Friday Facts #160 - Playtesting

[factoriouzr]

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

I really think we need an auto repair as well, and I love the idea of carrying electricity in the rails.

[factoriouzr]

+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)?

Every time I've tried it, it doesn't do anything. To requester works and its' great, I use it all the time, but I use the fast or stack inserters to limit how much of a product is made, eg. 4000 green circuits. This is beneficial with robots because I just copy and paste the factory with blueprints to increase production, but overall the item is still limited to 4000 for eg. To do the filtering I set <item> < <x> as a filter condition. It would be nice If I could copy and paste from a factory to the inserter and it would set both item in the condition part and the item in the filter part. Then the user can clear one if they don't want it or leave it as it will still work in most situations. Clearing is much faster then clicking the filter box and then finding the right tab, then finding the entity in the list and selecting it (as an example). Not sure if search works in this gui, but it's still faster to right click then to type or search for the entity.

For that matter we should be able to copy from an inserter to a factory and the factory should set the recipe from the inserter's item in the condtion part if one is set, else do nothing.

If you have the actual Item in your hand:
left clicking a request field will request one stack of that item.
left clicking a Filter field will set the filter to that Item (The exception to this are wagons and your Hotbar there it's middle mouse instead of left mouse, because left mouse would place the item instead of setting a Filter).
So you don't have to search for the item in the tabs only your Inventory, it's not perfect but maybe that helps a little.

I didn't know about the filter field for inserters being settable from an item in the cursor, thanks for the tip, however this won't help in the majority of my situations, because I am setting up factories to produce the good for the first time, so I don't have one of each good crafted in my inventory, and some take a long time to craft and could require a lot of ingredients like solar panels, roboports, oil refineries etc.

[factoriouzr]

Rail building:
I am also surprised, I thought the rail building was extremely annoying to the point That I rarely bothered with trains. I hated manually rotation the tracks and trying to line them up to go where I wanted. I'm glad there is no curved rail piece.

As a suggestion to the people who don't like the new system, have you tried rotating the end rail piece while in rail building mode? That has worked for me on many instances. Also if you can see that you have enough room to build the track in the way you want, but the autobuilder doesn't do what you want, I found that often times I can just build half of the track in one go, then do the other half in another operation. That way if the rail builder goes in weird directions, you can force it to go where you want part way on the track then when you finish the track it might get the right path for the second half.

It's more that instead of placing the pieces of the rail exactly where I know I want them, I have to try and figure out how to get the rail placer to understand exactly where I want the rail pieces, which introduces frustration. It constantly feels like I'm on the verge of a mis-click that will result in some random squiggly mess, and I'm constantly adjusting the start point or cancelling with q because I just needed to reset the thing. When using the rail planner, to me, it just feels like I'm constantly fumbling about, whereas with the individual pieces, I know exactly what I want, and exactly how to put it there, bam, done.

rotating the end piece and laying the track section by section help me build the rail the way I want it, yes, but it's still me trying to force the planner into doing things it doesn't seem to want to do. I can get the rail planner to lay (almost, if I start in the right place) exactly what I want, by moving 1-2 rails forward at a time, but at that point I'd rather just have the individual pieces back. It also doesn't help when I want to edit sections of track to add in something small, it sucks not having access to the underlying pieces that actually make up the track.


I don't see why it would be a big deal to just allow us to lay individual track pieces again, as well as having the rail planner.

It actually would've been neat if the rail planner was similar to the blueprint tool or deconstruct tool from the beginning, a small research to get a planner tool that aids in laying large sections of mostly straight rail.

Interesting, I see what you mean and that would be very annoying. Personally I never ran into it as bad as you did.

Are you aware that you can hold shift I believe to have the rail layer go through tress instead of around them?

Are you building a lot of custom rail sections? I'm asking because blueprints might help you. If you build the section of rail you want then blueprint it, it saves a lot of time. I use this all the time for straight sections of rails, T junctions, etc. Of course this requires robots, so maybe you are earlier in the game when you need it.

