Friday Facts #160 - Playtesting

[Syriusz]

I think that merging is good idea, but do not merge them with possibility of loosing items, like now with ammo, but instead make them average health.
So health of merged items should be: HP=SUM(HP of items)/(number of items).
It will require as many repair packs (more or less, depends on rounding) as before and there would not be possible to loose items. You could only make it that damaged items don't mix with items with full health, so you don't place damaged ones when you don't want.

When they first mentioned it I figured it'd be something like this, but after considering it more it just doesn't feel right to introduce rounding issues like that. Not a huge problem I guess, but I'd rather lose items. To be honest though both solutions are imperfect, and I wonder if the people suggesting auto-repair might be right.

Well, since turrets and walls (they will be most likely to be damaged) stack up to 50 then you would loose/ gain up to 25 hp or if it would round always down you could loose less than 50 hp it would be only 1/8 or 1/4 of basic repair kit, and that is just about half or one ore of stuff, so it would not be big deal. And most important it would be less than loosing whole turret instead of 1/200 of repair pack.

And stack health is already stored as % of full health, so it is precise since it need to cover entities with 5000 or more hp, especially with modded entities. (I think that it is precise since factorrisimo factories have 0% of health in inventory for storing data, and I never had it more than 0% even with dozens of factories). And when you place them you would sometimes have entity with one more or less hp, depending on stack health. Then health of entity would be HP_entity= HP_stack_percent*Entity_max_health/(number_of_items) with rounding to 1 and new stack health would change according to rounding of new entity (or it could just randomly give it one more or less hp, depending of how far theoretical float hp is from integer, IF it would save processing power. If someone want to exploit it, since it would be such pain in ass for little gain, they deserve it).

[lingnau]

I agree with most of your findings kovarex, I want to humbly address a couple of one them:

Decrease the bounding box of burner mining drills,chemical plants and pumpjacks so walking in between them is possible.
Increase stack sizes of belts,walls and pipes from 50 to 100, this is mainly for the later stage of the game with personal roboports, where making train stations and expansions meant having not enough of belts and walls way too often.

No objection, although being "hard" is part of the challenge, some players deploy whole roboports when they want to build something and take a whole train worth of stuff that they can't carry.

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

But why? A pump-jack isn't used that frequently, and you can always have more assemblers to get the job done in time. I feel the balance is currently ok.

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

Sounds cool. The previously suggested "sluggish" robot (that works similar to construction robots but is really slow sounds like a good idea)

Change the oil so the minimum yield is dependent on the starting yield so better fields are also better later on.
There are more oil fields (compared to 0.13) which is a good change, but setting them up is quite a chore for big ones, so having fewer of them with higher yield would be better.

Yes please! Definitively! The 0.1/s ending yield is frustrating and gets you nowhere, even with hundreds of pumpjacks.

MK2 personal roboport is a must, as the limit of 10 robots per roboport is not enough in later stages of the game when building bigger setups.
Concrete shouldn't be blue science (green only)

Absolutely yes!

The electric furnace should be somewhat cheaper. (Especially when it is used in science packs now)

It's acceptable for the current requirements, but definitively legit if they're going to be used in science packs.

Shift click (ghost placement) should go through trees and rocks as blueprints with shift do.

Absolutely.

Enhancement to the belt building mechanics, so building by dragging makes continuous belt.

You mean not only for straights?

Limit turret creep as it is way too powerful now (especially with personal roboport) with a turret activation time. As it makes the expansion harder, the resource growth from the center should be higher.

Maybe somewhat like a capacitor that takes a while to charge before it starts working for the first time? Since the recipe for the Laser turret includes batteries. I do agree that it's "way to easy" at the current time, but this is currently one of the most tedious/manual tasks in Factorio, so making this even harder may be annoying at the end of the day.

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.

Since the robots repair most stuff before I'm able to pick-it-up, I'm rarely ever annoyed by this. I would preferably have the damaged items stacked (displaying the condition of the worst icon in the stack maybe) and handing them out on a specific order from the stack(best to worst), but allowing the same amount of damaged items to be stacked as would happen with good items.

