biters NEVER attacking makes for some depressing gameplay

[Calico]

stuff

Yes, this is the right direction.
I just cannot understand the masses of aliens on that planet.
Even if there is live out there, and the chances for that is high, the chance to meet another intelligent liveform is nearly zero. And the chance to meet more than one is much lower. But well. Might be. It might be a cool idea to implement a second / third party, which have a completely different tech-tree - just for gameplay-reasons. And it might be very interesting to have nonconsensual communities, which want to fight each other, but need the research of the others, because they cannot achieve it themselves. But in my opinion an intelligent lifeform, which has the ability to fly into space is far beyond beeing aggressive, because otherwise they have destroyed themselves long before. See mankind: It's such a long and complicated way to get real colonization to run, that it is more realistic, that we destroy us, before we are able to go outside. It's much more difficult and takes much longer to take the non-aggressive way. The question is, if this would be a good game... I mean eventually, with some compromises. In every case it would be a not so common behavior (like other games), if another alien liveform is not aggressive per default.

Ah, i get where this is coming from. But i'd rather go the more space opera approach that we aren't alone... it just makes a so much better better background for stories then the hard scientific approach, with the Fermi paradox and the problems of impossibility of FTL Travel. Maybe space travel isn't that hard, but we lack some fundamental breakthrough that other species had. Who knows.

Anyway, it's up to the Devs which direction Factorio is going... so far i'm impressed enough. Maybe they want to keep the lore open, maybe they want to keep the sandbox style. I do agree that the game itself gives enough options for your own imagination, but i wouldn't mind some events/lore to mix things up a bit, giving a bit more background to the entire game and the universe it's playing in. There are quite a few questions open. Has Earth been destroyed and we are the only survivors? Are we just some settlers, running away from a overcrowded earth...or just a tiny part of a "imperial" colonization program. I could very well imagine dozens of different reasons why we are there.... i like the Titan A.E. version the most i guess (a little known movie that kills billions of humans in the first 5mins... and it's a kids movie). Damnit, i'm going totally offtopic. I'd like to discuss this further, maybe later when the Devs have given us a hint or two about the Lore and general direction later.

edit: sslik what have you done to your avatar, my eyes are bleeding. damn carnival

[ssilk]

Well, I admit, I'm a fan of realistic SF. One book I mentioned some time before was "The Songs of Distant Earth" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth), which can be seen as a very good try into that direction.

Vacuum energy, traveling with half the speed of light, cryogenic suspension... it's all still possible to bring that into the game. I'm not naive: Fun is the big question. Is it possible to make a game fun, but keep it realistic? It's not clear yet. I think one point is sure: It's much more effort to make a game fun AND realistic. But I really do not persist on it, it's just my opinion.

So I try my best to feed my opinion with arguments.

One important point in this book is, that the mankind decides to send the colony-ships sterile planets. The target in the book is a planet, far beyond the habitat-area, guaranteed to be free from any live-form. They will use the vacuum energy to bring the planet in a process of some dozen years into a orbit in the habitable area around the sun. And they make this effort, because they don't want to influence other lifeforms.

What a high moralistic aspect!

And for me the question is - no it's not a question, it's a fact: The mankind will not able to colonize the stars, the milky-way, if we just entering a strange planet, kill the native life and take their resources, just because we can.

It's a dead end! Of course the other direction is it also. The right direction is anywhere in the middle.

So, thinking logical: The situation we have in factorio can - in my opinion of course - only happen, if there was a very big accident. The colony-ship lost it's drive. They didn't want to colonize that planet, but to survive they don't have any other option as to colonize. In this case I think it is ok, to use a habituated planet for colonization. And it's also ok to defend against them. And it's also ok to do many other much more questionable things.

But of course it's much more effort. It's per sure not the easiest way. And what I would like in the game is, that you come at a point, where you have to decide that: Are you going bad or good.

And for factorio this means: Will you kill all and take the planet for your own (only keep some to breed eggs) or will you try to live with them?




