An early-game way to easily remove Trees is needed
Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 11:50 am
Factorio is very much a game about not doing things manually. The ideal player performs as little work as possible.
Yet there's on "odd man out" here: The removal of Trees. Early and mid game, you have to do that manually. Only in the late game do you get Roboports so that you can automate wood clearing.
Players resort to all sorts of stupid things to avoid having to cut down Trees, including shooting them with Shotguns, or with an SMG with AP ammo. You'd expect the Flamethrower to be superb for removing Trees,but I've not found that to be the case.
I have a distinct preference for playing on Desert maps, and while part of that is the colour scheme, a much larger part is the absence of Trees that must be cleared, so that I don't have to perform to much boring work. Yet one game I played, about a week ago, was in a variant Desert Biome which was very generously littered with tiny Coral plant thingies that also needed to be cleared away. I routinely "regenerate map" until I get a Desert look terrain, though, and most Deserts do not have Corals or at least not more than a few.
Something needs to be done about this. Factorio is a game, games are supposed to be fun, but clearing away hundreds of Trees one by one, manually, isn't fun.
Note that the problem is in the early game, and the mid game. Roboports arrive, by definition, late game, which is too late to resolve the frustration.
One solution for mid game could be to give the Flamethrower a huge damage bonus vs Trees. Effectively give Trees a negative Fire Resistance, so that they take quadruple damage from Flamethrower. Alternatively, have the Flamethrower create an on-going Ignite debuff on targets that have the "Very Flammable" flag set, which should include Trees (obvious) so that each tick they're hit, if not already "On Fire", they have a 50% chance of getting the "On Fire" debuff and will thereafter take periodic damage with a 5% chance per tick of ceasing to be "On Fire" (greater if it's currently raining; I know weather isn't in the vanilla game yet, but that might change).
But that still leaves early game.
The only really good solutions I can come up with are that when you manually place down an item, e.g. an Assembler Machine 1 or anything else, it simply supersedes any easily removable natural items already present, i.e. it removes Tree but not Rocks. Or else that you can build a Bulldozer, as a drivable vehicle, slow, burning a lot of fuel, and not having much cargo capacity,but with a superb ability to plow through Trees and Corals. Still, even a buildable Bulldozer won't be very early game phase...
Edit: I've made a few changes to the above, fixed a typo, clarified a bit. Also I've found that the Basic Grenade, a fairly early-game item, is pretty good at clearing Trees. It's silly expensive to use against one or two Trees at a time, given that it requires 2 Basic Grenades to do enough damage to destroy a Tree (50 HP, 25 down per Grenade), but if used against larger amounts of Trees, often 5 or 6 at a time, it looks like a decent bargain, compared to using AP Ammo from the SMG. And in the mid game there are Poison Capsules
Nevertheless, I maintain that better, more elegant, less effort-based methods, need to be added to the game, and ones that are available in the early phase. Maybe some kind of Agent Orange Grenade, that create a coloured cloud (not toxic to the player, nor to aliens) which gives Trees a disease that makes them slowly lose HP until they die, and which the player starts the game with a supply of, say 30 or even 50, and with more being craftable after inventing an early Tech?
Because Trees are ******* annoying, and Factorio is a game, and games are supposed to be fun, not work!
Yet there's on "odd man out" here: The removal of Trees. Early and mid game, you have to do that manually. Only in the late game do you get Roboports so that you can automate wood clearing.
Players resort to all sorts of stupid things to avoid having to cut down Trees, including shooting them with Shotguns, or with an SMG with AP ammo. You'd expect the Flamethrower to be superb for removing Trees,but I've not found that to be the case.
I have a distinct preference for playing on Desert maps, and while part of that is the colour scheme, a much larger part is the absence of Trees that must be cleared, so that I don't have to perform to much boring work. Yet one game I played, about a week ago, was in a variant Desert Biome which was very generously littered with tiny Coral plant thingies that also needed to be cleared away. I routinely "regenerate map" until I get a Desert look terrain, though, and most Deserts do not have Corals or at least not more than a few.
Something needs to be done about this. Factorio is a game, games are supposed to be fun, but clearing away hundreds of Trees one by one, manually, isn't fun.
Note that the problem is in the early game, and the mid game. Roboports arrive, by definition, late game, which is too late to resolve the frustration.
One solution for mid game could be to give the Flamethrower a huge damage bonus vs Trees. Effectively give Trees a negative Fire Resistance, so that they take quadruple damage from Flamethrower. Alternatively, have the Flamethrower create an on-going Ignite debuff on targets that have the "Very Flammable" flag set, which should include Trees (obvious) so that each tick they're hit, if not already "On Fire", they have a 50% chance of getting the "On Fire" debuff and will thereafter take periodic damage with a 5% chance per tick of ceasing to be "On Fire" (greater if it's currently raining; I know weather isn't in the vanilla game yet, but that might change).
But that still leaves early game.
The only really good solutions I can come up with are that when you manually place down an item, e.g. an Assembler Machine 1 or anything else, it simply supersedes any easily removable natural items already present, i.e. it removes Tree but not Rocks. Or else that you can build a Bulldozer, as a drivable vehicle, slow, burning a lot of fuel, and not having much cargo capacity,but with a superb ability to plow through Trees and Corals. Still, even a buildable Bulldozer won't be very early game phase...
Edit: I've made a few changes to the above, fixed a typo, clarified a bit. Also I've found that the Basic Grenade, a fairly early-game item, is pretty good at clearing Trees. It's silly expensive to use against one or two Trees at a time, given that it requires 2 Basic Grenades to do enough damage to destroy a Tree (50 HP, 25 down per Grenade), but if used against larger amounts of Trees, often 5 or 6 at a time, it looks like a decent bargain, compared to using AP Ammo from the SMG. And in the mid game there are Poison Capsules
Nevertheless, I maintain that better, more elegant, less effort-based methods, need to be added to the game, and ones that are available in the early phase. Maybe some kind of Agent Orange Grenade, that create a coloured cloud (not toxic to the player, nor to aliens) which gives Trees a disease that makes them slowly lose HP until they die, and which the player starts the game with a supply of, say 30 or even 50, and with more being craftable after inventing an early Tech?
Because Trees are ******* annoying, and Factorio is a game, and games are supposed to be fun, not work!