MK2 version of boiler and steam engine. It is going to be a must with the nuclear power, but it should be usable with conventional coal power generation as well.

This may make we want to play a little bit more with non-solar, because currently my steam/boiler set-ups don't last long in the game before becoming a "backup" power source.

As of now, research is somewhat underrated, I expect the new science pack changes to improve this and really force players to make more thoughtful choices, which will be good.

There's something that you didn't address and I believe gets very little attention. In most maps/plays that I see around the pollution is just skyrocketing. Since there are efficiency modules to reduce pollution which allows you to create a pretty impressive base without pollution (solar power + 2x Green Module 2 on everything) I would really like the idea of there being an upside to keep pollution down. Overall pollution counters (to keep an eye on) should also be cool, since they're relevant if you want to make a "peaceful" game (little bitter interaction/intervention unless when expanding). I'm all about "efficiency", so if you can make the same with less resources and less power/etc, you should be rewarded.

I do believe that with 0.15 the game will be "complete as is", since we're not paying for a subscription and this was a one-time purchase there must come a time where you say "The product is finished as it is" and my believe is that if you're not already there you're really close to it. Congratulations from a very happy player with over 250 hours on record(8 cents per hour of fun, can't blame about that).

And one last thing that I would like to see (Not because it's relevant, just because it's cool) : Electric locomotives. Hey, I'm already taking poles everywhere with my rails, why not electric locomotives (20 electric engine units instead of regular ones and you're done)

Cheers!

[ili]

Very nice changes

Increase stack sizes of belts,walls and pipes from 50 to 100, this is mainly for the later stage of the game with personal roboports, where making train stations and expansions meant having not enough of belts and walls way too often.

This is why when you create a new outpost you take a train full of belt and walls with you and not go on foot, that way you don't need to go back and forth to your base to fill up on stuff

There are even players that automate this and create service train station that fill a spacial train with all the goods needed to bulled an outpost

[Androkai]

I often get trouble with defending all my small outposts. Without a hangar and full robot-system I need to revisit them every 10 min to repair towers and refill ammunition in the gap till laser-towers are ready for mass-production. I wish for a possibility to automatically repair/supply small outposts like the one in the post-picture for example by adding an additional wagon to the train-system.

[Marik]

To avoid item loss after merging damaged items should combine there health to create undamaged ones, but leave 1 HP to them, so they could be fully repaired later. Items that have 1 HP will stack up and occupy lass space in the inventory. This would create stack of undamaged items, stack of 1 HP items and (potentialy) one partialy damaged item.

[AcolyteOfRocket]

The game took me 46 hours to finish.

No Spoon achievement for you then

The overall feeling was, that we shouldn't add much to the game content anymore or it will become too complex and big for the newcomers.

So does this mean you aren't going to double the types of science packs any more ? Told you it wasn't needed.

This means, that when we add nuclear power, dirty mining, and a few little things, that will be it for the vanilla part of the game.

The best way to improve the game as I see it, is to minimise the annoying parts of the gameplay.

You are going to remove combat ?

Decrease the bounding box of burner mining drills,chemical plants and pumpjacks so walking in between them is possible.

No that big a deal either way. Might not be worth the effort.

Increase stack sizes of belts,walls and pipes from 50 to 100, this is mainly for the later stage of the game with personal roboports, where making train stations and expansions meant having not enough of belts and walls way too often.

Nice.

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

Not that big a problem and the variation actually adds some interest to the game. I would advise against this, but I'm not going to cry over it.

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

Yes please.

Change the oil so the minimum yield is dependent on the starting yield so better fields are also better later on.
There are more oil fields (compared to 0.13) which is a good change, but setting them up is quite a chore for big ones, so having fewer of them with higher yield would be better.

Not a big issue, I doubt the change is worth the effort.

MK2 personal roboport is a must, as the limit of 10 robots per roboport is not enough in later stages of the game when building bigger setups.

YES !

Concrete shouldn't be blue science (green only)
The electric furnace should be somewhat cheaper. (Especially when it is used in science packs now)

Not an issue for me..

Shift click (ghost placement) should go through trees and rocks as blueprints with shift do.

Yes please.

Enhancement to the belt building mechanics, so building by dragging makes continuous belt.