I think an option to build manually or with the rail builder is a good solution, but with one caveat. DON'T BRING BACK CURVED RAILS lol. That will make it harder because we have to go back to crafting two different rail pieces and also carrying stacks of both in our inventory (more wasted space). but allowing toggling to curved pieces during manual placement would work. Personally I never want to use the old manual rail building system ever again. It was too tedious. Rotating a rail piece like 8 times to get the perfect angle was annoying, but having both options is always good. However I have a question for you. If you want to build a single piece at a time, how is using the rail planner and only placing one rail a problem? Isn't it exactly the same thing? You pick starting point, you press "R" to rotate till you get the "piece" you want and you place.

[aeros1]

Interesting, I see what you mean and that would be very annoying. Personally I never ran into it as bad as you did.

Are you aware that you can hold shift I believe to have the rail layer go through tress instead of around them?

Are you building a lot of custom rail sections? I'm asking because blueprints might help you. If you build the section of rail you want then blueprint it, it saves a lot of time. I use this all the time for straight sections of rails, T junctions, etc. Of course this requires robots, so maybe you are earlier in the game when you need it.

I think an option to build manually or with the rail builder is a good solution, but with one caveat. DON'T BRING BACK CURVED RAILS lol. That will make it harder because we have to go back to crafting two different rail pieces and also carrying stacks of both in our inventory (more wasted space). but allowing toggling to curved pieces during manual placement would work. Personally I never want to use the old manual rail building system ever again. It was too tedious. Rotating a rail piece like 8 times to get the perfect angle was annoying, but having both options is always good. However I have a question for you. If you want to build a single piece at a time, how is using the rail planner and only placing one rail a problem? Isn't it exactly the same thing? You pick starting point, you press "R" to rotate till you get the "piece" you want and you place.

Not really even now curved rails are done with regular rails. If rail item would work similar to blueprint book. Shift-mousewheel for curved rail. you wouldn't need 2 items.

[Antaios]

Are you aware that you can hold shift I believe to have the rail layer go through tress instead of around them?

Are you building a lot of custom rail sections? I'm asking because blueprints might help you. If you build the section of rail you want then blueprint it, it saves a lot of time. I use this all the time for straight sections of rails, T junctions, etc. Of course this requires robots, so maybe you are earlier in the game when you need it.

Trees aren't the problem, you have to tear them down manually when not using bots either way, and yes, when placing ghosts you go through them.

It not just custom rail intersections its hours spent fiddling round with intersection and station designs to try and find a new pretty one, more efficient one, or just something different. Some of us fiddle with railway design for fun, so there's a lot of non-robot work. I always use blueprints when I can and when I have them, I tech personal roboport as early as possible and run it off solar modules in the modular armour, it charges slow, but works.

I think an option to build manually or with the rail builder is a good solution, but with one caveat. DON'T BRING BACK CURVED RAILS lol. That will make it harder because we have to go back to crafting two different rail pieces and also carrying stacks of both in our inventory (more wasted space). but allowing toggling to curved pieces during manual placement would work. Personally I never want to use the old manual rail building system ever again. It was too tedious. Rotating a rail piece like 8 times to get the perfect angle was annoying, but having both options is always good.

That's all I'm really asking for. I'm not sure why, but rotating the curved rail piece never bothered me though.

If you want to build a single piece at a time, how is using the rail planner and only placing one rail a problem? Isn't it exactly the same thing? You pick starting point, you press "R" to rotate till you get the "piece" you want and you place.

Mentioned this before, but it's different. You have to specify a start and end point, you can't see the rail piece visually as you're trying to place it hovering where the mouse is. An example is trying to make a corner for a T junction, it needs to be in the right spot, I want it as tight as possible. Going one piece at a time with the rail planner, I can't see what I'm doing as I do it, so I have to randomly pick a tile that I *think* is the one that the curve should start on, and if I get it wrong, I have to press q, and then go select the tile before/after, or I have to move a tile forward by clicking and then doing the curved piece. It's a lot easier to know where the curved piece goes and where to click, if I'm holding a curve piece and moving it around with the mouse.

[aeros1]

Regarding biters:
Biters definitely need more variety, better AI, more interesting bases, more options to adjust their difficulty at the start of the game: number of concurrent attacks, how much bigger their forces get, etc. However Biters that bypass all your defenses and appear in the middle of your base, i'm not a fan of. That will just result in messy factories with laser turrets everywhere. Flying biters are a better way to deal with this in my opinion by also adding anti air turrets and options because it allows for variety without being cheap and just bypassing all the defenses the player spend time and resources building since the flyers would still have to path from their base to yours and actually travel that distance.

