A few ideas that could be implemented.

[waddyatalkinabeet]

Hello, firstly I'd just like to say that this is a brilliant game and hope it has a long fun future ahead of it.

Ok now onto business, I've been playing for a good few days solid now and have a bunch of ideas.

Firstly I think electricity and power control can be worked with even more, at the moment I can send electricity as far as I want away from the base with no loss of power. In real life this doesn't work because energy is lost as heat due to friction in the cables. If you could somehow add this factor in it would restrict how far electricity could be transported, which could easily fix the problem of tower crawling to destroy enemy bases. It would also allow things like step up/step down transformers to be implemented into the game which increase/decrease the voltage for sending electricity over long distance to reduce resistance and therefore reduce energy loss. This would make electricity transport much more complicated which would add challenge to the game. Maybe a very late game technology could be the development of cooling agents and therefore underground super-conductive electricity cables which would have almost 0 energy loss. On top of the transport of electricity production could also be increased, things like wind-farms, wave-farms, nuclear power (using a dangerous material)? I imagine having bitters attack my water pipe and my nuclear reactor going into melt down causing a large portion of the map/my base to be contaminated would be a horrible but also fun experience. You could make solar power less effective by implementing a weather system so clouds/wind/rain etc (this would also affect wind-farms) and by generally lowering the amount of electricity solar panels provide because currently they are unrealistically good at producing electricity. You would probably need to add readings on the electricity to make this all work as well, such as info about the current,voltage etc. But yeah I think electricity is a massively unexplored but interesting area.

Secondly something that has probably been mentioned a million times so I'll keep it brief, food + plant produce. Lots of useful materials come from plants like rubber etc so this would add a large amount of content to the game, you could make it hard by adding pests that destroy crops? Pollutants and toxic gases that cause plant production to be a nightmare to succeed in? Polluted water sources, poor soil, bad weather etc could all affect the crops/plants you grow. With food production you could add some kind of hunger survival aspect to the game, you could start off eating crops and plants but later cultivate fungus and make nutrient pills/pastes which could be loaded into your suit etc. I could talk about this for ages but I think it's been discussed plenty before so I'll leave it at that.

Thirdly would be pollution control, you could make pollution a much bigger problem using different kind of pollution such as soil or water contamination + also add ways to deal with pollution. For example early game tech could involve adding carbon scrubbers to your factories/mines output vents to reduce the pollution, but you would still have to find a way to dispose of the scrubbers after they were used up, such as by dumping them into water or digging landfills for them (which in turn would add to other pollution). Later game technology could involve using the gases/pollution to create other materials? Or maybe some kind of storage system for storing the pollution safely underground/underwater. Obviously crops could be brought into this as well, you could clear carbon dioxide pollution by planting lots of crops but other chemical pollution would need other solutions.

A proper atmosphere would be really good, maybe you need protective gear to enter certain terrains? Toxic gases covering useful materials, or protective gear to stop radiation poisoning when mining uranium? You and also your enemies could affect the atmosphere in different ways, maybe there isn't oxygen when you land and you have to produce oxygen to survive? Maybe you can plant trees and try and get oxygen on the planet but the enemies bases have certain things that cause deadly gases which can be caught in the wind and sent to your base? All sorts of interesting things could be done with an atmosphere that is affected by you + the enemies actions, acid rain/lack of oxygen/smog from coal burning blocking sunlight etc. Plenty of gameplay ideas in the atmosphere section but I presume it would be very hard to create a proper weather/intelligent atmosphere system.

Finally this links to pollution, obviously if you're adding ways to clear up your gases and chemicals then the enemy might be very easy to deal with, for example at the moment I run my whole base off solar power + had effectivity modules in a lot of my factories/mines/furnaces as a result my pollution is so low that I am never attacked and the enemy have barely evolved. I would like to see different ways that enemies are agitated/evolve, things like sound pollution? Lots of noisy factories would surely anger them, maybe mining causes vibrations that the enemy can feel attracting them to your bases, or lights at night? As I said before new pollution such as ground/water/nuclear could cause new different forms of mutation to the creatures, creating greater difficulty and also variety in the game. Bigger more complex enemy bases would also be good, maybe with things like flying creatures, better defences like trenches and maybe toxic to human waste, burrowing creatures, all sorts of things could be added to make enemy bases harder to beat + more complicated, maybe this would lead to more variety of drops from aliens rather than just arterfacts? On top of this the humans military system could be extended to deal with the bigger bases, things like ground to ground missiles could be a powerful late game tech, better radar systems, planes? automated/controllable bombing drones? nuclear weapons with devastating long term affects on the local area/atmosphere? future tech like railguns laserguns etc?

