Friday Facts #190 - The quiet days

[Aeternus]

The main issue was that while it looked different in the pipes, when you read the contents of a storage tank, it would tell the circuit network that it contains water. Additionally the circuit network had no signal to represent steam, so easily settings conditions for managing nuclear power setups was not possible.

The problem making with making steam separate from water is you've still got the issue of Steam at 165 (good for engines) and Steam at 500 (good for turbines) - and now heat exchangers only take water so you can't pre-boil the steam in boilers. The second problem is at least easy to fix (make exchangers accept water or steam). But you still have "easily setting conditions for managing X" issues still apply when you can't distinguish Steam165 from Steam500. And if you have a mod that requires Some Other Fluid at Some Other Temperature, you can't "easily set conditions for managing" whatever needs that hot fluid.

It seems like you've created a patchy solution, when what you really need is something more permanently useful. Like if the signals for each fluid included the temperature, so you might have several water signals at once. It might seem like a mess, but it's more flexible and permanent and would allow you shuffle steam/water at different temperatures around.

We will tackle those issues when we get around to the further polishing and UX redesign in the future, but for now we consider them less important than the inconsistencies and signal issues

Then it is on the todo list? That makes me a happy player
(Simplest solution is to allow heatexchangers to take steam as an optional input, but that'd probably require a programmatic change - kinda like how fuel burning machines will take anything with a fuel value and can switch between them freely)

The idea is, that you reload the artillery with some kind of ammo in the base, and then you make it go to some station, where it can just bombard/kill/remove all the enemy bases in quite a big radius

I hope there would be a short-range defense trains as well. That way you could have biters trigger attacks against the artillery when it hits their bases so that the train will have to defend itself from close-range attacks. If the artillery fire causes no real aggression then it's somewhat boring in my opinion.

That already happens - attacks against biters appear to trigger aggro from any mobile biters in a very large radius. They'll target whatever did the damage.

[Engimage]

Artillery is planned to be automated offense. The idea is, that you reload the artillery with some kind of ammo in the base, and then you make it go to some station, where it can just bombard/kill/remove all the enemy bases in quite a big radius. As it is part of train that can be automated, it can be used to clear the biter nests around all the expansions periodically.

I really do hope that you will introduce some stationary artillery!

[thereaverofdarkness]

I feel like fixing the replay achievement bug would be easy:

When you start a replay, the game should put your achievements in a separate file, then load the achievements of the replay. When the replay is finished, those achievements are unloaded and you return to your old achievements.

[exi2163]

To be honest, shouldn't all oil processing recipes require steam instead of water? I assume most of them require boiling up ingridients one way or another anyway.

Water is only used to cool components of the factory down at least for cracking of raw oil. Heating (>400°C) is done with some of the resulting produce. There is the technology of steamcracking for naphtha which would be used to crack "petroleum gases" down to propane, butane and such which i suppose is what "Advanced Oil Processing" is about. With that process the steam is stil not added for heating but just used as some kind of catalytic agent.

So it neither has a physical background nor would it make sense in the gameplay as you are already feeding enough energy into the refinery.


Judging from the "esoteric" level of fixed bug reports the devs have already eliminated the 90% bugs that take "only" 10% of the time and are now working at those nastly litte buggers that are harder to catch. I hope you are getting some rest after all that overtime (loved that patch at 22:00 so we could play the weekend, Thanks). You've earned it.

[Art1985]

Combat is still inherently bland, just adding content like spidertron or artillery train won't help its case.

I'd like to re-iterate what I and others have said. This is a puzzle game about automation. Until we can automate combat, it will never really be fun, it will simply be a chore. I'm not sure what form that automation should take, but there are many ideas in the mod portal.

what if the artillery train had ridiculous range?

Artillery is planned to be automated offense. The idea is, that you reload the artillery with some kind of ammo in the base, and then you make it go to some station, where it can just bombard/kill/remove all the enemy bases in quite a big radius. As it is part of train that can be automated, it can be used to clear the biter nests around all the expansions periodically.

Do we have any chances that we will be able to produce some kind of androids or war robots that we would be able to send to the "war"? It would be fun thing to have factory producing some kind of automated war machines and set them targets on the map.

