Friday facts #151 - The plans for 0.14

[kovarex]

I'm sad to see that a combat-rebalance is not on the list for your plans before 1.0.

The new additions to combat lately are nice, like the new grenades and flamethrowers. But there are some issues with Factorio's existing combat, particularly with the balance between items. An easy example is to compare the rocket launcher to the shotgun:
1) The rocked launcher requires much more research. Its ammo is complex to produce and expensive since it requires oil. It does a mere 72 DPS with explosive rockets until you get max upgrades, at which point it does 298 DPS.
2) The combat shotgun is easier to unlock. It's ammo is cheap - it's just some steel and copper. It does 230DPS with piercing shells, and after upgrades it does 1318 DPS. It's damage is divided into 16 projectiles which makes it weak against enemies with lots of resistance... but even against a behemoth biter with 8/10% resistance it still does 388DPS, still more than the rocket launcher (which does 197 in this case).

Have you ever tried fighting max-evolution bases with the rocket launcher? It takes over a hundred rockets to kill a behemoth biter, and by the time you kill it (~45 seconds) plenty more have spawned. It's truly futile. If reviewers find that Factorio's most expensive (handheld) weapon is pretty much useless, they'll think that the game is unfinished and unready for release. And that's tragic because the rest of the game is so good!

The solution isn't just to make rockets better because there are lots of other balance issues too that are interrelated. There have been plenty of discussions on this forum about what needs to change, and I think you may need to check the Health, resistance, walking speed, damage, range, cooldown etc of every entity in the game. It's a lot of work, but at least it wouldn't require programming or recompiling.

I'm sure others would prefer that you spend your precious development time on building-gameplay features and improvements. Afterall, Combat is not the focus of Factorio. It's not why I bought it, and it's not why I continue to play it. If I only wanted some violence, I could play Doom or something. Factorio's greatest strength is its building-focused gameplay. But combat is important because it enhances the building-gameplay too:

1) It creates a need to unlock research and produce items. Most of the technology tree is focused on military.
2) It penalizes producing too much pollution and it adds a cost to expanding to new resources, which protects the pacing of gameplay. Without combat, you can beat the game much too quickly and there's no need to explore.

Some people don't like violence, so Peaceful Mode is good to have. But there are people who use Peaceful Mode only because the combat isn't always fun, and that's a shame because it makes a lot of Factorio's incentive structure fall apart. For example, it should be fun to automate the production of rockets and set up a munitions factory... but why bother if rockets are useless?

My overall enjoyment of the game would really improve if I thought that the combat was compelling, fun, and motivating... even if that's not my main reason for playing.

P.S. There are lots of suggestions and ideas for combat in other parts of the forum, but I would really like to see an early-game solution to keeping things repaired. I imagine an inserter-like repair arm that is stationary and can pick up repair packs from behind it and repair the building in front of it. It's not as good as Construction Robots, of course, but roboports take a lot of research. I think this would allow for combat improvements when biters attack your defenses. Right now, if the biters can reach your turrets and cause damage, it is very tedious to run around and keep things repaired. To avoid this tedium, players build lots of turrets and have so much DPS that enemies die before they can cause damage. But this results in really boring battles, the waves of biters get annihilated in under two seconds. There's no tension or drama because the enemies seem so weak. If repairing things can be automated, then even early-game enemies can be given more HP (or turrets less DPS) to create more longer, more interesting battles without introducing extra tedium. In general I wish combat was slower and more thoughtful, to better match Factorio's thoughtful building gameplay.

You are right.

[ketil]

I think a special container for radioactive waste should be needed to avoid the radiation to spread from the items inside to the surroundings.

Make the nuclear reactor damage itself every n ticks. Research can decrease the amount it damages itself each time and maybe also increase the time between each time it damages itself. The more damaged the reactor is, the faster it damages itself. When the damage goes over a certain amount, it produce more power and its water consumption increases to cool it down, if the water pipes doesn't have enough capacity it damages itself faster. The extra water then pollutes the surroundings with radioactive materials. When the damage is high enough the reactor melts down and is permanently damaged, and if you are not able to get enough water to cool it down, or if you don't manage to repair it fast enough,it explodes and spreads a huge amount of radiation over a huge area.

