Resource Sinks

[Balthazar]

Factorio needs more ways to remove resources (Iron/copper) from the game. Right now the only sinks in the game are research and combat. (I don't count building as a sink because right now everything you build exists to provide MORE resources. Building is fun but spending resources to get more resources to get more resources is silly, and theres a limit to how fast you can build and it all gets really pointless when you're far enough in.)

Research is great, right up until you finish the techtree, all your labs become obsolete and a great hole for shoveling resources into is gone.

Combat removes resources, but its more of a penalty than something you spend resources on; tower creep can effectively kill anything with ZERO cost, the other methods are just easier but expend more resources so you're just paying for convenience rather than to accomplish something.

I would really like to see infinite research added to the game, it doesn't have to be practically useful, it can be really stupid bonuses, like +10 joule to the fuel value of coal or +1hp to your character and cost thousands of research packs, that's totally okay, it would just be nice to have something that will eat up resources and give some kind of benefit, no matter how silly.

I really hope this is something you'd consider working on because a lot of these survive and build games, minecraft, terraria, don't starve etc etc, have a hard ceiling for how much of a resource you can actually spend and once you're done spending it is effectively worthless and only used for cosmetic fluff. Factorio takes the production much further, and it takes a long time before you get to the limit but once you're there it sucks the fun out of the game very quickly. I'd love to build a nice research compound with lots of labs, it's own assembly lines for science packs and a train station for delivering materials to be eaten, but there's never a point; i make my starting setup and just leave it running until i'm maxed out scienceways.

I don't know how you're going to do oil yet but i'm hoping maybe fuel can be a thing that's infinite but extremely costly to mass-produce maybe? Anyway, anyone else hoping for something to build lategame?

[TGS]

This is a 'problem' attributed to pretty much any game where you have 'resources'. Especially in games where your capacity to gain resources increases. Now naturally this is offset by resource sinks and dumps. A sink being an investment and a dump being something to essentially dump resources into. 'infinite' research is one way of providing this. Something similar to a game called Star Ruler could be interesting where science labs provide x research per second. But each level increases the cost by double (Configurable) while providing a 40% increase to whatever the research is. Obviously 40% would be way too high in this game, and in larger games of Star Ruler it's even too much. You start with ships that have 20k hp and in 2 hours the exact same ship of the exact same design can be pushing millions of HP. However that would provide a good resource dump. Not realistically providing any real advantage, but providing a way to spend resources once you reach completion of the tech tree.

Now one thing to remember though is that this game is not complete. The 'tech tree' is not complete. The goal is not complete. The game is simply not done yet. And even if it were, once you reach "the end" you are essentially in a sandbox. The same thing can be said for Minecraft. Or Terraria to a lesser extent. Once you have all the stuff you want there really isn't much point going further and doing more. The difference between Factorio and Minecraft is that minecraft you can literally create your own goals. In Factorio, save for building the factory itself or building new and interesting factories there is no goal past 'completion'. But I'm hoping that will change somewhere along the way.

[slpwnd]

This (spending resources) has been one of the things that we struggled from the beginning. Infinete research is a nice idea (now there is a hint to that - try researching maximal flying combat robots amount ). Better goals (not just that crappy rocket defense) are on our todo list.

[ficolas]

Infinite research could be nice, but Im the kind of player that gets bored faster with monotony and I dont think ill play much with it.
Games like minecraft terraria or starbound have building as endgame thing, factorio factory building is "ugly", more functional than for looks, and when you get to a specified amount of machines you can get everything and start making complex stuff, but its true that the game needs something else for endgame.

[hoho]

Besides researching to increase the amount of combat bots why not also research the amount of some high-level factory buildings one could have running in parallel? Perhaps even some higher level defense structures.

I'm currently trying to play with zero productivity modules and it seems like I do need quite a bit of resources. From what I've read, using them can save up to 90% of material cost on some items. If those modules get balanced properly then that alone could be a pretty good step in the direction of increasing resource sinks.


Then again, considering that we can play on an infinite world all resources are effectively infinite as well

[Balthazar]

Besides researching to increase the amount of combat bots why not also research the amount of some high-level factory buildings one could have running in parallel? Perhaps even some higher level defense structures.

I'm currently trying to play with zero productivity modules and it seems like I do need quite a bit of resources. From what I've read, using them can save up to 90% of material cost on some items. If those modules get balanced properly then that alone could be a pretty good step in the direction of increasing resource sinks.

The finite high end factory thing would work, although it seems pointless since you could just add the research item cost to the factory's cost. But the modules would provide MORE resources, not remove them

Wanted to add megastructures to the list, like the ones from anno 1404 and 2070. Basically you first build a really expensive foundation. You then provide foundation with power and anything else it might want, like maybe water, and then you start shoveling resources into it, obscene amounts of resources that it slowly uses to finish. Like, a building could take 3 stages to make, first stage would want you to deliver 10 stone blocks and 10 steel to advance 1 point and need 1000 points to finish the stage. Then second stage 50 electronic circuits and an electric furnace 2000 times and the final stage 10 locomotives and a shotgun 3000 times, or something like that. Then once finished you got this beefy but super useful structure that does something really neat, like it could refine oil at a better rate, or do some specific recipe with better output, or just be a huuuge storage container that's easy to interact with.

