Friday Facts #162 - Theme Art Again

[factoriouzr]

TBH, one thing I'd like to see is (on top of the established change to artifacts) more variety of enemies and ones that are just more powerful at higher evolutions. I play with full bob's mods and even with his additional types and the mod that makes them split into the next size down when they die, the aliens are still comparatively easy once you get to the point of lasers and construction bots.

I fully agree!!!

[RobertTerwilliger]

...Alien Artifacts...
4) Make them a source of regeneration - they could be involved in replenishing (...) trees.

This!

[Engimage]

I see all the changes being positive.

As to alien artifacts - I have an extensive idea of how to use them but I will share it in the form of a complex suggestion thread a bit later when the whole idea is complete.
But for now I would just suggest to keep them and make them an ingredient only for WEAPON technologies. This makes sense as you will need to utilize them only if you wanna challenge biters but you will still not need them if you are playing in the peaceful mode.
Sure thing that you should not need them through Rocket Shooting Speed - Space Rocket way.
But anyways gathering them manually has to go for sure. You should be able at least to gather them using construction bots automatically (without deconstruction order) and they surely should despawn in 10 minutes or so to prevent map size growth.

[MrGrim]

I'd like to add my voice to the chorus of folks that feel removal of artifacts represents a missed opportunity. I love riding my train back to my base after a long day of biter nest clearing and seeing the stream of purple goo flowing from my character via my logistics bots. I was hoping to see the alien artifacts expanded in some way.

I think there are some excellent ideas here for how to keep them:

- Make them necessary for infinite research (I really like this idea.. it's a great way to help prevent infinite research from becoming too OP).
- Use them to enhance existing things.. improved fuel, alien explosives and grenades, research boosting, more effective ammo, so on and so forth. Keep them as part of tier 3 modules.
- Since spawners are so effective at absorbing pollution maybe create a mechanic that can use the artifacts for pollution management.

There are so many ways to go that can increase their value.. simply removing them seems such a shame.

[TheSim]

Wait! Are liquids really last value in Factorio measured in floats?
Is it have some reasonable meaning to have less than "1centibucket" of water?
Some fixed number math with temperature make great way towards absolute computational stability.
I suppose it is impossible now to get a power down event one tick earlier due rounding errors on different PCs but who knows...

[ssilk]

In late game, why not invert the biters reaction to player - make them run away. This way player has to fight biters for territory in early-mid game, but by late game they'll just get out of the way to avoid being further decimated by player.

It's like the evolution factor would be a curve - at from 0 --> 0.5 the biters get stronger and try to reclaim territory, from 0.5 --> 0.7 they try massive raids on player positions, from 0.7 --> 0.9 they try massive defence to hold on to their territory, from 0.9 --> 1.0 they accept defeat and start fleeing from player.

Failing that, they could become land fish, and start burrowing under player defences and popping up inside bases

That is absolutely brilliant. A wonderful idea, I never thought of that. It would solve so many problems and would be so fitting. Maybe let the biters have a final "siege" before they give in, like the mode there was with rocket defense, when they constantly attacked the players base.

After some thinking I realized the potential of this idea. This is ... it turns the top down.
They could run away and try to gather. And then the "real monsters" come. ( viewtopic.php?f=80&t=139#p82957 )

And one hundred more things...

[vanatteveldt]

In late game, why not invert the biters reaction to player - make them run away. This way player has to fight biters for territory in early-mid game, but by late game they'll just get out of the way to avoid being further decimated by player.

After some thinking I realized the potential of this idea. This is ... it turns the top down.
They could run away and try to gather. And then the "real monsters" come. ( viewtopic.php?f=80&t=139#p82957 )

It's a great idea to turn down biter settings in the end. I think biters are fun up to approximately where you launch the first rocket. After that, when you are interested in growing a megabase, they just get in the way.

Using the evolution counter for this (in a u-curve) might be a bit counter-intuitive for some, so what about making it a player-centered action, something like a final-game research to have a repellent that causes biters to flee and kills worms and nests, or some sort of space-based solution a la ion cannons (https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Superche ... n%20Cannon).

Another option could be to introduce hive queens presiding over say 50x50 chunks, normally located pretty far away from the player and well defended (with stronger worms/biters, not just five acres of worms to plough through). Give a special "queen locator" radar late-game research. Killing the queen will cause all biters in a large area to flee and the nests/worms to wither away. Queens should also drop some sort of unique loot (large artefact) that is useful for e.g. a fusion reactor mkII or some other cool gimmick . A new queen can eventually colonize the vacant area, but this should take a long time since we don't want to replace the monotony of killing nests with a similar chore...

[Engimage]

Endgame can introduce PSI Emitters to repel biters from your base. Or artillery which will effectively draw them away from your defences.

[Vaneshi]

Does this mean that Peacemod will finally be redundant and we can just toggle the aliens off at map generation? Because that gets my vote as peace mod has become rather janky in its patch placement recently.

