Why defending is a dilemma and enemies need polish

[vanatteveldt]

I think it's the Natural Evolution mod that has a Thumper. Think Dune, the little device you stick in the sand that causes vibrations to lure worms. Looks just like it. Except it lures biters and spitters.

But I think it's the wrong way to go. You don't want to make the aliens (even more) angry and force them to attack more and more. I would rather have something that makes areas uninteresting for attacks. Something that makes them look for a better target area. Think camouflage netting.

Note: If you protect everything then the aliens have nothing to focus on so they would run around randomly and find your structures anyway. And once that laser turret fires no amount of netting will hide it.

Since pollution attracts aliens hiding means redirecting pollution. I can think of a way to blow pollution in a certain direction but it should be impossible to blow everything towards the center.

Also interesting would be an option to add a sort of 'carbon capture' technique where you capture the pollution (from the air or directly from a machine) as a gas/fluid. You can then store it in tanks or transport it away with piper or fluid tankers and release it somewhere else, and since storage tanks are quite big you would have to release it at some point to be sustainable. This would allow you to completely transport away pollution of an outpost (making it a lot easier to defend) at the cost of significant extra logistics.

[SagaciousZed]

For some reason, parts of my wants to have an RTS level automation of combat played from the radar view. Build combat droids, create a way point, then issue an attack order and watch the bots go or die trying. On that note, it would create quite the resource sink to automate clearing out the biters.

Afterwards, you plot down some blueprints, connect some rail lines and you have another outpost.

Already possible with mods, but maybe it would work in vanilla.

[mrvn]

For some reason, parts of my wants to have an RTS level automation of combat played from the radar view. Build combat droids, create a way point, then issue an attack order and watch the bots go or die trying. On that note, it would create quite the resource sink to automate clearing out the biters.

Afterwards, you plot down some blueprints, connect some rail lines and you have another outpost.

Already possible with mods, but maybe it would work in vanilla.

Already present in mods. Huge UPS drain due to limits in the LUA interface.

[SagaciousZed]

Already present in mods. Huge UPS drain due to limits in the LUA interface.

Sure, doesn't mean a version can't be implemented in the base game and a Vanilla implementation may be able to make optimizations that are not strictly bound my the Lua interface. Like how belt optimization would not necessarily (from my understanding) change the Lua interface. Dirty mining was on the table before being replaced by mining productivity research.

Maybe I still dream of when the Devs envisioned a type of command chair which could be used to conquer the world.

[GurlPower]

Command and Conquer is a thing that actually exists, and factorio would benifit greatly from letting the player direct drones and tanks remotely through way points and attack-move. The entire point of the factory would be to automatically create and resupply your RTS tank and drone army. Crazy stuff like tanks having a modular armor tab where the player can kit it out with expensive reactors and shields, personal robo-ports and radar, allowing you to set down blueprints remotely from the zoomed in map view within the logistics network of a tank. You could do crazy stuff like have tanks pick up and drop off supplies in different logistics networks, acting like their own convoy and escort through the vast distances between outposts.

And that's just the basics. Buggies and tanks could have a designated parking space made of nothing but bricks or concrete that would act as a docking station, setting up a motor pool for your army. Patrols could be set through way points to go out and secure the wilderness, end at the motor pool to repair and rearm, then automatically repeat the same patrol again.

I am super excited to hear about cliffs and elevation changes in 0.16, but I think the spiderton misses the point of factorio. The point is you don't have to physically be there for an assembler to craft stuff for you, or a drill to extract ore for you, or a train to pick up and drop off stuff for you. The whole theme is automation; so why are we personally running around going die hard on planet biter with just ourselves and our personal cloud of drones, when the infrastructure we built could and should support an army of remote control tanks armed to the teeth with roboports, shields, and lasers?

[Dixi]

I usually reroll a map until I see some big lakes around, because building a square walls around whole factory is too long and no so fun.
For most peaceful living, from my point of view, I need quite lager area, so all pollution from main factory and energy complex stays inside my fence. Some mining outposts will be outside of main area, of course.
I agree with previous comments, that absence of biters or/and their nearly passive mode removes some fun from the game. When I play without risk of being attacked the game becomes more boring.
But process of clearing new areas around mineral deposits on later stages of the game, becoming a little too complicated.
So finding optimal balance for biters is not an easy task.

Also on standard settings, problem of not-big-enough ore deposits becomes annoying. On normal map settings good deposits I see around are about 2.5-4M size. That's not so much for a big and hungry factory. So instead of working on factory growth and optimization, I have to run around clearing biters and building new mining outposts to replace depleted. And this repetitive task takes more play time then I like.

[quineotio]

Command and Conquer is a thing that actually exists, and factorio would benifit greatly from letting the player direct drones and tanks remotely through way points and attack-move. The entire point of the factory would be to automatically create and resupply your RTS tank and drone army...

...I think the spiderton misses the point of factorio. The point is you don't have to physically be there for an assembler to craft stuff for you... so why are we personally running around going die hard on planet biter with just ourselves and our personal cloud of drones, when the infrastructure we built could and should support an army of remote control tanks armed to the teeth with roboports, shields, and lasers?

I don't think factorio needs to be an RTS (although it could be). I really like your second point and I agree entirely. My biggest annoyance with factorio is that the ability to build stuff doesn't scale with the amount of stuff you want to build. You're eventually going to get to the point where you need to massively increase your factory to keep going, but there's no way to increase automated building beyond a certain point. Basically, the amount of busywork you have to do scales up while your tech increases slow down over time. The end of freeplay is basically giving up when you can't be bothered building to the next level of scale. I'd like to see what the next level of complexity is, where the factory basically expands itself and you have to manage it at an overview level.

[Ohz]

I am 80 hours into a Death World map without laser, I wall in my huge factory and set up tons of outposts around for ressources, with a complicated system of train to supply in ammo and repair pack. It was lot of fun until aliens started destroying and random electric poles. That's terribly frustrating, because you have to run yourself, kill and repair, and plop/organize a patch of gun turrets just because for some reason this particular rail + power pole is not safe.



As said previously several times:

- We have no way to control pollution, therefore alien attractiveness

Idea: we could have the choice to run pollution with pipes and having building working as exhaust emissions like in cars. It would attrack alien, we could even set up a pollution train that drop all somewhere far ! Tons of possibilities and fun.


- Factorio is all about automation, defense should automated as well

We already have the solution for 0.16: Outposts defense can be 100% automated, but that's static, and artillery wagon would be there as military vehicule for patroling around, with a right rail setup.

[mrvn]

I am 80 hours into a Death World map without laser, I wall in my huge factory and set up tons of outposts around for ressources, with a complicated system of train to supply in ammo and repair pack. It was lot of fun until aliens started destroying and random electric poles. That's terribly frustrating, because you have to run yourself, kill and repair, and plop/organize a patch of gun turrets just because for some reason this particular rail + power pole is not safe.



As said previously several times:

- We have no way to control pollution, therefore alien attractiveness

Idea: we could have the choice to run pollution with pipes and having building working as exhaust emissions like in cars. It would attrack alien, we could even set up a pollution train that drop all somewhere far ! Tons of possibilities and fun.


- Factorio is all about automation, defense should automated as well

We already have the solution for 0.16: Outposts defense can be 100% automated, but that's static, and artillery wagon would be there as military vehicule for patroling around, with a right rail setup.

Install any of the greenhouse mods. I think all of them allow planting seedlings in the ground to grow new trees. Encasing your factory in a dense forest works great as pollution control.