Also I suggest improvements to belt upgrading.

Limit turret creep as it is way too powerful now (especially with personal roboport) with a turret activation time. As it makes the expansion harder, the resource growth from the center should be higher.

Be careful with this, turret creep is not the fault of the turrets, its because the combat in this game is awful. Some prominent youtubers already turn off biters because they think biters are naff - thats not the biters fault either, it the combat overall that sucks. If you eliminate turret creep experienced players might just turn down biters and noobies might play another game entirely. Of course the new flamethrower helps, so please don't nerf it.

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.

You don't need to help turret creepers that much

MK2 version of boiler and steam engine. It is going to be a must with the nuclear power, but it should be usable with conventional coal power generation as well.

I'm not looking forward to nuclear power, I don't think the game needs it.

[Zentay]

As for removing turret creep: put "siege worms" in biter bases that have huge range and damage and will target structures.

[ssilk]

10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not.

Since there is currently no application for boilers EXCEPT for heating up liquid to make electricity, an electricity-powered boiler would be roughly analogous to a solar-powered flashlight.

Might sound so. Indeed the point are not the boilers, but the storing of the hot water in tanks.
See https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?tit ... r_in_tanks

A completely filled tank with water at 100 degrees stores 212 Megajoules! This is the equivalent to 42 Basic accumulators, but the tank needs only 3x3 tiles of space. This way you can store much more energy in a much smaller place: 23.5 MJ / Tile vs. 1.2 MJ / Tile

I don't know, if that is really up to date, but if not it should not have changed too much. Also eventually interesting: https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?tit ... r_in_tanks

And this becomes much more interesting with nuclear energy (and other energy creation ideas: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=31440 ) : Players wants some energy storage.
See below "Storing energy" in viewtopic.php?f=80&t=31440 . There are more, but I just linked the most actual ones.

You need also to know, that solar panels are one of the most discussed subjects about balancing: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=18613 Solar panels less of a no-brainer

There are many ideas about making storage much more important. See viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342 Events (Environmental Disasters and Weather) / Biome-Types
And in discussions around nuclear energy there is a lot of agreement, that nuclear energy should be "slow" in the way, how fast it reacts to changes in power usage. This means: you need fast storage of energy.

So to conclude it: Electric boilers to create hot water is in my eyes a good idea to have some kind of "emergency energy backup". [And AFAIK such boilers needs to be implemented into the game, cause it cannot be modded easily: Implementations based on the current boilers would eat up too much CPU; you need some Lua-Script that shifts the consumed energy (by a accumulator-entity or so) into the boiler.]

But I don't want to hide: Another direction to store energy (also quite interesting) would be producing for example ethanol out of the air (CO2 + H2O + Power --> CH2 (methylen-group) + some O2 , air-cleaning and producing pre-products for oil and fuel , I mention this only, cause this is currently researches in reality and the results are really promising).

And we don't need to mix this up: Energy production is in my eyes a cool thing, when we speak about different speeds in availability. Every kind of energy should have their pros and cons. Hot water for example is - correctly built - very fast available, nuclear energy should be in my eyes much slower.

It will literally not work. That kind of contraption shouldn't even start. It's literally this.

Hehe... Well, the boilers have of course the same priority-level as accumulators, so that the don't consume energy, when not enough energy available. And more complex switching: Use circuits and power-switches.

I'd love an ability to use construction bots (or alike) at early stages of the game. Even just being able to lay blueprints and make them built at arm-reach automatically, as you get through ghost buildings would be super neat.
Also copy-pasting and cut-pasting sections of the base, like when you realize you've misaligned a whole bloc of your factory by one tile, and you have to tear ir down to rebuild it by hand (because, well, robots are blue science y'know ).

Well, also my opinon.
There is this big subject, which needs (in my opinion) to be known to understand the relations to other fields:

viewtopic.php?f=80&t=4682 Planning (Signs, Cloning, Ghosts, Blueprinting and more...).

Read the points about "Cloning", that is a technique which is relevant BEFORE blueprints are available. The basic principle with cloning (it's just a name, replace it with anything you like) is, that the player is able to copy a (small) areas and paste it anywhere in reach. It's not told, how to place objects, it could be some kind of "magic" or kind of robots, or you need to use "capsules"; I don't know, the details are not relevant here.

