Anyways, I have a couple of ideas to make the game on a more epic scale. First what we can do is have some type of template/blueprint where we can just copy and paste a whole setup within a certain area. For example, I have a setup where I'm mining iron ore with electric furnaces and a ratio of 3 iron plates to 1 steel. Each electric miner will have 1 electric furnace on the side with belts etc. And the surrounding area will have laser turrets and outside that will have double walls. And of course electric poles for electricity. Don't get me wrong, I love doing this manually myself and that's kinda the point of the game, but after 40-50 times doing the same thing on a field of iron, you kinda wanna "expand" a bit faster and it becomes kind of a repetitious practice and it feels manual after 50 times doing the same thing. So there should be a way to research something like "area templating" or "area blueprinting" and with an advanced version of this as well which I can discuss further. The research will not be cheap. It will basically bring the player into the next "tier" of epic factory building, just like from the jump of manually having to mine copper and iron and coal in the beginning to being able to craft a miner to do the work for you. I would say the research on this would be (120seconds + 2reds + 2greens + 2blues + 1purple) X 2000. Yes, 2000. So the player really has to work his butt off to get this feature. He can implement it and with constructor robots, they can construct it using raw materials (or the item itself on provider box, not sure what to decide here). Currently constructor robots only construct destroyed buildings but we can make it so that they can construct a blueprinted/templated area as well.
With the above feature, basically the game is expanded on a much wider scale now. The player can create many mining areas at a much faster pace. Yes I know this is kinda risky cuz the game is about building your own factory manually, but again, after 50+ times doing it the same exact way, the player feels there is an 'end game' and it becomes too repetitious. Well I'm all about NEVER HAVING AN END GAME lol. Expand and keep expanding forever is my motto. Anyways, after this feature, there should be much more resources needed on a big scale for other future epic constructions so that acquiring this templating/blueprinting ability has value and purpose so that the player feels rewarded for having spent lots of hours researching this.
My next idea is related to the above. That is to be able to remotely place items to be constructed regardless of where the player is. Currently the player needs to be about 6 game blocks away from where he wants to place an object, but with templating/blueprinting it will expand the game on a bigger scale so player should be able to also remotely place any object like train tracks that connect to that distant mining area he just templated without having to be even near it. This will quicken the game and quicken the process of acquiring more resources so that he can enter the next tier of the game with faster rate of resource gathering. Constructor robots are necessary for this of course and maybe have a way to research to expand the area of constructor robots as well. This remote constructing itself will cost alot of research points as well. Currently there's not enough incentive to gathering more research packs, but I'm assuming that's because the game is not done, but anyways, I think these ideas are a great addition to whatever else you guys got going on for the future.
I have some other ideas that I can briefly get into, but I won't speak for long since I don't even know whether these ideas will even be taken seriously lol. But after the above "going up another tier in the game" I was thinking of an even higher tier a player can enter into. So let's say the map has an edge that is surrounded by water, so basically player finds out that he's on an island (currently, I don't see an edge to the map, I tried to drive to the edge avoiding all those biters and worms and gave up after an hour lol). The island is still pretty big so with the templating feature, it's still very useful, but that has a limit until he can see that there's ocean surrounding him. He will then have to construct and research a big vessel and this vessel will be for trading with other players on other islands, and by the way, each island will have a somewhat unique rare resource, which can then be traded. Each rare resource will have its own type of building that can be built from it only. This will make interacting with other players more interesting and necessary. The other thing that can be done about this is maybe have the same player be able to own other islands (for single player). Then player will be able to trade between his islands. My inspiration for this idea comes from Anno which is a great series of games, but we can make it much more in depth. There may be memory issues since having 5 concurrent islands running at the same time is not possible but maybe have only one island active and "freeze" the other islands if the player is not on that island. Kinda like what SimCity has done (their new one). This way, now he has a network of islands trading resources so that all the different resources can be used to create many epic things. The one main thing I was thinking was, he's now able to create that rocket defense so that the aliens above won't shoot down his spaceship (which is already in the game as an end game).
Now the next tier would be to own other planets and now be able to trade with other planets lol. So the scale of the game becomes bigger and bigger. I think that's what the developers of the game was trying to achieve, which is to make the game from a tiny scale of having to manually mine/craft things to then having a fully automated huge factory. This type of gaming, from small to epic scaling, was what I was wanting in a game for so long and finally found it in Factorio. Many games have an "end game" which is great and all, but it left me with wanting more. I hope with Factorio, there will never be an end game and the developers will keep expanding the game for as long as we players are interested.
