Friday Facts #258 - New autoplace

[zOldBulldog]

Two (off by default!) options to include oil and uranium in the starting areas would be nice indeed !

[/quote]
OPTIONS... good.

I would even say essential. The whole point of a sandbox-style game is to let everybody play like they want to play, and not force them to play the way someone else thinks they should play.

[BlueTemplar]

- So... to get where you need to be to avoid boring repetition... you need ingenious blueprints and reasonably easy to reach oil and Uranium.

I understand that you need oil for bots... but why Uranium ?

I don't say the above lightly. Without ability to use ingenuity and good design to quickly get out of the "repetitive manual task" stage, I fear that I would quickly get bored and move on to another game.

If you have played Factorio so much that you are bored by the early game, maybe you should consider using mods like Bluebuild or Nanobots, or any of the "quick start" ones ?

The key question might be what is the definition of "starting area" as used in this sentence. If it is just your "immediate vicinity" when you start... no problem. If it is the full area free of biters, then... "OMG, are you nuts!!!" It would be game breaking for many of us.

Outside the starting area is where oil, uranium, and the spawners start. In fact I don't think that I've ever had a game where I didn't have biter nests at the same radius (or closer) than oil/uranum. But it looks like that there's a bug that sometimes spawns oil/uranium in your starting area?

Killing one (tiny) alien nest to get to oil (and especially uranium) seems like normal game progression to me !
But maybe it's too hard for many new players...
(might be one reason why most of the players never go as far as setting up oil?)

Then, the new campaign will probably guide the players in doing this.
(I remember the current campaign nest attack mission as being pretty hardcore!)

You might want to consider using RSO, which has both a "no oil/uranium" in starting area settings, and AFAIK is designed as to leave a path to (at least some?) resources through biter nests.

[zOldBulldog]

- So... to get where you need to be to avoid boring repetition... you need ingenious blueprints and reasonably easy to reach oil and Uranium.

I understand that you need oil for bots... but why Uranium ?

I don't say the above lightly. Without ability to use ingenuity and good design to quickly get out of the "repetitive manual task" stage, I fear that I would quickly get bored and move on to another game.

If you have played Factorio so much that you are bored by the early game, maybe you should consider using mods like Bluebuild or Nanobots, or any of the "quick start" ones ?

The key question might be what is the definition of "starting area" as used in this sentence. If it is just your "immediate vicinity" when you start... no problem. If it is the full area free of biters, then... "OMG, are you nuts!!!" It would be game breaking for many of us.

Outside the starting area is where oil, uranium, and the spawners start. In fact I don't think that I've ever had a game where I didn't have biter nests at the same radius (or closer) than oil/uranum. But it looks like that there's a bug that sometimes spawns oil/uranium in your starting area?

Killing one (tiny) alien nest to get to oil (and especially uranium) seems like normal game progression to me !
But maybe it's too hard for many new players...
(might be one reason why most of the players never go as far as setting up oil?)

Then, the new campaign will probably guide the players in doing this.
(I remember the current campaign nest attack mission as being pretty hardcore!)

You might want to consider using RSO, which has both a "no oil/uranium" in starting area settings, and AFAIK is designed as to leave a path to (at least some?) resources through biter nests.

To answer your questions:

1) Why Uranium?
Not for bots but to deal with the repetitive nature... Power. Otherwise you will need to make a bunch of steam plants or a humongous solar field. Even relying on bots, it is still boring as hell.

2} Bored by early game, why not use mods like bluebuild or nanobots?
- It didn't take long to find the early game boring. I did by the second game already.
- I am a completions, like many others. To finish the achievements you have to stick to vanilla, so I had to wait an out 1000 hours of game play before having the option. Instead I made the game interesting by finding and inventing designs that minimize the boring stuff. Oil and nuclear (plus my collection of blueprints) are simply essential to "fly past* the boring stage. Now that I almost achieved solving that problem and am done with the challenges I care to do (only missing the 3 speed ones) , yes I totally plan to use mods for all but my next play through. My next play through will be a permanent and well organized vanilla design, and ALL of my future vanilla play will be in it, until it dies due to UPS problems. I don't plan to ever start another vanilla, to avoid that boring and crippled early game, especially with these 0,17 plans.
- A game that can't stay fun in vanilla without mods... is by definition... Broken. That is almost certainly why most players bail before oil, and only about 10% get to launch the rocket. It is because for those that enjoy factorio for its *design* aspects the things that reduce and eliminate tedium are locked too far behind too much research and a chain of builds. It is no surprise that those mods got invented... People simply got so annoyed that they had to create a fix.