Other ideas for sinks maybe
- Terraforming
- Lake removal / repositioning
-Automated but really stupid attack bots ( like a megastructure that works as a drone hive for destroyer drones, you can tell the building to attack somewhere and it just sends all the drones there, they fight until everything in a radius from the point is dead then return or until all bots are dead)

[TGS]

Another 'resource' sink could come in the form of creature attacks. Now that we are going to have blueprints, and we already have 'structure reconstruction' through roboports we could have structured and organised attacks from the biters that instead of destroying everything until your factory is no more they adapt to breach your defenses and basically destroy a percentage of your buildings then they fall back. This could be done through a number of mechanics. Be it really really REALLY hard to kill special megabiters or long range artillery biters that sit on the outskirts of your factory lobbing shells at your buildings.

The point being that something will come along and mess up your factory and if you wish to remain 'in business' you will have to replace lots of your buildings. Thus consuming resources to do so. Ultimately it could be a very pointless resource sink, but a resource sink nonetheless.

Or hell you could even have meteors that can strike your base destroying a bunch of buildings forcing you to rebuild them. That naturally isn't going to make that much of an impact as most of the buildings do not 'cost' that much to make. But later down the line there could be a lot more complex and expensive buildings that could be vulnerable to these... forms of destruction.

[kovarex]

Hello,
In the start I thought that we might have infinite research from the start, so we might add it later anyway.
One of the approaches is just to have something like "Future technology <X>" Like in civilisation, it didn't bring anything special, but you could research it for points, it is not really interesting, but it could be the last resort for people that want to research and test setups etc. We can even make some secret (or not) researches connect to "Future technology 45" etc.

When thinking about the civilisation, I really loved the phase, where you could sink a lot of resources to buy and install additional modules to the space ship on the orbit.
We could go the other way around, we could build expensive facilities on the planed to accomodate incoming ships. Or the player could send resource packs on the orbit for the waiting ships.

But the truth is, that anything will get boring eventually, we can't make content for infinite amount of time obviously. So the game might just be more orientated to be finished, and maybe played on harder difficulty next time, or played to try to finish the game faster, or played over MP to compete with someone, who knows.

[BurnHard]

What I could imagine as some kind of endless play:

That kind of infinite research (which always, slowly increases damage/HP etc of structures and weapons) and an ingame button to initiate a biter evolution (attackpower, HP-increase) and start some attackwaves of biters.

Each time the button is pressed, a counter is increased, and it could be quite competative, how often you can press the button and survive the increasing waves of ever harder biters. (maybe some sort of highscore).

Combined with the some sort of endless resource fields (the mentionend 1/10th productivity), for ME it would be endless fun, to build always bigger bases with giant persisting structures, to always research more tiers and get harder biters)

[EDIT] Or the infite research project itself triggers the biter evolution and starts the attackwave, so you could spare the illogical button. The strenth of the biters of course increase more than the own strenght. The research tiers get more expensive each time.

[kovarex]

What I could imagine as some kind of endless play:

That kind of infinite research (which always, slowly increases damage/HP etc of structures and weapons) and an ingame button to initiate a biter evolution (attackpower, HP-increase) and start some attackwaves of biters.

Each time the button is pressed, a counter is increased, and it could be quite competative, how often you can press the button and survive the increasing waves of ever harder biters. (maybe some sort of highscore).

Combined with the some sort of endless resource fields (the mentionend 1/10th productivity), for ME it would be endless fun, to build always bigger bases with giant persisting structures, to always research more tiers and get harder biters)

[EDIT] Or the infite research project itself triggers the biter evolution and starts the attackwave, so you could spare the illogical button

To keep the player evil, the research could be called something like "Biter final solution project", every tier would make them more and more angry.
When you research level 100, which is almost impossible, all biters will die forever (and game would be really finished)

[ray4ever]

Hello,
We could go the other way around, we could build expensive facilities on the planed to accomodate incoming ships. Or the player could send resource packs on the orbit for the waiting ships.

Maybe extend the game by allowing ships to land and to build some sort of "housing accommodation". These structures can than to be supplied with by the players factory with all amnesties (maybe adding farms, consumables etc.). "Goal" would be to supply the biggest possible "town", while the resource intake of these structures increase exponentially while they are growing. Maybe something along the lines of the anno series, where you have to make more and more advanced goods to satisfy the growing and advancing population.


Another unrelated resource sink could the addition of ammunition in conjunction with regular attacks. These ammunition could for example be "laser crystals" of different colour/difficulty to make and would be used up by the towers. So an efficient defense system would need an ingenious logistic system to supply the ammunition (and repair packs?) produced in the factory to your defensive structures.

[ficolas]

Maybe extend the game by allowing ships to land and to build some sort of "housing accommodation". These structures can than to be supplied with by the players factory with all amnesties (maybe adding farms, consumables etc.). "Goal" would be to supply the biggest possible "town", while the resource intake of these structures increase exponentially while they are growing. Maybe something along the lines of the anno series, where you have to make more and more advanced goods to satisfy the growing and advancing population.

Epic astro story :3

[ssilk]

Really like that.