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[bobingabout]

I'm not complaining. I just have 2 comments about Oil Processing:
1. One can make a loop of Sulfuric acid, Sulfur dioxide and Sulfur production. With Productivity Module, it will generate unlimited Sulfuric acid. This is not bad because one can build a close loop so that there's no need to make any Sulfur dioxide from refinery. But it's kind of too easy.
2. The excess of Heavy Oil, Light Oil, and Petroleum Gas is always a pain for me. I know I can burn the excess out with additional mod but I'm just wondering if there's any way to use it? (In mid game my factory relies only solar power so no boiler is used. The trains consume fuel slowly.)

Do I actually have a productivity filter enabled for the sulphur dioxide process, or are you running with the filters disabled (If you disable the filters, you can actually get infinite crude oil from barrelling and unbarrelling it in a loop. you also get more barrels too)

For the oil products... well, you are supposed to burn it. Heavy oil is used in so many things though, it's very easy to run out of it in bob's mods. Light oil, and petroleum gas (since it isn't used to make sulphuric acid anymore) are the ones you're likely to see excess of, and the way to get rid of those is by converting them to fuel blocks, or down to hydrogen (and then fuel blocks). Light oil can go sideways with the research by being turned into fuel oil, then enriched fuel blocks.

[TheWesDude]

I think I have found an issue with the mod.

if you don't enable the ores or chemicals mods, the only way to make sulfur is with the oil+sulfur processing which means you really don't get any sulfur and considering how heavily sulfur and sulfuric acid is used, it means you don't really make any because eventually petroleum will back up and shut everything down.

should leave normal petroleum to sulfur in chem plant recipie if you aren't playing with the chems and ores enabled as you don't have what I guess are the other solutions available with those mods enabled.

plus I noticed that when I had ores disabled but chemicals enabled, I still had recipies that required gems or glass which are from the ores mod.

[bobingabout]

I guess I need to do something about ores not being a requirement of MCI.

As for the issue with sulphur, change the recipe on the refinery to the one that gives you sulphur dioxide instead of petroleum gas.

[TheWesDude]

I guess I need to do something about ores not being a requirement of MCI.

As for the issue with sulphur, change the recipe on the refinery to the one that gives you sulphur dioxide instead of petroleum gas.

there is no sulfur dioxide option for my refineries. all the sulfur processing unlocks is the crude refining that gives 2 sulfur per, and sulfuric acid.

there are no dioxides without the materials and chemicals. make a game and disable the ores and the materials mods and you will see it yourself.

[bobingabout]

I guess I need to do something about ores not being a requirement of MCI.

As for the issue with sulphur, change the recipe on the refinery to the one that gives you sulphur dioxide instead of petroleum gas.

there is no sulfur dioxide option for my refineries. all the sulfur processing unlocks is the crude refining that gives 2 sulfur per, and sulfuric acid.

there are no dioxides without the materials and chemicals. make a game and disable the ores and the materials mods and you will see it yourself.

I think they're the next tier of research up. look at advanced oil processing.

but playing without bobplates(MCI) installed wasn't fully accounted for. MCI is considered the core mod, and while most of my mods will add in a work around for it not being there(Such as electronics, and assembling machines, which allows you to use them by themselves, or with other mod packs), it is kind of expected that it is there.

[TheWesDude]

I guess I need to do something about ores not being a requirement of MCI.

As for the issue with sulphur, change the recipe on the refinery to the one that gives you sulphur dioxide instead of petroleum gas.

there is no sulfur dioxide option for my refineries. all the sulfur processing unlocks is the crude refining that gives 2 sulfur per, and sulfuric acid.

there are no dioxides without the materials and chemicals. make a game and disable the ores and the materials mods and you will see it yourself.

I think they're the next tier of research up. look at advanced oil processing.

but playing without bobplates(MCI) installed wasn't fully accounted for. MCI is considered the core mod, and while most of my mods will add in a work around for it not being there(Such as electronics, and assembling machines, which allows you to use them by themselves, or with other mod packs), it is kind of expected that it is there.

so you loaded up your mods and disabled the ores and MCI, and you were able to find a recipe that provides another avenue to get sulfur other than the recipe that gives 2 sulfur with crude oil processing? what is the name of the technology? I have been unable to find it myself despite looking.

[Jdeg]

My idea on "balancing" the higher tiers of things is to add a setting (slidebar?) for each item that has more than 1 tier in the mod settings.
This way if someone likes to go all the way to the highest tier of a specific item, it is that way by default. If someone thinks modules are OP and should only be limited to tier4 (for example) they can change it which disables all research from tier 5 onwards.