[PunkSkeleton]

The problem with alien artifacts is that they are too easy to get. In the late game I'm not even picking them up... And it doesn't even make sense to need them to launch a rocket.
It is a general problem with biters - they are weak and there is way too many of them. In the late game, once you get power armor and combat robots, dealing with aliens is just running around, making wall from turrets and cleaning rapidly spawning nests. It just takes time but there's no challenge, no danger, nothing fun. A simple solution is to increase their damage (like 4 times) and significantly decrease their frequency of expanding, as well as decrease the initial frequency of their bases. This will result in:
1. Less artifacts.
2. Less time spent on clearing the nests and fighting the biters.
3. More challenging combat (they would now really bite).
4. More incentive to keep the pollution away from them.

[Deadly-Bagel]

So if alien artefacts are no longer required, does that mean we are going to have an additional setting for biters to remove them from the game altogether? Hostile, Peaceful, Uninhabited or something? Because that would be really awesome, especially for sandbox mode.

Argh this has been the longest wait for November ever, pleease tell me 0.15 is still planned to be released this month =D

[SeeDee]

I also think that AA should stay in the game. There should be some more ways to consume them. They might be required for higher tier items, that are frequently needed, like express belts or flying robots (via an ingredient to lubricant?) If it is only needed for some rare high level items (like armor) it would just mean that you would have to wait longer to get them, but would not prevent piling up AA once you have those items. Though I do see the difficulties with this suggestion that peaceful players cannot build as efficient factories anymore. On the other hand I don't like the idea to kill bitters in order to get artifacts only to be able to kill more bitters (if artifacts were only usable to improve weapons / ammo).

I'm not a huge fan of infinite research in general, and for me it's not a good solution to AA in particular, because at some point the cost-benefit ratio will get bad enough to stop researching and the problem of to many AA is back.

As for the fluid changes I'm not sure if multiplying everything by 10 (and then using integers from that point on?) is the best idea. I'm still hoping to see my fluid productions in the statistics overview. At the moment most recipes require rather small amounts of input items per ingredient. If all fluid amounts are thus increased it might mess with the scaling of the graphs. Though I'm not entirely sure what the scaling would look like right now. Why not slowly increase the time a pumpjack needs to produce one unit of oil? And by the way I wouldn't mind if oil patches would run dry completely eventually.

[RichyNZ]

In all the discussion about artifacts, nobody is mentioning the fantastic looking artwork shown!

I've been looking forward to some new HD artwork like the menu screen, and am loving the sample shown here
Excited to see more, keep it up!

[daniel34]

So if alien artefacts are no longer required, does that mean we are going to have an additional setting for biters to remove them from the game altogether? Hostile, Peaceful, Uninhabited or something? Because that would be really awesome, especially for sandbox mode.

You can already do that, just set Enemy bases size to None and then you won't have any biters/spitters/spawners/worms anywhere on the map. I sometimes use this together with the alien science mod (crafting alien science packs from sp1/2/3) in my games.

[RobertTerwilliger]

In all the discussion about artifacts, nobody is mentioning the fantastic looking artwork shown!

Honestly, it's just TON of dull copy-paste. It was mentioned this is just an artist test, so nothing really to comment here. Yet.

[Sacredd]

plz make theme art nicely, clear and structured. not a dirty bunch of chaos...

[Deadly-Bagel]

But a dirty bunch of chaos is what Factorio is all about =D

[RobertTerwilliger]

But a dirty bunch of chaos is what Factorio is all about =D

A dirty bunch of highly-compressed order, I'd say ; )

[Andrzejef]

In late game, why not invert the biters reaction to player - make them run away. This way player has to fight biters for territory in early-mid game, but by late game they'll just get out of the way to avoid being further decimated by player.

It's like the evolution factor would be a curve - at from 0 --> 0.5 the biters get stronger and try to reclaim territory, from 0.5 --> 0.7 they try massive raids on player positions, from 0.7 --> 0.9 they try massive defence to hold on to their territory, from 0.9 --> 1.0 they accept defeat and start fleeing from player.

Failing that, they could become land fish, and start burrowing under player defences and popping up inside bases

That is absolutely brilliant. A wonderful idea, I never thought of that. It would solve so many problems and would be so fitting. Maybe let the biters have a final "siege" before they give in, like the mode there was with rocket defense, when they constantly attacked the players base.

After some thinking I realized the potential of this idea. This is ... it turns the top down.
They could run away and try to gather. And then the "real monsters" come. ( viewtopic.php?f=80&t=139#p82957 )

And one hundred more things...

This... This would make need to haul defenses en-masse to borderline sectors over and over again. That means constant infrastructure expansion, which means continuous factory growth. And that means...
That means I need a bigger train depot. And more of them
Absolutely love the idea

[Deadly-Bagel]

I want to make a mod "Seven Days To Build" that sends a huge wave of biters at you on the eve of every seventh day but are otherwise passive =P