3) Killing alien nests isn't hard, even in the early game (with simple turret creep) or with yellow science and artillery. But it is boring and annoying. It is not what I play factorio for. If I want to kill stuff I don't play factorio, I play an RTS or FPS game where it is actually fun to do. Factorio aliens had a chance of being fun in a unique way, through pollution and "playing green" to eliminate the need for combat, but factorio never developed in that direction. So instead aliens are "just a nuisance" for many of us instead of being a fun element. Forcing us to fight them game after game by moving oil and Uranium behind them is enough to make many of us simply turn them off completely or leave the game.

As somebody said in the thread, a map generation OPTION to have oil and Uranium in the starting area is the best way to solve the issue in a way that will be satisfactory and fun for all. Purists and combat fans can play with the option off, and the rest on.

[BlueTemplar]

- I am a completions, like many others. To finish the achievements you have to stick to vanilla, so I had to wait an out 1000 hours of game play before having the option.

BTW, unlike Steam's, game's own achievements aren't disabled by mods, but counted separately.
In fact there are mods adding new achievements :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MoreAchievements

- A game that can't stay fun in vanilla without mods... is by definition... Broken. That is almost certainly why most players bail before oil, and only about 10% get to launch the rocket.

Factorio, with its 34 median hours per player, is exceptional :

(2014 graph, Factorio is probably still in the top 10.)

Researching Oil Processing is 55%, but I'd expect it drop to less than the median for people that successfully managed to find, extract, and use it (if it's only directly crude in Flamethrower Turrets) :
https://steamcommunity.com/stats/427520/achievements/

3) Killing alien nests isn't hard, even in the early game (with simple turret creep) or with yellow science and artillery. But it is boring and annoying. [...] Forcing us to fight them game after game by moving oil and Uranium behind them is enough to make many of us simply turn them off completely or leave the game.

As somebody said in the thread, a map generation OPTION to have oil and Uranium in the starting area is the best way to solve the issue in a way that will be satisfactory and fun for all. Purists and combat fans can play with the option off, and the rest on.

Yes, that was me. (Though the first, and last time, I suggested that it should be off by default.

I don't see how killing a single nest would be that boring and annoying, but if you want, you can turn the biters all the way down, so the odds of them being in the way between you and oil/uranium become tiny (not that they were already high to start with with default settings!)
You might want to check the 100% speedrunners :
https://www.speedrun.com/Factorio#100
(though, of course, they do a lot of map rerolls)

[Oktokolo]

- A game that can't stay fun in vanilla without mods... is by definition... Broken.

I only ever played one singleplayer game that did not needed mods to stay fun after the second playthrough. And that is called The Dark Mod (trailer) and was for a long time itself a Doom 3 mod (but became standalone after id Tech 4 got GPL licensed). That game is in constant development enginewise and gets additional missions every year though. So it is not really comparable with a sandbox game. It is also not comparable with any commercial game as commercial games normally get abandonded by their developers when they start something new.
So i would not expect from Factorio, that it is fun without mods after the second playthrough. Stuff like Nanobots and upgrade planner are basically essentials - on the same level as SkyUI for Skyrim.

That is almost certainly why most players bail before oil, and only about 10% get to launch the rocket.

I would expect the reason for that to be, that Factorio is just way too hardcore in its very nature to be fun for most people. And people in general don't always research before starting trying a new game. So it is likely, that a lot of them get simply overwhelmed by the complexity and time investment needed to get to the first rocket (wich is advertised as the goal of the game).
Base builders, wich are not classic RTSes are somewhat niche. Rimworld is another good one, wich most people will probably only try once.

It is because for those that enjoy factorio for its *design* aspects the things that reduce and eliminate tedium are locked too far behind too much research and a chain of builds. It is no surprise that those mods got invented... People simply got so annoyed that they had to create a fix.

Yes, the vision of the developers does not match that of a lot of players when it comes to ease of life stuff. But they already stated, that they are adding the upgrade planner into vanilla.

[zOldBulldog]

@blue templar: that is interesting information.

- I knew about mod achievement's but I didn't realize there was a difference between the game's and Steam achievements. I bought the game on steam and I only ever saw one list of achievements in game, which seemed to match steam's list.

- blows my mind that people in average play any game only 30-some hours. I have never spent money on a game for so little play, it would feel like a waste. It is sad, bu if that is what people do... I certainly can't argue.