PS: Hm. My avatar was/is a test. I think it is completely failed.... Edit: Now I think this is better. This is from January on the Sodenberg and I sit on this bench:

IMG_1943-sm.jpeg (120.28 KiB) Viewed 7788 times

[GROOV3ST3R]

I'm just curious - going by the environmentally conscious approach to colonization, would that not mean that in fact all alien life in the universe would adopt this approach?

I mean, it takes a very long time to get to the advanced enough stage where this is a possibility, science and reason should prevail and - all things considered - it's just easier to colonize planets without any intelligent alien life present.

Anyways, that's just me going off on a tangent (and indeed off topic).



IMO, building living quarters and infrastructure able to support incoming colonists wouldn't be going off too far away from the core concept of the game. You still make factories, it's just the reason building them is a little different. And the game is sort of preparing for that anyway as far as I can tell. What you need to remember is that building anything civilization-related would only happen once you complete the core game - so it wouldn't actually be any distraction to your game at all. The game would simply expand from the point where you would normally finish.
(not to mention you only need a few basic living structures to transform the game, without the need for incredibly complex economy algorithms and such things - just supply certain structures with stuff = civilization)

[muzzy]

From what I understand, your gameplay choices makes you bored.

It's not really a choice, I just can't enjoy the alternatives. Taking out the enemy bases with laser creeping is super easy later on, and dealing with them using just a shotgun and a machine gun is just plain annoying.

Since the evolution of enemies is global instead of local, it doesn't make sense to make the game harder for you for no in-game benefit. What if you really want to take some expansions later on, and you've doomed yourself because you pushed all the enemies to evolve into big biters too fast? What if you run out of iron early because you've had to make thousands of rounds of ammo? Mining your resources faster doesn't give you any in-game advantage, it only causes trouble. Being fast has no advantage in the game, it only has advantages outside of the game.

One solution could be more focus on the custom scenarios. Being able to set parameters for world generator while still playing with custom rules could be interesting. Maybe someone could then write a mod that implements a scenario with an in-game time pressure.

IMO, building living quarters and infrastructure able to support incoming colonists wouldn't be going off too far away from the core concept of the game.

It would still have to serve some in-game purpose. I don't want Factorio to turn into another make-believe RPG where the gameplay consists of little more than playing with imaginary legos. Buildings thing in the game should have reasons and consequences within the game, not only in the mind of the player. There's no value in building something for sake of things that happen after the game has ended.

There has to be a difference between a success and a failure for the mechanic to be meaningful, and if the game measures your progress then the goal becomes merely satisfying the score that's being measured. The whole colonization thing becomes a story element to explain the game mechanic, not the other way around.

[Calico]

loads of interesting stuff

It is a very moralistic approach to colonization, that's for sure. I actually read that book once or twice, but it never made it into my "books i read every year" list like Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.

Anyway, the scenario of "Songs of a distant Earth" gives humanity a millenium to prepare, so going the moral approach of colonization is somewhat easier (even without sci-fi tech like warp, jump or hyperdrive engines). Other scenarios might not leave humanity with a lot of choices where they want to settle. Take Starlancer/Freelancer, where humanity got itself into a hundred year war over the solar system, with the losing side leaving in sleeper ships in a last ditch effort to escape. But i could go on about this topic forever, it still boils down to what the Dev's want. I might be left out entirly, leaving it to the imagination of the player. Or not. I will patiently wait for that day. ^^

[Smee]

I don't want Factorio to turn into another make-believe RPG where the gameplay consists of little more than playing with imaginary legos.

But that's what a sandbox game is.

It's like going into EvE online and expecting a Word of Warcraft-like endgame - a theme park - where you are guided through a story and made to feel special and all powerful.

Sandboxes don't provide story, they provide toys (tools). All the big events that hit news providers 2-3 times a year regarding EvE-Online are because of Player driven conflict and emergent gameplay, not the Dev's providing story and content.

By the sound of it you want Factorio to turn in to some kind of RTS... with a story driven campaign in the vein of the old C&C games? (The first of which you could ironically win with sandbag/tower creeping).

