[0.15.x] Bob's Mods: General Discussion

[Corvenus]

thanks, guess i was as much wondering if you had a list to hand from when you were going through and making them expensive as my understanding was that the expensive change was effectively a tag that you had to add to the code.

guess i will keep playing and making my list as i go maybe even post it for others to see and add to as well

[microbat]

Do you ever think about changing anything else like the combat? I would really like it to work more like a tower defense game where you have to build lots of walls to shape their path and then have multiple towers to defend with.

I've found that by adding the mod "Rampant" that it goes a long ways toward this! Rampant is quite a challenge. I recommend you check it out.
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Veden/Rampant

Cool thank you!

[Zephyrinius]

Minor issue: portable solar panels can be researched without researching solar panels. Doesn't cause any harm but might confuse somebody, since you can't actually make portable solar panels without researching and making solar panels.

These mods are awesome -- thanks so much for making and maintaining them!

[bobingabout]

thanks, guess i was as much wondering if you had a list to hand from when you were going through and making them expensive as my understanding was that the expensive change was effectively a tag that you had to add to the code.

guess i will keep playing and making my list as i go maybe even post it for others to see and add to as well

It is, you have to define what is expensive, and effectively define a second recipe for it. I did a few of these around the place, I just can't remember what.

My new rocket fuel recipe, most of the electronic boards, a few other things too.

Minor issue: portable solar panels can be researched without researching solar panels. Doesn't cause any harm but might confuse somebody, since you can't actually make portable solar panels without researching and making solar panels.

These mods are awesome -- thanks so much for making and maintaining them!

Which portables? the base game ones? if so that would be a base game issue.
if it's the vehicle ones then that would be my fault.

[kordansk]

I ran a pass after you added the rocket components from your advanced materials, so that should happen. It's probably more an issue with migration when we both update stuff and its used in existing save games. I'll have a look into it, might help if I had the save game and mods to see what is happening there.

Do you want a dropbox link?

[NewSwiss]

It's hard to put blame on one specific mod. Long story short, Angels mod is breaking it. what actually happened is that I made a change to my mod that I have planned to do for a while, add bob's stuff to rocket construction. however, Angels mod already does that sort of stuff, so, my change broke the mod. However, it isn't my mod causing the issue, it's the way Angel's mod overrides stuff from my mod causing the issue, however since his mod over-rides mine, the only fix I can do is undo my addition to endgame(which makes my mod go backwards), so it's up to angel to modify his mod not to break the game while mine is installed.

Is there a quick-and-dirty fix I can do for it? A line or two that I can edit in one of the mod files (either yours or his)?

EDIT: Yes, there is. The rocket silo becomes researchable by deleting the following lines in bobrevamp/prototypes/rocket_fuel_updates.lua

bobmods.lib.tech.add_prerequisite("rocket-silo", "rocket-fuel")
bobmods.lib.tech.remove_recipe_unlock("rocket-silo", "rocket-fuel")

I don't know if it's necessary to delete the second line, but I did it anyway. So best guess is that when Angel's petrochem removes Bob's rocket fuel, the prerequisite sticks around, but is invisible/unresearchable.

[bobingabout]

It's hard to put blame on one specific mod. Long story short, Angels mod is breaking it. what actually happened is that I made a change to my mod that I have planned to do for a while, add bob's stuff to rocket construction. however, Angels mod already does that sort of stuff, so, my change broke the mod. However, it isn't my mod causing the issue, it's the way Angel's mod overrides stuff from my mod causing the issue, however since his mod over-rides mine, the only fix I can do is undo my addition to endgame(which makes my mod go backwards), so it's up to angel to modify his mod not to break the game while mine is installed.

Is there a quick-and-dirty fix I can do for it? A line or two that I can edit in one of the mod files (either yours or his)?

EDIT: Yes, there is. The rocket silo becomes researchable by deleting the following lines in bobrevamp/prototypes/rocket_fuel_updates.lua

bobmods.lib.tech.add_prerequisite("rocket-silo", "rocket-fuel")
bobmods.lib.tech.remove_recipe_unlock("rocket-silo", "rocket-fuel")

I don't know if it's necessary to delete the second line, but I did it anyway. So best guess is that when Angel's petrochem removes Bob's rocket fuel, the prerequisite sticks around, but is invisible/unresearchable.

Well, yeah, if he deletes my rocket fuel research, then that would fix it. though I'm not sure why he'd do that.

[Arch666Angel]

I add an oxidizer container with nitric acid and the nitrogen tetroxide oxidizers and a fuel container with hydrazine and dymethylhydrazine, which you then combine to the rocket fuel. It is to combine both our fuel recipe into one system.