- It is good to see that oil is up to about 50% of players, even if rocket is around 10%. But, given the number of average hours that people play games... that now seems pretty much to be expected. It also explains the focus on casual gamers that never get past the early play... AND I see why make biters (in the default settings) such a big part of the design goal... It is mainly to make th game interesting to those casual gamers.

- Killing one or a few biter nests would not be a big deal - if that is what the DEVs were proposing - as for those that play factorio mainly for the design aspects it would just mean never turning expansion on and doing a perimeter walk early on, to clear the oil and Uranium patches of biters (annoying and stupid, but bearable). But they said that generation outside the starter area (where oil and Uranium would be) would remain random as is now. So, you would have to kill A LOT of biters to find and clear that area. That brings us back into game killer territory for many of us.

I still think that the real solution is OPTIONS for oil and Uranium in the starter area. They can be off by default too (I thought that would be the obvious default, and more so now with the perspective of focusing on casual pew pew gamers).

[BlueTemplar]

From the wiki :

Using the console or installing mods will disable achievements. Enabling peaceful mode or setting enemy bases to anything lower than default disables the following achievements: There is no spoon, No time for chit-chat, Raining bullets and Steam all the way. Any other changes to map generation or using the debug modes does not disable achievements. A separate instance of achievements will be used when mods are installed and earned achievements will not register with Steam.

In multiplayer, achievements can only be earned if the player has spent more than 50% of the time online.

Reenabling achievements again can be achieved by editing the binary data of a save.

modded_achievements.png (463.28 KiB) Viewed 7998 times

Note that it's likely than more than 13% that have finished a game, because a not insignificant percentage of people have likely moved on to mods (or used the console for /commands in their game) at that point - there's nearly 0.1M downloads for the latest version of Bottleneck, which, assuming multiple downloads per owner are negligible, should account for at least 6% of the 1.7M owners as using mods !

Base builders, wich are not classic RTSes are somewhat niche. Rimworld is another good one, wich most people will probably only try once.

As already mentioned, Factorio sold extremely well, it's in the top 100 Steam best-sellers, which is also the top 0.4% !

Also, Steam achievement and especially time statistics are not *that* reliable :
they don't activate when offline / in offline mode, and still count away when AFK/Alt-Tabbed.

- Killing one or a few biter nests would not be a big deal - if that is what the DEVs were proposing - as for those that play factorio mainly for the design aspects it would just mean never turning expansion on and doing a perimeter walk early on, to clear the oil and Uranium patches of biters (annoying and stupid, but bearable). But they said that generation outside the starter area (where oil and Uranium would be) would remain random as is now. So, you would have to kill A LOT of biters to find and clear that area. That brings us back into game killer territory for many of us.

Well, I don't know how often Oil/Uranium spawn in the starting area *now* (since again, from what I understand, it's a bug - which might not happen that often).
So you can't presume that...
And well, just look at the (very randomly picked) default 0.16 map settings :

You can clearly see here that oil and uranium are outside the starting area... and also that it wouldn't take much (if any!) nest-clearing to get to them !

[RocketManChronicles]

Well, I don't know how often Oil/Uranium spawn in the starting area *now* (since again, from what I understand, it's a bug - which might not happen that often).
So you can't presume that...
And well, just look at the (very randomly picked) default 0.16 map settings :

You can clearly see here that oil and uranium are outside the starting area... and also that it wouldn't take much (if any!) nest-clearing to get to them !

This is where I lose my understanding of people's gripes about oil and uranium. I know I am different, but I do not see a problem with oil and uranium being even a little further than your shown example. Fighting nests that size with the initial ammo and a submachine gun is not hard at all; takes maybe three minutes to clear the path.

Unlike a lot of vocal people here, I guess I am alone in wanting more of a fight between me and the biters. I want to exert a lot of effort to reach new resources. I enjoy the challenge and the fight for survival.

[bobingabout]

If the enemies look like that, there's not much of an issue. I've been on maps before where the starting area was a distinct circle, and everything on the outside of the circle was just solid red.

Granted, I don't think maps spawn with that many enemies anymore, but that was a fun challenge, and I wouldn't want to have to play that without oil in the starting area.

[RocketManChronicles]

If the enemies look like that, there's not much of an issue. I've been on maps before where the starting area was a distinct circle, and everything on the outside of the circle was just solid red.

Granted, I don't think maps spawn with that many enemies anymore, but that was a fun challenge, and I wouldn't want to have to play that without oil in the starting area.