Not as much variation variation may bring to blobb of everything upproach which would be not so interesting. If you ask me "Infested planet" approach with biter and biter nest evolutions might be more interesting. This way biter nests gain their own difinitive history and quirk of evolution based on biome, pollution type(or just amount) Nearby resources, or objects. Player aggression type and such. Ai also not necessarry to be strong and cunning, in fact it can do simple things.
As for more biters types well: I take analogue of starcraft 2.

Currently we have something of hydraliskls(Spitters) and zerglings(regualar biters)

But now imagine slow short range spitters but tanky, or siege artillery biters requiring some range upgrades and ore longer range turrets, but generally coming into range, while doing few far strikes on your clastered defences, or bomb biters rushing to walls trying to breach them.(hello minefields, also is it possible to make mines set their activation time instead of exploding on contact( or just small delay, after all they are antipersonal mines.), or fliers mobile but relatively weak both armor and attack wise, but having vulture AI if attacked, they mark spot as deffended based on damage, and seek different approach trying to find defenceless vital structures to harrass(still stopped by turrets this way), and if find no such place, try weakest spot, while allowing nest to decide on least deffended spot.

Or more armored biteres trying to decimate bots, both capsule and roboport ones, seeking them intentioanally and trying to get in melee. Or stealthed subversive ones that (not destroy or damage factories, but lower efficiency or productivity(last one probably not) of some buildings like steam engines, but detected by player or radar.) Wit last one I'd advise building to be more or less vital, but not commonly used (Putting turret and radar at each assembler could be annoying for some, while protecting only hemical plants or refineries or steam engines and or sollar panels.) In fact imo having drainer biters target sollar farms could be good downside of sollar panels, requiring you at least protect your sollar farm.
Hunter killer spawns when you piss off indiginous life forms to no end they rarely send assasination biters which fairly resistant to static deffences(maybe not trigger them but trigger alarms if they get on radar, so you need to be armed not to teath but at least have something more than set of iron armor and pistol.) Wild strains?? Big fat bosses, hard not to notice, maybe their spawning is trackable due to change of biter behavior and some reconnisance data you get from radars. (Like hives stir, and expantion stops as if they going into sleep. Yo can see how nests around you weaken and die, leaving only free space, becoming husks, and biters retreat farther from base, but in the end they gather up for doom attack(lots of biters and leader which if killed would stop semi organized behavior of biters) to swipe your base, so you have to prepare.(with new ghosts it is not problem to rebuild bases as long as you have 1 surviving roboport. and enough spare parts(good reason to automate production of assemblers and such))
Or any other boss waves.

And at last if it is possible for separate settings it would be nice too, so players could pick and choose what they like.(in fact AI:War has pretty good approach for customizable experience, allowing to control lots of aspects of game)

[SHiRKiT]

I have a friend that just started playing Factorio and those little tips are a MUST.

[sekanz]

So...

can we see your base kovarex?

Is this not happening?

[Ranakastrasz]

Pocket repair, when it worked without crashing, made it so that damaged items in your inventory would use repair kits to repair automatically. While not instant, that was extremely effective at fixing those items.

Unfortunately, it was only active really late game once you should have robots already, but I modified it myself to make it active from he start.

Also, add some attachment support for specific items, since some mods, like factorissimo, use the health to point to attached data.

[PureAwesome]

Some suggestions and alternatives for item merging:

1. Make merging items optional: perhaps whilst holding a damaged item and holding down shift-ctrl (or whatever), clicking on another damaged item of the same type merges them. Also, add a key combo (e.g. alt-ctrl) so that if you click on one damaged item of a certain type, it merges all damaged items of that type in your inventory.
2. As far as merging items goes, maybe add a button on the inventory UI that says 'merge all items' or something similar.
3. Add the ability to repair items whilst they are in the inventory. (Maybe holding a certain key whilst holding repair pack allows you to do so). Also add the ability to mark items in the inventory for auto-repair by bots. (Make it directly proportional to how many active bots (max{bots, robotport storage}) you have in your inventory.) Add the ability to toggle "auto-repair items in inventory".
4. Automatically let items in the inventory repair over time, possibly do as a module that can be worn in armour.

