Friday Facts #152 - Team production challenge

[DaveKap]

I'm very happy to read that you guys are developing multiplayer scenarios, I really feel like this area is where Factorio is failing its audience the most. As is, multiplayer just doesn't "play" well with my friends in the pure sandbox mode it offers. I have an idea that I think is really good and I just now realized I should have put it as a request in the mod forum! Thanks for the reminder and hopefully you'll spur more multiplayer scenario development, we could really use it!

[eloy2030]

any news on when and how to participate?

[Calbrenar]

I want to preface this comment by saying I am thrilled with this game, the fun I've gotten out of it, the production quality, the polish, and the release schedule.

That being said I'm pretty disappointed at what's being pushed to 15. Multiplayer is working fairly well right now and I am really missing some quality of life improvements for my two and three player mp games. I understand that power is currently trivial but making football fields of solar panels with construction bots isn't particularly rewarding so the nuclear updates were very interesting to me.

Along with that I was really hoping for the liquid tankers as it would make some things quite a bit easier/fun to maintain. I was also hoping against hope that the GDIW mod would be integrated in the game along with the liquid tankers as being able to swap inputs around would be amazing.

[Loewchen]

I want to preface this comment by saying I am thrilled with this game, the fun I've gotten out of it, the production quality, the polish, and the release schedule.

That being said I'm pretty disappointed at what's being pushed to 15. Multiplayer is working fairly well right now and I am really missing some quality of life improvements for my two and three player mp games. I understand that power is currently trivial but making football fields of solar panels with construction bots isn't particularly rewarding so the nuclear updates were very interesting to me.

Along with that I was really hoping for the liquid tankers as it would make some things quite a bit easier/fun to maintain. I was also hoping against hope that the GDIW mod would be integrated in the game along with the liquid tankers as being able to swap inputs around would be amazing.

The fact that everything except new MP is pushed to 0.15 does not necessarily mean that it would have come earlier originally. The new features are not finished yet, so we get MP w/o having to wait for those to combine all in one 0.14 update.

[ShawnShepard]

Hello; I have been playing factorio only since 13.x, but with over 300 hours of gameplay. both single and online. I believe teams with objectives would be and can be maybe useless, but something challenging and ongoing is the fight for similar resources (outposts) and also the fight to defend their base from both human and biters (which both already implemented). But what could be interesting to consider, is like a supply drop somewhere in the world where both team X and Y will want and must fight to get through players and bitters. But honestly the game has a lot of replayability already at its current state even with Player VS Environment, only major problem is the performance drops when more than 2-3 players on 1 server after 2-3 days of gameplay on same map. The performance decrease gets to the point where it is unplayable.

If you have any questions or concerns or do not understand some statements above please feel free to private message me. Keep up the great work developers!

Your love,

ShawnShepard

[Deadly-Bagel]

That being said I'm pretty disappointed at what's being pushed to 15.

The FF clearly states it will not delay the features by much. All good things come to those who wait =) and having multiplayer tested and debugged separately is going to make the whole process a lot cleaner and more efficient.

But what could be interesting to consider, is like a supply drop somewhere in the world where both team X and Y will want and must fight to get through players and bitters.

Direct competitiveness just isn't in the spirit of Factorio. Even with the proposed scenario the balance of skill vs effectiveness is very skewed. Ie players with little experience will have fun and take a little while to sort out their designs, at this level this game mode is good, but anyone with a few games under their belt will just be racing to apply their setup which to me won't be very rewarding. You will have a few players that will finish in half the time of anyone else (looking at you AntiElitz lol).

Having said that cooperative play is not without problems either. A scenario where each player must produce items to pass on to the next player to build into other items etc until some goal (eg a t3 module of each type) is met would be interesting and fun and require lots of communication, this would be most rewarding for me. The problems arise when you get players who aren't interested, either in working with the team or in cooperating at all.

I might poke my head into a few multiplayer games but my experience in online play is that there are always people who are just there to ruin it for everyone, or who simply don't care that they've stolen 90% of your green circuit production or rerouted your miners to their own factory. "It's just a game" after all, "stop taking it so seriously".

Multiplayer would become most interesting I think when some more strategic combat elements are introduced, such as that Destroyers can be programmed to deploy automatically and travel to a target. I don't see this mode becoming a reality - there is a lot of problems to consider (such as, what is to stop you from rushing laser towers and creeping them over your opponent who still only has guns) and Factorio has a naturally slow progression with casual play reaching endgame at around 20 hours which is far too long for casual online play. And what is the objective? Player death occasionally happens arbitrarily but buildings are too cheap and numerous and the map too big for an annihilation mode. Would need a cut-down version with something like 10% research costs and you start with 20 miners, 10 steel furnaces and a steam engine column, and once all that has been done it remains incredibly difficult to balance.

[ExMachina]

I like this idea. I like that it is not one player shooting the other.
Is the purpose of this to challenge players while recording progress on another server, i.e. no cheating
Otherwise, the challenge could be just set out in the public forum where people post their results.

How would you choose a winner? Time; first one to goal?

Efficiency could be another measurement.
I love efficiency. I would like to see a challenging mission where one of the measurable goals is to use the least amount of resources. This would make for a nice challenge.
Or, craft a level where efficiency is required to succeed.