Factorio Forums

evopwr wrote:Its not about making it more enjoyable for me.

I was considering what would make the game better overall.

Think of other games. If you could click a button, and bases just built themselves the same as before - would they be as enjoyable?

In ARK, Conan, Minecraft, Outpost Zero, or many others examples, or any other base building game (hundreds to chose from!) - one of the core enjoyable parts IS the base building. That's one of the most hugely successful genres at the moment. Base Building. You wont see ANY other base building game have a button to "redo what you built last time", because it totally detracts from the fundamental purpose and enjoyment of the game.

I can play how I want, so its not about making it more enjoyable for me. I just think it would be more successful, where more people keep playing again and again, if this option wasn't available in the vanilla game.
What % of people play more than 100 hours? I'm guessing less than 5%? I'm just thinking about what can be done to increase that, and make it enjoyable to keep playing.

I think you are going by the wrong assumptions. You are assuming that base building is what makes *this* game fun. Except that it isn't only that, and what makes it fun depends on the person.

- Some people might enjoy the manual labor of base building.
- Others enjoy the more intellectual job of coming up with better designs than the previous one... which doesn't mean they want to rebuild everything from scratch, one assembler and one inserter at a time.
- Yet others enjoy the combat aspects of the game.
- Others like speed-runs with various constraints.
- Others like to design train networks.

And the list goes on and on.

But regardless of which, most of those forms of gameplay would quickly become extremely boring if we didn't have blueprints.

I am one of those that would positively hate the loss of blueprints. Frankly, my enjoyment comes from designing blueprints that are better than my previous one, and I'd be gone immediately if they removed them.

Also, you mention the players that stuck around for over 100 hours. I did (well over 600 by now) and it only happened thanks to blueprints and tutorials. The early "everything manual" "slap anything anywhere" type of gameplay got me bored extremely quickly, and the only thing that kept me going was KoS' and Nilaus' tutorials and their associated blueprints... not as something to copy and build blindly, but as something to learn from and to use as inspiration for my own designs.

So, no... removing blueprints is NOT a good idea. It is a terrible one.

evopwr wrote:I can play how I want, so its not about making it more enjoyable for me. I just think it would be more successful, where more people keep playing again and again, if this option wasn't available in the vanilla game.
What % of people play more than 100 hours? I'm guessing less than 5%? I'm just thinking about what can be done to increase that, and make it enjoyable to keep playing.

I highly doubt that the ability to use blueprints is the reason people stop playing.

In fact, if I had to guess, fewer people would play more than a game or few without moving blueprints from game to game.

I’d be curious if there are any collected stats regarding blueprints in new games. It would even be interesting to know the amount of time the game saw “common” blueprints used across millions of games. I’m betting belt balances would be high on the common imports list.

Balancers are the kind of things I trust to theorycrafting. And don’t care to try to build myself. I like to play the “macro” game with Factorio. Maximize the whole factory, not micromanage every item running across the belts. Maybe I’m a minority, I don’t know.

The fact that someone smarter than me, with math and geometry and systems engineering, can figure out an 8-to-3 balancer and I can benefit from that is amazing. It helps me avoid something I would consider tedious and not fun at all. And I hope the brillliant person that designed it got some warm fuzzies knowing their belt baby is helping a mathematically challenged redneck build a more efficient factory.

But again, I think the majority of people share the attitude “nice feature, but I’m not going o use it this time” rather than “I hate this game for giving me this option, and I’m going to punish myself by never playing it again because this optional feature is stupid”.

As I said above, you can use the permissions system to prevent blueprint importing.

This, in my opinion is the best of both worlds. It means that it is already possible to prevent for those who don't want it, and remains available for those who do want it.

evopwr wrote: In ARK, Conan, Minecraft, Outpost Zero, or many others examples, or any other base building game (hundreds to chose from!) - one of the core enjoyable parts IS the base building. That's one of the most hugely successful genres at the moment. Base Building. You wont see ANY other base building game have a button to "redo what you built last time", because it totally detracts from the fundamental purpose and enjoyment of the game.

I'm playing "7 Days to die", another game with base building included, for totally different reasons than Factorio and I would never put them in the same category. I don't like building bases in "7 Days", only the minimal I can get away with. In Factorio everything I do is building and optimizing.

I use existing blueprints mostly for the parts I don't want to redo again, turret-creep designs, straight walls with turrets, mining setups, train stations. My most-used blueprint is the one to put roboports at a regular spacing with electricity and that design is totally fixed and predefined by the range of the roboports.

As a long-time player I have to set my own goals and limits, so for example I don't use logistics bots as belt-replacement and still try to save space in my designs in a world where space is available in heaps. It isn't a stretch for me to also not use "advanced" blueprints (i.e. blueprints of complete assembly line setups). But this is me doing micro-design. If I ever want to do macro-design, i.e. a mega-factory with a specific kspm goal, I probably would use advanced blueprints quite heavily.

Incidently the makers of 7 Days think about implementing something like blueprints, at least for houses!

And it makes no sense pointing at popular genres, otherwise Factorio would have to be changed to a battle royale shooter.

In my case, I almost never play the same game of Factorio. Between mods, and ore distribution, and simply wanting to use differing and not purely optimal designs, I rarely play the game the same way twice. The only things I use blueprints for are the train system, defensive emplacements, and in the moment duplication. (Because I hate trying to repeatedly configure Bob's Inserters when I inevitably make a copy-pasting mistake.)

But trial and error has netted me a set of train blueprints that are exactly what I like and what I want to use. The length of interconnecting rails wouldn't change between versions or games, because the distance between large power poles on which it's based doesn't change.

As for importing them? I want those all the time. I use them all the time so there's no reason not to have them.

Some very constuctive replies - I will concede it was obiously a bad idea...

You have to decide what you want from the game. There are a great many amazing sandbox games out that don't have an end objective. If you feel that not having your previous blueprints would make the game better, but you are still using the blueprints, it suggests that you don't want to be redesigning the same chains anyways. I think that going beyond bobs, and adding angels, or trying something like pyanadon's or others is where you should be looking. That gives you new assembly chains to be creative with, while not just redesigning the same assembly line as you would have used a blueprint for. Or do something crazy like peaceful mode maximum biters, and don't kill them to clear space a la MangledPork's Living With Biters series.

Finding ways to stay interested in the game is a challenge many players run into in sandbox games like Factorio. There are those who do crazy things with combinator logic, like the combinator lamp video on one of the FFFs. Others who go for mega bases and maximum science per minute, or even beyond like Clusterio. Others who take the challenge of lauching a rocket in the shortest time possible with speedrunning. Others build mods, or do PvP competitions, the list goes on and on. Most of them are probably bored with launching a new game and plopping their blueprint library until they launch a rocket too.

evopwr wrote:Some very constuctive replies - I will concede it was obiously a bad idea...

I have hundreds of bad ideas everyday !