I see two different strategies for covering a broken reactor. One is to use construction bots to build a shelter over it, these construction bots get damaged in the process. Another alternative is to make a cover building some distance away, and move it on rails with at least two parallel tracks some distance apart. This shelter could be moved at the speed of e.g. 1 tile per minute until it's in position.

The best strategy for a nuclear reactor is to keep a good supply of water, fuel, power(can be provided by itself), repair packs, and construction bots at hand. When one of these things fail it might be hard or too late to fix, depending on the situation.

[hitzu]

In my mind nuclear power plant should require a bit of circuitry in its design in order to operate properly with no meltdowns. It would detect the temperature/pressure in the reaction chamber and decide what to do: move uranium rods or add cold water or exhaust the radioactive steam etc. It should be not very complicated, but it should provide a variety of many different designs.

And there should be an option to use the radioactive waste as a dirty bomb

And please, add some more specific buildings aside from assemblers and chem plants. For example vehicles should be crafted in a hangar and deployed in the form of an entity, centrifuges for enriching neclear fuel or industrial autoclaves for producing concrete and composite materials etc. There should be some divericty in using machines.

[Fatmice]

Well, I am glad nuclear power will finally be coming to Factorio.

You know what will even be better? If the dev's implementation of it will render my mod obsolete. I'm glad there are already a number of very nice suggestions regarding game mechanics that do not already exist regarding nuclear power. There is only so much that could be created in a mod and game mechanic like radioactivity "cloud" isn't one of the more feasible one for a mod, especially if such cloud spreads. The next being multiple fluid type occupying a single fluid-box. This is simply not tenable in a mod. The last and perhaps most important is recipe that add or subtract energy in a fluid.

Currently, I'm doing a rewrite of the mod, so hopefully it will be even better than the dev's version due to the extra mechanics that will be introduced.

[keyboardhack]

Hopefully multithread works out without any "shit this isn't possible" bugs. Looking forward to all the optimizations possible in 0.14.

I Guess WaiTex will slowly die when 0.14 is released. RIP WaiTex.

[Mooncat]

The hype for 0.14 now begins... (too early? )

By the way, are we expecting the space platform to be in 1.0 or later?

[Ironwolf200]

That's pretty much how I went about it when I made my Uranium Power mod. However it made a lot more sense to use chemical plants rather than a specialised centrifuge building.

There were a few core problems that I couldn't solve, and I eventually walked off in frustration.

During the enrichment process, when do you stop? It doesn't do it justice to have a single product called "Enriched Uranium", and it seems a waste not to have rows of centrifuges slowly purifying your Uranium 235. But then when do you stop? Do you let the player make fuel pellets out of every enrichment value? With the current system of recipes, this is just too much.

Do you bother about nuclear waste? Over the span of the game you would produce so little. Is it even worth modeling? On the other hand, who doesn't want to make plutonium.

How do you implement a reactor? Is it just a single building that produces electricity? That would be a little dull. The only other option as I see it is a glorified boiler, but then that doesn't mesh well with the implementation of boilers and steam engines. It could work if the rebalanced/reworked it.

I'd say more centrifuges = faster to produce "Enriched Uranium". A single centrifuge/centrifuge plant would produce a small amount, and so you would need several and/or with modules and beacons to produce enriched material at a usable level. You could model enrichment by more "enriched uranium" meaning higher enrichment. Put "enriched uranium" into a centrifuge and get a tiny bit more enriched uranium. This would basically make uranium a limitless resource, but it would only be practical with a massive amount of centrifuges, or, ideally, by continuing to put raw material through. Although I'm not sure it would be useful to model enrichment for power. Between 3%, 3.5%, 4%, it just changes the physics a little, and so we're playing less Factorio and more Monte Carlo. I'd just stick with the "uranium" into "enriched uranium" and not mind where exactly we come out at.