[pickpocket689]

First, I absolutely love your game, however....the only thing I have found truly missing was the ability to select the direction of input and output with inserters. There is a small mod called "Side Inserters" that fixes this but I just wasn't sure why this wasn't made into a core component? If you guys have your reasons, I was just hoping to know. I wouldn't see it breaking any major game mechanics to do so, and it also adds a bit more depth (in my opinion) to resembling real life robotics. I mean, if a guy can crash land on a planet and eventually build a satellite to launch into orbit....why can't he make an inserter that pivots 90 degrees instead of 180? Thanks again for making such an awesome game!!!!

[thereaverofdarkness]

Combat is still inherently bland, just adding content like spidertron or artillery train won't help its case.

I'd like to re-iterate what I and others have said. This is a puzzle game about automation. Until we can automate combat, it will never really be fun, it will simply be a chore. I'm not sure what form that automation should take, but there are many ideas in the mod portal.

I thought combat was something to do while you wait for your automated factory to produce things for you. This game needs to have at least a few things that aren't automated. I'd support being able to automate combat and we already can somewhat, but I also want to have viable options that aren't automated, like the tank.

[hoho]

I thought combat was something to do while you wait for your automated factory to produce things for you.

If you need to wait for things it means your factory isn't producing enough stuff fast enough and instead of waiting, you should be expanding it

[thereaverofdarkness]

If you need to wait for things it means your factory isn't producing enough stuff fast enough and instead of waiting, you should be expanding it

But sometimes expanding it forces me into combat.

Then I have two choices:
1.) combat because I am busy and have to
2.) combat because I am bored and want to

[Patashu]

The way achievements for multiplayer are being handled seems like a subpar solution. You've pretty much made it so that if you want achievements in multiplayer, you need to be there at the start of the server, even more so for servers that are long running.

I have the perfect example, a personal server for friends, has 80hrs total play time. Due to personal reason, I've got maybe 20hrs, but i helped setup the core infrastructure to get the base to the point where it was producing all the science before i had to stop playing for a bit. At this point the map was at about 12hrs total play time on there. I come back, to find the map at about 30hrs in and we finish setting up everything required to launch rockets (They purposely didn't launch rockets for me). I played for maybe 6hrs on the map, and it's now at 80hrs due to friends. I've got, if I'm lucky, 25% of the total play time of the map, and now I'm going to be locked out of achievements. What a terrible solution, it's disappointing that this has occurred.

I have a suggestion for a compromise - what if instead of having at least 50% of the total server time, you just need to have 10%?

For a server that's been going 1 hour, you need to hang around 6 minutes for achievements.
10 hours, hang around 1 hour.
100 hours, hang around 10 hours.
And so on.

Possibly it could be pushed even lower than 10%. 5%? 2%? 1%??

[Drury]

Combat is still inherently bland, just adding content like spidertron or artillery train won't help its case.

I'd like to re-iterate what I and others have said. This is a puzzle game about automation. Until we can automate combat, it will never really be fun, it will simply be a chore. I'm not sure what form that automation should take, but there are many ideas in the mod portal.

I thought combat was something to do while you wait for your automated factory to produce things for you. This game needs to have at least a few things that aren't automated. I'd support being able to automate combat and we already can somewhat, but I also want to have viable options that aren't automated, like the tank.

Yeah pretty much.

I'm not against automating combat for the people who aren't into it, but for people who are into it it shouldn't be boring.

[Tepalus]

Well, it would be nice if we could get something like "Space Stations" and/or "Deep Surface Expansion" as DLC in the future. I think, most people here would buy the stuff, even if it's just to support you guys.


Also combat...well... I do not know how to fix the issue. You either have the focus on the factory or set the gameoptions to high biters. At the beginning it is fun with all the different biters but as soon as we see more and more of the same biters, it gets boring (for me). It could be interesting to have some special and rare biters like flying biters, where you need AA in your base, "crackers" who are very good and destroying your first line of walls and turrets, some broodmothers with much health and some other special abilitys, waterbiters, much like octopuses where you have to defend the coast and something like lictors from Warhammer 40k, who just want to kill you and who can run over walls and ignore the rest of your base.

