New pollution mechanics to increase factory design diversity

[Chin]

This is a repost of my reddit post, slightly edited to fit forum rules. As far as i can see this has not been suggested before.

TL;DR - Having a second type of pollution that directly affects the efficiency certain processes could encourage players to build more strategic and split up factory designs, rather than mega DO IT ALL factories


After spending far too many hours in this amazing game, one common theme that has stood out in many of my factories is the fact that the game never forces you to move away from a central mega factory, one with everything from smelting and intermediate production to research all in one area. The only exception to this is proxy mining bases bringing in resources linked by trains, (with RSO and bobs mods).

What I have been pondering is ways to change the behavior of the game so that it encourage more segregated factories designs, so instead of trains just shipping ORES and OIL to the central base and returning empty, the player is rewarded by shipping out resources to build at specialised proxy factories, with the trains returning full of [microchips], which I believe would increase the strategy in the game. I understand the the player can happily make a factory today to do this for the sake of it, but I personally feel it is much more fun when you are 'beating' the game rather than pure sandboxing.

So with that said, I have come up with two main ways to achieve this aim. The first, and what I will be concentrating on in this post is an overhaul to pollution mechanics to penalise building a factory all in one area. The second is to encourage building in different areas due to geographical features - for example have a sunny area where solar is 100% efficient, hot springs for better steam power production, or even some weird alien lore where a particular process is increased or decreased in efficiency (easy enough to create a reason for this when on an alien planet).

[New Pollution mechanics]

There will now be two (or more) different types of pollution, each spreads as in vanilla, but are independent and have different effects. I will refer to as vanilla pollution as CO2, and the new type as SMOG, though the names don't really matter of course. CO2 is produced exactly as before from all factories, burning fuel, mining etc, and only effects the bitters aggression and evolution. SMOG however is only produced from certain structures, (furnaces, mining and oil production in particular). SMOG would have different effects on different PROCESSES, which also make sense by LORE. The ideas below could potenially work with just vanilla pollution, but would be more limited.

For example I could see that chip production would be negativity affected by SMOG as it is a clean room production, and dirty air would hinder the process. If it is possible to affect both the craft speed and the efficiency (the amount of raw resources to make a product), it would be nice and easy to balance. The player would therefore be encouraged to separate his furnaces from his chip production, or suffer inefficiencies. To further this and balance around early game, the higher levels of assembler may have different % SMOG penalties than level one assemblers (due to more advanced and therefore stringent processes). Importantly furnaces themselves would not be affected by the SMOG (else you couldn't a bunch of them close).

The above idea can be extended to all the different processes, perhaps even increasing the efficiency of some processes such as tree farming. I also envisage the SMOG can have different levels, eg a low concentration might cause basic chips to cost 25% more, a high level 200% more resources. However it goes down, the idea is that you can't produce everything all in one area, and need to have micro factories linked by rail or long belts if you want an efficient factory, rather than one that brute forces production by expanding sideways.

The second addition to pollution, which may exist in someform in MODS today, would be adding dirty and polluted water. Processes requiring water now produce a dirty water product. This can either been cleaned up by structures requiring an intermediate or large power requirement, stored in huge storage farms, or dumped producing huge pollution at the dumping structure. Player can decide on the best course of action, perhaps shipping barrels away to the middle of nowhere to avoid the SMOG consequences, of create a treatment factory to dump or reuse clean water (with no pollution penalty). Importantly SMOG can contaminate water sources when in high enough concentration! Now player might want to ship in clean water from elsewhere of have pre-treatment plants near the oil production. As always the aim is to encourage strategy depending on specific situations.

SMOG would also allow research into smog reducing technologies, adding a branch to the tech tree, with the cost being a slower craft rate (a bit like CO2 capture IRL). Finally SMOG could affect bitters, either poisoning them, or my personal favorite, sending them into a frenzy and increasing their stats while under its influence (defend your refinery bases!!)

[websterhamster]

I was just thinking about this yesterday, we definitely need water pollution and treatment mechanics.

[ssilk]

This reflects 100% my opinion.

And it is another suggestion, which points to the basic function, that would make sense to extend:

viewtopic.php?f=80&t=3440 What do biters do in their spare time? (Pheromone pathfind)

Sense: A Pheromone could also be a different kind of pollution. The total pollution at an chunk is the added pollution of the different types. So this works as now, without change. But when turning on the map and the pollution view you see not only a red shimmer, but different colors.