Getting rid of alien artifacts is a bad idea

[The_Destroyer]

Personally, I love their removal. Biters are still an issue- their attacks, and land as a resource, but I don't have to farm them to get large amounts, especially for infinite research. Having a science pack that isn't automate-able is kinda meh. Now, with automatic terminators, that's when I find it more fun.

[cellular]

I like the removal myself, but it feels like there's an obvious solution here which should make most people happy: tweak the spawning algorithm so that most ore patches will have a biter base or two very nearby, and so that biter expansion is slightly biased towards ore patches rather than random. That way, there's always a good reason to clear out bases rather than building walls, but the game still functions for people who'd rather play without biters. It also sidesteps the issue of automation, since outpost construction already can't really be automated without mods.

[BlooSkies]

The way I would want it:
Optional alien research/tech tree that uses artifacts as a base.
Maybe even an expansion/DLC?

Things dropped by the local alien populace rightfully shouldn't contribute to launching a conventional rocket.

[Snicker]

It is a bad idea! This only makes the aliens an annoyance, and not a resource or something you even need in the game. Bring back alien science!

-Snicker-

[steinio]

It is a bad idea! This only makes the aliens an annoyance, and not a resource or something you even need in the game. Bring back alien science!

-Snicker-

You can start making your own game with alien science.

The developers of Factorio decide here what they want and what not to be in the game.

You can make a suggestion but not this kind of demand.

Greetings steinio

[Tricorius]

So, after playing a normal mode game in 0.15 to the point where I'm getting enough biter attacks to have to build a mark one wall around my base and go clear out some nests...

I'm liking the rebalancing of combat. The biters feel a bit like a threat again (it is much more challenging to just breeze your way to advanced power armor and build up a legion of combat bots). At the moment, I have basic power armor, loaded with solar panels, 4 shields, a roboport, and night vision goggles--kudos on the changes there, too--, and a few batteries for night. I'm sure there will be a point of getting over-powered again, but it feels like further down the road.

Hell, I even built a car again because my base is expansive and I don't have all the tech I need for exoskeletons automated.

The removal of the alien artifacts is, indeed, the correct overall decision for vanilla.

[iceman_1212]

For folks who like the combat aspect of this game, it's business-as-usual as they can choose biter-heavy maps and make territory defense/expansion an area of focus. Folks who prefer to stick to the factory-building aspect of the game now have the option to do so in vanilla (whereas previously they did not). It's win-win. There is no need to impose a playstyle on others in a sandbox game.

[Silba]

This is not so clear, in my opinion, if I think the story. I am going to build industry to produce rockets capable of satellite launches. What artifacts could uncivilized anthropod like aliens which are far less clever than ants give to encance that process? I do not want to eating in Factorio. Maybe researching and fabricating of special chemical or biological weapons could need alien body materials or their primitive develop stages (should artifacts be eggs?). But how on Earth piece of alien meat would make better speed module or power armor parts?
Maybe that could be a working tradeoff for all. Destroyed spawners would give alien eggs, which could be used to research and fabricate super efficient poison capsules and tank cannon shells. It would not be necessary but it would give more and better options for offensive warfare. Maybe later research could give some microbes which would infect from one biter individual to another in near contact and kill them during time. It could clear 90 % of biters in whole base in couple of game days.

In any fight you must learn how to enemy behaves to beat them (boiling water in ant holes, just regular water will not work and neither will digging up their ant hills for example and certainly stamping on them doesnt work). So it would make sense that they could offer something with immense value. Knowledge on how to beat them. I agree that they themselves wouldnt be able to offer any knowledge but that doesnt stop us learning about them. (military science, bio warfare, anything) their hard shells, especially the armored ones could be used to enhance armour or wall defences. Nature even inspires us now, its called biomimicry if you arent already aware.

[Hannu]

The problem is there usually isn't much difference processing-wise between a small elite squad and a horde. The strategies themselves are different but it's basically "determine suitable weakness in defence and exploit it" so either way it's needing to interpret many variables and calculate a plan of attack. Take a game of chess for example, there are FAR fewer options, pieces and variables plus it's not realtime, but would you say it's a much simpler game to automate in a way that's challenging but processing-efficient?

I did not mean top level chess AI. Then it would be impossible to win biters if you did not be a professional military officer working in some kind of strategic war planning department. But in my opinion there are very much room between stupid horde and intelligent elite troops. There are some mod, which seems to make biters significantly more intelligent and not so annoying. I have not experience, but maybe I test when I begin next game.

I thought about simple group mechanics and psychological variables. Biters could detect their own forces and my forces in area. That information would not need to update at every tick. It could be for example individual thread which would run once per second. Then small groups of biters would not make stupid suicide attacks against triple wall and continuous line of laser turrets. There could also be some kind of fear variable. Biters should flee if their health is under some limit. Attacking biters should naturally retreat more easily than biters defending their nests.