[GROOV3ST3R]

See, I don't play EVE but I love the stories that come out of it. Battles where intellectual property worth $300k has been lost, Trillion-isk heists, a player flipping the entire economy of the game to the point where CCP had to step in or it would destabilize the entire game... You can't make that stuff up, but that's what happens when you put 30000 people in a sandbox and give them total freedom.

Regarding the not-wanting-factorio-to-become-a-make-believe-rpg:
1. There would be no Unicorns, Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, Magic, Zombies or whatever
2. It was to my understanding that that is roughly where the storyline is heading, if it would be expanded
3. The game mechanics wouldn't be altered at all. That's a by-the-way.

Well, the way I'd do it would be to first add research for residential buildings of 3 tiers. These would act like ''storage'' chests, with spaces reserved for a specific amount of colonists. Each tier would house more than the last but would consume more electricity, water and possibly other high tech resources - how about providing fibre-optic networks to living quarters in the same way we can make logistic networks?

So these entities would consume said resources with the consumption rates increasing the more people are in them. In turn, well, they would provide space for colonists.. At the moment they would just be plain researchers, geologists, generic scientists, military men - stuff like this. All NPCs though, they would just mind their own business and they wouldn't be your main concern. HOUSING them is, but they themselves aren't.

They would also consume food and various random parts for research or generic things that they want/need, meaning that you would still have to use your factories - possibly even expand them.

The storyline?

Well, you are an advance party preparing the colony. You are practically unlimited in the amount of time you can take preparing the colony since the ships can simply hibernate in orbit around the planet, waiting for you to get ready. Your job would be to create protected settlements able to house all the colonists that are arriving on the ships and use your factories to supply them with everything they want. That will keep you challenged since they will want more and more things and higher and better tech levels of those things.
The catch is that you have to be able to supply housing for a veeery large group of colonists all at once, because they are all arriving at the same time in a ship. We don't know yet how many ships are arriving, but you can't really expect to leave half the colonists on a ship still in stasis - it poses some intricate moral issues. So the limitation is either everyone comes to live on the planet or nobody at all. That would provide you with a challenge in itself to build a settlement large enough to house everyone with factories and power stations large enough to supply them.
The said civilization would also expand exponentially, forcing you to expand housing zones, factories, clear out more and more biters whilst being attacked more and more.

I mean, just by adding 1 placeable entity that acts as a resource drain (essentially), you could practically simulate civilization on Factorio. It would keep you challenged as colonists would produce a lot of pollution and constantly deepen the struggle against biters whilst simultaneously draining your resources faster and faster. You would need to build larger factories than ever before, stretching out further and further. There would be no end game to this scenario, just you, struggling to keep everyone alive.

Don't tell me that this ISN'T like Factorio and that it would force an unnecessary RPG/RTS aspect on the game because the game already IS an RPG/RTS. You are role playing an alien attempting to prepare a planet for colonization through building of extensive factories supplying research chains. A lot of people seem to forget about that core aspect of the game... All I'm suggesting is to expand upon that to make the game truly endless and increasingly challenging. You wouldn't be building more stables to equip your horsemen with better horses or give your orcs better armor or any of that crap... People are coming to your planet whether you like it or not and it's your job to keep them alive when they do. Just how you do it depends on you.

As Smee pointed out, a sandbox game IS like playing with imaginary legos but on a much larger scale. And yet right now, you are forced into a time-limited storyline and have to make your own decisions on how to differentiate gameplay and play longer. So why not make it a sandbox challenge - choose to either attempt to live in peace with biters in an ever growing struggle for resources and space or wage a full on war against them. Or separate yourself from biters altogether. Or don't colonize the planet at all - it's all up to you. But you would at least have some sort of an open end goal to your game.