If you implement artillerytrains, just please do also make some stationary artilleries. Otherwise we will then soon see lines upon lines of trains near the walls. Maybe also a tank with artilleryabilities?

[teemu]

Perhaps you could make it clearer that steam is just another state of water? Make it appear as steam but make clear to the player that it's actually still water.

(Then you could let boilers make sulfuric acid steam again!)

[Loewchen]

Perhaps you could make it clearer that steam is just another state of water?

It no longer is.

[js1]

Steam complicates all things, apparently. Not only it's not clear if it is actually water or not, it will also not let you clear your achievements.

Personally, I agree, I got several achievements just by loading other people's bases, and they can't be deleted on Steam. I suspect they don't really want people to delete achievements, because they want people to buy new games, not to replay the old ones. I tried to delete Factorio's achievements.dat, but it got restored from Steam. So I really hope you will be able to fix this issue, although personally, I am determined to reach the achievements myself regardless if they are already awarded or not.

Anyway, regarding the artillery train - glad to hear about that. I thought it would be nice if one could put turrets or radars to the train. Also, a defensive turret that would release combat robots would also be handy.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Possibly it could be pushed even lower than 10%. 5%? 2%? 1%??

It would become too easy perhaps to get achievements. I think firstly, achievements should be kept separate between single player and multiplayer, but then it would be nice to find a way to tell who was really involved in the achievement. It might be reasonable to go down to 25% time to get the achievement, because in longer games, it will be more common for major players to spend less time in the game.

[Patashu]

Possibly it could be pushed even lower than 10%. 5%? 2%? 1%??

It would become too easy perhaps to get achievements. I think firstly, achievements should be kept separate between single player and multiplayer, but then it would be nice to find a way to tell who was really involved in the achievement. It might be reasonable to go down to 25% time to get the achievement, because in longer games, it will be more common for major players to spend less time in the game.

If people want to get achievements, they can and will (by loading a save file, lurking in a multiplayer server, following a walkthrough, by using programs like CheatEngine, etc)

The goal of this change is not to make it so you have to work to get achievements. It's to make it so if you DON'T want an achievement, you don't get it by mistake.

[thereaverofdarkness]

The goal of this change is not to make it so you have to work to get achievements. It's to make it so if you DON'T want an achievement, you don't get it by mistake.

It's a good point and I agree.

[bartekltg]

When a player joins a multiplayer game, no matter how long he has been on that server, he will earn all the achievements earned in the map. This was especially detrimental to new players, who might just want to have a peek at another factory, before diving in and experiencing the game fully themselves.

Similar thing happened to me. I downloaded a huge base to check a couple of things (count poles;-)) and it give me a bunch of achievements. Yes, I know, only my fault here. I should think that will happen and install any mod. I don't think this could be avoided (the game can't read minds is loaded save is my game from previous installation and I want achievements, or i'm only looking and don't want it ). Maybe a reset button? It can change achievements on steam, but that ones kept in the game maybe could be reverted.

[loco830]

No hills or bridges please! (we can put down land if we want to simulate a bridge)

As for multiplayer achievements -
1) Are there separate achievements for multi player vs single player? There should be, every xbox live game works that way.
2) Is there no way to track involvement counters for a player while multiplaying and base multiplayer achievements on what the player does?
suggestions:
[*] MP achievement: You helped a multiplayer map by creating xx number of machines
[*] MP achievement: You helped a multiplayer map by laying down xx belts
[*] MP achievement: You helped a multiplayer map by destroying xx enemies
[*] MP achievement: You helped a multiplayer map by laying xx pieces of track
[*] MP achievement: You've joined xx multiplayer games!
[*] MP achievement: You saved another player from near death (other players health < 10% and you destroyed enemies that were attacking him, and he/she lived)
[*] MP achievement: You helped a multiplayer map by taking part in creating a [something more complex like an oil refinery, nuclear reactor etc..]
Achievements for doing xx number of things could have multiple achievements at the 100, 1000, 10000 points for things like belts & track and 10, 100, 1000 points for more serious things like assemblers
etc...

Please, no multiplayer specific achievements. Not all of us have the time or desire to join a multiplayer game.