I do not believe that it would ruin FPS, if it was programmed well and kept in reasonable level. Number of biter could also be lowered to fifth of current number. I think it is only because devs do not have interest to program combat things. It may not be a bad thing at all. Development of other parts of the game give probably more entertainment, like new things in 0.15. And more clever biters would probably just feel more natural, which is purely aesthetic thing. At least I have tendency to enclose the whole base with heavy defense lines.

As for your second point, I think any gain to be had by biters and/or spawners dropping anything is eclipsed by the tedium of needing to go around afterwards picking everything up.

It is true. It should be automatized and needed amount should be low. Decision to remove artifacts now was right. They should be super easy to mod back, if someone want.

[hoho]

I understand the artifacts caused issues for strict base builders. That's been fixed by changing recipes. But what about the players who enjoyed the artifacts collection process?

I HIGHLY doubt there are (m)any people who actually *enjoyed* the artifact collection process. At most, they saw it as a small bonus they got from clearing out more land for expansion - they have to clear it anyway but when you're in full mk2 armor with flamethrower, biters aren't exactly challenging.

When I did my "megabase" to get the 20M circuit achievement, I did that by making tier 3 modules. It took me some 10,000 artifacts to do it and it was a massive chore.


Though I wouldn't mind if it was possible to use artifacts for something. E.g boost uranium enrichment process or be an alternative (cheaper) recipe for some high-tier research potion.

[Tev]

It would be good to admit that pre-0.15 artifacts did nothing to gameplay AT ALL - you had many more artifacts then you needed.
Unless you went out of your way to not expand and tried to not kill nests even deep in your pollution cloud - then you would occassionally run into artifact shortage, forcing you to standardize gameplay a bit. Changes caused you are no longer forced to do that, and you can have your minibase all the time, which clearly just adds options to gameplay, while doing nothing for anyone who actually fights the biters.

So gameplay-wise removal or alien artifacts did nothing, and reversing it would change nothing. Maybe potentially breaking some infinite researches at high lvls, as cost could be too high in alien artifacts. But frankly I haven't seen anyone argue for that.

There are only 2 valid arguments for re-introducing the alien artifacts:

1) opening up more combat-related research for people enjoying the combat.
But why exactly? There was just major combat-rebalancing, why don't you play a bit and figure out new options in current state, why bring back meaningless shiny thing? Of course the answer seems to boil down to

2) people liked shiny meaningless thing, and they want it back, no matter the cost to other players who like the changes.
To that I'd respond "download a mod." And maybe "grow up."

[Deadly-Bagel]

2) people liked shiny meaningless thing, and they want it back, no matter the cost to other players who like the changes.

Pretty much what I said at the end of page 2. Once you have enough artefacts to complete all the science and however many modules you're going to use, they're about as useful as burner inserters. And you end up with tens of thousands of them, so effective value is 0. Therefore the only reason I can think of for wanting them back is some psychological need for justifying pointless biter slaughter.

[rcp27]

Last weekend I wanted to finish off the play through I had been working on by launching a rocket before 0.15 dropped. In the course of building out the base and securing the resources I needed for all the red green and blue science and to be able to build the rocket. I'd cleared out two or three biter bases to secure my perimeter and resources, but that hadn't yielded enough artifacts for the purple science I needed to complete the research for the rocket. My base wasn't being threatened, and my perimeter was secure, but I ended up having to way out of my way to wipe out a bunch of alien bases simply to get the artifacts. This felt like a real break to the natural flow of my gameplay, more like the annoying kind of mini game some other games include that don't involve the core mechanics of the main game, and simply serve as a roadblock to my progress.

The core problem with alien artifacts is that the production of the resource was simply not scalable. For every other resource your production can be automated, and so scaled. You can build more miners or pump jacks, you can set up automated outposts with trains to increase supply. To make alien artifacts as a concept work, there would have to be a major change to how they are created, gathered and utilized. The only thing I can think of would be to make the biters themselves drop them so that when your turrets kill them your robots can come and collect the artifacts. Then you could wall in a biter base and farm the biters as they spawn. But that in itself would be a huge change to the mechanic and nothing like alien artifacts in 0.14 worked. I'm also not sure it would add much to the gameplay.

[Tricorius]

There are only 2 valid arguments for re-introducing the alien artifacts:

1) opening up more combat-related research for people enjoying the combat.
But why exactly? There was just major combat-rebalancing, why don't you play a bit and figure out new options in current state, why bring back meaningless shiny thing? Of course the answer seems to boil down to

Indeed. Those that play 0.15 to military science will find that it still requires a lot of shiny things.

[Paul17041993]

The artefacts couldn't be automated, thus they were removed.