[Air]

Run into an issue with alient artifacts. If I set

Code: Select all

bobmods-enemies-aliensdropartifacts = false
bobmods-enemies-enableartifacts = true
bobmods-enemies-enablenewartifacts = true
bobmods-enemies-enablesmallartifacts = false

the game doesn't load and says it can't find __ base__/graphics/icons/alien-artifact.png

If

Code: Select all

bobmods-enemies-enableartifacts = false

or

Code: Select all

bobmods-enemies-enablenewartifacts = false 

the game loads fine.

[NewSwiss]

I've done some tinkering with BobsWarfare and BobsVehicleEquipment. A few thoughts:

The plasma cannon is really cool, but its projectiles move way too slowly. The AoE damage is so high that when the projectiles would follow biters towards me, I'd take tons more damage from the plasma than any of the biters or worms. I would have to constantly be running away. Even with 5 max level shields, the tank takes a lot of damage after only take 1 or 2 hits. If you feel that the low projectile speed is important for balance, then at least have it scale up with the tiers (0.3 at mk1, then 0.6 at mk2 and so on until 1.8 at mk6).

Also, there should be a plasma cannon for power armor. The tank mk3 is cool and all, but in the late game it just can't compete with the 16x16 grid of the iron man suit. I added the vehicle equipment categories to the mk5 armor so I could run plasma cannons in it, and it's definitely more fun than spamming laser defense like I did before. By the time people have mk5 armor, the cheese of being able to use vehicle equipment in power armor doesn't really change balance IMO.

Lastly, the tiers of radars should scale more strongly in terms of scanning radius. When I get into the late-late game, I would rather plonk down a bunch of radars in my base and get a scan of everything within 3000 distance than have to explore all that area manually or set up radar outposts all over. For this reason, I ended up making a "radar mk6" that takes 100 radar mk5s, uses 100 MW, and has 4x the range in max radius and 3x the vision radius. It's a funny solution, but my rationale is that if I can afford a continuous 100 MW for radar, I should be entitled to something ridiculous.

[Recon777]

That's interesting since I found plasma cannons to be completely useless in 0.14. Were they changed?

Regarding radars, that's been a bane for me because I use RSO. So I ended up using the rather cheaty feeling "rso radar" mod which buffs up the vanilla radar a lot but short circuits Bob's progression of radars, so I end up never building the Mk2 etc. It would be really nice if Bob's included some kind of radar range research or something (there's a mod which tries and fails to do this). But yes, definitely the Mk2+ radars need to have a more pronounced range buff. For people who play RSO, you need that range so you don't have to trudge around on foot in hostile territory looking for that rare deposit of xyz which you need to tech up.

[Light]

That's interesting since I found plasma cannons to be completely useless in 0.14. Were they changed?

Regarding radars, that's been a bane for me because I use RSO. So I ended up using the rather cheaty feeling "rso radar" mod which buffs up the vanilla radar a lot but short circuits Bob's progression of radars, so I end up never building the Mk2 etc. It would be really nice if Bob's included some kind of radar range research or something (there's a mod which tries and fails to do this). But yes, definitely the Mk2+ radars need to have a more pronounced range buff. For people who play RSO, you need that range so you don't have to trudge around on foot in hostile territory looking for that rare deposit of xyz which you need to tech up.

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Afforess/Big_Brother

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Tron842/ ... obs_plugin

Configure the bob plugin to say 0.15 and enjoy the range increase for all of the radars. A single Mk5 is all you'll end up using late game, but the electrical cost will also balance it out.

[Recon777]

That's interesting since I found plasma cannons to be completely useless in 0.14. Were they changed?

Regarding radars, that's been a bane for me because I use RSO. So I ended up using the rather cheaty feeling "rso radar" mod which buffs up the vanilla radar a lot but short circuits Bob's progression of radars, so I end up never building the Mk2 etc. It would be really nice if Bob's included some kind of radar range research or something (there's a mod which tries and fails to do this). But yes, definitely the Mk2+ radars need to have a more pronounced range buff. For people who play RSO, you need that range so you don't have to trudge around on foot in hostile territory looking for that rare deposit of xyz which you need to tech up.

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Afforess/Big_Brother

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Tron842/ ... obs_plugin

Configure the bob plugin to say 0.15 and enjoy the range increase for all of the radars. A single Mk5 is all you'll end up using late game, but the electrical cost will also balance it out.

Yes this is the one I was referring to when I said "tries and fails".

