Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

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Dreepa
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Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by Dreepa »

So I was thinking about the status quo of the way Factorio deals with enemies.

In the beginning, it was fun. Building a defense perimeter, laying belts, having turrets defend my fortress. Eventually the whole map was red, but I stood strong. Upgrading weapons and mixing laser turrets in there.
It was really cool. However, as time was moving on, I slowly figured out that in order to enjoy playing with expanding and non-peaceful enemies, I basically had to repeat that process for each individual expansion I was making.

It was not "defend this choke point" or "use that mountain range to your advantage". It wasn't anything like tower defense or RTS turreting. Instead I got used to an eventually very boring process of encircling every expansion of my realm with a belt of turrets. After a while, I realized: This is no fun. It is too basic, too much of a no-brainer. To labor intense. And most important, it is a very repetitive and thus boring move that precedes every single move I make into the map.

I think there are two reasons for my disappointment:

1. There is no terrain (except water) that channels and guides natural defense lines.

2. Enemies are just everywhere and attack from all sides.


My dilemma is, that I really really do not not want to play without enemies attacking me, as it makes a huge amount of research opportunities worthless.

Anyone else feels the same way?
Last edited by Dreepa on Sat Dec 02, 2017 1:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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5thHorseman
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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by 5thHorseman »

I agree in part. I personally leave expansion on for them but crank it way down. Half an hour seems about right.

Then, I don't need to immediately defend everything but to need to consider defense and research it.

But I don't want more thought (by me or the devs) put into the enemies. I want to build factories, not wage war on insects.

leitk
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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by leitk »

My take on it is that the enemies in Factorio are both too hard and too easy.

They're too hard in that if a few get into your factory it is a major problem, and in order to defend against that you need an impressive wall, which is a fair amount of research and expense to deploy and keep up.

They're too easy in that once you've done that, they are no longer a threat, just some tedium in expanding the walls when you need to expand.

I've never tried sending rail lines through unsecured territory, as some people seem to do, as every time I go outside the walls it seems like I get attacked with a ton of enemies quickly (too hard). And as turret expansion is fairly easy once you've got a nuclear power plant, lasers and robots, there is not any real need to take the risk (too easy).

Currently I build a wall of lasers around the base, and eventually build up to a 2 thick wall of lasers. That very rarely takes any damage. In my last game I didn't bother with repair stations and it holds without any problem.

One idea to make things harder:
Random resistances, so say 1 in 10 biters are basically immune to one type of turret, forcing you to use at least two kinds. This should scale with evolution as well, so early on there may be a few that are slightly resistant, but later there are some that are immune or close to it.

But as 5th, says, I wouldn't want the developers to spend much time on this, and as it's obviously complex (anything that is both too hard and too easy has to be complex to balance), it's probably best left alone.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by CLion »

maybe add something like a giant speaker or hormone sprayer as an attention drawer?

that way you can create your own choke points and give the biters high priority targets

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by TreefrogGreaken »

Maybe you could give Rampant a try?

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Veden/Rampant

Modifys the way the bitters behave and may give you more of that challenge your after. I hear it can get pretty difficult with it enabled.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by DerGraue »

This is the reason why I have automated killing biters.

I want the challenge, but doing the same thing over and over again gets just too boring.

mrvn
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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by mrvn »

I agree that usually you just end up with one big encircled territory. Maybe something simple can be done to make that less attractive.

1) Have terrain types the aliens don't spawn on. They would form islands in the map where satelite factories can be placed. This would be preferable to killing all the aliens in a large area to expand a single base.

2) Have alien factions that don't like each other. Make one faction cluster together while leaving a gap to the next faction. So instead of uniform red around you you get blobs here and there with some space between to lay railroad tracks, even at the end game. They don't have to fight each other (and waste CPU) but simply not expand where another faction is too near.

Note: If you eliminate one huge nest of aliens (one faction) that means the surronding aliens would become free to expand towards that new gap and get bigger.

3) As you get further away alien nests should get bigger. As faction limit the size aliens can expand to less factions should be created. Factions could be bigger than a single nest. At the start every new nest placed would be one faction but further away multiple nests could be in the same faction and then expand till they are one big nest. So something that looks like a nice gap between two alien factions is actually just space inside the same faction and will get filled in over time. Too bad if you put your railraod there.

