[MOD 0.12.22+] Vanilla Plus (obsolete)

[Nasabot]

This mod is outdated since some time and due to 0.15 some features even became obsolete (thats good!)

Am I blind or why do I not find the delete button for this Thread?
If a moderator reads this, please delete.

I am looking forward to 0.15, can't wait!

[vanatteveldt]

Sounds good! Especially better gun turrets and more use for stone sound great, and I've never liked the infinite but slow oil production.

Two questions:

Steel and silicon can now only be produced in steel furnances

How do you 'bootstrap' this, i.e. if steel requires steel, how do you make the first steel furnace?
Or do you mean, they can be produced in stone or steel furnace, but not in electric?

From another post (viewtopic.php?f=16&t=20526):

Gun turret: more tanky,(same HP as laser turrets but additional resistances to make gun turret with its lower range a "frontline" building), lower range, slightly higher damage DPS than Laser turret, consumes ammo

Did you consider making two gun turrets, i.e. keep the current cheap early-game gun turret, and add a beefed up gun turret that also requires e.g. concrete?

[Nasabot]

Steel furnances recipe and technolgy is changed.

Instead of

tech: steel->steelfurnace; (steel for furnace )
its now
tech: steelfurnace->steel (stonebricks for furnace)
Steel and silicon can only be produced in steelfurnace

(the reason why I left the name "steelfurnace" is because it SMELTS steel. So it still makes sense )

It might be a legitimate argument to say that this skips stone furnaces too fast, but for me the slow smelting of stone furnaces in the beginning felt redunant. The recipe for the new steel furnace is not too cheap(25 stone BRICKS and 8 iron) so stone is a more required resource and it will take some time to upgrade your furnaces.

Did you consider making two gun turrets, i.e. keep the current cheap early-game gun turret, and add a beefed up gun turret that also requires e.g. concrete?

Actually I wanted to avoid additional buildings as much as possible to keep the mod slim, but I will consider this. Espacilly new usage of concrete for turrets or walls is something I like. One point I try to make is that in my opinion a different building also needs to looks different(for "readability"). I want the mod to keep the looks of the vanilla version as much as possible and if I introduce a new gunturret I have to recolour it somehow. My idea is that new buildings, if I introduce them, can be distinguished by the player, but still look like its the normal game.

When I first tested it, I didnt felt like the steelcost of the first gun turrets was a big hinderance. In my opinion its totally fine this way.
There is an interesting mechanic: Gun turrets scale better in the long turn, because of technology and laser and gun turrets have similar DPS in lategame(gun turrent a little bit more, because of lower range).
Also I changed the balance of bullets, the early game of pistol and sub machine gun is stronger (3 instead of ~7? hits per enemy), so you are not too reliant on gun turrets for the first waves(as long as you have ammo ofc ^^)


Another interesting thing with bullets is the "assault rifle"(lategame):

Submachinegun: 15/s
Assault rifle: 5/s, +200% damage, higher range

Actually this is an indirect DPS buff(because of enemy armor) and makes "players-shot" bullets equally good than "gun-turret-shot" bullets. (gun turrets have so much technology bonus, so the +200% is a compensation for the tech bonus).

This are the thoughts behind the balancing

As I wrote in the first post I will rebalance combat in the future, but now I am testing what I created and I will finetune the mod on the run.
However, if I rebalance combat I might introduce Tier 2 turrets, but my main focus is on making flame thrower stronger(maybe with enemy negative fire reistance), spawner more durable, granades stronger etc (=weaker weapons viable and niche application)

[shandrolis]

I feel like this mod is getting way too little attention.

Admittedly I have not tried it myself, but I will do so soon.

Anyone want to share their experiences with this?

