Just started a couple days ago; thoughts

[pojodan]

First off, let me just say that I am thrilled with Factorio. It's scratching an itch I've had for awhile now and I'm excited to see that it is still being developed and improved upon.

Here's my feelings so far:

Early game: I'd like to see a couple of things. First, give the option of starting out with enough resources or pre-built devices to delve straight into electricity and automation. My desire to replay is a bit stymied by the time it takes to get past the electricity hurdle. This could easily be done with a simple mod, though. Second, make getting to electricity a bit more involved, so that the early game is a bit more varied and less 'I need exactly X iron plates to make my first steam factory, then things will start getting interesting.

Mid-game: Getting the blue research factory setup is my favorite part of Factorio currently. The multitude of ways one can design it, all the while balancing the logistics of copper, iron, and power to supply enough to get the job done, is really quite fun and I love nothing more than pondering why my inserter line is falling behind while I've got rockets up the hooha. Putting together a big, sprawling module factory is quite satisfying, too, though it is less challenging and more just putting it all together.

Late game: I keep reaching a point where my research is rocking and my modules are chugging away, and I find myself faced with having to go out and kill biters and not really digging it. The combat system is awkward, and setting up walled-in laser turrets repeatedly getting tiresome fast. Perhaps if construction robots could be told to tear down, in addition to the blue-prints forthcoming, I wouldn't mind. That said, let me build a tank. I don't care if I have to mine out 5 square miles to get the resources, but so long as it doesn't need alien artifacts to do so, I'll happily build it and have an army of constructor bots to keep it repaired. Either that or let alien research be optional, i.e. it is mainly for making bigger and better weapons, with a few factory perks thrown in. Logically speaking, I don't see why I'd land on a planet for the purpose of building a missile turret when I lack the technology to make such a thing and simply assume the local bugs will glean the secrets of it to me somehow.

Other ideas:

Add a train car that works like a real ore car works: Items are fed into a hopper that leans out over the track, and when a train stops, the hopper dumps a massive quantity of stuff into the train car in a couple seconds. Back at home base, the ore car is either tipped over into a hopper, or dumps out from below. The fact that the train has to sit at the station for 30 seconds-or-so for a bunch of inserted to pick it empty one item at a time is the reason why trains are less desirable than long conveyor belts. Having a series of miners, powered by solar to reduce the chance of attacks, sending big loads of ore back to base where my smelter line pumps out plates would make having trains worthwhile.

RIght-angled inserters would be lovely.

Seriously. Let me build a tank. A laser tank. Mmmmm.

[Pandamonium]

Right-angled inserters would be lovely.

I sooooooooo want this!

For both normal length AND long arm variants!

[dusho]

..now I want tank as well
and +1 for 90 degrees inserters

[kovarex]

Hello, thank you for the feedback, critics is always welcome.

Construction/Deconstruction:
The good news is that the construction robots will not only be able to build according to blueprints (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater), but it will be possible to use these to deconstruct larger factory areas as well. (It is done and it works fine):

Deconstruction tool. Allows player to order construction robots to deconstruct buildings in the selected area. When the buildings contain items (chests etc.) construction robots first move these items out of it and place it into the logistics network.

This will hopefully remove another tiresome "work" from the Factorio gameplay.

Early game:
I believed, that the fact that the player already starts with some iron burner mining drill and furnace + the fact that burner mining drills are not as slow as they used to be makes the early stage much more fast.
When I know what to do I can get to electricity quite fast, but maybe I'm wrong.
The other way to solve this would be going the other way around. Having primitive Coal assemblers and Coal labs would allow to setup some automation even before electricity, so even the electricity would have to be researched.

Mid-game:
We think, that it is the best part currently as well. But we plan to change the recipe configurations to be more interesting anyway.

Late game:
The combat system is kind of "1.5th version", we have a proverb here that "3rd version is usually good", so we will try to learn from this experiment and alter the fight in the future.
We definitelly agree, that some kind of tank is "must have" part of factorio, it should probably have the equipment grid similar to armor. It is not in our soonest roadmap (0.9 + 0.10) but I believe it will get there soon.

[MF-]

Right-angled inserters?
Not having those was part of the challenge.
Having Left and Right versions for each inserters... that would be just too many inserters.

@Picking up items one at a time..
What about the inserter-multi-grab research? Doesn't that apply to trains anymore?

[ray4ever]

The other way to solve this would be going the other way around. Having primitive Coal assemblers and Coal labs would allow to setup some automation even before electricity, so even the electricity would have to be researched.