[bobingabout]

My idea on "balancing" the higher tiers of things is to add a setting (slidebar?) for each item that has more than 1 tier in the mod settings.
This way if someone likes to go all the way to the highest tier of a specific item, it is that way by default. If someone thinks modules are OP and should only be limited to tier4 (for example) they can change it which disables all research from tier 5 onwards.

This is something I have been considering... though not for specific items like modules.

Modules are a bit harder to work with as they themselves are components for other things, and detecting the highest tier is a lot harder than just checking if tier 8 exists.

As for factories though, Assembly mod for example currently has the ability to disable ALL of a type of machine (the increased versions of Chemical plant, oil refinery, electrolyser for example, or just all electronic assembling machines), but doesn't offer you to turn off higher tier assembling machines. (Though really, if you're going to turn all of them off, just don't run the mod)
This, in my opinion is a sufficient level of configuration, and should be applied to a few other things too. It just gets harder with items.

Of course, you also end up digging your way into the "what's the point of even making titanium?" hole, when nearly all of what uses titanium is a higher tier of something else that only costs steel.

[Rue99]

It's belated, but fwiw my feedback is simply this: seeking balance is futile, and I think players have to take responsibility for how they use your mod. No one is forcing module usage, or higher tier machines (as you say, without them, what's the point of Tungsten or Titanium or whatever).

Your mods have made Factorio a truly great gaming experience, so all power to you. In the future, I'd like to see more sinks for byproducts, and possibly more wood processing (though I've Bioindustries to scratch that particular itch).

[OvermindDL1]

Much as I love the sniper turrets, they are way overpowered. I know their DPS is less than turrets, but they make the ammo far stronger, and the ammo is still easy to get, and they are easy to spam out (especially since they use very little ammo) so taking out bases becomes a walk in the park.

Honestly I'd say toss out the Sniper turrets (or give them a unique ammo type) and replace them with rocket turrets, along with specialized rockets that are focused on single-unit destruction in addition to rockets that are focused on area attack (anti-tank and anti-personnel respectively, I.E. one does massive damage but no area effect and the other does lower damage over an area). This will give a use for rockets, which also subsume the point of sniper turrets (far range, slow attacking) while being a unique ammo type that is able to have a variety of styles and purposes.

/me never really sees rockets used defensively... this should be fixed

[arbarbonif]

I think balancing sniper turrets comes down to when you should be able to deal with giant+ worms. For attack/turret-creep, that is the big advantage they give you. Without shields a behemoth worm one shots you (even in heavy armor I believe). A sniper turret can just barely kill it before it dies (I can never get them in range without them being attacked), a sniper rifle makes them safely killable with care.

At the moment you can get sniper turrets without oil/sulfur. Sniper rifles need blue science. Shields need advanced circuits. Rockets would need sulfur for explosives. Where is the logical line?

[BlakeMW]

I think balancing sniper turrets comes down to when you should be able to deal with giant+ worms.

The 0.16 Artillery Turret (maybe including earlier, weaker, shorter range artillery turrets, maybe called mortars or something) provides a new potential offensive mechanism for dealing with dangerous enemies, without being OP for defense.

[RocketManChronicles]

Bobingabout:

I love your mods. They add a great deal of complexity and playability that really enhance the vanilla game to where Factorio should be. The Electronics mod is my favorite, because it adds difficulty and a progression that is REALLY satisfying once you get to the next level (the next board). I would not change that mod one bit.

As you are aware, I have gone through a 0.15 playthrough of your mods and found the end-game to be similar to what everyone is experiencing. What I think the REAL problem is, is that you get so damn efficient in the late game that there aren't enough resource sinks to use what the mage factory produces. Using the mod package, you use everything to continue scaling up, resources to unlock the next set of resources that then help unlock the next set, and so on. Once you reach the end, have the highest tier assembling machines, module 8s, express inserters, mk3 beacons, etc, you don't have to sink so many resources into it. I can have an extremely small factory producing more with less than the factory it took to get to this point. Then, do to the speed and efficiencies, the infrastructure is too big to supply the 'new' factory. At this point in the game, after unlocking the highest tier items, your only resource sinks are rocket components, combat bots, ammo, science research, and repair packs. Everything is so powerful that you only need to have bots make repairs, if necessary, and never have to worry about replacing ANY structures anywhere. The game basically enters its own Creative mode. Now don't get me wrong, I love having to downscale everything to produce more efficiently, that entices me to go for efficiency once I get this far. But the train network that was humming with hundreds of trains moving stuff around is now mostly quiet, only shipping oil to flamethrower turrets, repair packs to the perimeter walls, and making rockets so that I can continue infinite science. The factory is pretty much in auto-mode and I do not need to do anything but sit and watch the rockets launch continuously and choose the next science to research.

