Friday Facts #160 - Playtesting

[Keks]

someone said that with victory chests removed we Need some method to protect vast Rail Networks;
I agree.
so how about creating a crane Item to be put into vehicle Grids (or maybe a special Wagon type with a crane Sprite) so that Passing Trains can replace destroyed Structures if they have them available in cargo instead of using bots that are inevitably going to be lost when the train runs away from them.
the repair could be done by nanite-clouds that work like poison capsules just the other way around (a small repair per second with long duration + can't stack multiple hots). repair packs & Bots should be more efficient if available but a repair train that passes by occasionally and throws Nanite-clouds at damaged buildings can cover a much much bigger area.

Item merging:
that's meh! having 5 turrets / Other Buildings at 20% health merge into one is kind of... meh! don't like it!
I like the idea of averaging the health of all Damaged items you pick up much much better but I don't really see any reason to change how it is right now unless you are in combat your bots will repair them anyway and picking up a turret that's focused and dropping fast before it dies is a nice feeling of success that would be turned into a "why did I even bother" feeling if its lost by merging it into another one.

removing turret creep:
why remove it? Flamethrower is even more OP even less Work and doesn't cost any more resources either? I always hate it to be forced to play in the one right way instead of being able to play the way I like and do it diffrently each time.
you like huge armies of bots? go the robot follower count way. You like fire? Then go Flamethrowers, You like Turrets? Then go with turrets. I always thought Factorio was mainly about building a Factory not going on a Holy Crusade against Aliens.
I like using an Army of Construction Bots to build Laserturrets and get rid of Biterbases that way, even if dragging a Powerline behind you everywhere you go does take more time and is riskier then simply passing them and spraying a few shots of fire before running towards the next bunch.

tutorials:
Sounds great but why lock the Chain signal one away behind building 50 normal ones? They are Researched simultaneously, you unlock them for building them simultaneously, You should Learn what they each do simultaneously.

as for a feature I'd like to see happen:
personally I think a Pause toggle for personal Logistics slots, Personal trash slots and your Personal roboport sending out construction Bots and Actinng as a Provider chest would be nice.
one example for the second point:
usually I limit, for example, the allowed Wood in my Inventory to 50 everything else is to be hauled away Automatically but then from time to time I Like to dump the wood into boilers to keep my logistics net from overflowing (I like to do that by hand and Treefarm AC is Broken most of the time so I cant Just turn the wood into Coal). (As for why I even have so much wood, Probably cause of RSO. It seems like it's Reducing the spawn rate of ore, biters etc. but not wood?)
when Building a new mining outpost it's similar, generally each belttype is limited to 150, Miners and furnaces to 50 (one stack for them), Rails, powerpoles,...... but when i want to build a new Outpost I need much more then that so I have to remove all these auto trash commands and put them back in afterwards, that could be solved more comftably.


Tl.Dr.:
I'm not nearly as hyped about 0.15 as I was about 0.13 but then NOTHING can top the Train rework in 0.13 buuut there are several nice changes I'm looking forward to, you just have to straighten out the things that aren't so great .
ANYWAY, I WANT 0.15 RIGHT NOW!!

Please???

ALSO, I WANT THE SPACE EXPANSION RIGHT NOW!! WORK FASTER!!!!!

Please???

Joking aside you are awesome, keep up the Great work, I'd much rather have you take your time and keep the quality as high as it has been so far.

Good Night everyone

[Mehve]

On a list of things that could stand to have their bounding box shrunk - how about solar panels? Not as big a deal, especially since they tend to be set-and-forget, but laying down multiple blueprints via personal robo-port, you currently need to take care that you don't make a blueprint that your roboport can't reach the middle of.

[deemer]

Merging items with different health. - We didn't do the item merging, as we didn't want the player lose his precious items as two 49% items would merge into one, which would prevent the player from repairing both for just a few repair. In reality, I feel that the annoyance of having 8 different stacks of laser turrets/walls in my inventory is not worth the rare possibility of losing an item or two.

A compromise solution would be to merge damaged objects, but keep the same number of objects and just average their health. That would limit the number of extra stacks used by damaged items.

[Stevepunk]

It's nice that they've focused on the mechanics so much in this game and have removed a lot of tedium.

But I think at least one person there should start focusing on the rest of the game. The game only has 2 biomes and they don't contain any different resources (only the trees look slightly different in desert and there's less of them).

There is only 1 enemy faction (the biters) and only 3 enemy types (biters, spitters and worms). Even the evolution system is limited to a few stages.

The world is infinite but there's no point to exploring it if everything is the same. And there's no point to different research paths if everything is the same.