The aliens should still roam, find the satelite factory or railroad tracks and attack. The goal isn't to make it safe and boring but to make some places relatively safer than others, more attractive to build there. Make exploring to find more "safe" places more attractive than simply killing every alien in sight.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by JackGruff »

And the removal of alien artefacts have made them just a pest now.

I sometimes wonder if we would miss much if they were just completely removed. This would be a waste though, it's a lot of art done the drain; but as it stands, what exactly would we lose? The enemies have never felt like they were a part of the game. They feel like something that's there to give Factorio a semblance of a game. But really, do you go to your friends and say "you get to kill all these aliens, it's awesome!" when advertising Factorio?

The element we've always battled against is logistics, it's why we love this game. If the developers can somehow figure out how to weave the aliens into that, then they definitely have a place.

Frightning
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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by Frightning »

Dreepa wrote:So I was thinking about the status quo of the way Factorio deals with enemies.

In the beginning, it was fun. Building a defense perimeter, laying belts, having turrets defend my fortress. Eventually the whole map was red, but I stood strong. Upgrading weapons and mixing laser turrets in there.
It was really cool. However, as time was moving on, I slowly figured out that in order to enjoy playing with expanding and non-peaceful enemies, I basically had to repeat that process for each individual expansion I was making.

It was not "defend this choke point" or "use that mountain range to your advantage. It wasn't anything like tower defense or RTS turreting. Instead I got used to an eventually very boring process of encircling every expansion of my realm with a belt of turrets. After a while, I realized: This is no fun. It is too basic, too much of a no-brainer. To labor intense. And most important, it is a very repetitive and thus boring move that precedes every single move I make into the map.

I think there are two reasons for my disappointment:

1. There is no terrain (except water) that channels and guides natural defense lines.

2. Enemies are just everywhere and attack from all sides.


My dilemma is, that I really really do not not want to play without enemies attacking me, as it makes a huge amount of research opportunities worthless.

Anyone else feels the same way?
You can partially remedy this by messing with water settings in mapgen. I've managed to generate some maps with genuine choke points and stuff. I think the big thing is adjusting frequency of water to very high, but you can also tweak size too.

Escadin
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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by Escadin »

The problem with defending against aliens is that there is ZERO strategical choice and ZERO combat challenge involved in it. You just draw a line of whatever turret suits your preferences and done, problem solved, come ant or behemoth. Instead of evolving your defense layout you research number upgrades for your turrets which out-tech the enemy and that's that.

It's not like in an RTS or Tower Defense game where you have to consider the AI attack pathes, layout of the land or what kind of enemy units you face. There is also next to no difference in what defensive structures you use. Single file wall + any turret does the trick and the only notable outcome of that choice is which kind of resource your wall eats for supply - not how it performs in combat against any given enemy.

That's why it feels so one-dimensional and chore-like. There is nothing to explore, nothing to "optimize" in a military sense and it's just another form of logistics which is not even put behind a challenging puzzle.

Solution
Give different biter and turret types different properties to create some interesting interactions:
-Expand the armor and damage type system to Rock-Paper-Scissor (soft or hard)
-Change AI behaviour of different biters so they become more or less prone to flamethrower aoe or mines or whatever
-Give biters a chance to break through walls (like with a new suicidal alien) or otherwise alter the flow of battle so there may be new cases an automated defense has to account for over time
The kind of thing any RTS or Tower Defense game does or at least the bare bones of it.

Also, give as a reason to adapt defenses beyond standard turret + bullet damage research. I think worldmap rework to involve elevation is off the table at this point :/

JackGruff wrote:And the removal of alien artefacts have made them just a pest now.
Hell no. I never cared about alien artifacts for more than 2% of my playtime on any map. What I do care about 100% of the time is the space and resources my factory requires and you still have to take that out from under the aliens dead husks. What weird perception of priority is this? :D
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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by live22morrow »

At the current stage, defending against enemies is somewhat antithetical to the rest of the Factorio gameplay. At current, most of the things you're building in your factory consist of concentrated units of production. Smelting is done in a single plot fitted with as many furnaces as possible. The way that pumps work means that the most obvious way generate power is to pack in 40 steam turbines close together. Most players will end up building circuits in massive numbers at a dedicated facility rather than build them on demand.