What's relevant? Well, that mentioned subject is quite old. In my eyes it should work currently like so:
- Copy/paste should work from begin on with ghosts. Meaning: You can currently place single ghosts. I see no problem to place multiple ghosts at once. That is also a super useful-planing tool for multiplayer.
- Some research and items are needed to have the ability for ghost-placing: You place a ghost and if you come near enough to that ghost and holding a tool and have the right items, it is placed.
- I think also blueprints before you have construction bots is a good idea. With the stored blueprints in the blueprint-books from former game, you can improve early game a lot. I think creating such books, that enable fast early game for example, would keep many players engaged. In my opinion this can become the same "level of fun" as mods already have.
- Some research might increase the radius of this tool. And when I speak about a tool: Perhaps it's not a tool, it's robot-capsules, that work for a minute until destroyed. Again: The "How" is not relevant yet.

+we should be able to copy and paste from a factory to an inserter and it should set the filter to the same good as being produced by the factory

I thought you could already do that, or maybe only to request container (which has same effect)?

Indeed you can do both.

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.

There are a lot more suggestions: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=20566 Changes for the Personal Roboport
One of them are such a switch. Another one was, that the bots don't wait for orders and get lost (e.g when driving train). I don't know, how much of the issues are currently fixed, but with each version it was better.

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.

[/quote]
There are a lot of ideas: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=3440 Enemy Variations / Enemy Variety / New Enemies / Boss

I think the favorites are:
- Underground enemies, that dig tunnels and they suddenly appear in the middle of your base
- Thieve enemies, that steal your produces items.
Both is difficult to implement and I don't think this will come before 1.0.
But at this point I like always also to point to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=3440 What do biters do in their spare time? (Pheromone pathfind)
which might be a way to become completely different (and unforeseeable) behavior.

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.

Indeed. The current world-generator does in my eyes a very good job, but compared to other games we need to create 50-100 times bigger maps, which results (cause area has x and y direction) in 2500 - 10,000 bigger areas. A map-editor is only of limited use with that sizes (create a small production site). :/
There is this subject: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=13022 World Generation / Map Generator / Game Modes / Scenarios / Biomes
which describes a way to autogenerate worlds, composed out of layers of worlds and chooing the right "layers", like photoshop.

[Bart]

Sounds great, all these changes!

Although I am missing one important annoyance: when you hover the cursor over a chest, you can see the content of the entire logistic network. Unless you have too many different kinds of items. Please fix this, then my factorio experience will be perfect .

[JoneKone]

I'm sorry, most of the proposed changes are just making the factory have a smaller foot print and makes the game eazy mode...

The need to 100 personal robots is useless.
The need for lessening build time and lessening resources needed for building anything is useless.
The need for even slower robots makes multiplayer useless.
The need for Increasing stack sizes of belts,walls and pipes is just simply lessening single player time.

The oil issues can be managed true modules.

I simply see these changes as dev playing the game and getting annoyed for some small things and wanting to change them. cause damn those annoying little things that increase play time.

It's a factory you can over come these things by increasing the size of your factory.

[Blailus]

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.

Instead of merging, can there be a way to repair items inside your inventory? I agree it is annoying, but mainly when turret creeping, which was already stated as OP. If we could repair the items inside of the inventory, that'd both fix the merge issues, and not waste items.

[imaytag]

Instead of merging, can there be a way to repair items inside your inventory? I agree it is annoying, but mainly when turret creeping, which was already stated as OP. If we could repair the items inside of the inventory, that'd both fix the merge issues, and not waste items.

This is my preferred solution as well.

Also I would kill for an upgraded rail (rail + copper cable or something) that can carry electricity to my outposts. I'm building power lines along all my rails anyways and I get sick of having to do it

[Snowf4ll]

Decrease the bounding box of burner mining drills,chemical plants and pumpjacks so walking in between them is possible.