I prefer to play the way you describe, nothing but a sea of solid red around my initial circle. It takes a lot of patience, strategy, brute force, kiting the biters, and a lot of ammo (better be automated and a lot of it!) to push your way out. But, once you push and reach that first oil deposit, you get some serious confidence and a great sense of accomplishment.

[Tesse11ation]

A game that can't stay fun in vanilla without mods... is by definition... Broken. That is almost certainly why most players bail before oil, and only about 10% get to launch the rocket. It is because for those that enjoy factorio for its *design* aspects the things that reduce and eliminate tedium are locked too far behind too much research and a chain of builds. It is no surprise that those mods got invented... People simply got so annoyed that they had to create a fix.

Thank GOD I finally found someone who understands this.

Vanilla should be able to stand on its own for a fun experience... especially since indie games like Factorio are beacons of light in the dark age of video games.

I don't mean to rip on mods. Mod creators are awesome, they enrich the experience for entire communities of players. However, mods should not be the only way people can get replay value out of a game (I'm looking at you, Bethesda).

Furthermore, the more tedious something is, the less fun it is by definition, since "fun" is typically achieved with a state of arousal or flow when faced with a proper challenge. Building a main bus by hand is not fun, nor is placing hundreds of furnaces, or waiting for a ridiculously long manual crafing queue. Yes, automation and bots mitigate this... but at that point, as you say, most people have lost interest.

Oil is probably my favorite part about Factorio (aside from train layouts) because of how fun it is to design. Most people that I've played with hate setting up oil, and it baffles me as to why. It's more puzzling than most of the other activities and provides a challenge, which makes it fun for me.

QoL features are great, but like you mentioned, it's locked behind so much late-game tech that unless you're making mega-factories from blueprints, you can never really fully take advantage of them. Even then, the game has just become much easier and there's no longer fun from challenge.

The key word here is balance. At some point, we've all felt "Cracktorio" kick in, lost track of time, and neglected personal hygiene because there's always. One. More. Thing. To. Do. Finding out all of the how's, where's, when's, and why's this happens and capitalizing on it could make Factorio even more of a dream.

For me, I know for a fact "Cracktorio" hits in the transition from early- to mid-game, right around the time acquiring blue science becomes a big priority. That's when I get my trains and oil. Most of the early game before that and the late game far afterward just doesn't even come close for me in excitement factor. I believe there's a strong link between the "Cracktorio" feeling of the mid-game, and the proportional apathy I feel towards starting out at square one with nothing but a stone furnace and burner mining drill, or joining a mega-base in a multiplayer game where all the work has already been done.

[zOldBulldog]

@KoblerMan: it is funny you mention oil design. I can't even count how many times I redesigned the ultra-compact oil setup that is part of my Jumpstart "MiniMart" until I got it just right so that it will never stall... and had great fun doing it.

But of course the whole point of that design is to couple it with my compact "build bots and autodeploy them" design so that I get bots as early as possible, to free myself from the tedium.

But to not have easy access to oil or the easy and compact power of nuclear would totally ruin that anti-tedium plan. *THAT* is what makes forcing oil and Uranium out of the starting area a big problem. And why it is so important that if the dev go that route for the default they also include map generation *OPTIONS* to keep oil and Uranium in the startup area.

[usafphoenix]

"lets fix the crappy map generator by slightly improving some settings, while completing removing the ability to have oil in the starting area"
......WHO THE CRAP IS MAKING THESE DECISIONS?!
you don't make the game better by going halfway towards a resolution and then make another problem midway.

The way you fix the *perceived* issues of having oil in the starting area is by setting the default setting to not generate it in the starting area by default..... but if a player wants it? why shouldn't they be allowed to have it?

The reason the statistics show that only 10-11% of people launch a rocket in vanilla is because of decisions that make vanilla game not enjoyable.
The solution to this is to see what mods and settings players ARE playing with on maps that have 100+ hours played, rockets launched, etc and learn from that data set.
....i mean, you can also learn from the data set taken from seeing how many people play with the vanilla map generation before rushing to download RSO.... that'll tell you somethin'.

[Koub]

[Koub] Please, chill down. No need to lose one's temper.

[zOldBulldog]

You are right about the temper, but even though we might not say it as strongly, his reaction is shared by many of us.

The thing is, there are at least two groups of players. One like the idea of losing oil and Uranium from the starting area while the other hates it with a passion.

Those that hate it are probably those that feel "held hostage in vanilla" by the steam achievements getting disabled if you use mods.

I felt exactly like him, until I got my last steam achievement. Now that I did I no longer care, because I immediately downloaded a mod (one to take better screenshot) and I plan to only use RSO and never again use that horrid vanilla map generator.

And calling vanilla map generation horrid is being generous. It was OK in 0.15, became really bad in 0,16, and it promises to get even worse (for many of us) in 0.17.

What puzzles me is that the objection can be easily eliminated with two simple checkboxes: [Allow oil in starting area] and [Allow Uranium in starting area]. I am surprised that the DEVs have not announced already that those two options will be part of 0,17. It is so common sense that I can't imagine them doing anything else.

Another thing that surprised me is that the moment I installed that screenshot mod I started getting achievements all over. Achievements didn't get disabled, they got reset to zero and I started earning them again (I hope it didn't affect my already completed Steam achievements or I might start cursing like him too). Is that a bug?

[Engimage]

The problem here arised when devs decided to make decisions instead of players. Generally its the same stuff as with bots vs belts. This is mosly a shitbomb thrown into community to make them express their emotions on the matter and make a real decision later.

This is really aggressive stuff but it is better done now then after release.

So generally this is something that has to be done to suit all of playerbase.

• Give separate options for resource richness/density for starting area and beyond for every resource (make another column)
• Clarify a setting for the size of starting area
• Make an option to use new cool algorithm for spawn point priorities separately for resources in/outside of starting area
• Revise preset difficulties to include settings intended by devs

IMO there is no need to introduce any special algorithms for starting area. A separate set of settings would definitely do the job quite fine.
IMO there is absolutely no need to disable spawn point priority algorithm outside of starting area. It would make water rich worlds much more consistent resource wise and definitely would not harm gameplay in any way. However it would definitely prevent situation like I had - 80 hours into the map (high water) and I failed to find ANY oil miles away from my base cause it all spawned under the water. I just had to spawn it using console command to reduce frustration.

[Koub]

Actually, I strongly dislike what happened to the map generator since the old 0.11-0.12 days.
I liked the ole one way better.

[Oktokolo]

Just for the record: I like the 0.16 map generation and having oil just outside starting area would actually be fine as piercing ammo is way more powerfull than is needed to get to it without using turret creep.

[zOldBulldog]

Just for the record: I like the 0.16 map generation and having oil just outside starting area would actually be fine as piercing ammo is way more powerfull than is needed to get to it without using turret creep.

Oil and Uranium "just outside" the starting area would not be as bad as what they proposed.

But notice they did not say that would be the case, they said two things that combined can make for mostly nasty maps:

- No Oil or Uranium in the starting area.
- Random placements of ores (including Oil and Uranium) outside of the starting area. I can't remember with 100% certainty but I think they said that outside the starting area they would continue to use the 0.16 terrible algorithm.

So, there are no guarantees that you can wipe a single or very few nests to get control of the oil and Uranium you need.

If that was the goal, all they would have to do is place one decent deposit of each *inside* of the starting area, but right at the border. Then you would be forced to clear one or 5 nests but no more. That would be fairly reasonable and would not have caused all this controversy.

[Oktokolo]

But notice they did not say that would be the case, they said two things that combined can make for mostly nasty maps:

They also said that they would not revert the removal of sideloading belt compression - and then they made inserters compress belts and added filtering to the splitter. I liked the non-compressing behaviour, but most seemed to hate it. So they fixed it.
They also do care for the noobs a lot (nothing wrong with that, we still got the enourmous mod API to make the game more beefy).

Most people will not be able to get through fifty nests to get to their first oil patches. So even if they really get a version out where oil is hard to find - the next version after that would make oil easy to find for the average noob again. Folks on Steam will complaining a lot if they can't proceed without going all-in Duke Nukem on the natives. A lot of the new players will come from the city builder genre. They are not the best fighters. Devs will make sure, that they can still beat the game - with default options (because noobs don't change options and devs know that).

At the end, oil will probably almost always be inside the tile scan radius of a radar placed at the spawn point. Radar covers the default spawn area and some biter nests around it. So it would probably really be fighting less than ten tiny to small nests to get to the oil.
There are only small worms at the point of time you typically start needing oil. And that would be easily manageable with piercing and heavy armor without having to use any special tactics or even turret creep.
The average noob would get some piercing ammo in his submachine gun and a heavy armor before just running towards the oil while holding down space - and that would work as well as it does now (you do not even need fish if you pull back for a minute after fighting more than one worm).