My observations from playing the game (Trains/wishlist)

[Nirahiel]

Also using signals, you can merge several rail lines together, saving a lot of materials, and you can also setup two way routes, thing you can't do with belts.

[ssilk]

I see that only for transportation of the character, the car or trains. Because to let it open all the time will cost just too much power.

Does anybody know the commonwealth saga from Peter f. Hamilton? A must-read for anybody, which likes space opera. There are such star gates, which needs whole nuclear power plants to keep them open and the transport between the planets is done by trains. So they spare energy, because only trains are able to transport enormous masses in short time.
The whole story sounds stupid, but only in the first moment, and technically using trains for transportation through stargates is a very cool idea, because you couple existing working technology with high tech.

I like that. And it is soooo steam-punky.

And to be more concrete: at first you have a very small gate. Just enough for the character. And perhaps only one times useable. But thats ok, because you can research a better. And when you researched car and/or train, the biggest type of gate can be researched.

[cube]

I see that only for transportation of the character, the car or trains. Because to let it open all the time will cost just too much power.

Does anybody know the commonwealth saga from Peter f. Hamilton? A must-read for anybody, which likes space opera. There are such star gates, which needs whole nuclear power plants to keep them open and the transport between the planets is done by trains. So they spare energy, because only trains are able to transport enormous masses in short time.
The whole story sounds stupid, but only in the first moment, and technically using trains for transportation through stargates is a very cool idea, because you couple existing working technology with high tech.

I like that. And it is soooo steam-punky.

And to be more concrete: at first you have a very small gate. Just enough for the character. And perhaps only one times useable. But thats ok, because you can research a better. And when you researched car and/or train, the biggest type of gate can be researched.

I think the main difference is gate vs teleporter (stargate style vs startrek style ). Gate should imho take a lot of energy just to keep opened and then transfer stuff almost for free, but a teleporter should remain inactive most of the time and only consume (lots of) power when actually transfering things.

[ficolas]

If we need to choose I would choose gate because its cooler :3

[slpwnd]

At the moment moving around the factory and between the mining exps is really annoying. That was my biggest takeaway from playing quite a lot recently.

I am not so sure about the teleporters though, for two reasons:
1) Technologically it doesn't really feel fit in the game. Of course the gameplay comes first, but still. Having belts and inserters and trains, everything nice and (relatively) simple and then boom there is a teleport gate that takes you who knows where.
2) In case of pair to pair gates some hierarchical structure would have to be setup. This might actually be interesting or it might be really annoying because to move from one edge of the factory to another one you need to jump through 4 hops and know which ones those are.

Personally I think the car is underrated. If we have a mechanics to move safely with the car in and about the factory that would be a great step forward (mentioned couple of times before in the ideas & suggestions thread). Another option would be to have a something like a personal hovercraft that doesn't have collision with regular building and you can use it too move fast in your factory. Or the ultimate alternative when you just enter the "throne room" and give orders to your building robots.

Another points mentioned are valid. The repair robots are needed especially since we would like to introduce a shooting kind of enemy (spitter? ). One thing that I am personally looking forward to is making some kind of "diplomacy" with the enemies and avoid fighting with them whatsoever. This would involve alternative ways to get the alien science packs. This has also been mentioned many times before. I believe it will add an interesting alternative storyline to the game when the player will be able to choose to cooperate with the "natives" rather than just keep destroying them.

[Nirahiel]

I have some ideas for the car, but I need to sort them in my head before posting a suggestion topic

[ssilk]

Yes, teleporter/gates doesn't fit into the game right from beginning. But I think the gameplay needs here a simple element to speed up traveling. It must not be a teleporter/gate! Anything, which speeds that up is welcome. Faster walk, faster car...

... My vision from faster travel is by a helicopter. You need landing places and helicopters and they fly automatically and very fast. You only need to say to which landing site you want. Nothing else is needed. So they work not much different to a teleporter, and you can speed the helicopter traveling by research. I think that would fit into factorio. You have the "I need have been there to place a helicopter station."-element. It is no transportation of items (maybe later?), it's just to speed things up.