So, my solution is to find resource sinks at this stage of the game. Easier said than done, I know. I would suggest making the defensive structures weaker, but then I would lose on the creative use of the gems to make the new lasers. My perimeter wall of mk5 laser turrets, mk5 gun turrets with uranium (I know this is vanilla), and flame turrets is totally impenetrable, even with an attack wave of 50 biters and spitters. My bots simply repair the turrets and walls as they take damage and I do not lose anything. But there needs to be something that would require me to send more to the perimeter than just thousands of repair packs.

Speaking of gems.... these are way too easy to gather in mass number. I accumulated over 1mil polished rubies in storage chests, and probably have over 10000 mk5 laser turrets. I suggest making gems/gemstones a much smaller number in veins. The gems should be extremely difficult to get, especially diamonds. The grinding wheels, polishing wheels, and polishing compound are a nice control and balance of complexity. I think there should be a mere several hundred gems in an 'ore field' of gemstones, rather than tens of thousands.

Hopefully, if given more time to think about it, I can provide some more examples, but maybe I sparked some thoughts about the end game.

Thanks again for hundreds of hours of enjoyment!

[solarcloud7]

I just want to say thank you for the mods. I'm super impressed at how fast you are rolling out 0.16 These are really making the game enjoyable. Thank you SOOOOOOO much!
-solarcloud7

[npuldon]

Bob, what is your take on this rebalance of your modules?
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Coppermi ... ebalancing

Anything in there that strikes your fancy enough to incorporate into your own mod pack? My favorite part is probably that rocket control units take tier 8 modules but in general I think the end-game modules stuff is pretty OP and so I like this rebalance for the most part.

Thanks for all your mods and hard work! They add a lot to the game

[Light]

I'll keep this simple as possible, although my opinion may slightly differ from others experiences due to being combined with other mods like AAI and Angels.

My love: Electronic boards are the determination of tiers, not metals.
Due to the recipes of boards increasing significantly in difficulty each time, they aren't made so easily or quickly; Thus reaching the next step is almost an event in itself for unlocking the next tier of goods. I've always felt like your mods have improved the feeling of progression in this manner, as metal alloys aren't so difficult to make in comparison, not even late game alloys are that troublesome. It's only the boards which have caused me to spend hours upon hours making a proper setup for them, which is far more exciting and harder not to spaghetti than a simple alloy setup is.


My dislike: Some tech lines are outright useless or seldom required.
It's to the point you just outright ignore some things because there's either no point in them, or their use is so limited you just create something simple and ignore it forever. In the case of metals, it's very imbalanced to the point you ignore patches of them when they should all be useful. I will greatly applaud Angel for correcting this flaw with mixing alloys in the metallurgy mod, which uses lesser needed metals to increase yields for highly demanded metals, restoring those other metals to a more valued state when supply of high demand metals are in shorter supply. It's tricky for me to outline all the imbalance of the metals since Angel will actually balance their use somewhat more in his tech tree by incorporating them more frequently in his recipes or the aforementioned alloy mixing to fix imbalances.

The second one that stands out regarding useless tech is mostly on the combat side. Laser turrets are still the best option for defenses, rendering your ammo and other turrets rather pointless. One part of the problem I've always taken issue with is how easy it is to get hundreds of gems and how they're all easy to cut and polish. It feels like gems are supposed to be a rarity, so laser turret spam isn't so simple. However, because 1 raw gem can turn into 4 gems nor takes much effort to polish, it's not hard to create a laser wall, so you do.

If I had any suggestions on this, I'd have gems be more difficult to not only obtain, but also not multiply into four each time. Anyone using productivity modules turn that into a huge surplus. Increasing the rarity would not only help prevent easy turret spam, but also impact how many modules a person can create so easily, allowing one to consider priorities. It also wouldn't hurt for better gems to require more material to cut and polish so they're not all identical and just a copy-paste design for all of them. I honestly obtain a diamond early as possible and polish it for the diamond axe, skipping all the tiers before it due to the ease of obtaining and polishing a diamond.

I do know your enemies mod does improve some resistances to lasers to encourage use of bullets, but that's far later in the game when you likely have a huge wall up already. Perhaps a minor buff on the mid-tier enemies against laser damage would help a touch more in that respect.