We can think of these next tiers as a whole other game even but still in keeping with the core concepts, even with the vessels and space ships and trading with other planets, those too can have some type of factory building theme to it. Maybe having to be able to build a trading spaceship using the same current concepts can be implemented so the player will need to figure out how best to construct that trading space ship. Maybe the space ship needs to have a factory onboard with a twist along with gathering special materials only from outerspace to make the onboard factory working (special energy). Something like that. I'll leave the details to the devs.
Each idea above is kinda like an expansion so devs can charge $10 or $5 for each expansion so there's incentives to keep developing more content for the devs and for us players, we will gladly pay for more content. Anyways, let me know what your thoughts are. My dream game is what I've illustrated above and so far the devs of Factorio have made a great game that is almost what I've always wanted to see in a game. Great job guys! Keep up the good work.
Other small suggestions: Have an inserter that is ultra long and is adjustable. So have one that can reach 3 spaces out instead of the 2 max currently, but also be able to have the player adjust where it is picking up and dropping off product, either 1 space away, 2 spaces away, or 3 spaces away, in both directions. I find it sometimes useful that I want this item to be picked up at this exact spot and dropped off at this exact spot but then I have to play around with the normal and long inserters and sometimes it feels a bit restricted.
Other balancing issues, which I don't know if it was addressed in 0.9.2 because I was playing 0.8.8 at the time, was the fact that the large biter was impossible to kill only until I finally got the highest tier shotgun (speed:2) with highest bullet type. The machine gun was ineffective and I researched all my armor and all that, eagerly waiting for them then when I got them, I was still unable to kill the large biters. I would say to make the large biters have less armor so that using machine gun is at least somewhat effective. Right now it's impossible even with maxed out damage and speed. I would suggest having the large biter alot less armor and then introducing a "huge biter" as being a lil bit stronger than the current large biter. This way the player is able to kill the large biters for now until he works up his research to killing the huge biter which will not be there until later in the game. I found myself basically having to not be able to kill any aliens until I've researched basically everything military and then finally be able to kill a large biter. I think it should be a back and forth thing where player researching some military, then is able to kill some alien, gather the alien balls, use those to do further military research so that he can be stronger to kill bigger and stronger biters.
And by the way, I found myself "cheating" being able to place tons of laser turrets on the alien bases and being able to keep constructing them closer and closer to the aliens until they can kill them themselves without me having to use a single personal shot so it defeats the purpose of me even researching better military anything. This should be changed, especially in the beginning where the alien's bases are weak with no big biters. Maybe have a cooldown time of 5 sec or 10 sec per laser turret so if placing 10 turrets, each one will be effective after 10 seconds one after another. This will prevent "laser turret spamming". Also the biters should attack the laser turrets if they are close enough to them. I just have to run around my turrets all day long and avoid a single hit from them.
One other balancing issue I found was the fact that the aliens don't get stronger until you've researched more and more. So they get stronger the more you've done research. This makes sense on some levels but on others it doesn't. There's no incentive for the player to build his factory as efficiently and quickly as possible. I had 2 types of games going. The first game, stupid me, I didn't even know about being able to create a factory that can craft items (the icon pic for that was hard to see since it was just all grey with a small o or 2 o's or 3 o's, which was easy to be overlooked). I actually thought the research was for MY crafting speed to be faster and faster since it says "crafting speed 0.5 for first one, and .75 for 2nd and 1.25 for 3rd, so all that time I thought it was for my own crafting speed to be faster. Anyways, I basically crafted all of the science packs by myself and I had to run the game overnight to do it without any issues from the aliens. My turrets easily fended them off. In my opinion, I think the aliens should get stronger and stronger so that there is replay value. If the player dies then he will need to improve his speed and skills of building his factories in the next game before the aliens become stronger and stronger. So it's a survival game basically and you just have to be faster than the aliens. And btw, for the 2nd game, I was able create and research my stuff much faster, but the alien's strength became much stronger faster as well which defeats the purpose of having to build a super efficient factory. Maybe this can be introduced as another type of difficulty level, survival or something)
Anyways, I hope you all made it this far haha. I can't wait for the devs to come up with something exciting to add to the game. Hope it will be of epic proportions.
