How resource scarcity affects production

[thereaverofdarkness]

This isn't directly a suggestion, but rather a discussion of gameplay elements I have seen elsewhere. My purpose for making this post is to inform you readers about these details so that it may influence the suggestions you make, and perhaps lend credibility to some future ideas involving adding more resources or introducing new types of resource scarcities. Still, at the end of the post I will discuss things I'd like to see in Factorio.


In Total Annihilation, there were multiple ways to generate power for your base, and what was the best choice depended significantly on your environment. There was a lot of variance to your options, and no one playstyle was always right. The ways you could produce energy were: solar, wind, geothermal, fusion, or absorbing trees. Geothermal was only available via geothermal vents on the ground, so a map with a lot of those had little energy scarcity. Fusion was a late game option which required a lot of energy and metal to setup but was very compact for how much energy it generated. You could set a group of workers out to absorb all trees in any given patch of land and they could be diligently kept busy for a long time, but eventually the land would be cleared and you'd run out of trees. But I think the most interesting was solar and wind. There was no day/night cycle but wind speed varied, and each map had a built in brightness and average wind speed. In addition to this, terrain sometimes had shadowy regions which could be mountain shadows, valleys, or any area the map creator decided should be arbitrarily dark. Likewise, some parts of the map may have had more or less wind than normal. This variance influenced how much energy you generated from solar panels or wind turbines. There could be strategically important parts of the map that are dark or windless, and that would influence where you can effectively build solar panels or wind turbines. If your map was dim, you could build solar panels for energy but they would be less effective, and wind turbines might be a generally better option but you had to discover that for yourself in each map. Some maps had more or better trees/vegetation/other objects that can be absorbed for energy, lending more viability to that tactic. I remember a map called Gasbag Forest which was filled with gasbags, a cool plant that yielded a large amount of energy when absorbed.

Another nice detail from TA: solar panels could close, which they would do automatically when attacked. They would fold up and stop generating power, but would become armored and more durable.

Other resources were dealt less with in Total Annihilation (metal was the only other resource), but its abundance varied significantly across maps. If you placed a metal extractor on a rich metal patch, it could generate metal for you at a high rate. Smaller patches yielded less, and you could potentially put multiple extractors off center on a single patch for lower yield per extractor but greater total yield, though the effectiveness of that strategy varied with the size of the patch. Basically, more patches generally meant more metal production. The Core world was basically a giant metal ruin, so maps that took place on that world allowed you to place a metal extractor anywhere and gain full yield. You could also gain metal by absorbing rocks and other debris. You could even absorb wrecks of machinery from battle to get metal. If you had a metal shortage and a bunch of units or buildings you don't want, you could destroy them and clean up the mess for metal.


Warcraft and Starcraft played with resource scarcities. Several Warcraft 2 maps centered around control of gold mines. Your resources were gold, lumber, and oil, but oil was only necessary for naval ships. Lumber abundance varied depending on the map, but it was always in limited supply as obtaining it required you actually cut down trees which forever changed the map's landscape. In a long game you could easily turn a thick forest into a wide open plain. But gold was only found in gold mines, small structures which you have workers enter to get gold. Some maps had several gold mines with only a small amount of gold, and some had a few mines with a large amount of gold. Some of my favorite maps started you and your opponent with a gold mine containing just enough gold to get you started, but on the other two corners of the map were each a very rich gold mine. There was then a race to conquer these gold mines before the other player got to them. Positioning of the gold mines as well as how much gold was in each mine were elements that greatly influenced how the map would play out. Starcraft had a resource, minerals, which were usually found in rich patches but could occasionally be more spread out and found in tiny bits, more like the trees of Warcraft. With map makers able to set any amount on each mineral patch, there were a lot of options to make maps unique. I once made a Starcraft map that had lots of poor mineral patches scattered about, with varying amounts scattered around. In that map, you could generally find minerals by exploring just about anywhere, but some parts had richer patches and it was important to find and control those before your opponent got to them.


Age of Empires resource patches look and feel more similar to Factorio, but they are functionally more similar to Warcraft's gold mines. Each patch was a square of resource on the ground which had whatever amount, usually a high number so it would last quite a while. You could have up to a certain number of workers harvesting one patch of a resource. Since they didn't take up much land, it was easy and cost-effective to set up a perimeter defense around them and control them. So it was important to explore and gain control of important resource patches so that you could use them to fuel your war effort or improve your economy.