There's probably a few other tech lines I'm forgetting, but I wanted to keep this brief and hit the bigger points for me personally. I've been using your mod for over a year and can't play without it, but I don't like that I require another mod or modifying yours to correct some of the downsides. Nevertheless, I do love how both your mod and Angels work together, so I do hope you both continue to communicate your ideas and work well with each other so we may all benefit.

[bulldog98]

I think Diamonds in coal is set to 1% chance. The problem with chance based things like that is that I'm not sure what the lower limit should be and the game still actually have them.

However, all the numbers for gem chances are in the configuration options, try setting the gem chance down from 0.1 to 0.01 and see what happens (Which would reduce diamond chance from 1% to 0.1%)

Ahm if I remember my math correctly 0.1 should be 10% not 1%.

[bobingabout]

I think Diamonds in coal is set to 1% chance. The problem with chance based things like that is that I'm not sure what the lower limit should be and the game still actually have them.

However, all the numbers for gem chances are in the configuration options, try setting the gem chance down from 0.1 to 0.01 and see what happens (Which would reduce diamond chance from 1% to 0.1%)

Ahm if I remember my math correctly 0.1 should be 10% not 1%.

You're right, you know what I mean though.

[Lurve]

I just wanted to chime in and say that I really enjoy the tradeoff between complexity and scale in the mod. It makes for a very different gameplay style which looks daunting at first but is actually quite laid back. Whereas the vanilla game is completely focused on maximizing throughput and scaling everything up and burning down half the world for a 5% increase in plate production, with your mod I find myself wrestling with spaghetti, but once that's done I can just leave it all in place and upgrade it at my leisure. I need to do a little bit of a lot of things, and that's not a bad situation.

If someone is having boredom problems when their factory's completely automated and maxed out with max level modules in everything: have you tried SpaceX? I haven't, because I haven't gotten there yet, but I can see it waiting there in the tech tree to kick me in the balls when the time comes.

I think Diamonds in coal is set to 1% chance. The problem with chance based things like that is that I'm not sure what the lower limit should be and the game still actually have them.

Fun math fact: the mean and variance of poisson distributions (chance < 5% or so) are equal. We can use that to calculate expected yields. If we assume a 0.01 chance, and a coal patch of 260k (my base's starting amount), we can expect to find about 0.01*260k = 2600 diamonds in mining it. The variance is also 2600, so the standard deviation is sqrt(2600) = 51, roughly twice that represents a confidence interval (102), so you're looking at 2500 to 2700 diamonds from that patch of coal. You can adjust accordingly.

Bare formulas:
rate * events = lambda, "average value"
95% confidence interval = lambda +- 1.95 * sqrt(lambda)

[bman212121]

Second: raw speed modules/MK3 Beacons, i like them a lot, but OP module combined with OP Beacon... OP^2, kind of madness. Greater reach + more distribution efficiency + more slots = too much. Now it's too easy to obtain, for example- 400 prod. speed furnace in reasonable build. [Possible solution]: I think MK2 and MK3 beacons should have standard 50% efficiency, or MK2 - 3 slots, MK3 - 4 slots, i like better second option with less slots.

I would have to look at the efficiency thing... as for the change in number of slots, that could be an option.

And that is the problem with the "raw-speed","raw-productivity"-modules ect. in my opinion as well. You could balance them in the way that they get you the effect without side-effects but only half the original effect as en example. (maybe something i will do with my mod)

Currently, the modules are quite configurable, but a lot of things are locked together, such as productivity bonus is the same across all modules (doubled for God). Perhaps a "God module effect multiplier" and "Raw module effect multiplier" could be added in to the settings, so you can set them to 0.3 and 0.5 for example, to make them less overpowered?

I would like to address this by reducing the health of turrets or let the biters do more damage. I hadn't the time to balance this part o the game better then reduce the overpower the bob-equipment gives you and ramp up the lasers a bit. But i would like to take this on as well since the challenge is somewhat gone in bob's at a certain stage and there is so much potential to it. Something like rocket-turrets to bombard your way through the biters (and give you a reason to mass produce them) or "swarms"-attacks that occur at a certain pollution level, would make that part of the game much more interesting (and challenging). An integration of middle range turrets in general sounds thrilling to me (be it artillery or rockets).

Personally, this is one of the areas where I'd look at reducing the number of tiers of things. Maybe only 3 tiers of all the turrers including power armor. But then you'd get people who like the high end stuff complaining that I've removed the. Perhaps an option somewhere, such as hardcore mode that turns off the recipes for the higher tiers?

This is also the moment, that I realized, that all of my poor belt based designs are not sufficient for throughput even with fastest belts because the modules are so extremely powerful and the machines have so many slots. and then those beacons...

From this I basically read that I should do something about the number of module slots on machines, which has already been mentioned.