HNGFGNBHLBABLB YES PLEASE THANK YOU

*ahem*

But yeah looking good overall

[ketil]

Instead of merging damaged items directly, you could merge them visually so they occupy the same inventory slot, while they instead are represented as a priority queue of damaged items. Obviously the type of all items in a PQ are equal, so the object containing the PQ could contain all information about what kind of item it is, while the PQ only contains numbers representing remaining hp. Visually you see average condition, type and amount, but when you place them, you get back the damaged item with the most health first. If you also implement repair in inventory, then you repair the one with most health to full health first, before you start repairing the next. I think damaged items should have lower priority than the full health stacks in inventory, so if you select one stack, but run out, you switch to a remaining full health stacks if it exist, before you switch to a damaged PQ. If the PQ contains more elements than in a normal full health stack, then it occupies 2 or more inventory slots, or is split into 2 or more PQs depending on what is easier to code or cheaper to do.

[SaberCherry]

I'm not sure why there is so much resistance toward the concept of electric boilers. They would be a simple and space/resource-efficient way of storing solar electricity. For example, considering the attached image -

In this situation, the coal boilers could be replaced with electric boilers hooked up to a solar grid; the water input would be gated by a small pump that only activates when there is excess solar power - e.g., when a connected accumulator is full. The output is gated (via a delay switch) to only produce electricity when the accumulator (connected to the main power grid) drops below 10%, and it shuts down after the accumulator goes above 15% for a while. Ideally, the priority of electric boilers would be lower than other things, but with the correct gating that's not really necessary. As for the delay switch in the image, it consists of 2 boxes, some belts, and 4 inserters; the red-wire inserter activates at <10%, green-wire at >15%, and the power switch allows power through when the box is not full (<20 blocks). You can adjust the delay by changing the number of blocks in the box.

[inteljoe]

Something I was thinking about in regards to infinite tech are infinitate techs that change global policies.

For example:

Infinite Production: Increases global crafting speed by 1%.
Infinite Mining: ^^
Infinite Energy: ^^
Infinite Gun Damage: ^^
Infinite Laser Damage: ^^
Infinite Fire Damage: ^^
Infinite Explosive Damage: ^^

etc, etc.

Have it cost a crazy amount of science packs to even out or from prevent from becoming OP for example.

Just an idea.

[aober93]

TURRET CREEP this is an important change ,this will reveal the awful combat part of the game even more. Attacking the aliens is shit. Defending from aliens is boss. Exactly what peaceful aliens dont solve. And turret creep isnt ideal either. It just solves an even worse part.

Damaged items in your inventory are a pita to fix. I'd rather see them merged, instead placing them down to fix individually. It happened so rarely but limited my playstyle.

So yay for all your findings.

[Probe1]

>Shift click (ghost placement) should go through trees and rocks as blueprints with shift do.

Wait what I never knew!

Also as much as I appreciate not overloading newcomers, the late game is really lacking both challenge and content compared to the early and mid game. You're not gonna drown the people who have mastered the game by adding stuff to the end.

>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.

That's just dumb. Even the possibility of eliminating items is much worse than the very mild inconvenience of dropping an item and repairing it.

>You build 50 rail signals → Tutorial of chain signals unlocked

This is much better. I still don't know how to use chain signals and I've played for 300 hours. They've never been critical and they aren't exactly explained in game.

[Probe1]

TURRET CREEP this is an important change ,this will reveal the awful combat part of the game even more. Attacking the aliens is shit. Defending from aliens is boss. Exactly what peaceful aliens dont solve. And turret creep isnt ideal either. It just solves an even worse part.

Damaged items in your inventory are a pita to fix. I'd rather see them merged, instead placing them down to fix individually. It happened so rarely but limited my playstyle.

So yay for all your findings.

I agree. Combat and biters in general are really underserved. I like turret creep because it's effective, it requires discovery planning and ingenuity to come up with, and it eliminates the really unenjoyable aspects of offensive combat.

Yay I have a tank.
.. yay it's only good for running over small biter nests.

[Avezo]

I feel there is too many different inserters. I'd rather have just a single inserter and ability to set it into different operation modes that you unlock through research. Maybe something similar with belts. You'd get just one basic belt color, but then you can upgrade its speed through research, not through building a new better belt. Things like that might help if it feels liek there is too much in the game.