On the side:
Success and failure mechanic - you succeed if all your colonies are self sustaining and safe from biter attacks. You lose if you die to biters, which will become increasingly more aggressive and stronger. You can also lose if you run out of supplies or if everyone dies in one way or another. If you really WANT an endgame, there could always be a couple of pieces of ultra-expensive and difficult research that you would have to complete as a colony - upon completing these, your colony would then have the technology to finally become truly self sustaining and the game would end. Or you could choose not to do that and carry on the old fashioned way to challenge yourself. I don't know, it's a sandbox after all.

[muzzy]

I don't want Factorio to turn into another make-believe RPG where the gameplay consists of little more than playing with imaginary legos.

But that's what a sandbox game is.

It's like going into EvE online and expecting a Word of Warcraft-like endgame - a theme park - where you are guided through a story and made to feel special and all powerful.

No no no, you misunderstand me. This isn't about content, this is about the interactive game world versus what's in the player's head.

There's a fairly old article about competitive gaming, "Playing to win", which touches the issue of the attitude towards the game mechanics. Factorio has these strategies that involve 100% certain victory, always, and I sure as hell won't be playing in a way that decreases my odds of winning the game just because it'd be "more fun" to not do so.

If I choose to goof around to "have fun" instead of aiming to overcome the challenges of the game, it no longer matters if I play my imaginary games with Factorio or if I do it with a set of legos.

I'm okay with trying rules like "efficiency modules are forbidden", but not with rules like "don't try to restrict pollution". Abandoning the winning strategies is not acceptable. Defining clear rules that prevent the use of earlier winning strategies is okay. For that reason, I'm trying the low water (almost no trees) game next which probably eliminates the ability to do pollution control. But I sure as hell will try to do pollution control anyway

[Smee]

Aah I see - so it's the fact there is a victory condition (which of course neither EvE nor Lego has! ) that is the issue. Correct, I was misunderstanding.

I'll have a read of that article too - seems interesting.

In the meantime I hope the rule conditions you can allow yourself to apply work for you.

If I choose to goof around to "have fun" instead of aiming to overcome the challenges of the game, it no longer matters if I play my imaginary games with Factorio or if I do it with a set of legos.

If this is the case though - I want to know where the hell you get your Lego from that includes Laser turrets and automatic factories. All I have is 300 3x2 bricks with a few 2x2, and 1x2s

[ludsoe]

If this is the case though - I want to know where the hell you get your Lego from that includes Laser turrets and automatic factories. All I have is 300 3x2 bricks with a few 2x2, and 1x2s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcjplFIUhD0

I haven't seen any laser turret kits though, this is lego were talking about.....

[muzzy]

Aah I see - so it's the fact there is a victory condition (which of course neither EvE nor Lego has! ) that is the issue.

Indeed, you could say the existence of the victory condition is the problem. It's the only goal, the only aim there is.

EvE has a lot of smaller scale content that has victory conditions, though. The missions can be super depressing when you just sit there in highsec being a carebear and hit some buttons every now and then to pick the next target. The larger scale of things is a sandbox with no victory conditions though, but even then there are some easy measures of power and wealth and since there's always risk of losing what you have, those things have a real meaning.

In factorio, you can currently eliminate the risks 100% completely through some pollution control and then just sit and wait to get all the pre-pot4 technology.

Actually, I just tried to low water thing ... it was a little interesting at first since I was actually attacked, and since resources were scattered away really bad I had multiple places to defend and needed to make quite a bit of gun turrets and ammunition. For some reason none of the nearby enemy bases were smaller than 3 spawners, most of the closeby ones had 6 spawners ... Soon I was dealing with waves of 20-30 small biters, having to build walls and research piercing rounds (omg how long has it been that I had to get piercing rounds?!).

Rushing to efficiency modules killed all of the struggling, however. As soon as I had effectivity modules installed in all the drills, factories, research facilities, attacks slowed down and I was only hitting one enemy base with my pollution. After solar panels (no accumulators yet), no more attacks at all...

Being able to get -80% pollution is super imba. Even without any trees and plenty of large biter bases nearby, I found myself in 100% peaceful situation again. I didn't even think about pausing the game when I went to the bathroom, and when I came back I realized I had already won the game and it was only a matter of waiting for the victory to come automatically to me... I quit before I got the laser turrets because everything was so meaningless again.