A second idea: the car can be much faster and there could be something like streets, which allows to have extreme speeds. There is a whole thread about streets and also here the driving could be more or less automatic, you just need car stations, which also can do the filling of the cars.

[I would also add, that the filling of coal by hand every time, when you place a car is ugly and time eating. I didn't also understand, how I can take a lot of cars and locomotives in my inventory, but be myself not nearly as fast as a loco. ]

I dunno, if I would like a hovercraft. Maybe it's cool, maybe not. (a heli sounds to me more logical) but I'm sure I would like to race around with the car, if it would behave like a car and streets would bring new elements into the gameplay, because a street is eventually nothing than a big plate and hinders the worms to make new bases...

[cube]

I think it would be nice to have partial automatic obstacle avoidance for cars (turning towards an obstacle would be slower than turning in a free area)

[Balinor]

I'd prefer a click to move option for the car. Currently the control of it feels clunky to me. I like the sound of the hovercraft and the "throne" room suggestion though.

[Imp0815]

Teleports
Its a nice idea but what should i do with my car then? And whats about the trains?

Cars would still be useful for exploration and trains for mass transportation of cargo.
I believe that teleports should be fairly slow to recharge after every use and that they should eat up quite a lot of energy.
We were also talking about teleports begin able to transport items -- at high energy cost and in low volumes.
This would be ideal for transfering some hypotetical rare resources from far away mining sites. Although it could also mess up the game ballance a lot

Balance fixes
That would be a game changing mechanic. You get in front of an alien base out of detection range, set up your artillery pieces and set up a defense line and then start to pound on there base. Then the creepers swarm out to kill you and die in a horrible death of leasers, bullets and mines (that would put finally a good use to those). I could see this would be a funny thing but it would be very repetitive after the 10th base or so. You should make more options to kill off those aliens then its on the player to decide how to deal with them. The only problem i could see that after a while some perfectionist figure out whats most efficient way and just use it only and then go to the forums and complain uhhh its always the same and too easy.
So on every method to attack there should be a trade off Maybe the artillery takes longer than rushing with a robot army but a robot army is expensive and not very reliable and save than a setup long range outpost. And just dealing yourself with the thread its harder but more rewarding like double the drop when player kills off the buildings.
So i can see there is potential and most of this is already in the game but its on the developer side to decide what fits there taste the most.

+1, i think that automated artillery is the factorio way to conquer bases.

Ha! I just took the thought a little bit further, how about train mounted artillery Guns like in World War 2? You could lay tracks to the position you want to assault and then drive the Cannon there and begin with the pounding. Also you need to build a logistic system that provide your gun with the big artillery shells. Maybe Drones or an other Train wagon that is only used to store these big artillery shells
You need to put the both train rails parallel and then place inserters that put the shells into the gun after each shot. Hell that would be Amazing.

[ssilk]

I mean this is an excellent idea, because in most cases, the resources are, where the native live. So this is one of the best reasons to begin building tracks. And when you have the first track then the second is not much more afford.


Additionally, the more tracks you have, the more complicated it is to drive through the network, without crashing. I like that, because then you need also to setup the signals correctly and this would be cool: built a track and then request a train, in this case the "fight-train"

What's also fun: sitting in the train and setting the tracks while driving; if that works in a way, that you don't always need to stop, because you need to switch to curves etc. this would really rock.

And some other point: artillery is very air polluting! So, when you set an artillery, and shoot for a while, the surrounds is extremely polluted and the natives will begin to start fight against it.

[slpwnd]

Ha! I just took the thought a little bit further, how about train mounted artillery Guns like in World War 2?

This sounds good. Nice combination of convenient attack and preparation for moving the resources later on to your base.

[Nova]

If you want to implement it, you HAVE to call it "Schwerer Gustav". Biggest railway gun of the world, firing shells of 7 tons over 29 Miles (41 km). Well, we REALLY want to not only kill, but DESTROY the worms, biters and anything around them!