Other games solve this problem by having different biomes and different rare resources limited to (or more common in) different biomes. Of course different biomes also feature unique terrain (such as impassable mountains), and often different wildlife (sometimes neutral and sometimes agressive).

There are often remnants of ruined civilizations lost to time and possibly ancient technologies.

Give us a reason to explore. A reason to make use of all the other parts of the game. A reason to research a particular line of tech or use a specific weapon based upon our starting location or which enemies are nearby.

Give us a reason to play the game more than once and take advantage of all the mechanics you've lovingly polished over time.

Games which I feel do level design well are:
Minecraft (biomes, ruins, unlock new areas through tech )
Civilization (biomes, ruins, rare resources, enemy variance, research choices based upon all of the above)
Rimworld (the best ruins - would like to see these type of ruins in factorio)
X3:TC/AP (not procedural but still features many of the above options)
Mount and Blade (the map is quite dull but different areas do produce different resources like X3, and the different enemy factions do make the game a lot more dynamic like Civ)

[loganb]

Hello, just wanted to leave a few comments on this:

Decrease crafting time of some items (engines and pumpjacks 20->10, advanced circuits 8->6)

I really like having items with long craft times. While in the game I am frustrated when I can't get 100% of what I want immediately, on a meta level it's good because it forces me to plan ahead my anticipated demand of an item. Inserters of all kinds get built so fast, for example, I just plop down one assembly machine and never think about it again. For engine units, conversely, I have to actually think about how many I'll need and the time horizon or else I'll be stuck waiting forever.

If anything, I recommend making later-game, non-intermediate items take even longer to craft than they do presently. Things like steel power poles and substations, train tracks and stations, wagons, cars, etc. Right now, these things craft so quickly there's no reason to automate their production. If they took 20+ seconds to craft, players would be encouraged to automate further and build out logistics networks to supply them to the player.

For reference, I completely avoided building a logistic network for my first two play-throughs because I considered it "cheating" to use flying robots rather than belts to move goods throughout the base. I was still able to launch a rocket pretty easily in <20 hours while also learning the game because crafting everything I needed to build bases was easy to do manually.

Figure some way to have low level personal construction robots earlier in the game.

Very much this. Maybe blueprints are researchable from the beginning of the game. Instead of robots, there's an auto-placement mode where items are auto-placed in tiles adjacent to the player. That would make it just as time-intensive to place structures in the early game, but cut down on error.

[Ninjadude501]

YESSSS YES YES YES PLEASE ADD LOW-TIER BUILDING ROBOTS PLEASEEEEE
/freakout

It'd be so awesome if you added those. Also the tips & tricks at different parts of the game could be so awesome. Glad to hear that you guys are starting to look at that sort of stuff! Maybe it'll let me get back into the game!

[Jackalope_Gaming]

An issue I see with turret creeping though: If you place turrets just outside of biter aggro range and then wait for them to charge up, you can then place a second set of turrets in firing range of the first turrets so they get covered while they're charging, and then the second set of turrets can shoot the biter bases.

Are you going to change the way biters aggro or something? If the goal is to get rid of turret creeping then it doesn't seem like a charge-up time will get rid of that. If the goal is to slow it down / reduce its effectiveness then that'd work, yeah.

[maistho]

Suggestion for the item merging:

When merging two items, create two items in a stack with the average health of the two items.

Example:

I have two turrets with 20% HP. When merged they become a stack of two turrets, each with 20% HP.
I have two turrets, one with 20% and the other with 10% HP. When merged they become a stack of two turrets, each with 15% HP.

Exclude full hp items from merging.

[Antaios]

Just woke up to a FFF

read through and picked a few from the pages I liked.

On the talk of mark II versions of a few vanilla items. I hope the actually upgraded item implemented is creative and is more than just a color tinted version of the same item with the stats cranked up.

Definitely agree with this, Don't go MK* crazy with everything, really make a mk2 item feel unique and special. It feels so cheap in mods when there are MK1,2,3,4,5,etc of everything and they all just look the same with a colour filter (though I realize why mod devs with little time do that, don't get me wrong)

1) ...and I'm not really happy with rail planner tool (or current rail creation process). I do appreciate the notion, but still, I'd rather be able to craft and place curved rails myself too, especially that the tool mostly makes some strange rail loops that makes the process rather annoying.

Agree with this too!, God I miss the individual curved rail and straight rail. Every time I'm laying out a complex intersection or station, trying to design a new blueprint, the rail planner has no bloody idea what I'm actually trying to do! Especially a frustration is in places where it's ambiguous where to put a corner, e.g. you want to add an S curve to switch tracks in one place on a vertical line, the rail planner will decide that you actually want it one tile down, or up, so you have to cancel, move the start point one tile down, or up, and try again. I'm constantly guessing exactly which tile the curved piece will start in without being able to see the curved piece, and then making the shortest turn possible so that I can, in essence, just place the curved piece on it's own anyway. SO FRUSTRATING! please give us both options, manual and auto.

