I think I've modded myself into an autoloss

MisterFister · Post by **MisterFister** » Sat Oct 28, 2017 4:31 am

I have a confession to make: I think I officially outsmarted myself.

TLDR -- I am wondering if, after reading my description below of my bootstrap efforts so far, if this modlist is even winnable in single player.

Running a lot (i.e., many dozens) of errata-type mods that are largely irrelevant to my overall point here, such as Cardinal, Asphalt Roads, TrainSpeedLimit, the non-Angels Warehouse Mod (in addition to Angels, see below) Flow Control, Bottleneck, etc.

But. I decided to challenge myself. "Push the envelope," as it were. Hard mode. Masochist. Steeper difficulty curves make for more rewarding milestones, yes?

Well, now, I'm wondering if survival in these modded conditions is even possible. Behold:

Full Bobs (first time)
Full Angels (also first time... yeah, yeah, I know...)
RSO (experienced with it)
Rampant (experienced with it on a MP server with me and a second player, not experienced 1p)
Axial Tilt (for that extra spicy aftertaste once you climb the hump into solar power)
Mk 3 and Mk 4 Armor mods (various overlapping)
Dirt Path (turns land tiles into desert if heavily traveled -- note that desert tiles allow pollution to spread more quickly, inconsequential in small scale, but with greater surface area of tiles transmuted to desert biome.... See above, "Rampant.")
NoHandCraft (first time, going for Lazy Bastard achievement -- facepalm buffering 50% complete)
Marathon Mod on top of default-option marathon-mode settings (facepalm buffering 95% complete)
OreChaos (facepalm buffering complete, continue)

Map ore settings (RSO, Angels, Bobs) universal default except water very large very rare, to allow for large lakes and oceans with lots of opportunity for natural chokepoints. First bootstrap attempt, 4 hours in, no steam electricity yet, manual everything, manual filter everything with OreChaos on all ores including starter area.

After 4 hours with no ammo beyond starter ammo and starter pistol, depleted starter area of coal, no ability to contest biters to expand for new (and still coal burner everything with less than two stacks of belt, and with no electricity that means no starter research dome) I wised up and said funk dat and re-rolled the same mape string but disallowed OreChaos on starter area resource patches.

With that re-roll and some carryover knowledge of map layout and starter biter locations, I "raced" to bootstrap as much as possible, as quick as possible. Marathon settings make everything SUPER expensive, even before NoHandCraft. Tech researches STARTED at costs of 100 red bottles and up. TEN copper plate to one copper coil, NINE copper coil to one low-tier circuit (analog for vanilla green circuit.) ONE HUNDRED FIFTY iron plate to yield THREE steel plate. Filter inserters and electric ore crushers both require mid-tier circuits. Depleted starter coal, was lucky enough that the next logical coal expansion (OreChaos contaminated) is 1.3M and on a peninsula such that most of its pollution cloud only aggros over water chunks.

I'm nineteen hours into the setup. Scaled up to 8 boilers / 16 steam gens. I estimate that I have about 3-ish hours of manually and tediously transferring ores and intermediary ingredients to eke out the bare minimum of filter inserters to properly decontaminate the coal ore and to finally get started on electric burners for a single yellow belt each of automated iron, steel, copper, lead, and tin.

And note the inflated ratios -- NINETY copper plate to ONE basic circuit.

My problem is that the EVOgui indicates 60% evo. Medium biters already take 5 or 6 turrets to focus down successfully (TWENTY iron plate to ONE yellow ammo cartridge.) Within the last ninety minutes of gameplay I've seen a sudden uptick of biter nest expansions inward toward my starter area. THREE crushed stone to ONE stone, FIVE stone to smelt ONE stone brick, FIVE stone brick to ONE wall segment. FIVE iron plate into ONE iron gear. I have a choice that I can EITHER invest my iron into research, OR into ammo and turret creep, OR into filter inserters and electric crushers. Any of those three choices seems to foreclose the other two, and there's a new biter nest that just spawned on the outskirts of my pollution cloud.

I can re-roll, or I can restart from the same seed. I ENJOY a challenge, I am NOT complaining. Instead, I am asking if winning is even possible on this super-hard-mode mod combination I've curated.

I'm new to Factorio forums, I can post screenies / modlist / savefile upon request if someone explains how.

PS -- the delightful side effect of the crafting ratios above is that with these settings, it actually becomes worthwhile to contemplate dedicating whole mainbus channels to intermediaries such as iron gears and copper coils, since they compress down from ore so drastically.

MisterFister · Post by **MisterFister** » Sat Oct 28, 2017 4:36 am

Map exchange string

Savefile dropbox link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/uxhw4et6w5xx8 ... 1.zip?dl=0

Flux Faraday · Post by **Flux Faraday** » Mon Oct 30, 2017 10:36 pm

I love this post. I have no idea what the answer to your question is, but the notion of an unwinnable start is appealing in a masochistic sort of way. A couple of years ago I was playing Dytech, which was totally winnable. But I got off to too slow a start. As the evolution factor grew and I started to run out of materials for power and repair packs, I realized there was no hope of pushing past the nests to the next ore patches. RIP. Thanks for sharing your tale of woe

MisterFister · Post by **MisterFister** » Tue Oct 31, 2017 4:50 am

To be entirely clear, my own speculation of autoloss isn't entirely reliable, since I'm a slow-grind type of player to begin with. I am ENTIRELY willing to be convinced that there exists a sort of "Overton Window" (a polisci term) of winnability here that I simply sailed past very early into a twenty-some-odd hour attempt so far. Simply, the testing that I imagine might be needed to attempt to prove or disprove that... I simply don't think I could restart it enough times, after playing deep enough each time to get a solid idea, to discover it definitively.