[Psycho0124]

Does anybody know the commonwealth saga from Peter f. Hamilton? A must-read for anybody, which likes space opera. There are such star gates, which needs whole nuclear power plants to keep them open and the transport between the planets is done by trains. So they spare energy, because only trains are able to transport enormous masses in short time.
The whole story sounds stupid, but only in the first moment, and technically using trains for transportation through stargates is a very cool idea, because you couple existing working technology with high tech.

I was thinking about this in relation to the game storyline and thought of a neat idea that might could make the storyline more appealing.
What if the ship that crashed was on a mission to establish a big inter-planetary portal/wormhole on the planet; like a receiving end to a portal already built on earth for sending over colonists? It would eliminate the need to have colony ships in orbit and explain the lack of orbital assistance. After the untimely crash, the player would be the only living person for light-years in all directions; making for a good story mechanic of utter isolation. One lone technician trying to complete the mission of the whole crew/ship.
The ship would have been carrying modules linked through quantum entanglement from Earth to built the gateway. They could have been strewn all over the continent in the crash (tough/high-tech shielded casings; survived reentry?). The 'entanglement modules' could emit some kind of frequency/energy that causes the biters to collect them (a direct replacement for alien artifacts inside Biter spawners even?) and attack the base when they're used. It would explain how mindless biters have such valuable loot, and how they're so useful for research and construction. The player might could even build some kind of quantum reactor, load it with the q-modules and collect the energy for end-game massive power production.

The player might could build temporary micro-wormholes to allow for trade with earth during the course of the game. Rather than the rocket-defense being the end-game goal, the player would need to collect enough modules, build, and then charge up a big gateway (maybe the gateway charging processes attracts biters from a huge radius, like a large scale attraction that the entanglement doodads cause?). When the charging is complete, the gateway could do some big dramatic animation with sci-fi looking arms extending, sparks and lightning bolts, the wormhole opening, and high-tech military troops/tanks stream out and save the day. Very satisfying after all that building/fighting.

Meh, just some thoughts.

edit:
Bummer.. Sorta been done before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Space_%28film%29

on a 10-year mission in suspended animation to the nearby planet Alpha Prime, where they will build a companion "hypergate" to the one orbiting Earth.

Oh well..

[slpwnd]

@Psycho0124 The story is very good. On the other hand same as you we found out there is just too many foreign planet survival / colonizing games already. Maybe the best would be to have no story whatsoever, oh well ...

[Nova]

No story? No, please not. "Factorio" itself should have no story, but the campaign should. I like the idea of Psycho0124. It would nealy fit perfect: One person needs to build gigantic factories - enough work for a whole crew without huge automatisated parts.

[ficolas]

There are also lots of medieval RPGs and that doesnt mean a new one with something diferent isnt cool

[ssilk]

I mean it should have a story. But why only one?

When I think back to the ideas in this thread and at some others! I come to the conclusion that there are so many, that it would be a pity not have them all.

And how could that be? Of course not with logical explainable stories. There are two sorts of stories which can be the setup/background for all the others:

- inside a dream/nightmare/part of an experiment, I think that type of story knows everyone. Think for example to assassins creed, which take this background story to create endless new.

- humorous, non-logic. The background is just the inverse of the mission. The missions are logic (more or less), serious, dangerous, dark, you are completely alone, unknown aliens, unknown unknowns etc. The background is the opposite: light, funny, completly idiotic and everyone knows what's coming next, because you are interacting with other persons. An example how that could work I made here https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... t=10#p9821

Well, of course it could work without story, but I mean the community will create some, and for that case it makes sense to decide, in which direction it should go. (There are of course more than these two)

[slpwnd]

No story? No, please not. "Factorio" itself should have no story, but the campaign should. I like the idea of Psycho0124. It would nealy fit perfect: One person needs to build gigantic factories - enough work for a whole crew without huge automatisated parts.

The campaign will have a story:) Kovarex is working on it. And I kind of like it.

What I meant is that I am not sure if we should present the game as Yet Another Alien planet survival-builder game.

[ssilk]

For me the building was always in foreground. The creepers and now the natives was only there, because of having a bit more hurry. Yes, the story are not the natives (they bring some elements in, which makes good stories easier) but the story is the player and his big "task"... Why is he really there?