I also liked the variety of different metals and alloys in the beginning, but at a certain point, I think its a bit too much, because they are so similar producable and rarely used. F.e. nickel plate is only used in roboport mk4 (or maybe somewhere else i didnt discover). There are also many, which are not really used for anything towards the rocket.

Nickel never was supposed to be a metal you use directly, IRL it's an alloy component, so it's used to make Invar, Nitinol and Tungsten.
There are however some metals that feel like dead ends... Bronze for example, until the edit to science pack 3, was basically used only for bronze pipes in a couple of entities.

And yes, I also think, that there are too many tiers of everything. Imho 1 base tier and a second enhanced one for mid-/endgame, which makes a difference, would be sufficient for most items.

I also like, how the boilers and steam engines enhance. In my current run, I'm only using steam power so far. and they are very efficient with enriched fuelblocks or woodbricks from angels bio processing. With raw module esp. green modules in miners, its not so important to have a big power supply.

Unlike most other factory chains, the power system (base steam at least, not the new heatpipe versions) have had a lot of thought put into balancing them, meaning that even the top tier shouldn't really be overpowered (at the end of the day, the final fuel efficiency rating raises from 50% to 96%, plus it's more space efficient), where other chains like the assembling machines, although the numbers look good for individual points (Say, speed by itself looks good. power consumption along with it doesn't look bad), when you add up all the changes (IE, take increased number of module slots into account) they start to look overpowered. Also, note: the Assembling machine MK6 is the only machine capable of automating Raw Productivity 8, and God 5. Each tier can handle +2 ingredients, and those high tier modules take more than 10 to craft.

The bullets are nice, but the uranium bullets are too easy compared. The sniper turrets are a bit powerful because of the range and damage bonus. (They outrange most worms)

Changing the recipe for uranium bullets to be similar to that of my new types of bullets should solve that problem. a little rebalancing might help even further too.
Part of the other problem could be the resistances of my enemies against nuclear (whatever the resistance is) might not be high enough, which is why they seem most effective.

Sniper turrets were only really added in because they were requested. Longer range and higher damage at a slower firing speed sounds natural for something called a Sniper (After all, they're supposed to be long range 1 hit kill weapons, slowed down because they require accuracy), but it's not so easy to balance it in game. They already have a much lower DPS than the equivalent Gun turret (Sniper 1 with Gun 1, Sniper 2 with Gun 3, and Sniper 3 with Gun 5), but that's a trade off for ammo efficiency, and Range.

A bit late to this party, but I'll gladly raise a hand as someone who like MK5 tiers, and god modules, and huge amounts of slots etc. It depends on what you're going for as to how you want the game to feel. I can get enjoyment out of complete absurdness and don't have to take what I'm doing seriously. Do I care that I can't use all of the production allotted if I slam a factory full of modules? Not really. Do I mind that MK5 things like roboports are so huge you can barely even align them to a grid? Nope. Do I mind that a few god modules throw production out of whack and give you a ton of items for little resources? Heck no.

I had some of the most fun in the game putting 26 exoskeleton's into my MK5 armor, and glitching over walls. Being able to do things that shouldn't even be possible can be fun and entertaining. The whole point is that I can determine what is fun for me, and base my play style on that. Some of the best games that I've ever played were modded, because they allow me to taylor the experience to my interpretation of the game. I don't want someone else to tell me what is fun, because I might not agree with them. One of biggest advantages to Bob's is customization. You can not only turn on and off the parts of the mods that you want, but you can also set a plethora of options via the modding menu to help follow your vision. I do understand that you need to strike a balance on the stock settings for the mod, so if the stock settings for the mod might only give 3 module slots instead of 5, then I completely understand the logic. As a server admin I just hope that you can expose as many of the settings as possible for me, so I can have the flexibility to do whatever I want.

If it's possible to put sliders into the mod gui to change the number of slots you can have on factories, I'd be all about that. If I can get text boxes that allow me to play with the base settings for gun damage, I'd be all about that as well. I can crack open the mod and manually tweak things if I really wanted to, but having them in the mod GUI is certainly a more clean way to do it. If someone feels an particular ammo is too powerful, they can dial it down, if they want their favorite gun to be more powerful or even OP, they can do so. Maybe I'm in the mood for a challenge, and I want to make the game vastly more difficult in some aspect. If I have the options exposed to me, I can dial things accordingly. If I could set module slots to 0, it could make things pretty interesting as you'd have to rely solely on increased factories. The point is that the game will never get stale, and I could do hundreds of play throughs even using the same mods, and never had the same experience if I wanted.