6) I like the train color tool, but I'd like to see some presets apart from sliders, and when I have 2 locos on one train (so it can go both directions), so they both change color when I edit either of them.

Presets sound nice, but I'd suggest just a button in the gui to colour all attached locos the colour of the currently selected one, that way if someone wants a multicoloured train they can have one.

7) Train rename would be nice too, alongside with labeling each viewport in train tracking window.

+1

+we should be able to multiply the requester chest items requested via buttons in the GUI like (x2, x10, x100) and the default on copying from a factory to a requester chest should be exactly enough goods to produce 1 item, that way we have easy controls to set the number we want via the multiplication buttons

+1 to this, too. Always want to set the requester chest to x10 resources needed for a recipe on fast recipes.

If possible, can there also be another modifier key added, ctrl perhaps (ctrl+shift+click on chest), so that an assemblers recipe requirements can be added to a requester chest, without replacing the current configuration. I've usually got places where multiple assemblers have one requester chest between them, and the ingredients need to be done manually.


Add me to the list of people against damaged item merging, too. I don't want to lose an expensive laser turret in midgame if I pick it up... and 90% of the time, it's laser turrets or gun turrets, and I'm at a stage in the game where they take some significant time and resources to make, that I have damaged in my inventory.
Removing turret creep wont 'fix' the repair problem either (it will fix OP turret creep, though, I'm good with that). Even when I don't turret creep, I'll have turrets behind me to back me up if I get in too deep and need something to run back to, or maybe I just setup a temporary line of defence? I'm going to have damaged items, and I'm gonna be rather annoyed if I lose them like that.
+1 for auto repair in inventory, I don't think that should even really require bots, it's in your inventory, after all. Though probably include a toggle or something if that's the way you go, if I'm low on repair packs, I might not want my turrets repaired before my tank/car/whatever.

[AndrolGenhald]

1) ...and I'm not really happy with rail planner tool (or current rail creation process). I do appreciate the notion, but still, I'd rather be able to craft and place curved rails myself too, especially that the tool mostly makes some strange rail loops that makes the process rather annoying.

Agree with this too!, God I miss the individual curved rail and straight rail. Every time I'm laying out a complex intersection or station, trying to design a new blueprint, the rail planner has no bloody idea what I'm actually trying to do! Especially a frustration is in places where it's ambiguous where to put a corner, e.g. you want to add an S curve to switch tracks in one place on a vertical line, the rail planner will decide that you actually want it one tile down, or up, so you have to cancel, move the start point one tile down, or up, and try again. I'm constantly guessing exactly which tile the curved piece will start in without being able to see the curved piece, and then making the shortest turn possible so that I can, in essence, just place the curved piece on it's own anyway. SO FRUSTRATING! please give us both options, manual and auto.

I'm a little surprised to see people complaining about that, I thought it was an amazing improvement over all of the manual rotating. I have noticed the "where is it gonna curve" problem though, maybe right click to back up 1 rail would help?

+we should be able to multiply the requester chest items requested via buttons in the GUI like (x2, x10, x100) and the default on copying from a factory to a requester chest should be exactly enough goods to produce 1 item, that way we have easy controls to set the number we want via the multiplication buttons

+1 to this, too. Always want to set the requester chest to x10 resources needed for a recipe on fast recipes.

Yes! This! I always end up manually adding a couple 0s on to all the requested items.

[Antaios]

I'm a little surprised to see people complaining about that, I thought it was an amazing improvement over all of the manual rotating. I have noticed the "where is it gonna curve" problem though, maybe right click to back up 1 rail would help?

I don't think it would help much. Rotating never bothered me too much, it's better than systems which have to try to guess what you want, and inevitably fail.

The rail placer is brilliant for long stretches of track, and really useful for diagonals too. However for anyone who cares exactly where the curved pieces go, and how all the rails line up, I find that it almost always lets me down if I deviate from a straight line. I'm also not one to just lay some random rail that goes any which-way to get to a point. Neat, organised lines for me, which means I can't generally just 'start'-'end' the rail planner, its 'straight line here' 'curve, no, curve a little later, no, up there, argh two more straight pieces', 'now curve here, right, 90 degrees', 'straight line to the end, got it, yay'.