I like your idea because in the current setup coal powered equipment isn't used much at all. The only real big downside of coal automatisation is that you have to manually refill the coal powered inserters. If this "problem" would be fixed, meaning that they could "refill" themselves if coal is available in their grabbing area than the addition of electricity research would be feasible.

[BurnHard]

My hopes were going the other direction, that we can get rid of the "coal-fired-inserters and miners" completely. That electricity becomes such a basic thing (with eg cheap windmill-generators and cheap mk1 miners) that we can skip this (10-minute) phase in early-early-game completely. and the first use for coal is furnaces and steam generators. How can coal-feeded inserters work anyway with just a fire in them?

[pojodan]

The good news is that the construction robots will not only be able to build according to blueprints (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater), but it will be possible to use these to deconstruct larger factory areas as well. (It is done and it works fine):

Ah, marvelous! I can definitely see this being useful. Thank you.

The other way to solve this would be going the other way around. Having primitive Coal assemblers and Coal labs would allow to setup some automation even before electricity, so even the electricity would have to be researched.

Yes, this. As it stands I pretty much never use coal inserters as it's just more productive to focus all effort to getting electricity going first. IMHO the steam engines require far too little resources for what they are and should be both better at producing electricity, and more difficult to acquire. If anything, solar should be the early electricity option, which means harvesting a lot of copper, and then having challenges with nightfall and getting batteries setup.

Right-angled inserters?
Not having those was part of the challenge.
Having Left and Right versions for each inserters... that would be just too many inserters.

Have there be research that allows changing the direction of inserters. You then place the inserter, hover cursor over it, and hit a button that will swing the input arm around to various directions. Even having it reach diagonally would be possible with long-arm inserters.

@Picking up items one at a time..
What about the inserter-multi-grab research? Doesn't that apply to trains anymore?

That does help, yes, though I just like the idea of a train being able to stop for 5-10 seconds and having a hopper dump a load of ore, rather than having 20 robot arms fling the ore in hand-fulls at a time.

[hoho]

Early game:
I believed, that the fact that the player already starts with some iron burner mining drill and furnace + the fact that burner mining drills are not as slow as they used to be makes the early stage much more fast.
When I know what to do I can get to electricity quite fast, but maybe I'm wrong.
The other way to solve this would be going the other way around. Having primitive Coal assemblers and Coal labs would allow to setup some automation even before electricity, so even the electricity would have to be researched.

I'd quite like it if coal would be a bit longer tier. Currently I've played just around 30-ish hours and never reached to even logistics robots (restarted a ton of times due to deaths/updated mods/changing PC's, etc). Later restarts I just try to find a place with all resources in sane distance and spend 5-10min to get basic electric network up and running. Coal stuff is nearly useless and low-end electricity is WAY too cheap.


I quite liked how Gregtech in MC basically added two new tiers before IC2 stuff (hand tools/vanilla furnace and bronze/steam stuff). In factorio I get a burner/miner from the start and basically don't mine a single thing by hand besides a few trees for chests and electric poles. It would make some sense if player would need to do some manual mining for basic tools. E.g players might have some hammer, screwdriver, saw, etc to actually be able to build machines. Those tools could be upgraded later on with fancier materials to allow for faster manual crafting

Coal-based stuff in itself isn't too bad, just that electricity is WAY too cheap. More tiers for electricity production (boilers and steam turbines) is a must-have and even the cheapest stuff should be tens of times more expensive than current things while also producing much less power than current. Currently my very first electric plant usually has at least 3-4 turbines + 10-ish boilers (for easier expandability) before I even put down a single electricity user. As said, stuff is WAY too cheap.

First tier of boilers should be relatively inefficient and turbines produce a few times less than current ones. First tier boilers should be good enough to generate enough steam per-coal to mine ~3-4 items, later boilers increase the efficiency. Similarly bigger turbines would be using less steam per watt of output while simultaneously being more expensive in terms of materials used.

Another bonus for more tiers of electricity producers would be that massive factories could save up on tons of entities/CPU load by replacing tens of boilers/turbines with fewer bigger ones. Of course coal boilers turning water to steam shouldn't be the only way to produce energy. I think nuclear plants are already planned (hopefully outputting massive amount of steam with accompanying massive steam turbines) and hopefully oil will give us some other alternatives.

Spamming passive energy generation (solar/wind) isn't really a good thing imho. They should still exist but be expensive enough to not be spammable in ludicrous quantities.

Right-angled inserters?
Not having those was part of the challenge.
Having Left and Right versions for each inserters... that would be just too many inserters.

Or just one super-high end inserter that can do everything (smart+logistics) + has an UI option to change what direction it picks stuff up and where it places it?