Defense however is completely different. Because enemies can attack from any angle, and most factory designs naturally become quite spread out as you progress, the only way to effectively defend is to make a massive wall lined with turrets around the entire base. Making tougher enemies won't fix this. It will just mean that you have to put more turrets along the wall. You end up spending an inordinate amount of time building a massive structure that sees very infrequent use.

A way to fix this is some way to predict or affect the aliens' path ai. My suggestion is a structure or tower that attracts all aliens in a wide area and forces them to destroy that structure before any other that isn't attacking. To balance this, the tower would also cause affected aliens to become more aggressive, attacking in larger and more frequent waves. This would change defense from having to cast a wide thin net, to revolving around defending a handful of heavily fortified key points. Imagine having attacks frequent and heavy enough that you need an ammo assembly line just to keep the defending turrets active.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by vanatteveldt »

What makes this game fun is figuring out good solutions, generally in terms of combinations/ratios of plants and the logistics needed to support these.

What is boring about the game is repetitiveness. Scaling up your factory can be fun as long as there is new challenges to deal with: what if you can't just build a bigger bus anymore? what if you can't pipe enough water to you nuke plant anymore? Once scaling up just requires stamping more of a given blueprint it is "solved" and no longer fun (note - finding the "infinitely scalable X" can be a very worthy goal and as elusive as the holy grail -- but once you've found it, applying the solution 99 times isn't really fun any more.

This brings us to the two parts of factorio that are plain boring: outpost expansion and biter defense. Once you have rail, power, and building supplies set up creating more outposts is pure boredom, hence things like infinite resources and mining productivity research.

The same holds for biter defense. Figuring out the logistics to build a good wall system, whether based on belts+ammo or rails+logistic repairs+supply trains or cracking+flamethrower+wall mazes is fun, and it is cool to see that it actually works and to improve on it as time goes on. Most of the time, however, we are simply applying the solution we found 100 times, which is just boring.

Offense (clearing areas) is the same. It is fun to research weapon systems and try out tactics, whether the tactics are tanks, nukes, or blueprinted roboports. However, to move from a megabase to a gigabase doesn't involve a lot of new tactics, it involves mostly applying whatever tactic you like 100 times.

I think the solution that fits the game is automation. Hand-crafting 1M green circutis is boring, but building a base that can produce 1M green circuits can be fun. The same holds for expansion and defense. Recursive blueprints offer a way to automate outpost buiding (viewtopic.php?f=204&t=41377) and turret creep (viewtopic.php?f=204&t=54304), but the mechanics of recursive blueprints are quite arcane and of course not vanilla.

My suggestion, therefore, would be to find a way to automate base expansion aimed at new outposts and new defensive walls. I'm not sure what the best form would be - maybe a more user-friendly vanilla implementation of recursive blueprints, maybe a variant on automatic robot armies complemented by automatic ore expeditions.

Alternatively, a purely automated offensive tool (like the artillery train or ion cannon) can also take the tedium by clearing everything that could attack or block expansion, turning offense and defense into a logistics challenge rather than a clickfest. However, ultimately this means using your logistics to effectively turn off biters, and it would be more challenging if you would actually have to find a way to automate dealing with biters, rather than just "zapping" them.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by Dreepa »

Good comments here I think!

One more thought on the topic:

Attack groups always consists of nearly the same unit types. That means your combat always looks similar. If alien nests and attack groups would sometimes be ranged only, or melee only the fight would also vary. Fighting a bunch of melee is different from fighting a bunch of ranged. So maybe there is also some potential for variety.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by Bauer »

vanatteveldt spoke well. This is game about automation. The two things you cannot automate appropriately are outposts and claiming more land / clearing aliens.

The problem with automated blueprints is that "programming" this automation with combinators is a pain the ass and way above the average player's skill. Maybe automated vehicles that have some intellegence would work...

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by mrvn »

Bauer wrote:vanatteveldt spoke well. This is game about automation. The two things you cannot automate appropriately are outposts and claiming more land / clearing aliens.