Realistically, there would be very little waste produced. Especially, for balance sake, we wouldn't be building huge reactors to produce 1000MWe. Maybe something around 30MWe would fit into the game and balance. Tiny tiny amounts of output waste over a long period of time, as in it could be neglected and not bother modeling it. One option would be to ditch realism for the sake of gameplay, make waste generation something really high. Or, to add complexity and gameplay, you could add specialized reactors or reprocessing mechanics. A reactor could be run in "power mode" where input enriched uranium would be more efficiently turned into electricity, or "material mode", where input enriched uranium would be more efficiently turned into waste, although produce much less power. For reprocessing, put "spent fuel" into a reprocessing/chemical plant and get uranium, plutonium, and high-level waste as an output. Uranium can be put back into the reactor, although the amount produced would obviously have to be balanced to avoid unlimited resources. The plutonium could be used to make a tactical nuclear weapon. Completely turns an area to dust, sets fires around the perimeter of the blast zone, produces a ton of pollution, may require special launcher. Plutonium could also be used to mix with uranium to make MOX, mixed-oxide fuel, which would be basically the same as enriched uranium for the sake of simplicity. The high-level waste would have to be dealt with somehow, maybe put it into an assembler with concrete to make dry storage casks and hopefully make it so they can't just be put into a box and destroyed. "Spent fuel" could also just be put into casks directly if you don't want to deal with the reprocessing or the tech hasn't been unlocked for it yet.

A large building, like on the scale of the rocket silo, where you have enriched uranium in, power, and perhaps waste, out would be simplest. You could break everything into parts, take several regular pumps to feed into a coolant circulation pump, feed into the reactor, have another pump to go through the generators. Of course, you would need new generators to reasonably extract power from the thing, opposed to connecting 50 vanilla steam engines to one reactor. If everything is separated into parts, that could lead to making boiling-water or pressurized-water reactors, by different configurations. Say, PWRs need the added complexity and volume of the extra coolant loop in exchange for a bit more power production, perhaps. There's also the added complexity to the game of trying to make sure the game recognizes what counts as a PWR or BWR. Separate tech levels, separate buildings, maybe?

[afk2minute]

i hope developers would not go absurdly 'close to reality' path like many people want here, leave this to modders please.

Also if you are going nuclear, can we have RITEGs too?
They would be even more great.

[devilwarriors]

You guys are never going to mention FFF#120 concrete ever again are you?
No plan for that to be part of that HD upgrade?

[Linkens]

Hi,
Really nice roadmap here, I really look forward to seeing more !

I wanted to suggest some ideas :

If you plan to input nuclear power, if done realisticaly, it implies to have some sort of higher voltage network.
Has I work in the field, I maybe can show you a very factorioesque way to implement this:
Electric_power_distribution on wikipedia is a good way to start.

Here are the basics :
You have a high voltage network with the corresponding voltage: V1
the current flows through the cables at the rate it is consumed by the high voltage machines, lets say : pump jack MK2 or electrical smelter MK2.
But at some point you need to have a lower voltage to power inserters and assemblers. So you use a Step down transformer to get from V1 to V2 (Less voltage, more current !)
The transformer is a new entity and could use insulating material to function (constant flow of nitrogen,oil byproducts, new CO2 based gases)

Sudden changes in current (high demand, lighting strikes and damaged pole) can be a problem for a network and can cause malfunctions.
For this, you need circuit breakers that can stop the default and insulate the "clean" network from the "dirty" one, not doing so could damage your installations (or melt inserters )
In a nutshell circuit breakers are switches on steroid, and are also insulated by the same material as transformers.
(IRL huge circuit breaker with insane dielectric resistance are INDISPENSABLE for any high voltage production center ie : Nuclear plants)

Those entities could make the layout puzzle more fun on the power generation side.

There are other entities on a real network but I think those would suffice for a game like factorio.
As a programmer myself, I could do some modding, and as you already created separate network logics I think this could be feasable, but :
1- I'm a terrible designer and my entities would probably look as weird potatoes.
2- I think I'd need Current and Voltage flow logic on each subnetwork and a Voltage requirement of every electrical elements. (I'm not sure a mod can do this.)
3- You'd probably do a better job anyway.

