What should I do with science packs?

bobingabout · Post by **bobingabout** » Sat May 06, 2017 2:41 am

As the title says, I'm looking for advice on what to do with science packs.

Previous progressions included
1
1+2
1+2+3
1+2+3+4 (non-warfare) 1+2+3+Alien (warfare)
1+2+3+4+Alien
then the special case coloured alien science packs for advanced warfare researches.

In the new versions of the mods, science pack 4 was replaced with production, and 4+alien replaced with high tech. Also with warfare variation.
so science pack 4 is currently redundant.

I'm open to sugestions for new science packs, and what they should be for.

Additionally, I am open recipe changes for the existing science packs. I've seen some people sugest I should return to a more classic recipe, because "Putting buildings in science packs is dumb", and I do sort of agree with that.
Another sugestion, since production is use a lot, where warfare not as much, is to create a Logistic science pack, then seperate those non-warfare technologies into either production or logistic, and update accordingly.

Opinions?

qwerter96 · Post by **qwerter96** » Sat May 06, 2017 4:52 am

I really like the idea of logistics science packs and would support that. I also think that the production science packs at least would make sense to use buildings in. I also really liked the warfare color variation packs and would support keeping those. Personally I didn't really like the existence of the generic alien pack (though if it's necessary as a base for the others I would support leaving it in but removing it as a recipe requirement).

Light · Post by **Light** » Sat May 06, 2017 5:01 am

When it comes to science packs, I think of the Bob's Extended mod as a good way to handle them.

The vanilla recipes are left in tact, but an additional intermediate was required which was comprised of strictly Bob only materials to create a "science component" which was added to the recipes. They also had various tiers of their own for later game science packs. This made it so you needed an inserter, transport belt, and basic science component which used a bronze plate and some glass (Just an example). Then more mid-game Bob intermediates were used for a higher tier science component used for science pack 3, and so on.

Something as simple as that could allow a player to use some intermediates seldom or never used in their Bob's game like cobalt plates, bronze plates, silver plates, or sometimes gems. Plus the added benefit that people don't have to rebuild their entire vanilla science build, but simply add a little part to create these science components.

This is how I'd like to see things moving forward, as we have plenty of science packs but the recipes are too vanilla and maybe a touch too simplistic.

bobingabout · Post by **bobingabout** » Sat May 06, 2017 12:25 pm

I'm still not keen on buildings in bottles, but adding a bob ingredient to the base game science packs does seem like the way to go, especially with higher tier packs like... high tech.

One thing I actually did consider was moving the battery back to science pack 3 instead of assembling machine (or is it mining drill now?)(I know it was moved on purpose because it was "Hard to build" requiring you to research the entire oil chain.) The reason I was thinking of doing this was so that production pack would then cost Li-Ion batteries, and high tech would cost silver whatever it was batteries.

I can definitely add more intermediates to other packs too.

I really need to figure out if I'm adding new packs soon though, because I'll need to make edits on the second pass to look for them.

orzelek · Post by **orzelek** » Sat May 06, 2017 12:30 pm

I would consider current science pack amount enough really.
Adding more intermediates especially made from bob's ores would be better - also editing rocket and satellite later on to match.

This would create consumption for ores that are not used that much normally since you needed them only for higher tier buildings.

bobingabout · Post by **bobingabout** » Sat May 06, 2017 12:53 pm

orzelek wrote:I would consider current science pack amount enough really.
Adding more intermediates especially made from bob's ores would be better - also editing rocket and satellite later on to match.

This would create consumption for ores that are not used that much normally since you needed them only for higher tier buildings.

I think aluminium should be one to add to that mix. but it's one that's outside the starting area, so I'd put it in pack 3 or higher. it would also burn through that pesky sodium hydroxide!

TheTom · Post by **TheTom** » Sat May 06, 2017 1:15 pm

Talk about "puttng buildings in science packs" as you want - but from a game perspective it forces a significant production chain if you suddenly throw away thuosands of assembly machines. Megabase style.

I really hope for that. I would actually ask for even MORE science packs.