I had Big Brother and also the Bob's plugin for it installed, but then I found that the radars weren't actually scanning anymore. They'd reveal visible range just fine, but no new sectors were being revealed with further radars being put up. The whole thing ended up just causing a mess on my system and I removed it all in favor of rso-radar. Ideally, Bob could add some kind of balancing setting or research or something which would do all this internally.

[NewSwiss]

That's interesting since I found plasma cannons to be completely useless in 0.14. Were they changed?

I don't know what they used to do. but now at mk6 they do 3k+ damage, spread over multiple damage types so they bypass resistances, with a range of 40 (farther than max-tier sniper turrets). Oh, and their AoE is 11, so 1 shot will take out a whole cluster of spawners and biters. The issue is that most of the time they will target biters running toward you, and they move so slowly that they won't explode until the biters have reached you and thus will blow up your tank. You can constantly fire and run away to avoid getting hit by your own plasma, but with even moderately sized bases, they'll spawn enough biters that you can never get a shot off on the spawners themselves.

Regarding radars, that's been a bane for me because I use RSO. So I ended up using the rather cheaty feeling "rso radar" mod which buffs up the vanilla radar a lot but short circuits Bob's progression of radars, so I end up never building the Mk2 etc. It would be really nice if Bob's included some kind of radar range research or something (there's a mod which tries and fails to do this). But yes, definitely the Mk2+ radars need to have a more pronounced range buff. For people who play RSO, you need that range so you don't have to trudge around on foot in hostile territory looking for that rare deposit of xyz which you need to tech up.

Same here. I used to use that mod, but at some point (0.13?) it stopped working. I just assumed that Bob overrode it in favor of his own radars. I guess I was mistaken. Still, this raises the point that it could make sense to have overrides to massively buff Bob's radars when RSO is present.

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Afforess/Big_Brother

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Tron842/ ... obs_plugin

Configure the bob plugin to say 0.15 and enjoy the range increase for all of the radars. A single Mk5 is all you'll end up using late game, but the electrical cost will also balance it out.

This looks like a step in the right direction, but if my math is right, then a mk5 radar with maximum "amplification" will only have a radius of a little over double its current one. For an RSO game, it should really be 4x (or more) the current value. A long-lived/megabase-scale RSO game can require you to go out to 2000+ distance to set up outposts, so I would like to see the top-tier radars cover at least this far (ideally farther). Given the relation between scanning speed and power consumption, it seems more than fair to have an end-game super-long-range radar that eats tens if not hundreds of megawatts. Plus, I feel this should be a default behavior of Bob's, rather than requiring another 2 mods on top of it.

[bobingabout]

I add an oxidizer container with nitric acid and the nitrogen tetroxide oxidizers and a fuel container with hydrazine and dymethylhydrazine, which you then combine to the rocket fuel. It is to combine both our fuel recipe into one system.

Fair enough. you could still use Rocketfuel Research though. Anyway, you know the fix now.

Run into an issue with alient artifacts. If I set

Code: Select all

bobmods-enemies-aliensdropartifacts = false
bobmods-enemies-enableartifacts = true
bobmods-enemies-enablenewartifacts = true
bobmods-enemies-enablesmallartifacts = false

the game doesn't load and says it can't find __ base__/graphics/icons/alien-artifact.png

If

Code: Select all

bobmods-enemies-enableartifacts = false

or

Code: Select all

bobmods-enemies-enablenewartifacts = false 

the game loads fine.

It's someone elses mod. This has been reported before. I'm not sure what mod it is, but there is one of the mods that you are obviously using that messes up if alien artifacts exist.

I've done some tinkering with BobsWarfare and BobsVehicleEquipment. A few thoughts:

The plasma cannon is really cool, but its projectiles move way too slowly. The AoE damage is so high that when the projectiles would follow biters towards me, I'd take tons more damage from the plasma than any of the biters or worms. I would have to constantly be running away. Even with 5 max level shields, the tank takes a lot of damage after only take 1 or 2 hits. If you feel that the low projectile speed is important for balance, then at least have it scale up with the tiers (0.3 at mk1, then 0.6 at mk2 and so on until 1.8 at mk6).

The cannon unfortunately doesn't even function as intended. It's supposed to be a position target type, meaning it will fire at where the enemy currently is, and hit that spot if the enemy is still there or not. No chasing. Yet although I'm sure I've programmed it correctly, it doesn't seem to behave as intended.

Lastly, the tiers of radars should scale more strongly in terms of scanning radius. When I get into the late-late game, I would rather plonk down a bunch of radars in my base and get a scan of everything within 3000 distance than have to explore all that area manually or set up radar outposts all over. For this reason, I ended up making a "radar mk6" that takes 100 radar mk5s, uses 100 MW, and has 4x the range in max radius and 3x the vision radius. It's a funny solution, but my rationale is that if I can afford a continuous 100 MW for radar, I should be entitled to something ridiculous.

