Factorio Forums

The 'Factorio Official Team Challenge' server is extremely fun and there's at least a few of us who have been playing it basically non-stop. A few issues we've encountered:

Impossible Rounds
I've personally encountered two 'impossible rounds' (and others have been encountered), including impossible research (modular armor) and impossible products (piercing shotgun shells).

Suggested fix: whitelist the possible research items/products and only select tasks from those lists
Suggested fix: create some kind of voting system to allow users to 'veto' the current round

Extremely large tasks
Personally I enjoy the odd large-scale production challenge, but some of these are just absurd like the 100 cars (800 engines anyone?) or, god forbid, 100 trains (2000 engines anyone?) which can take upwards of an hour.

Suggested fix: re-tune the maximum values for certain products
Suggested fix: 'veto' system, see above

Inactive/Griefing players
There have been some inactive players taking up spots on teams for literally hours at a time. Griefing has been less common but is definitely a potential issue.

Suggested fix: Vote-kick a player who is AFK or griefing.
Suggested fix: Auto-detect inactivity?


Also, some miscellaneous suggestions:

'Throughput' challenge
Instead of producing a fixed quantity of a product, this challenge type will force player to create a large assembly line. For example, the challenge might state 'produce 40 circuits a second,' 'produce 5 engines a second,' or similar. Assuming there's a way to measure the production statistics per team this should be a nice addition to the current production and research challenges.

Nerf hand-crafting
Currently there are too many challenges that can be solved by handcrafting almost everything. While the occasional handcrafting round is fun and keeps you on your toes, currently handcrafting is superior to automation for most challenges.

Suggested fix: make handcrafting 50% slower
Suggested fix: make an actual round/challenge type where handcrafting is removed entirely

Map rotation
While randomly generating the map is most likely not viable, there should be ~3-5 maps and one is randomly selected for each round.

View teams
Currently there's no way to view the teams and there's no way to view which color team is on which 'tile.' This goes for both spectators and players.

View progress
Currently there's no way for spectators to view the progress of the different teams


Long-term suggestions (things that probably aren't viable at the moment but are probably worth looking into for the future):

Matchmaking/Queuing
Some kind of matchmaking/queuing system could be built to solve the 'joined 5 minutes into a half-hour long round' issue.

Single-player version
Assuming the population and demand is there, a single player version would be nice in addition to the team version.

Integrated voice chat
Or maybe just an easy way to integrate with existing platforms? Publicize an existing discord or teamspeak/mumble/whatever server?

---------------------

I'm sure I'm forgetting things, I'll update this as I remember more and as other players reply. Thanks again to Klonan for the game mode!

Warlord Alpha wrote:Impossible Rounds
I've personally encountered two 'impossible rounds' (and others have been encountered), including impossible research (modular armor) and impossible products (piercing shotgun shells).

Suggested fix: whitelist the possible research items/products and only select tasks from those lists

For item production challenges there actually IS a whitelist. It needs to be fine tuned, though. Piercing shotgun shells can't be crafted because the required research is missing. So either the research needs to be added or the item needs to be removed from the whitelist. These base numbers are multiplied with a random value between 1 and 8, depending on the amount of tasks.

For research the algorithm is a bit more dynamic. It searches the technologies defined in the scenario and picks 1-3 random ones. I guess modular armor is enabled because you're sometimes equipped with one. Though the prerequisites for modular armor (i.e. speed modules) aren't added to the scenario, thus you can't actually research it. So either there needs to be a whitelist, too or a blacklist for special technologies such as this.

Warlord Alpha wrote:Extremely large tasks
Personally I enjoy the odd large-scale production challenge, but some of these are just absurd like the 100 cars (800 engines anyone?) or, god forbid, 100 trains (2000 engines anyone?) which can take upwards of an hour.

I didn't do 100 cars, yet, but 75 comes close enough. I for my part didn't find that too long (a little less than 1 hour) and I enjoyed it. Though it's true that people that join in later or spectators need to wait pretty long till they can actually play... If you check the list above, cars were removed.

Warlord Alpha wrote:Inactive/Griefing players
There have been some inactive players taking up spots on teams for literally hours at a time. Griefing has been less common but is definitely a potential issue.

I hope you're not referring to my ghost (likely in 0.14.4 fixed bug 31748). Afaik Klonan moved it to the spectators team after some hours. When you run 0.14.3, connect to the server (the one for that version is still running) and join that team you can still see it .

Warlord Alpha wrote:View teams
Currently there's no way to view the teams and there's no way to view which color team is on which 'tile.' This goes for both spectators and players.

Yeah, I even miss a simple list with players on the server. Like the list you get with the tab button in many games. Colorize the names there based on force and you're good to go . Like that you still don't know on which tile which color is, but it's a good start.

Currently I've scripted myself a little web app that shows the data from the matchmaking server for me. Like this I at least know who's with me on the server: