Friday Facts #226 - New mod portal & other news

[Lubricus]

Honestly... It's up to the devs to decide on how THEY want to view game progression. And if they decide to nerf bots, someone will just make a mod that undoes the changes, anyway. Lol.

Personally, I've always had one problem with the bots. They make blue belts obsolete before you even really have the chance to use them. I've always seen the bots as 'late game tech', but in all honesty they are given to players far too quickly. If it were me... I'd lock the logistics bots behind the same research as the logistics chests. Give players the ability to use construction drones pre- blue belt, make players grind through the full research vial setup. Let them come up with a solution that DOESNT involve drones. Then when they have all the research done, let them unlock the logistics bots.

To me, the perfect factory has the right combination of bots and belts. I like my mines and smelting operations to still run on belts. They are usually too condensed to optimize drones, and belts just make it look cleaner. Then I'll load everything up on a train, haul them to my central production, and unload where an army of drones waits to take things to where they are needed. It's a beautiful system, and treats the game the way it should be.

How does bot's replace blue belts before requester chests? You can replace red belts with blue, to change from belts to bots you need to redesign everything so that is rarely done before beacon-ed setups. Why should we grind and place everything manual instead of using blueprints and bots to construct things?

[Kaesemuffin]

Hey Twinsen, Kovarex & Klonan

I am replying to your @Bots vs. Belts discussion.
Also I am for sure no active forum user, but I am around since the beginning. And since this debate is getting so huge I wanted to add my opinion.

First of all -> TAKE YOUR TIME - I believe you are more than capable to handle this.

Just think about games like Starcraft, DotA or Leage of Legends - Balancing a game is one of the worst nightmares of a dev.
Trust yourself to make decisions instead of waging all odds and ends within the community. You and you alone as a team brought this game so far.
You are above the 1.2 million players, of course you can't get everyone to favor your point of view.

So I am not saying that you won't consider thoughts and ideas out of the community but the contrary:
You did more than a community can ask for although you thought about removing logistics bots you decided to leave them, because you acknowledged that they are part of the game now and the community wants to keep them.

BUT: there is a catch and there should be - in order to leave bots in game you add or expand a game mechanic to balance it - and that is absolutely the correct thing to do.
Because in your development roadmap or your fundamental idea of factorio there was and always will be spaghetti ...
DO what YOU think is the right thing to do for YOUR game.

We (the community / playerbase) will deal with.
You even gave us the means of changing (modding) the game to our likings. So there will be a "Botponyland Mod" for sure.

And with your given new challenges (changelog / bot balancing) we will find new creative ways to play. And maybe there is a new idea sitting in the corner that we all discover that you can add later to your game ...
Have a nice day and kind regards,

Kaesemuffin

[Jürgen Erhard]

Change of tack with this post, from belts/bots to T-shirts.

Could I suggest that you never make any more of the 'factorio gear' t-shirts. Make a new design instead. It's not as though you are short of great graphical images, from inserters to biters, so why not offer different designs each time around?

That way, as the game grows in popularity, and especially after the official launch of v1.0, the early merchandise becomes really collectible. You the developers gain, because fans want to buy the latest designs (so you sell more stuff), and the fans gain, because their collection gains in value, thus rewarding the early adopters.

I wear my t-shirts, I don't collect them, and certainly not for their "value". So please kindly FO.

[Lubricus]

Hey Twinsen, Kovarex & Klonan

Just think about games like Starcraft, DotA or Leage of Legends - Balancing a game is one of the worst nightmares of a dev.
Trust yourself to make decisions instead of waging all odds and ends within the community. You and you alone as a team brought this game so far.
You are above the 1.2 million players, of course you can't get everyone to favor your point of view.

Factorio is not an competitive multiplayer game as Starcraft and similar games and don't need the same level of balancing. Even if it's a more sandboxy game I think Wube should make so the road of least resistance to win the game (Sending a rocket into space) Should be fun and in line with their vision of the game. In that sense the bots don't have a great throughput but they can solve some logistic challenges.
Things like big megabases is odd in the sense of balancing because they are optimized against CPU usage instead of something that is intentionally balanced by the devs.