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

I really want deconstruction time for everything to be instant. I don't feel it adds anything to the gameplay. Things can be constructed instantly, and deconstructed instantly by bots. You can shift-click to place "blueprint" items for planning purposes, but then run the risk of bots coming along and auto-constructing them. Also, it's another layer of effort that, again, just increases the annoyance and not the challenge. Even if it is instant, it will still take enough time and effort (in terms of running around), to 'punish' the player for constructing something wrong, so this argument doesn't hold truck with me. Also, it's extra annoying that stone structures and concrete take even more time to deconstruct. Anyone who agrees / disagrees with me?

[sekanz]

I really want deconstruction time for everything to be instant. I don't feel it adds anything to the gameplay.

I think the delay is not for game play, but rather, for making sure you don't accidentally delete something you don't mean to delete.

[kovarex]

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.

This is a great idea! Simple and everyone will be happy.

[PureAwesome]

I really want deconstruction time for everything to be instant. I don't feel it adds anything to the gameplay.

I think the delay is not for game play, but rather, for making sure you don't accidentally delete something you don't mean to delete.

In that case, a menu option to deactivate it would be nice.

[PureAwesome]

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.

This is a great idea! Simple and everyone will be happy.

That sounds good, yeah!

[ssilk]

Regarding copying to inserters:
No you can't do both. I just tested it again in 0.14.13 and you Can't copy from a factory and paste on an inserter and have it set the filter in the condition when a fast inserter is connected to the logistics network.

Hm. I'm not 100% sure, but think this worked in 0.12 with smart inserters: Sets the item to test for to that which is produced by the copied assembly. I think this is too complex with the new inserters now and if, then I used this feature not so often, so I'm not sure.

However Biters that bypass all your defenses and appear in the middle of your base, i'm not a fan of. That will just result in messy factories with laser turrets everywhere.

Or it is a good reason to pave your factory area with concrete. Greetings from Dune. And there is of course a lot of balancing needed to make that really useful.

Flying biters are a better way to deal with this in my opinion by also adding anti air turrets and options because it allows for variety without being cheap and just bypassing all the defenses the player spend time and resources building since the flyers would still have to path from their base to yours and actually travel that distance.

Well flying enemies is 3rd place. I admit: Not my favorite.

[factoriouzr]

Regarding biters:
Biters definitely need more variety, better AI, more interesting bases, more options to adjust their difficulty at the start of the game: number of concurrent attacks, how much bigger their forces get, etc. However Biters that bypass all your defenses and appear in the middle of your base, i'm not a fan of. That will just result in messy factories with laser turrets everywhere. Flying biters are a better way to deal with this in my opinion by also adding anti air turrets and options because it allows for variety without being cheap and just bypassing all the defenses the player spend time and resources building since the flyers would still have to path from their base to yours and actually travel that distance.

Not as much variation variation may bring to blobb of everything upproach which would be not so interesting. If you ask me "Infested planet" approach with biter and biter nest evolutions might be more interesting. This way biter nests gain their own difinitive history and quirk of evolution based on biome, pollution type(or just amount) Nearby resources, or objects. Player aggression type and such. Ai also not necessarry to be strong and cunning, in fact it can do simple things.
As for more biters types well: I take analogue of starcraft 2.

Currently we have something of hydraliskls(Spitters) and zerglings(regualar biters)

But now imagine slow short range spitters but tanky, or siege artillery biters requiring some range upgrades and ore longer range turrets, but generally coming into range, while doing few far strikes on your clastered defences, or bomb biters rushing to walls trying to breach them.(hello minefields, also is it possible to make mines set their activation time instead of exploding on contact( or just small delay, after all they are antipersonal mines.), or fliers mobile but relatively weak both armor and attack wise, but having vulture AI if attacked, they mark spot as deffended based on damage, and seek different approach trying to find defenceless vital structures to harrass(still stopped by turrets this way), and if find no such place, try weakest spot, while allowing nest to decide on least deffended spot.