The range expansion is currently linier. I could consider an upgrade to it though.

That's interesting since I found plasma cannons to be completely useless in 0.14. Were they changed?

I can't remember the specifics, but I think because in the base game the personal laser turret's damage was multiplied by 15, I multiplied the damage of ALL power suit weapons by 15 to match.
Personally, I think this huge increase makes them overpowered, I just put lots of lasers and shields in my suit, then go stand in an enemy base, my weapons are a bit pointless. (even though they were buffed too it was only by about +50%, so 1 laser outpowers your own weapon, 12 of them in my suit, my weapon is effectively useless)

[solntcev]

...
Personally, I think this huge increase makes them overpowered, I just put lots of lasers and shields in my suit, then go stand in an enemy base, my weapons are a bit pointless. (even though they were buffed too it was only by about +50%, so 1 laser outpowers your own weapon, 12 of them in my suit, my weapon is effectively useless)

As countermeasure you can add Laser resistance to spawners, it will give you reason to use own weapon, and personal defence still fulfill defence role (eliminating biters).

[bobingabout]

...
Personally, I think this huge increase makes them overpowered, I just put lots of lasers and shields in my suit, then go stand in an enemy base, my weapons are a bit pointless. (even though they were buffed too it was only by about +50%, so 1 laser outpowers your own weapon, 12 of them in my suit, my weapon is effectively useless)

As countermeasure you can add Laser resistance to spawners, it will give you reason to use own weapon, and personal defence still fulfill defence role (eliminating biters).

The enemy nests added by my own mod already do have laser resistance. you can see the difference if you walk up to a base game nest or mine. The base game nest melts instantly, where mine takes half a second to melt.

[solntcev]

Laser immunity then? 100% resistance.

[NewSwiss]

The cannon unfortunately doesn't even function as intended. It's supposed to be a position target type, meaning it will fire at where the enemy currently is, and hit that spot if the enemy is still there or not. No chasing. Yet although I'm sure I've programmed it correctly, it doesn't seem to behave as intended.

Even if you could get it to function as intended, the projectile speed could use a buff. That would be the simplest way to make it more useful, IMO. That, or reduce their grid size to 2x2 so you could fit loads of them in. That would create an interesting dynamic, where you would have to go into combat with lots of charged batteries in order to support the power drain.

The range expansion is currently linear. I could consider an upgrade to it though.

Linear is fine, but the slope is not steep enough. Take storage tanks for instance: each tier adds 100% of the mk1 capacity. If you did the same with radars, then by mk5 you'd have a radar that works even for RSO.

I can't remember the specifics, but I think because in the base game the personal laser turret's damage was multiplied by 15, I multiplied the damage of ALL power suit weapons by 15 to match.
Personally, I think this huge increase makes them overpowered, I just put lots of lasers and shields in my suit, then go stand in an enemy base, my weapons are a bit pointless. (even though they were buffed too it was only by about +50%, so 1 laser outpowers your own weapon, 12 of them in my suit, my weapon is effectively useless)

This is a tricky issue. On the one hand, players spend the first 80% of the game without power armor, where each biter base removed is an ordeal. So getting a "super-weapon" in the late game seems only fair to me. On the other hand, I can understand that some folks want a challenge (or at least required strategy) even in the late game. One balance that could work as far as personal laser defense and plasma is increasing their power requirements a lot at the higher tiers. They might have "infinite ammo", but if it takes several of the equivalent tier of fusion reactor to support each one, then it will require more strategy in their use. Plus people will be more inclined to use batteries.

Laser immunity then? 100% resistance.

This would render laser turrets useless in the late game, or at least relegate them to a minor component of base-defense. I could see raising the spawners' and worms' laser resistance a lot, but full laser immunity on biters/spitters would be really rough.

[Air]

Run into an issue with alient artifacts. If I set

Code: Select all

bobmods-enemies-aliensdropartifacts = false
bobmods-enemies-enableartifacts = true
bobmods-enemies-enablenewartifacts = true
bobmods-enemies-enablesmallartifacts = false

the game doesn't load and says it can't find __ base__/graphics/icons/alien-artifact.png

If

Code: Select all

bobmods-enemies-enableartifacts = false

or

Code: Select all

bobmods-enemies-enablenewartifacts = false 

the game loads fine.

It's someone elses mod. This has been reported before. I'm not sure what mod it is, but there is one of the mods that you are obviously using that messes up if alien artifacts exist.

Yep, sorry, it was the Research Queue mod.