[Yehn]

So when do we get mod portal notifications..?

[ske]

Factorio is not an competitive multiplayer game as Starcraft and similar games...

Ummm... I think someone would like to have a word with you about that...

[Grimshad]

I appreciate the work you guys have done getting the mod portal to an acceptable level of responsiveness. I assumed back when you announced that there would be a redesign it meant that new features were coming. One I've specifically been wanting is the ability to filter mods by factorio version as currently when you search for something you get a mix of things from different versions that you now have to sift through to find what you want page by page. Speaking of search, ever since the update the search is... broken? For example if i type in "Bob's Plates" which is the exact name of the mod. The results show everything except bob's plates. I've resulted in using google to search the mod portal for now: https://www.google.com/search?ei=zWZmWq ... itNiH_lY7U

[bobingabout]

There are 2 things that bug me about the mod portal.

The first one is that drag and drop uploading doesn't work, but I've already reported that as a bug.

The second is that every time I visit the site, I have to log in again, where previously it would remember my information for AT LEAST a week.
On top of that, where the previous version took you back to the page you were looking at when you logged in, this version forces you back to the main page, meaning you have to go back twice in your browser (past the log in page), then refresh, adding at least 2 entire page loads to your interaction.

it might be surprising to hear this, but those few moments it took to log in and upload my mod were actually more frustrating than the 10 hours previous of updating my Warfare mod, and I had to deal with issues, such as the changes I made to my ammo caused the bullets to just fly past the intended target.

[Deadlock989]

Splitter filters/priority: best thing ever. A real game-changer. More of this sort of thing

[pieterhulsen]

Regarding bots vs belts:

First of all, glad that you take your time and don't go into any hastly decisions.
You have a great game standing and it be difficult to change a major feature like this.

I reallly believe that the solution does not lie with the bots, they can remain the same but with improving belts.

perhaps start the belts of a bit slower and then with research bring them up to normal quite quickly and then you can even add speed with infinite research?
Another thought: bots are very strong in combination with trains at unloading and loading.
Perhaps we should think about making belts and trains combination stronger, adding an offloader for cargo wagons directly onto belts with full compression and a buffer?
Something like pumps already perform for fluids now for ore only? that type of thing.

[mathe172]

Is the intention for the advanced splitter features to be available immediately? Or are they locked behind another research? This might make it possible to give Belts a bit of the same late-game feeling when they get a significant upgrade further down the tech tree...

[FlyHigh]

Calmer FF after the past weeks of rush, eh?

To help you relax, here's a couple of inspirational videos:

Belts, lots of belts!

Robots and Belts working together

Inserters are Robots too!

[foodfactorio]

hi, thanks for keeping bots as they are, they are very helpful and i often use a mixture of both belts and bots in my games.

(Im not sure if anything to do with belt improvements is planned, but if so, one of my older saves, but was my main game with largest base, went really slow after i upgraded several belts or loaders to the highest tier, especially when feeding belt items into a cascaded storage area. Basically this was with a handful of mods, but with only about 1-2000 robots, and the slow down seemed to be just when upgrading some belts/feeders, and when i reverted them back to the lower tier, the game sped up again.)

i still have the savegame (and mods folder about 70mb) if you would like, but it seemed to be due to trying to have 1 main item belt bus (for storage), which was always having items taken out of it and moved elsewhere, so that the belt bus would not get clogged up and full. for example, shown in some screens of my older post here:
viewtopic.php?f=97&t=34176&start=20#p294780

edit: prime example image is here:
download/file.php?id=27344

[doxsroxs]

Bots vs belts?! What about trains vs everything?
We need a way to send a train to a station directly via the circuit network (unique station ID) without using mods and adding it to a schedule :p