[Swadius]

In general, I feel like there needs to be more motivation for the player to seek out resources from beyond the base, maybe shift the last tech on free mode by one magnitude, or introduce more technologies in between.
As for the biters, they need to be more proactive when the player goes out and starts actively wiping the nests out in bulk. One way to do this with the infrastructure that is already in place is to put 2 hives on attack for every one that the player destroys. While the biters are not sophisticated enough to prevent their nests from being destroyed, I think they are sophisticated enough to retaliate in scale.

[ssilk]

I think to bring in this "motivation"-stuff is no problem. Not yet. We (the player) are here (in this forum), to think exactly about that: We have this framework and what directions might become a good game?

When reading this thread, it can be seen clearly, that there are types of gameplay, which are good, motivating, fun. And others, which aren't. The devs need that informations to program the game in a way, that the good parts will happen more often and the bad are avoided.

There is just not yet the right time to stand in the corner and cry, we have all enough intelligence to create good games with factorio by ourselves (as also proven in this thread).

My opinion.

[slay_mithos]

I really don't understand playing a sandbox with the only aim being to win.

Well, I am one of those that try to automate everything, build massive contraptions, and research (and use) everything.

Still, I am usually not attacked, because I go out of my way to eradicate the camps before pollution reaches them.


But your case really is strange, because you play to win, not to have fun, and still attack the game for not being fun.

You never have to sit and wait for the next research if you are making tons of research vials for a lot of labs, and you should always have things to be doing, like expanding, automating more things, killing bitters, using what your last research unlocked...
It's really strange to attack the game when it's clear that your choices and goals are what makes the game depressing and less fun for yourself.

[muzzy]

But your case really is strange, because you play to win, not to have fun, and still attack the game for not being fun.

Ah, but winning by overcoming challenges is fun. "Having fun" is not fun in itself.

I've already explained this a few times so I suppose I need a different kind of approach to get it across. Here, I drew it for you, does this help you understand how I feel about the issue?

[Smee]

Love it.

Perhaps another way of looking at it though is not as a maze, but as the original sandbox. The place of adventures and imagination.

And one of those 'toys' in the sandbox is a 'Big win button'.

Like any toy in a sandbox, you don't have to play with it. It's just there for those who want to. Whilst you are there staring at the 'Big win button' and feel compelled to go play with it, others are busy making mazes with transport belts on the far side of the box.

Fundamentally - we all have fun with 'different' toys, and it's the dev's job to make us all happy. Mwahahahaha.

[slay_mithos]

Not bad, except that maze should have other things than just mazing along the way.

I am not just making things complicated for the sake of it being complicated, I just make use of all the tools the game gives me to pass the time in an entertaining way, and eventually reaching the "win".

Our approach is just fundamentally different, in that I don't need a "win" to play a game, and I tend to finish very few games because I always try to explore and discover everything, no matter the game, even if that means playing sub-optimally, as long as I enjoy the time I spend.

When I reach a state where I just want to alt-tab the game for a while, jut because I don't find anything worth my attention for a few minutes/hours of waiting, I just close the game and go play/do something else instead.


I can understand wanting to min-max everything, and finding an optimal way of accomplishing the goal, but your way does not seem very optimal, except for keeping pollution to a minimum.
If your aim is to just win, why not go out of your way and try harder to min-max the other parameters as well?

By that, I mean the time it takes to achieve the win, the least amount of resources mined, the best path in researches...
There are a lot of things that you can min-max in your way to victory, and you could very well go even further, by knowing exactly the amount of each resource you need for your perfect victory.

Sure, that's not my way of playing, but it seems to fit the goal of achieving victory as prime target, and gives other ways of reflection and other ways where you can potentially make things better for an even more perfect victory.



To take your "maze" against you, you would be aiming to always solve yours in the least amount of moves, going as far as applying an A* algorythm (or similar) to it, and going on about how dull the mazes are, when they can all be solved so easily.