[Nasabot]

I wondered if people like the mod or not and if they have any suggestions.
My mod is based on my own expections of how a game should be thought through and I KNOW, that a lot of people usually do not care much about (or see it different) of what I consider good game design. I got used to this fact, and I am a minority. When I was younger I wrote a lot of thoughtful suggestions in different game forums just for getting a "no"-oneliner or replies which use arguments I have already disproven in my first post(so you would exspect people to engage on the counterargument)^^

Recently the download number jumped quite a bit and now I am really curious if people like it more than the original game or are like: "Meh, why does the water now gets heated to 400°C, thats stupid" And turn off.

I know that some points are not perfected yet in my mod(there are still some minor inconsistancies) but I plan on updating and tweaking the mod in the future, even more if factorio gets new content patches. Factorio is actually very easy to mod and I enjoy playing while modding *gg
The current problem I see is, that my mod is not fully lategame tested and balancing is based on theoretical thinking, numbercrunching and anchor points, not so much on actually playing the mod for a long time.

An example of my balancing method:
Sword does 10 damage @ 1/s
Dagger does 5 damage @ 2/s

So the anchor point is "10 DPS"
But to enrich the game I would introduce asymetry so I could do something like this:
Dagger has 5 damage @ 2,5/s (12,5DPS) but some enemies get 2 Armor which reduces damage by 2, therefore the sword has an advantage against armored enemies, while the dagger is better vs unarmored enemies.

But here is the problem: Without long term testing it STILL MAY turn out, that the newly introduced asymetry creates a new imbalance so I think the best bet is to do rebalancing ITERATIVLY and with constant feedback from other players. Most games have very long iteration cycles in balancing or are even completly ignorant to it. Not that its a good idea to listen to EVERY shallow emotionally driven suggestion from others, but if somebody says for instance: "Hmm, the new rockets are cool for their long range but they feel a bit redunant compared to the flamethrower which is also very strong against units" I might investigate it further and rethink it.

However, I know its not a good idea to go too crazy about balance, if everything is the same, a game might also becomes boring, but it is important, that every lategame content is at least "usable" (for a rational thinking person, who enjoys optimizaton).

So if anybody has a meaningful suggestion, there is considerable chance that I will think about or even introduce it

[AlexTheNotsogreat]

Any chance you could make this mod opened in a .zip file from download. For some reason, my computer doesn't open .rar files properly, so I can use this mod. Hopefully you can fix this soon.

[Nasabot]

Sorry, I dont know how to add folder and I dont want to make things complicated with external downloads. Have you tried installing other zip programs? I would be surprised if a computer can't handle zip files. I use winrar which can be downloaded for free.

[Factorio2016]

Nasabot

http://imgur.com/YCljgYM

[Raught19]

I have been playing this mod extensively along with Natural Evolution and Swarm. And I have to say, nice job! Its pretty well thought out. Although I'm still trying to get used to this new laser turret setup. With just 6 laser turrets it drains my 600 accumulators pretty quickly... which seems kind of awkward. I enjoy the damage increase and extra weapon slot to tanks as well, very cool! And my favorite part of this mod is the Advanced buildings, like the Mining Drills and Steam Engines. I would like to see you add an Advanced Tank as well, because endgame even with the damage increase of the tank ammo, 1000 health is just super low.

I also noticed you reduced the movement speed while firing the rocket, which I agree with. But I went in myself and changed the damage some. You had it as default for Basic Rocket as 75 and explosive as 45. I changed it to Basic as 165 since its single target, and Explosive to 75, this brings it more in line, especially after the movement decrease when firing and the cost of ammunition. This allows it to at least stand up a little against Behemoths and Big worms.

All in all though, great mod! Very fun to play!

[Narraka]

I just try it and need to stop due to an error. In your recipe of steel furnace, you call it "steel-furnace2" so you need to delete the "2".

edit : I figured out what is wrong. Compatibility mods problems, sorry. But i have an other problem now, more hard to resolve : lot of others electric generator have 90% of green bar production empty when they run at 100% and in the description of them it's never write good production (20 times more but produce only 10% of them).