At some point replace Science 1 with Science 1HT (high tech) - that requires a Science 1 plus some really expensive high end components and is used for example in all the unlimited research. And the Science 1 turns from "the science" to an ingredient of the high tech version. I personally look forward to marathon games feeding a thousand laboratories

obuw · Post by **obuw** » Sat May 06, 2017 10:55 pm

I think it would make sense to put stuff like Titanium/Nitinol Bearings, Gears, etc in production research instead of assembling machines or whatever. High-tech can require electronic processing boards, lion / zinc batteries, while military research can require stuff like cordite and laser batteries. There's so many cool processing chains and subcomponents in your mods, I don't think there is any reason to stick to the vanilla recipes and put stuff like drills and turrets in recipes.

Perhaps if you want to incorporate more alternative recipes and make these advanced science packs available earlier, but still have them improve as you advance through the processing tiers, you can even add an intermediate subcomponent, for instance a "production research material" that can be crafted with multiple recipes; steal gears/bearings, nitinol gears/bearings, titanium gears/bearings, etc. Each recipe giving more material. Then you use this "research material" component (along with batteries, etc) to craft a science pack. Especially makes sense with the military pack I think, since this way you can use all the different kinds of gems, ammo, etc.

bobingabout · Post by **bobingabout** » Sat May 06, 2017 11:06 pm

The only problem with putting things like cordite in military science pack, is that I have made the research to unlock cordite require military science pack. But I was thinking I should put in something other than a gun turret.

Titanium might work, Nitinol currently requires production science.

These are just some of the issues you need to think about when redesigning the recipe, it won't work if it costs a science pack to unlock that you need to research it.

Though, the structure of my mod so far would take science packs going...

for Production/Logistics
1 -> 2 -> 3 -> Production/Logistics -> High tech -> Maybe a high tech 2.
For military
1 -> 2 -> Warfare -> 3 ...... Gold + alien in the alien lab.

I think recipe for Gold should be science packs 1, 2, 3 and warfare (Adding warfare to the recipe from previous)

clampi · Post by **clampi** » Sun May 07, 2017 5:10 am

Hello Bob,

Here are a few thoughts to ponder about:

Having science packs have buildings in recipes promotes a play-style more in line with Factorio. As you could read from past FFF, the devs introduced those as a help for those of us who craft stuff on spot instead of an automated production for things like inserters, assemblers, mining drills.
There are a lot of science pack already in the base game, adding more just for the sake of having more is a bad approach in my opinion. Having ways to mix the existing ones for certain researches would be a good approach in my opinion, as it creates the choices for players. Having to decide, dependent of the map, what to research is a good thing in my opinion. For example, one might play a death world where the immediate focus would be military, in order to survive. Other may play with no aliens, just to develop a factory and go for large, early expansion.
Technology dependencies, interactions and gaps are not currently well thought. Some very useful recipes are enabled before they can be really crafted, as the factories used to build those recipes are unlocked in a higher tier tech.

Example of those would be the copper advanced copper smelting, the advanced lead smelting which require an Electrical Chemical Furnace, gated behind a blue-level science. I like the advanced copper recipe as it provides a higher plate yield, compared with vanilla smelting recipe. Also, the cobalt-steel required for Miner3, unlocked with green science, can only be obtained once Electrical Chemical Furnace are unlocked (default options for bobores, without cobaltite). Invar-Cobalt-Steel Armor can't be built, until blue science, when the Titanium-Ceramic Armor is unlocked and is better.

The above technology gaps/dependencies could be solved with an intermediate furnace, let's say chemical steel furnace and steel metal mixing furnace, which can bridge the gap between the recipe unlock and the point when one is really able to craft the recipe.
Having additional ingredients added or replacing existing ingredients to existing science recipes would be ok, provided that the ingredients are accessible at the respective science level and the resource drain won't create an artificial "harder" game-play. There are already map presets for that, I personally don't wish for for more.

aklesey1 · Post by **aklesey1** » Sun May 07, 2017 8:24 am

bobingabout wrote:
aklesey1 wrote:Hi Bobingabout, have u plans for changing science packs in 0.15?
there is a topic dedicated to it, the issue is... change to what?

viewtopic.php?f=51&t=46637

Not "to what" but how, change components which we'll need to create new science packs because ur mods have more complicated structure with many complex items

arbarbonif · Post by **arbarbonif** » Sun May 07, 2017 4:35 pm

bobingabout wrote:I'm still not keen on buildings in bottles, but adding a bob ingredient to the base game science packs does seem like the way to go, especially with higher tier packs like... high tech.