If you think this is interesting, I'm more than happy to provide what I know on the subject.

anyway good job and keep up the excellent work !

[Mooncat]

You guys are never going to mention FFF#120 concrete ever again are you?
No plan for that to be part of that HD upgrade?

Maybe it will be in 0.14. There was no word mentioning it would be in 0.13.

[Machine Medic]

The main thing I would like to see with the introduction of atomic energy is the addition of a high power steam turbine. Steam engines work fine for the beginning of the game, but the ratio of steam engines to electric furnaces means that it takes 120+ steam engines to fill up four red belts with iron plates and still have a good capacity to spare. Being able to consolidate power generation to a handful of very expensive 4-30MW steam turbines would break the tedium of spamming more steam engines and boilers on a regular basis. Steam turbines may require rotor or blade assemblies that wear slowly over time.

As far as the nuclear side of things, definitely go with a reactor that outputs fluid heat, rather than electricity.

Reactors should utilize fuel that is enriched to varying degrees. Maximum capable heat-energy output should be proportional to the level of fuel enrichment. Fuel assembly (or reactor core) temperature should be inversely proportional to the coolant input flow rate and temperature, directly proportional to the fuel enrichment level and power setting, and should factor the thermal mass of the reactor. Reactors should either utilize 0-255 or 0-1 output power control schemes via GUI and/or circuit network. Exceeding the maximum safe fuel assembly/core temperature should present a proportionate chance per second of meltdown or explosion.

Enriched fuel should be producible in 4-6 levels. Enriched fuel assemblies should last for some time (2-60 minutes) under maximum safe load depending on level of enrichment. The enrichment process should require a fixed quantity (100-1500 units) of raw ores per level, but consume increasing quantities of time and electricity per level. Enriched fuel should be combined with iron and copper to form cladding and produce finished Fuel Assemblies. All levels of Fuel Assemblies should degenerate into Spent Fuel Assemblies after their respective useful lifespan. A recycling recipe should disassemble Fuel Assemblies and produce enriched fuel at one level lower than the recycled fuel assembly (except spent assemblies, which may only produce sub-critical/level 1 enriched fuel).


*BROWNIE POINTS: Reactors produce Irradiated Water or use NaK instead of water as coolant. This will necessitate the use of a heat exchanger, and the formation of primary/secondary coolant loops.

Would be visually appealing if the steam turbines mentioned above would utilize low-rpm salient pole synchronous alternators as part of the visuals. Other examples of similar machines for visual/artistic reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfI6lzjKasA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cj1x8hcoc4

A very good example of fun nuclear energy mechanics for reference: https://esa21.kennesaw.edu/activities/n ... y/nuke.htm

[psihius]

I hope there will be "Depleted Uranium Shotgun Shells" - we need something to kill those pesky behemoth biters, this can be the prime candidate for a major shotgun/machine gun buff. And probably not that easy to get

[mattj256]

Some thoughts on nuclear power.

Provide an item that goes in your power armor that offers some protection against radiation. (There could be a few tiers of this item.)
The later tiers should be difficult or impossible to produce without a working nuclear power plant. (Add another tier after Processing Units that requires nuclear power.)

The player shouldn't be able to hold or transport nuclear waste in large quantities unless they have enough shielding in their armor. Maybe they shouldn't be able to hold or transport it at all.
Nuclear waste is indestructible. Shooting a chest with nuclear waste destroys the chest and speads the nuclear waste in the immediate area.

Nuclear radiation damages player / aliens / trees.
Nuclear waste is either a solid object that can be put into chests, or a liquid that can be put into barrels.
Nuclear waste emits radiation (which causes pollution and harms the player and the environment.) Putting nuclear waste near other nuclear waste greatly increases the amount of radiation generated.
(When the nuclear industry is starting waste can be stored on the ground, but this is not a feasible long-term solution.)
Nuclear waste can be safely stored in a certain building which can only be built on a certain terrain type. (Buried deep underground, or in a mountain.)
This terrain type should be rare and far from the starting area so trains are necessary. The nuclear waste is never destroyed, only stored, and the storage buildings have a finite capacity so storing it is a challenge.
With increasing tech you can increase the nuclear storage capacity of each building, or relax the restrictions for building this type of building.