[sleyn]

Hi kovarex,

This is my first time posting! After seeing you bring up tutorials, I felt the urge to point you towards Rimworld's latest implementation. If you haven't seen it - they do a reaaally slick passive-tutorial that looks like this: https://youtu.be/Ow3euohDqUA?t=1037

It's the stack of contextual "hints" in the top right corner that pop up based on what the user is doing. User can click/mouse over the hints to get them, and mark them as "learned" so they never come up again. They're interactive and fill up/autocomplete like progress bars if you're doing the action they represent (making them feel like mini-achievements).

I hope that helps or gives you some ideas. Tutorials are hard to do.

Great work, and good luck with 0.15!

[Rythe]

Merging items with different health:
Please do not. Could you instead add a mechanic to allow pocket repairs? Maybe it's a module in the armor, maybe it's a research that just enables the capability, but rather than potentially losing items because of picking them up unfixed, allow them to be fixed while an item.

+1 - It may clutter the inventory as things are, but the proposed FF change would create a lot of annoyance and confusion when new players discover that moving a bunch of damaged turrets means they lost a few of them. Older players will just be forced to repair first as good practice rather than risk a turret or two when they're looking at more than one damaged item. So merging damaged items into one creates more potential problems and annoyances and steps than it actually solves.

It also breaks game logic when a non-consumable item suddenly becomes consumable by way of health repair by way of pulling them into your inventory.

[porcupine]

Merging items with different health:
Please do not. Could you instead add a mechanic to allow pocket repairs? Maybe it's a module in the armor, maybe it's a research that just enables the capability, but rather than potentially losing items because of picking them up unfixed, allow them to be fixed while an item.

+1 - It may clutter the inventory as things are, but the proposed FF change would create a lot of annoyance and confusion when new players discover that moving a bunch of damaged turrets means they lost a few of them. Older players will just be forced to repair first as good practice rather than risk a turret or two when they're looking at more than one damaged item. So merging damaged items into one creates more potential problems and annoyances and steps than it actually solves.

It also breaks game logic when a non-consumable item suddenly becomes consumable by way of health repair by way of pulling them into your inventory.

Why not just have the stack go to the average health of the contained turrets, like many other games do?

That way, no free repair from pickup, no multiple stacks, and no disappearing turrets.



On an unrelated note... Is there any estimated timeline for 0.15? I've been holding off playing after frothing over the weekly updates, but I can't find any clue regarding estimated timeline... Tried using the search function in the forums, but it's not something really searchable (since it doesn't like ".15" amongst other things)

[Extended]

Isn't this game about automation? I would absolutely love the war to be automatable too, by creating robot armies that we can send to attack the enemy! It would really be useful for the PvP mode too.

Setting a delay for turrets is a great idea to avoid turret creeping! But I also think that there should be better military technologies, because to my mind, they are currently not enough powerful.

I personally don't like the idea of merging items because I don't want to loose some without being able to choose. I'm not really happy with the rail tool either, it's inconvenient when trying to precisely place small pieces of rails, a manual alternative would be nice.

I hope that you also will make technologies for water in this version. For the space exploration, instead of making an extension pack, you could make a second game but cheaper for people who bought the first one.

[Daid]

On the item merging, it could always be a manual action? When you pick something up that is damaged, it is always a new inventory item, but you can put it on a stack to merge it?

This will give you the option to merge if your inventory space is limited, but won't make you lose your expensive laser turrets.

[Zentay]

I would also like to see aquifers and drilling for water! With ability to have no lakes at the start.

[Eurofighter1200]

Nice ideas more space for the inventory is always great and mk2 boilers and nuclear wow great i cant wait for it!

I thought why not add a late game technology so we can crack coal in oil in a chemical plant that would be cool and coal have a use even we use only solar and only electric furnances.

[GeniusIsme]

Finding 1 - the game contains a lot already

That's true. The problem is player do not need all of that. It only takes 46 hours if you want to check it all. But if you just want to finish the game with reasonable pace it will only take you 20 hours. On top of rocket requirements you just add laser turrets, some pink modules and logistic robots for convenience. No need to higher tech stuff - in only consumes time and resources. You don't event need big enough base to justify blueprints. The game needs more ambitious goals or difficulty settings, for example multiplier on research and rocket cost.

On other points, I completely agree with you. Including merging damaged items, yes please.

[Arcania85]

If we list game annoyances i would say this one is my biggest one:


Logi bots try to repair other logi bots....


When im clearing, ussually with a flame trower sometimes a stray logi bot comes flying back at a crawl pace.

It it gets damaged from fire or a biter an other will launch, also gets damaged, out comes an other bot to repair the repairing bot...etc, untill a large swarm is out while there getting killed of my and my fire, and the biters.

For the fire part, you can simply make them immume, they fly 'above' it not in it, as a explanation.
But that still leaves the occasional bitter damaging. issue.