One thing I actually did consider was moving the battery back to science pack 3 instead of assembling machine (or is it mining drill now?)(I know it was moved on purpose because it was "Hard to build" requiring you to research the entire oil chain.) The reason I was thinking of doing this was so that production pack would then cost Li-Ion batteries, and high tech would cost silver whatever it was batteries.

I can definitely add more intermediates to other packs too.

I really need to figure out if I'm adding new packs soon though, because I'll need to make edits on the second pass to look for them.

If you do something like this you need to balance the costs/requirements for researches as well. Remember that requester chests now need both purple and yellow packs. If you need third levels batteries for that I am doomed. I'd rather see the vanilla packs remain as they are (buildings in a bottle don't bother me) and maybe a new pack or two added (like a logistics pack). Maybe a pack that takes every processed plate to make?

One thing that I like about the new vanilla packs are that they have several different considerations built in. Take blue packs for instance, you have drills which require everything pre-oil, engines which are slow to construct (and not otherwise needed in mass) and advanced circuits which need plastic. Yellow packs have a bunch of level 3 circuits (which are expensive), batteries (which add the rest of the oil chain) and copper cable (which adds a logistic/throughput challenge). Production packs need stone and lube which are things not widely needed and so are a logistical challenge to get them where they are needed.

If you are looking to change the recipes I think requester chests need to be researchable without leaving home. The higher level packs should need you to expand to get new resources. One of the great strengths of your mods is the added variety. With vanilla the core issue is throughput since there are only a handful of resources. Your mods make throughput easier, but add a lot of complexity and introduce lots of different things to play with. Science should reflect that, rather than the main metric being how expensive things are.

And I agree with everything that clampi said.

obuw · Post by **obuw** » Sun May 07, 2017 8:24 pm

bobingabout wrote:The only problem with putting things like cordite in military science pack, is that I have made the research to unlock cordite require military science pack.

Yeah, I thought that might be a problem.. That's why I made the intermediate subcomponent suggestion, so you could for instance make 2 military subcomponents from a piercing bullet magazine, or 10 subcomponents from cordite. (then each pack would require 5 subcomponents).

Kryzeth · Post by **Kryzeth** » Mon May 08, 2017 12:06 am

I like the idea of production/logistics split. Also that idea about adding bob-exclusive "science components" in addition to the usual vanilla stuff in science packs was nice.

Personally, I never saw the science packs as literal bottles of science (I mean, how does experimentation of transport belts and inserters give you a bottle of liquid science?) but more as an abstract object, representing a quantifiable amount of research. At the very least, something called a Production science pack should have production-related ingredients imo. Although blue science using an electric mining drill doesn't make the most sense. It would be nice if the science packs could all be renamed to something that made more sense of their ingredients. I remember ScienceCostTweaker mod renamed them things like electromagnetism and electrochemics packs.. or something like that, up to quantum interactions packs. Something along those lines would be nice.

bobingabout · Post by **bobingabout** » Mon May 08, 2017 6:57 am

Kryzeth wrote:At the very least, something called a Production science pack should have production-related ingredients imo. Although blue science using an electric mining drill doesn't make the most sense.

that's basically my thought. I don't like the idea of buildings in bottles (Okay, not literal bottles), but then if you put the production tag on there, it probably would contain a building. High-tech might not need to, but then you just have to ballance that to cost about the same when it doesn't have buildings in there.

pezzawinkle · Post by **pezzawinkle** » Mon May 08, 2017 11:31 am

I have been thinking a little about this, but...
if you keep the current packs "as is" but increase the ingredients to match your new tiers (3 battery tiers, 3 bearing tiers, advanced materials, advanced electronic) etc...

If you want to crank it up to have the extras for warfare, aliens and such, that would be good to keep.

In terms of changing the actual recipes:
T3 pack: same as you had basically is good.
T4 pack: i loved that you had this, and the recipe was a higher tier.
warfare: keep it as is, changing to cordite based stuff is too late game for when you need the warfare packs.
production: electrolyzer, furnace, electronics assembly machine and chem-plant... say T2 of each.
high tech: adv. material alloy, higher end solar panel, top tier battery, the good uranium... or a construction bot

just some thoughts.

British_Petroleum · Post by **British_Petroleum** » Mon May 08, 2017 12:20 pm

I agree it's weird putting buildings in science packs.

I think you should add an extra science pack, between high tech science and space science, using higher tier Bob items.