Mechanic to change nuclear waste into something less harmful (but still radioactive).

New chest type that can hold nuclear waste and only leaks nuclear radiation when the chest is opened.
(When items are put in or taken out.) This is a strong incentive to only interact with nuclear waste using upgraded stack inserters.
Regular chests can be used as well, but then the player has to deal with the consequences of the radiation.

New barrel type that reduces (but does not eliminate) nuclear radiation. There could be a few tiers here.

Nuclear power generation should come in two or three tiers. (Others have already posted about enrichment.)

In all the nuclear power games I've played, the challenge is to keep the water at the right temperature. Too low and the fission reaction can't sustain itself. Too high and there's a nuclear meltdown.
This is best left to the circuit network, and a power outage here should be potentially catastrophic. (Water temperature keeps rising until the plant explodes.)

A nuclear power plant heats water. Once the water is hot it can be fed into a plain old regular steam engine.
There should be a mechanic to cool the water (by drawing water from a lake with an offshore pump).
There could also be a mechanic where lakes and oceans gradually heat up as the water is used so you can't spam nuclear power plants the way you spam solar panels.
(The water cools off over time but only if you don't use too much water.)

Logistic or construction robots should be able to clean up nuclear waste (after suitable upgrades).

[Liquius]

In all the nuclear power games I've played, the challenge is to keep the water at the right temperature. Too low and the fission reaction can't sustain itself. Too high and there's a nuclear meltdown.
This is best left to the circuit network, and a power outage here should be potentially catastrophic. (Water temperature keeps rising until the plant explodes.)

Temperature doesn't play much of a role in the rate of fission. It's not like a normal chemical reaction. If anything hotter water would slow down the rate of fission.

[SiC]

I want to have a chance to do an accidental Chernobyl when nuclear power gets added. Imagine that stuff blowing up if not cooled properly (risk/reward), and when it goes the radiation cloud can mutate the biters into whatever freakish mutations you can dream up that should be a pain to deal with

[Machine Medic]

The thing that most people don't understand is that cooling is not the biggest problem in a nuclear power plant. Heat is automatically depleted in the process of generating electric power via bohr's law. The only reason you actually *need* cooling towers for a nuclear plant is to reduce the turbine exhaust temperature enough to either be efficiently re-used or to be discharged into the environment without bringing your lakes and rivers to a near boil.

Rate-of-Fission control is the biggest concern in a reactor. In order to produce lots of power, you need to get the core hot. In order to get the core hot, you need a high rate of fission. The problem with a high rate of fission at a high temperature though, is that neutron flux tends to change multiplicatively instead of additively. A small upset in the factor of Neutron Multiplication can create an exponential feedback loop, resulting in an overheat in minutes, seconds, or -in extreme cases- fractions of a second.

[ZombieMooose]

add nuclear missiles that "launch" like a rocket silo and can be targeted like Orbital Ion Canon!

also also flying enemies and planes maybe? at least add modding support for changing graphics to be above other graphics.

[TheUnknown007]

Of all things about enrichment and how to go about nuclear power, this comment seems to be the only one that gives both nice gameplay and is implementable within this year.
Also, we need uranium/plutonium bullets for dealing with behemonths.

[Machine Medic]

add nuclear missiles that "launch" like a rocket silo and can be targeted like Orbital Ion Canon!

Actually a good idea.

Use maximum-tier enriched fuel to create a fission warhead to be installed in a rocket in the Rocket Silo. Implement a target control system to select a target location and wipe out a whole bunch of biters. This is one possible solution to the issue of not being able to effectively explore beyond a certain radius in this game without disabling alien spawns or enabling peaceful mode.