Zeus and Poseidon is one of I believe a group of similar economy-based games in which you must find resources to become able to produce things in your society, and that influences your people's quality of life and productivity as well as how you deal with other neighboring nations. The goal of the game was to improve the quality of life for your citizens so that you could attract more people to your city, which gives you more labor, which can yield more resources, which can help you build more and better housing, and the cycle repeats as you become a more powerful and successful nation. What resources you start with access to greatly influences how the game plays out. When I played it, I had an abundance of wheat and olives, so my people could make bread and olive oil. These were valuable trade goods, but my people wanted wine and cheese which I couldn't produce because I had no goats or grapes. I was able to trade for goats and get cheese later, but wine was trickier. Nobody was selling grapes and the only nation that was selling wine didn't want anything I had. So I had to trade with other nations in order to come up with resources I could use to trade for wine. I haven't played the game much, but it appears it is set up as sort of an economic puzzle game in which you have to solve both logistical and trade problems to provide all of the resources your nation needs or wants.


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Id like to see scarcity take on a greater role in Factorio, to make different maps less stale. I like when there are multiple ways to achieve a goal, but one or more ways are clearly better given an abundance of the necessary resources. I have often entertained the idea of being able to generate power in Factorio in situation in which you don't start with coal or water nearby. I love KS Power's burner generator, which is a less efficient and rather polluting way to spend coal for electricity, but it works great for providing a backup option for a base that's lacking water. Solar panels do this without pollution, but they cost some research before you can make them. Solar panels are also a unique option for generating power: they don't function at night and they take up significantly more space than most other energy sources for the same amount of energy. Nuclear power is a really cool addition to this--of course it requires uranium to function. It's more compact for the amount of power generated and a great way to power very large factories, but it presents some fascinating logistical puzzles.

But some things in Factorio aren't very player-driven. Some things rob the player of choice, or play out the same on every map. Resources are the primary part of this. Uranium is an unnecessary resource and you can do just about anything in the game without it. But water and coal are absolutely vital to basic progression until you get solar panels, and both iron and copper are vital to production at all times and at every stage of the game. Oil is vital for later science packs and pretty much the whole late game, and though Coal Liquefaction enables a player to convert coal into oil, you must have some oil initially to start the process. Stone is also vital but at least you can harvest it from big rocks if you don't have any patches of stone to mine.

I'd like to see more ways to get by without a given resource, and a more uneven distribution of resources so that you sometimes find yourself without a resource so you have to work around that scarcity until you explore more and find that resource. I think coal liquefaction should not require any oil to start, but instead should be a less-powerful workaround for those who never find an oil patch as well as being for those who simply used up their oil. It would also be nice if there were some ways to get by without iron or copper, or without coal or water as I stated in the previous paragraph.

There's also little use for wood in Factorio. You use it for a bit then eventually is fuel or trash. Bob's mods offer an interesting use for wood: it's for circuit boards. This make sense, given we generally use plastic because it's abundant, but in Factorio you've got to start from scratch. You can't make a circuit board from iron, it's too conductive. Wood is probably the best option. Bob's mods also offer a couple of extra ways to get wood: a greenhouse that grows wood with water and fertilizer input, and a recipe for synthetic wood you can make with oil. So when playing with those mods, it's important that you get wood, but after the early game it doesn't necessarily have to come from trees.

[ssilk]

Hm. This is not, what I understand under suggestions.

Because I think it's better to have such discussions here than in General I made a new post in viewtopic.php?f=55&t=46327&p=276610#p276610

[Slayn25]

I loved Total Annihilation. TA also had tidal power generators & metal makers. Metal makers were a less than efficient way to convert energy into metal. However, since metal patches were finite & energy production was not, they fit quite well situationally. Sounds similar to what the replicator mods currently do, but haven't tried them yet.

Might be a bit ambitious for Factorio but if they make a sequel I'd like if map & exploration played a bigger part in the game. The idea of different biomes in factorio being better for certain types of power generation, housing different aliens, environmental effects, resources required for progression, etc. All these things appeal to me.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Thank you, ßilk. I may become impatient with you at times but your hard work does not go unnoticed and is much appreciated.

Might be a bit ambitious for Factorio but if they make a sequel I'd like if map & exploration played a bigger part in the game. The idea of different biomes in factorio being better for certain types of power generation, housing different aliens, environmental effects, resources required for progression, etc. All these things appeal to me.

Yeah! It could be neat to have individual biomes more likely to spawn certain things. Perhaps your suit could have a robot tutorial agent (similar to Aura) which gives you hints what to look for or which direction to head in order to find resources. Maybe there could be a long range radar that uncovers larger areas of terrain at a higher distance but in low detail and only for checking out the terrain, biomes, and presence of water bodies. Or regular radars could do that in addition to their normal function.

[ssilk]

I thought a bit about such discussions in here and I think they are no problem.
What someone looks for in this board is not just suggestions after suggestions, but also an overview of what is currently interesting.