Or more armored biteres trying to decimate bots, both capsule and roboport ones, seeking them intentioanally and trying to get in melee. Or stealthed subversive ones that (not destroy or damage factories, but lower efficiency or productivity(last one probably not) of some buildings like steam engines, but detected by player or radar.) Wit last one I'd advise building to be more or less vital, but not commonly used (Putting turret and radar at each assembler could be annoying for some, while protecting only hemical plants or refineries or steam engines and or sollar panels.) In fact imo having drainer biters target sollar farms could be good downside of sollar panels, requiring you at least protect your sollar farm.
Hunter killer spawns when you piss off indiginous life forms to no end they rarely send assasination biters which fairly resistant to static deffences(maybe not trigger them but trigger alarms if they get on radar, so you need to be armed not to teath but at least have something more than set of iron armor and pistol.) Wild strains?? Big fat bosses, hard not to notice, maybe their spawning is trackable due to change of biter behavior and some reconnisance data you get from radars. (Like hives stir, and expantion stops as if they going into sleep. Yo can see how nests around you weaken and die, leaving only free space, becoming husks, and biters retreat farther from base, but in the end they gather up for doom attack(lots of biters and leader which if killed would stop semi organized behavior of biters) to swipe your base, so you have to prepare.(with new ghosts it is not problem to rebuild bases as long as you have 1 surviving roboport. and enough spare parts(good reason to automate production of assemblers and such))
Or any other boss waves.

And at last if it is possible for separate settings it would be nice too, so players could pick and choose what they like.(in fact AI:War has pretty good approach for customizable experience, allowing to control lots of aspects of game)

Yeah some great examples of nice varieties in biters. This is the type of thing I would like. However I don't like the random mutation aspect of Infested Planet. i don't think that would suit this game because in Infested Planet you can easily get destroyed just based on what mutation the enemy gets. It's no fun to have that happen in a 20 hour or 200 hour game. I like the rest of the ideas though as long as you can always defend against all waves in a fully automated way (usually by building walls and turrets and having robots for support to repair and replace as necessary). I like the idea of customizing the difficulty even further with setting the biter types that are allowed to spawn in addition to difficulty settings such as ramp up speed, force strength, max number of concurrent attacks etc.

[ChurchOrganist]

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 the way forward here would be to link laser turret upgrades to biter evolution. At the moment it is possible to use fully upgraded lasers on medium biters.

If it was only possible to upgrade lasers at certain points in the evolution cycle, it would have the effect of restraining the amount of OPness without nerfing them completely as an offensive technique.

Introducing a delay would simply make biter clearance in late game even more tedious than it is now; and unless you clear entire land masses now, biters will attack trains, powerpoles, rail and even solar panels, which make transport of materials from outposts very difficult.

This, coupled with the relative weakness of vanilla walls against behemoth biters and spitters means you are spending more time managing biter attacks than you are building your factory once you are travelling more than a few tiles to transport resources.

Consequently those of us who favour widely spaced resources with heavy use of rail to transport them will be at a disadvantage at normal biter settings.

Perhaps you could even make laser turrets a purple science research requirement. After all, it is possible to use normal turrets with equal effectiveness in the early and mid game for turret creep, if you can work out how

[factoriouzr]

Are you aware that you can hold shift I believe to have the rail layer go through tress instead of around them?

Are you building a lot of custom rail sections? I'm asking because blueprints might help you. If you build the section of rail you want then blueprint it, it saves a lot of time. I use this all the time for straight sections of rails, T junctions, etc. Of course this requires robots, so maybe you are earlier in the game when you need it.

Trees aren't the problem, you have to tear them down manually when not using bots either way, and yes, when placing ghosts you go through them.

It not just custom rail intersections its hours spent fiddling round with intersection and station designs to try and find a new pretty one, more efficient one, or just something different. Some of us fiddle with railway design for fun, so there's a lot of non-robot work. I always use blueprints when I can and when I have them, I tech personal roboport as early as possible and run it off solar modules in the modular armour, it charges slow, but works.

I think an option to build manually or with the rail builder is a good solution, but with one caveat. DON'T BRING BACK CURVED RAILS lol. That will make it harder because we have to go back to crafting two different rail pieces and also carrying stacks of both in our inventory (more wasted space). but allowing toggling to curved pieces during manual placement would work. Personally I never want to use the old manual rail building system ever again. It was too tedious. Rotating a rail piece like 8 times to get the perfect angle was annoying, but having both options is always good.

That's all I'm really asking for. I'm not sure why, but rotating the curved rail piece never bothered me though.

