (40%, 60%, 80%) or added as their own

Pollution cleaning effect is available in Bob's Modules if you want to check it out.

3, removal of medium biter powerspike (changing biter armor or bullet damage.)

Yeah, medium biters do seem a little OP compared to their immediate predecessors.

4, easier anticipation of attack direction, maybe with radars. Or gather points could be more obvious and straight forward

I've never had a problem spotting posse gathering on radar when I try to do so. The problem is that I'm almost never staring at the radar enough. If I know how the pollution is spreading and where the hives are, I rarely have problems anticipating attack direction. One thing to remember is that they (seem to at least) go from low pollution chunks to high pollution chunks. This can cause a posse to track in on a vector very different from a straight line between the posse gathering location and the high pollution area they're after. Once, I pulled up power from an outpost and stayed standing in the chunk it was built in, which had grass. The posse stopped in the neighbouring desert chunk because it had higher pollution, didn't find anything, and self-destructed.

[Ahry]

I really like how pollution works. Yes at beginning i have some problem with biters... now I do not, because I know how to build factory. Trees take place for some another factorio, but eat pollution, so it I have to make choice if I want to build there, of safe that trees to eating pollution.

It is true, that in the late game I never use green modules (for less efetricity and pollution) I think, that this can be make cheaper.

But what i really like in this game, that it push you to make not easy decision also some decision are better then another only in same words. But I really like, that this is not bad RPG like game like almost everyone, in almost every one your stats grows and in same rate the enemies stat grows, and that is really wrong and boring design.

[Hedning1390]

If you like it the way it is then why did you necro it?

[Frightning]

I want to like the mechanic, not just because of the moral value, but also because of the general idea of "pollution bothers biters -> biters attack" but I feel like the mechanic is falling short in many ways.

TL;DR:
It's just not an elegant solution. Evolution (aka difficulty) should be directly related to the players factory size and tech level, not the pollution. Biters should attack in general, the intensity of attacks determined by evolution (aka player strength) and their chosen difficulty setting. Difficulty shouldn't rely on terrain (desert vs. forest), but on what the player selected and what he does in the game.

Pollution isn't good
1. As mechanic to increase the evolution (=difficulty) of enemies
2. As mechanic to tell the AI when to attack
3. at interaction with trees and terrain

The biggest issue I have with pollution is that you cannot avoid it in any meaningful way. Early and mid-game you produce a lot of pollution without much possibilities to do anything about it. Solar panels are somewhat expensive and inefficient in the mid-game and by then a lot of the damage has been done. Shortly after begins the late-game in which you start crafting modules, mainly efficiency one.

And this is where I feel the mechanic fails. Once you equip your mining drills, refineries and chemical plants with efficiency one modules that are pretty cheap to make, your pollution drops like a stone. For a very long time after that you will be invisible to aliens, not because you even wanted to, but simply because you were trying to reduce your energy consumption.

At this point players usually start using productivity and speed setups because there is no reason to care about pollution anymore. Your defenses can hold any attack easily, especially with the new uranium rounds and infinite research (1x infinite turret research and uranium rounds give turrets like 200 dmg per bullet... that's pretty ridiculous).

But shouldn't the game get harder as time goes on? Shouldn't it be easier at the start?

To recap:
1. A research/factory size indicator + time would work better than pollution as evolution factor, though pollution works somewhat okay early/mid game
2. The AI should not be bound to pollution to attack. It just makes the game completely random. The player has absolutely no control about where his pollution goes as he can't sow trees, can't revive trees and can't move resources where his miners will need to be. It creates very hard and very easy games just based on the density of trees, which brings me to the last point:
3. In the desert you will get attacked from all sides all day and in a dense forest you're invisible. New players not knowing this might get a much harder or easier game than they want to. Also people who don't like desert or forest (color, personal preference whatever) can be punished for their choice of terrain.