Anyway I could talk forever but there are just a few ideas, I hope to see this game expanding even more, keep up the great work!

[kovarex]

You made me daydream

[waddyatalkinabeet]

You made me daydream

Haha I'm glad you enjoyed it, I could talk about this stuff for ever I keep getting ideas while I play it. I feel like I'm role playing a planet coloniser more than trying to achieve the goal of getting all the tech at this stage, I'm having too much fun driving round pretending I'm planning how to make the whole area liveable for the humans that are coming soon, I guess it's an over-active imagination but it's damn fun.

[ssilk]

The idea with the friction in cables is good. Anyway, I would like to know, why do you think, that Factorio needs more challenge and how does your suggestion with that add it? What else would that add to the gameplay?


The rest of the ideas is nice, even if more than the half is already suggested, but nothing against to repeat it.

And as tip: suggestions have a better chance to be read, if they are small and/or one thought per thread. I think if anybody can say that, then me.

[waddyatalkinabeet]

The idea with the friction in cables is good. Anyway, I would like to know, why do you think, that Factorio needs more challenge and how does your suggestion with that add it? What else would that add to the gameplay?

Well like I said at the moment enemies are easy to deal with by keeping low pollution levels, the main challenge I see is making an organised operating base and keeping on top of production. More enemies/better AI would help massively (the AI currently attack at the same spots on your walls because they are drawn to the highest pollution areas). New content would make it more challenging as it would take longer to construct operating bases, if things like water/electricity etc were harder to use and transport then it would take more time and a lot more planning/thinking to make a proper working base. Obviously I would love to see content that had no real purpose and goal other than for the sake of immersion and RPing, such as living areas/random events/spaceship wrecks with stories?/other humans or intelligent species? But yeah that's all just rough ideas

Haha yeah I realise it's a big original post, I got carried away while writing it.

[Calico]

I'm still very unsure about the whole eat/living thing. The underlying theme of Factorio seems to be automation and i do believe it excels at that. Most (but not all) things around the eat/living theme distract from the one thing that makes Factorio unique amongst the hundreds of indie titles.

That said, i'd sure like a bit more RP elements that give the game a bit of lore and background. A few random events wouldn't hurt either. But other games out there already excel at the "building a life on a alien planet" theme, like RimWorld, Planet Explorers, etc. It all comes to balancing the elements to make a attractive game, which when it finally gets on steam, gets greenlighted insteadly so Kovarex, Cube and co can make a huge profit ( which they will reinvest into Factorio 2 ofc ).

[waddyatalkinabeet]

It all comes to balancing the elements to make a attractive game

I'm not sure what you mean by this but I hope the devs focus on making it a great solid + expansive game building on what they have already made, as well as making it attractive to the mass market. But not just focusing on making something that will sell.

[Calico]

With elements i mean the different game elements. The main theme/element IMHO obviously is automation, ressource management and survival. Other elements are combat, Real Time Strategy (although that one is more a planned thing), Multiplayer. I'm not sure if the entire stuff surrounding food production and pollution would add a lot to the game besides making it very complex and thus less apealling for a broader audience. Complexity can be a good thing but adding to much of it could easily overwhelm the "normal" gamer. Factorio alread struggles a bit finding it's audience... some of the dev Blogs reflected on this, looking at other indie games like RimWorld, which only has been in development for a few months and already has sold more then 24,000 copies despite beeing 3 times as costly as Factorio.

Dont' get me wrong, i love this game. And i even believe that a bit more complexity could be added, especially late-game. Combat also could use some changes but that will be addressed in 0.12. But some concepts are just to much and likely won't add a lot to the game as it is. For ppl that strive for even more complexity there are several well maintained and highly complex mods already. I'd leave it to the modding scene to go a step further and let the Devs focus on making Factorio a bit more appealing to a broader spectrum of players while still giving the modders the needed tools to implent more complex gameplay features like you propose.

I'm sry that i can't put this in better words.