humblegar wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2019 12:17 am
- You are basically starving because you have to churn out ammo and walls, while you would like to research stuff. We are talking 5+ assemblers for ammo just to stay alive.
That's absolutely intentional. Biter attacks in the campaign are driven by a combination of pollution and research percentage, such that you need more and more of your base's production dedicated to ammo as research progresses. At 90% research, the biter attacks are designed to consume 100% of your production capacity in ammo, so unless you've gotten ahead of the previous attack strength, you're
guaranteed to be overrun.
I think the intended result here is that you start cranking out magazines, circuits, and research. As the research progresses, you have to refit your circuit production to produce ammo instead.
And the faster you are researching, the less time you have to see and respond to the pattern of the attacks. At six science a minute (as recommended), researching the 150-pack green science tech takes 25 minutes. Ammo is consuming about a third of your production capacity; each production line is about two assembly machines worth of production. And if you refit green circuits, it will consume about two-thirds of it. So:
1. Refit green circuits within 8 minutes
2. Add further capacity within 16 minutes
3. Outpace attack intensity before 22 minutes
That's two labs. If you have four, your times get shorter. If you have six, they're even shorter. At eight, you have to figure out what's going on and respond to it in less than
six minutes (Doug E. Fresh, you're on).
And if you're producing that much science, you'd need
dozens of assemblers producing ammo. Because it's percentage-based
and scaled to pollution. If you build out much larger than the requirements for the goal, the game punishes you for it. Mo' production, mo' problems.
Likewise, if you add (say) two assemblers producing walls, it skews your percentages and you go from needing four ammo assemblers to five.
But! If you spend ten minutes beforehand researching optional tech,
and refit your electronics production for ammo, while building your defence perimetre and setting up your turrets...
everything changes.
That ten minutes at 50% production (assuming two wall assemblers) gets you far enough ahead that 50% production for the next 25 minutes is essentially 70% production the whole time. What you actually need is an average of roughly 55% production, so you have a surplus at the end.
An experienced player doesn't need very long to crank out those production lines, and then when the game says "research production science" they go "yeah, definitely, right away" without thinking for one second that
assigned goals advance the story progression.
Because that's not how Factorio works, is it?
I think it's that assumption that is biting people. "This is not how the game works." But the entire structure of the campaign looks and feels like an RTS mission, so I think most players will
approach it like an RTS mission. Which means they're not approaching it the way Factorio works, they're approaching it the way Starcraft or Civilization works.