All of your complaints here can be addressed with the current mapgen settings in 0.16, as long as you understand their impact and how to tweak them to achieve what you desire (I will admit, fine tuning map gen settings to get the experience you want can seem like black magic to someone who hasn't researched the heck out of how those mechanics work as well experimented with a lot of different maps; maybe more presets are needed to show to manipulate those map gen settings to achieve desirable results)

Expanding on my above point about mapgen settings being more versatile than people realize: You seem to want the biters to attack frequently and in numbers, in order to provide a challenge to defend against. This is achievable with vanilla mapgen, consider these adjustments:
-Increase expansion rate, especially early on.
-Make sure starting area size is set to at least small if not very small (biters will have their closest nests much closer to your start that way=pollution will trigger attacks MUCH earlier in the game=you need to consider defenses much earlier on)
-Adjusting impact of pollution and killing biter nests to evolution will adjust how quickly they evolve relative to factory size, as well as their response to being counter-attacked by the player versus just defended against (e.g. if you want to make the 'maximum prejudice' strategy ineffective, jack up evolution from spawner kills, but keep pollution and time based evolution manageable).
-Messing with terrain types in map gen to enforce desert start can further increase how quickly pollution expansion starts triggering hordes of biters to attack you (note that attack size is a function of how much pollution the spawners are absorbing).
-Pollution generation and absorption can also be tweaked if you fine pollution expansion isn't working out as you had hoped.

[zOldBulldog]

It is probably important to remind the OP (and those who love combat) that Factorio'd primary audience is builders and designers, not combat. Yes, there are some combat elements that make the game more interesting for some and annoying for others, but typically those interested in combat will typically play games that are far better suited to it.

In other words, while combat has its place in factorio, it cannot be shoved down the throat of every player or a large portion of Factorio fans will move on to greener pastures. Even locking out achievements unless you commit to combat is detrimental.

The key is options. And the current set of options is fairly decent, they just need to be explained better so that even the casual player understands them, and maybe do some minor adjustments.

[Dixi]

Factorio, even without mods, have a lot of options. I think there are quite enough options related to biters behavior and pollution, to fine tune those factors as much as you like.

Current default pollution+biter mechanics is very easy to understand, and it add some random elements (and fun) to automated factory building game.

I don't think it need any changes.

If you look in ideas and suggestions section or on most popular mods, you'll see several very interesting but much harder to implement and balance ideas.

[MisterSpock]

Biter attack size and frequency only rely on pollution.

It also differ very much on map type. Trees and Terrain type can completly change the game.

There is no way to say "I want a hard game" or "I want a easy game". A lot of ppl never encounter biter attacks the first few hours, which can be annyoing.

[zOldBulldog]

Biter attack size and frequency only rely on pollution.

It also differ very much on map type. Trees and Terrain type can completly change the game.

There is no way to say "I want a hard game" or "I want a easy game". A lot of ppl never encounter biter attacks the first few hours, which can be annyoing.

There is a way, but like everything else when generating a new map, it is not very clear:. Just choose the smallest starting area possible and the nastiest pollution and biter settings available...and you will get a hard game.

Also keep in mind that "a lot of people" do not want to be bothered by biters, they have other goals for the game. That is why OPTIONS are important, to give everybody what they like without ruining other people's games.

[sthalik]

Wish there was an additional scale for pollution rate for a time period (computed via EWMA). It could influence chance of particular biter size generation, as well as even more dangerous variants. Take into account how many tiles are polluted as well. Even for one base it's a function of the total pollution value emitted.

Is this moddable? Can you point me to an API? I can handle writing the code otherwise.

Maybe this is nostalgia but I like the mechanics as a new player. It's similar-ish to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. I remember that one game against the CPU...

SMAC

Had a continent full of boreholes and mirrors for the tasty resources. Thus faster and faster global warming. The attacks were already significant, and the Planetary Council was unanimous in backing my "launch solar shade" proposal.

Then made a critical mistake due to not knowing game mechanics. Launched three nukes on largest enemy population centers and followed up with nerve gas. The nukes make Planet really angry. It launched constant attacks against all of my continents, reclaiming them for nature's sake. It was impossible to defend given seemingly infinite waves upon waves of worms and locusts.

While all my bases were being destroyed, I managed to build just a few Clean Reactor hovertanks with Nerve Gas pods. Given they don't take any maintenance cost from their bases (Clean Reactor), I could use them with impunity before all my bases were brutally murdered.

I managed to move them outside my sphere of influence in some convoluted way. Most of the gravships survived, avoiding the swarm tiles. Launched Nerve Gas against the remaining alliances. They were solid but the chemical attack does wonders. I was already knee-deep in trouble so it didn't change a thing ecology-wise.

The enemy alliances died. I won by conquest. Though if the game was taken to its logical conclusion afterward, I'd die to Planet's response within a couple dozen turns anyway.