Some items you could use as ingredients for science packs:

higher tier batteries
Higher tier robot frames / tools / brains
Green / blue circuits / ic's / CPUs
Higher tier belts
Express inserters
Tin / gold / insulated wires
Gears / pipes made from Bob materials
Higher tier modules
Gemstones

SpeedDaemon · Post by **SpeedDaemon** » Mon May 08, 2017 6:10 pm

It makes more sense to me to re-label the specific science packs to something like
- Logistics
- Engineering
- Chemistry
- Military
- Space
which would probably make it a lot easier to figure out which are appropriate for a given tech, because they're closer to actual scientific disciplines.
Mining drills would be logistics + engineering
Cannon shells would be military + chemistry
Laser turrets would be military + engineering
Fluid handling would be chemistry + logistics
etc.

Adding a few science-pack-specific intermediate ingredients might help customize the raw resources and complexity required for a given pack without having to include other strange items like buildings, or having to worry quite as much about where the ingredients themselves fall in the tech tree. These would be in addition to other normal items.

Examples:
Laser Spectrometer (for a chemistry pack - another use for gems, glass, etc.)
Materials Sample Set (for engineering pack, could be made of various metals/chemicals)
Experimental Neural Net (for logistics, lots of circuits, etc.)
Target Dummies (for military, lots of steel, Ti, etc. - maybe even cars or tanks, if you're feeling particularly evil)

If you do multiple tiers of the special packs, you could have something like "Laboratory Glassware" (low tier), and the Laser Spectrometer for the high tier chemistry pack.

HOSH · Post by **HOSH** » Mon May 08, 2017 6:54 pm

Wow, lot of suggestions here... So balancing I will leave off and just what say what I think would make it more interesting.

Only thing that comes to mind is to modify the vanilla game science packs starting at least the 3rd one up to be more complex. As someone mentioned maybe have the higher ones use the next levels of batteries, as they all use plastic and sodium hydroxide. Modules are good to go just some balance tweaks as someone mentioned using the gold item in them.

More on to the High Tech is adding back in the Alien Science packs for higher Warfare and at highest tiers to the Space Science Packs, as something like colored alien space science pack. Maybe too much, but adding the alien tech to space science pack for some of the very high or infinite research items, depending on what it is...

bobingabout · Post by **bobingabout** » Mon May 08, 2017 10:38 pm

Okay, Changes SO FAR for science packs and technology in bobtech:

Code: Select all

  {
    type = "recipe",
    name = "logistic-science-pack",
    enabled = "false",
    energy_required = 15,
    ingredients =
    {
      {"filter-inserter", 1},
      {"fast-transport-belt", 1},
      {"steel-chest", 1},
    },
    result = "logistic-science-pack"
  },

bobmods.lib.tech.replace_science_pack("logistics-3", "production-science-pack", "logistic-science-pack")
bobmods.lib.tech.remove_science_pack("logistics-3", "science-pack-3")

if data.raw.item["lithium-ion-battery"] then
  bobmods.lib.recipe.replace_ingredient("high-tech-science-pack", "battery", "lithium-ion-battery")
  bobmods.lib.recipe.replace_ingredient("science-pack-3", "electric-mining-drill", "battery")
  bobmods.lib.recipe.replace_ingredient("production-science-pack", "electric-engine-unit", "electric-mining-drill")
  bobmods.lib.recipe.add_ingredient("high-tech-science-pack", {"electric-engine-unit", 1})
end

if data.raw.item["bronze-alloy"] then
  bobmods.lib.recipe.add_ingredient("science-pack-3", {"bronze-alloy", 1})
end

if data.raw.item["silicon-nitride"] then
  bobmods.lib.recipe.remove_ingredient("high-tech-science-pack", "copper-cable")
  bobmods.lib.recipe.add_ingredient("high-tech-science-pack", {"silicon-nitride", 2})
end

Note: Alien science remains as it was in 0.14, and is already accounted for in my mods.

With the addition of a logistic science pack, the plan is to edit all logistic based technology costs... pretty much to replace production pack with logistics pack.
This will be in 2 parts:
Part 1: Edit all my mods (not the tech mod) to look for Logistics pack, and use it where appropriate. This would mostly be in the logistics mod, as everything in my other mods except Warfare and vehicle equipment mods is pretty much production based.
Part 2: Compile a list of base game technologies that use production science, but are logistics based, and edit them to use logistics pack instead of production.

On that note: Does anyone want to compile a list of logistics technologies that use production packs?

Also, please provide feedback on my choices so far.

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