The main point of any game and/or toy is to pass time in a way you yourself can enjoy, you are not forced to play exactly like I do, but can you explain me why you made a thread about how your way to play is "depressing", if you are going to completely disagree with everyone giving you ways to make it less so?

[muzzy]

Sure, that's not my way of playing, but it seems to fit the goal of achieving victory as prime target, and gives other ways of reflection and other ways where you can potentially make things better for an even more perfect victory.

There's no such thing as a "more perfect" victory. There's only victory and no victory; any path that leads to victory is already a perfect victory.

To take your "maze" against you, you would be aiming to always solve yours in the least amount of moves, going as far as applying an A* algorythm (or similar) to it, and going on about how dull the mazes are, when they can all be solved so easily.

Ah, we're at the heart of the problem here!

A* is something that provides the solution, and once you have the solution isn't not going to be fun to walk through it. Walking the path is never the fun part, finding the path to walk is the fun part.

The problem with pollution control is that this path always exists in every game, with very few exceptions. There's no discovery remaining, you already know exactly how to get through the game, all that remains is walking the path... and secretly hoping you run into something that makes your strategy fail so you could get back to the fun part again.

The main point of any game and/or toy is to pass time in a way you yourself can enjoy, you are not forced to play exactly like I do, but can you explain me why you made a thread about how your way to play is "depressing", if you are going to completely disagree with everyone giving you ways to make it less so?

Unfortunately other people's solutions haven't really worked for me. I've tried a bunch of things already, low water and low resources seemed promising ... but so far effectivity modules still own both of these scenarios. Pretty much all other suggestions involved changing my strategy to a weaker one, and that isn't going to work for me unless there's an actual in-game reason to make such a decision. The entire game loses its meaning if I walk out of the path for no reason whatsoever.

Kovarex's suggestion of trying to finish the game as fast as possible might perhaps work if there was a way to measure my success in some reasonable way. Beating a score that comes from a different map isn't just going to cut it.

Right now, I think either nerfing the pollution control or changing aggression mechanics are the only ways forward for me. It's time to check out modding to see if there's anything else I could do...

[slay_mithos]

Well, in that case, you should be able to mod the game to suit your tastes.

The pollution part, at least, seems relatively easy to change, as it's all about changing base pollution and/or effectivity modules.

Changing the aggression mechanisms is going to be a lot harder, but a skilled modder should be able to make a mod that make bitters attack based on other events than proximity or pollution.
I'm nowhere near knowledgeable enough for this part though...


For now, most existing mods are more designed for the type of players that want more toys and things to do/automate (more bitter types, new resources, new weaponry...), and I don't think it would make any difference for your kind of play, sadly, because they don't aim to change balance or making the game harder.

dytech might help you a bit in some ways, mainly making the final count down way harder by introducing way more powerful bitters, but it also introduces even stronger ways to control your pollution (with new modules and machines for both producing and reducing pollution).

treefarm makes you able to grow your own trees, as well as giving you the ability to get plastic without the oil branch, so it's again more against pollution.



As for a timed rush to the "win" screen, you could save your map right when you spawn, and distribute it so that others wanting to challenge your time could play on the very same map.
For now, that and a custom scenario, which would basically be the same thing, are your only choices.
Let's hope for an easier way to play on the "same" maps in future versions that would make it easier to make challenges.


I'm afraid all of this doesn't really give you answers, and I'm sorry to say that there is little chance for the base game to really nerf the pollution control, when so many players tend to rant about how they constantly get attacked everywhere (even if they usually don't try to restrict their pollution, making the whole point weird).

[Swadius]

You never have to sit and wait for the next research if you are making tons of research vials for a lot of labs, and you should always have things to be doing, like expanding, automating more things, killing bitters, using what your last research unlocked...
It's really strange to attack the game when it's clear that your choices and goals are what makes the game depressing and less fun for yourself.

Increase the pollution levels of the game by a magnitude of 10, biter evolutionary speed and spawn, and how often their bases pop up.