I posted my info here in the errant hope that maybe someone else would take it as a challenge themselves, thereby helping me out. Of course, I theorize that fast-tracking to turrets, automation, and other key tech nodes in pursuit of expanding asap might be possible, but sheesh.

For repeatability's sake, I think the fairest examples would come from everyone working off the same mapseed -- which unfortunately only introduces the possibility that I suppose MAYBE the mapseed itself could be the problem. Nevertheless, as I say above, the mapseed I am using has somewhat feasible chokepoints nearby, AND has expansion ore patches at the far flung edges of the RSO-expanded starter area WITHIN the first set of obvious chokepoints. (...I simply haven't by this point managed to invest enough stone into walls, let alone metal into turrets, to successfully seal those chokes.

It's a frustrating prospect to slog through that startup repeatedly, but one possibility that crosses my mind type this here is to fast-tech to oil and grease turrets to back up the regular turrets. I might consider that.

I'll report back here on my progress, though with life and work and school, those reports might be infrequent.

BlakeMW · Post by **BlakeMW** » Tue Oct 31, 2017 12:47 pm

Basically you need to be able to get to flamethrower turrets before big biters evolve or you are forked cause if you're struggling to be cost-effective against mediums the bigs will utterly destroy you. Fire not only kills anything it also does so absurdly cheaply compared with throwing away iron plates making bullets. I'm not sure how possible it'd be to get Flamethrowers quickly enough with your mods but fortunately the material requirements are pretty simple even with Bobs+Angels - military packs require a lot of iron but nothing complex, and the flamethrower tech itself only requires a small number of military packs compared with other techs.

Selvek · Post by **Selvek** » Tue Oct 31, 2017 8:11 pm

Wow... I'm speechless... this sounds like the most painful experience one could imagine.

impetus maximus · Post by **impetus maximus** » Tue Oct 31, 2017 9:05 pm

MisterFister wrote:Map exchange string:

use spoiler= tag along with code tag.

map exchange string

Naviaux · Post by **Naviaux** » Wed Nov 01, 2017 4:07 pm

I think I have an idea of which mods you have installed, but could you post all the mods you have installed? I'm quite interested in doing this myself.

MisterFister · Post by **MisterFister** » Fri Nov 03, 2017 2:47 am

impetus maximus wrote:

MisterFister wrote:Map exchange string:

use spoiler= tag along with code tag.

map exchange string

Thanks dude!

Naviaux wrote:I think I have an idea of which mods you have installed, but could you post all the mods you have installed? I'm quite interested in doing this myself.

Sorry about that. In posting my savefile, I was under the impression that the savefile itself would provide a modlist. My mods folder has 112 items in it not including the 2 .json files, though a fair number of them are cosmetic / QoL mods (Bottleneck, Asphalt Roads, etc.) Notably, full Angels, full Bobs, RSO, Rampant, NoHandCraft. Also note that the savefile would provide exact map settings and mod settings as well. It provided a Dropbox link individually to my savefile above, but I'll post a link to go to the entire folder, now that I have more info in it.

MisterFister · Post by **MisterFister** » Fri Nov 03, 2017 3:19 am

Notable non-standard settings:

Preset: Marathon
Water frequency VeryLow, water size VeryBig, all other resources default
Mod settings: [Startup] generally default I think
[Map] Axial Tilt 365 days, OreChaos Default exclude starting area (originally attempted straight Default -- nope, 5 hours in still no steam electricity). All other settings default.

All of these settings were verified from my own memory after a slow and detailed scroll-through the mapgen and mod settings screens. Note that I did choose icon overlay scaling for warehouses, which is cosmetic and can be manually manipulated through the .json after the map is created.

Note that with the map string, of course, you can use lua commands to reveal the terrain in a baseline saved off to the side and then revert to a pre-cheat-code savefile so that achievements are not disabled. Therefore, physical terrain features including orefields would be identical for anyone else attempting this, and the same for default starter biter nest locations. Differences would then develop as a result of biter expansions.

Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kjoy8i3brgx8 ... 3SwCa?dl=0
Within that link I provide my latest autosave (two-minute intervals) as well as MapGen[1-3] to show mapgen settings. Modlist to show mods folder contents. SaveState1 shows mod-provided HUD info on progression and playtime elapsed. SaveState2 shows mapview. For better visibility here, I provided pollution data that does not show up very well on the screensnip (red outline shows furthest extent of lowest-intensity pollution cloud, purple outline shows inner radius of second-level pollution.) Power grid view is enabled. Turquoise indicates high-threat biter locations, including a roaming pack due east of central production area, and biter nests 1 and 2 in order of tactical threat importance. Light orange highlights potentially accessible orefield expansions if not for biter presence -- though to be clear, even with biters cleared, I have absolutely NO ability to expand to those areas any time soon anyway.

Note that my own playthrough experience with Rampant allows me to know that at some point in biter evolution, attacks will eventually come to be literally non-stop and constant. Literally never a time when there is no tooltip popup, requiring fasttrack research to laser turrets and grease turrets, as well as emphasis on solar changeover to support laser, as well as EXTREME emphasis on ammo belts to all outer perimeter walls.

With these Rampant settings, I know from previous experience that literal minimum perimeter requirements will include 3-layer solid wall, dragons-teeth wall buffer at least 4-tiles deep (up to 7 deep in high-threat chokepoints) with minimum of 2-layer gun turret OR (because power generation will be a bitch initially) 3-deep laser, with a 1.5 deep grease turrets behind those (1.5 = solid line of grease turrets just behind the laser, followed by half-full line behind that first line.) In a mostly-vanilla playthrough with RSO and Rampant only, lasers become necessary roughly around the time that belt-delivered orefield expansions became stupid and rail became absolutely necessary -- roughly around the pink-yellow science threshold.

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