The problem with automated blueprints is that "programming" this automation with combinators is a pain the ass and way above the average player's skill. Maybe automated vehicles that have some intellegence would work...
That is the challenge. Learn to use them.

Level 1) build a rocket
Level 2) build a factory that builds rockets
Level 3) build a factory that builds factories that build rockets


For de-alien-ation it would be nice if radars had a circuit connection that would give informations about where aliens are. With AAI vehicles you can program attacks. You can also scan for aliens, one tile per tick, but that doesn't really cut it.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by Bauer »

I have used automated blueprints for automated growth of my solar farm. This is well defined and realively easy to set up. Still too difficult for 95% of the factorio player base, which -- I have to add -- is not the average shooter guys.

But I havn't found a way to automate automatic outpost building. Size, form, and _location_ of the ore patches is at least difficult to figure out.
Yes, you could lay out a blue print with miners and observe if one is gone. Then use nested intervals to determine where the patch is. All in a very defined grid that allows for an automated train/track system. Do I really want to program this in combinator language? NOOOO! This is more a student project than something I would want in my xxx RPM base. I shiver when I think about what this would do to my already low UPS.


Re alien elimination, there are examples how to push forward a laser tower line automatically. As I said, this is way above an average player's skill. And frankly speaking, I switch off aliens because by the time I can afford an automated laser line, aliens arn't a challenge anymore anyway. With a long time of manual, non-challenging, pain-in-the-ass alien cleaning in between. From the posts about such automated laser lines you can see that they rather have the character of student projects rather than something ppl. are using in "real life".
If there is such a thing.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by bman212121 »

live22morrow wrote: A way to fix this is some way to predict or affect the aliens' path ai. My suggestion is a structure or tower that attracts all aliens in a wide area and forces them to destroy that structure before any other that isn't attacking. To balance this, the tower would also cause affected aliens to become more aggressive, attacking in larger and more frequent waves. This would change defense from having to cast a wide thin net, to revolving around defending a handful of heavily fortified key points. Imagine having attacks frequent and heavy enough that you need an ammo assembly line just to keep the defending turrets active.
I actually like this idea a lot. I think the reason why the aliens are so random in the first place is because of how the pollution works. It evenly spreads to all the squares around it, so essentially it doesn't really matter where in your base the most pollution is, all of it ends up averaging out until it attracts the aliens. If you could "bait" them somehow by being able to direct your pollution in a more concentrated manner you could influence where they are trying to attack.

If you think of how anything that pollutes works, we almost always use some type of tube or chimney to direct where we want the waste to go. It seems like you should be able to do the same with your factories. Imagine if you could hook up a pipe to the factory for pollution, and then all of the pollution goes into the pipe instead of directly into the air. We could hook up the factories to this pipe and run it to a location. Obviously you'd probably want something that would be able to scrub some of the pollution out, but if you have a stack or a tower that is venting to the air, it's certainly going to change how the pollution works.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by Triaxx2 »

For some reason the Biters seem inordinately attracted to Radar's, so I place those inside fortress areas, which not only nets me area scanning, but also serves to attract attention away from more soft and squishy infrastructure. Fortress areas are serviced by rails, and covered by robots, so I only need to set them up and then they'll self-feed as long as I have resources.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by mrvn »

I think it's the Natural Evolution mod that has a Thumper. Think Dune, the little device you stick in the sand that causes vibrations to lure worms. Looks just like it. Except it lures biters and spitters.

But I think it's the wrong way to go. You don't want to make the aliens (even more) angry and force them to attack more and more. I would rather have something that makes areas uninteresting for attacks. Something that makes them look for a better target area. Think camouflage netting.

Note: If you protect everything then the aliens have nothing to focus on so they would run around randomly and find your structures anyway. And once that laser turret fires no amount of netting will hide it.

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Re: Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

Post by Dreepa »

More thoughts on the matter:

Information game-play

"Alien threat organizing attack in sector AM13".
"Alien breeding detected in sector BA41"

Could help a bit with awareness

Maybe it is provided via radar. Or some reskin of the radar and called Xeno-Activity Scanner building.

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