Factorio Forums

Tekillaa wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 14, 2019 1:28 pm

it puts a term to the question for me.

You are of course welcome to take part in the discussion in the thread that I mentioned. If more people show their support for this suggestion, it has a higher chance of getting implemented in vanilla. It is better if you show your support for this idea in the main thread, instead of only showing your support in this separate thread.

Of course, i'll do my best to show my point of view and bring argument in the discussion, just got the intention to not create a separate thread when i wrote it first.

+1. It will be a great option for construction armor layout and will allow to keep personal reactor in military branch for out-of-base operations.
But balancing is required : reactor must be better then batteries charged at home.

This would actually be perfectly acceptable as a 'side-grade' item to the reactor. I can see this providing more power than the reactor, even by a fair margin, but with it only works while within the area of your power grid and thus would require a substantial number of batteries to be usable for any kind of extended trip. Nigh-infinite power when at home, but only as much as your batteries can provide once you leave. I think that most people would ultimately go with the reactor long term for the simple reality of never wanting to be caught out of base without power.

Darinth wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 15, 2019 12:41 pm

This would actually be perfectly acceptable as a 'side-grade' item to the reactor. I can see this providing more power than the reactor, even by a fair margin, but with it only works while within the area of your power grid and thus would require a substantial number of batteries to be usable for any kind of extended trip. Nigh-infinite power when at home, but only as much as your batteries can provide once you leave. I think that most people would ultimately go with the reactor long term for the simple reality of never wanting to be caught out of base without power.

8 Batteries MK2 (same area as 1 reactor) holds 800MJ energy. 1 reactor will provide such energy in ~18 minutes. Thus, if player plans a trip longer then 20 minutes, he is better to take reactor instead of charged batteries. Actually, it's acceptable balance.

leadraven wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 15, 2019 12:51 pm

Darinth wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 15, 2019 12:41 pm

This would actually be perfectly acceptable as a 'side-grade' item to the reactor. I can see this providing more power than the reactor, even by a fair margin, but with it only works while within the area of your power grid and thus would require a substantial number of batteries to be usable for any kind of extended trip. Nigh-infinite power when at home, but only as much as your batteries can provide once you leave. I think that most people would ultimately go with the reactor long term for the simple reality of never wanting to be caught out of base without power.

8 Batteries MK2 (same area as 1 reactor) holds 800MJ energy. 1 reactor will provide such energy in ~18 minutes. Thus, if player plans a trip longer then 20 minutes, he is better to take reactor instead of charged batteries. Actually, it's acceptable balance.

And they've still gotta save space to put in at least 1 connector module (however large those would end up being). For the connector to be viable for short trips at all you'd need to have multiple MWs of power draw. Even a 5MW power draw with 100% efficiency would result in about 2.5 minutes of needing to stay within range of power polls. Even at 50MW, enough to recharge the 800MJ of batteries in 16 seconds, it's still only a side-grade due to the simple reality that you're only carrying around 18 minutes of power from a PFR.

I'm waiting for this feature since forever.

Yeah this is very much needed feature.
While there is a mod for it... Still
There is a low usefullness in personal batteries. And personal solar panels are total crap which does not let you do much ar all especially bot building which drains your energy in no time ***even if you are still at your base***.

How very Astroneer!

Actually the way it is done in Astroneer is very innovative and fun.

abregado wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 16, 2019 10:30 am

How very Astroneer!

Actually the way it is done in Astroneer is very innovative and fun.

Yeah and it would be awesome in Factorio and also makes total sense

So... I was thinking. Why should I absolutely have to sit around and wait for my dinky modular armor's solar panels to recharge things, when I have a huge solar farm powering everything else

I tried googling a bit - maybe I didn't use the right search terms - but I found nothing.

My idea is simple: Allow a player to hook up to an electrical grid and get the batteries and items in your power armor filled up on electricity via an external source.

Perhaps for balance purposes it can only be done at a substation? Just an idea - I mean, you connect everything else with powercables... not yourself?

I agree.

However, this has already been suggested in the following thread:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6866 Local power connector module for modular armor

EDIT: Meanwhile, the threads have been merged. Therefore, my above link now points to the current thread.

This kind of mod already exists: Personal transformer by Xalos. But the author seem to abandon development and the current version seems quite raw to me. Would be nice if anyone else with bigger enthusiasm bag catch it up and remake. IMO this kind of thing must have been in vanilla. Running out of power in the middle of the base with gigawatts flowing through the cables all around - it feels very dumb. Situations like that do not add any benefit to the gameplay, more likely it is other way around.

The only means to power your armor's equipment is with solar panels or a fusion reactor; the former is slow, only works in daytime, and reliant on batteries, and the latter is at the end of the tech tree and very expensive to research and build. I wouldn't mind having alternatives besides "early and inefficient" and "late and expensive". But why come up with a new power source for one's armor, when power is all around us coursing through the wires overhead?

The Inductive Charging Module is an equipment piece for armor with a 2x2 footprint. When equipped, while the Engineer is standing within range of a power pole (and assuming their armor is not otherwise powered), their armor's equipment will draw power from the electrical grid to function. This also extends to charging the batteries in one's armor if any are equipped. The exact rate of charge would be subject to balance of course, and I envision it as such that a case can be made for equipping two ICMs to speed up the charge rate, especially if one is making heavy use of personal roboports that constantly tax their power supply.

I don't know how difficult it would be to program such a thing, but imho for gameplay balance and usage it's simple, easy to understand and use, and makes armor equipment more useful without hugely disrupting balance, particularly since it'd be most impactful when you're working in your factory and less impactful when fighting enemies.