If you want to build a single piece at a time, how is using the rail planner and only placing one rail a problem? Isn't it exactly the same thing? You pick starting point, you press "R" to rotate till you get the "piece" you want and you place.

Mentioned this before, but it's different. You have to specify a start and end point, you can't see the rail piece visually as you're trying to place it hovering where the mouse is. An example is trying to make a corner for a T junction, it needs to be in the right spot, I want it as tight as possible. Going one piece at a time with the rail planner, I can't see what I'm doing as I do it, so I have to randomly pick a tile that I *think* is the one that the curve should start on, and if I get it wrong, I have to press q, and then go select the tile before/after, or I have to move a tile forward by clicking and then doing the curved piece. It's a lot easier to know where the curved piece goes and where to click, if I'm holding a curve piece and moving it around with the mouse.

Sorry, I probably just missed it, but why can't you see the rail being placed? Is it because you have to click and then move over one space and click again? Doesn't it show you what it will look like as you drag out, or is the issue that you have to keep dragging until the planner has enough space for a curve and it's this guessing part that's annoying? If it's this dragging part then I see what you mean. When fine tuning and doing custom stuff it can get annoying.

[factoriouzr]

Some suggestions and alternatives for item merging:

1. Make merging items optional: perhaps whilst holding a damaged item and holding down shift-ctrl (or whatever), clicking on another damaged item of the same type merges them. Also, add a key combo (e.g. alt-ctrl) so that if you click on one damaged item of a certain type, it merges all damaged items of that type in your inventory.
2. As far as merging items goes, maybe add a button on the inventory UI that says 'merge all items' or something similar.
3. Add the ability to repair items whilst they are in the inventory. (Maybe holding a certain key whilst holding repair pack allows you to do so). Also add the ability to mark items in the inventory for auto-repair by bots. (Make it directly proportional to how many active bots (max{bots, robotport storage}) you have in your inventory.) Add the ability to toggle "auto-repair items in inventory".
4. Automatically let items in the inventory repair over time, possibly do as a module that can be worn in armour.

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

I really want deconstruction time for everything to be instant. I don't feel it adds anything to the gameplay. Things can be constructed instantly, and deconstructed instantly by bots. You can shift-click to place "blueprint" items for planning purposes, but then run the risk of bots coming along and auto-constructing them. Also, it's another layer of effort that, again, just increases the annoyance and not the challenge. Even if it is instant, it will still take enough time and effort (in terms of running around), to 'punish' the player for constructing something wrong, so this argument doesn't hold truck with me. Also, it's extra annoying that stone structures and concrete take even more time to deconstruct. Anyone who agrees / disagrees with me?

I think the time delay in deconstructing by player is a good thing. It prevents accidental miss-clicks from destroying your base. This is especially good for people who aren't used to playing a lot of computer games, new people to the game, and people who haven't played for a while that are returning. I sometimes miss click and that delay saves me from destroying a requester chest, factory or something else important.

[factoriouzr]

Regarding copying to inserters:
No you can't do both. I just tested it again in 0.14.13 and you Can't copy from a factory and paste on an inserter and have it set the filter in the condition when a fast inserter is connected to the logistics network.

Hm. I'm not 100% sure, but think this worked in 0.12 with smart inserters: Sets the item to test for to that which is produced by the copied assembly. I think this is too complex with the new inserters now and if, then I used this feature not so often, so I'm not sure.

However Biters that bypass all your defenses and appear in the middle of your base, i'm not a fan of. That will just result in messy factories with laser turrets everywhere.

Or it is a good reason to pave your factory area with concrete. Greetings from Dune. And there is of course a lot of balancing needed to make that really useful.

Flying biters are a better way to deal with this in my opinion by also adding anti air turrets and options because it allows for variety without being cheap and just bypassing all the defenses the player spend time and resources building since the flyers would still have to path from their base to yours and actually travel that distance.

Well flying enemies is 3rd place. I admit: Not my favorite.

I would use the copy to inserter feature all the time. Right now I do this constantly as soon as I get robots for every single item I make (which is every single item that is possible to make). I like to automate everything . This feature would be invaluable to me. In theory it should also be easy to implement. Just like copy factory to requester which are two completely different types of entities, if pasting onto inserter just set the filter object in the condition and the filter object in the filter section only if the inserter is a filter inserter, done.