Friday Facts #266 - Cleanup of mechanics

[Oktokolo]

Factorio is like programming. In FORTRAN. An obscure dialect of FORTRAN with only one level of subroutines allowed. And you can have arrays and you can have floating point but you can't have floating point arrays. In fact forget FORTRAN. Factorio is like a crappy BASIC on an 8080.

So true! The cuircuit system is severely underpowered. Sure, it is turing complete and you can make a video player with it. But doing anything more advanced than controlling a cracking plant takes way too much space, is definitely not fun to do and a real pita to debug. There are mods implementing µC combinators - at least one of them even supports programming in simple assembly language. But some programmable µC combinator should be part of vanilla (and would probably also allow more UPS-friendly modding of them).

Factorio is all about automation. But don't automate too much. Because? OP!

You might want to try using mods to make your bots even more usefull, than they are already. And as you are a programmer, you can even make them yourself if the existing ones are not giving you enough automation freedom. You could start with mini loaders and altering roboports to have more recharge slots. That combination should give you as much throughput, as you could ever wish for. Or go straight for creative mode - because its just a tiny step further...

Axes are just one small symptom of counterproductive dev attitudes.

Yeah, they put them into the game because everyone has them in his game. It indeed should be all about automation and not handmining stuff with axes. I am glad, they finally decided to axe them.

Interesting terrain, interesting opponents, a story, and once you're researched them you can combine chassis/reactors/weapons/armor/specials in pretty much any combination without some annoying dev popping up and screaming OP!

Terrain already is interesting - and there are additionally mods for that. Opponents are indeed pretty lame and will never become more advanced in vanilla (they want them to be cannon fodder and to not distract from the base building too much). But there are already mods for that too (unsurprisingly none of it seems to try adding diplomacy though).
Combination of different parts into variations of stuff should be possible to mod. Would probably have to use equipment grids or module slots on some generic chassis to emulate the customizability and then script the creation and display of the item or entity. Or you just create all combinations as different recipes (that is, what vanilla did for the inserters - they could also have made only one inserter with module slots for power source, speed, reach, capacity - and would have had a more flexible inserter wich probably also would be harder to use by unexperienced players).

[featherwinglove]

It is unfortunate reality of early access games - you might see the game as something else than what developers see it as and end up being disappointed when the development progresses and the game gets closer to vision of developers rather than what you have thought it is going to be. So I feel like we have "tricked" you into buying wrong game. I am sorry for that.

Bearing that in mind:

Just don't get rid of hand crafting or non-botting, if I ever get bored with running around and carrying things or having everything go on belts, I'll give bots a try (or if my base gets too large to manage myself) but I think bots are far from what I thought the game would be when I purchased it.

It seems you could read too much into that and trick yourselves, or scare us into thinking you've tricked yourselves, into thinking the game is more about automation than it should be. Maybe you're already too tricked: Factorio is a game about surviving on a hostile planet, but unlike any other game with that theme, you have to build design a factory to do it. (Caught this on the copyedit pass: In Outpost 2: Divided Destiny, you build factories as individual entities; design is very much on the RTS level.) You see, it's not about simply building factories. Other games do that and to deprive Factorio of its core mission would remove its unique flavor and render it generic. (E.g. Yorg.io is about building tower defended factories just for the sake of building tower defended factories, and I'm the only one who has ever challenged that, and in a very minor way.) Can't a non-breaking axe just be one reasonable step on that path? I mean, you just need to walk back the bane of Zelda:BotW, not take the axe out completely, right?

By the way, one step would be to simply kit the player with an axe from the start, and I'm actually rather surprised that had never been done.

I am pretty sure, that he not only could reimplement the axe, but will also realize, that the axes indeed do not improve gameplay at all.

That's just your opinion man. I'm not just trying to be the Dude, but you really are speaking as if you're the only guy who could be correct and that if the devs do what you like, everyone else can be damned. I'm pretty sure I've brought something like this up before in the thread, was it with you? (flip flip) Nope, not even the same thread. The point still stands: Just because you don't like something doesn't mean everyone else should be deprived of it. (flip also has the argument I made with posila in this thread: I'm not speaking from "feels", people just aren't reading the logic.)

Let's meet half way, shall we?

Engine:
1. Reimplement the axe in the engine, along with a moddable wear rate that can be set to zero.
2. Write in the ability for a technology research complete event to spawn inventory items.
3. Write in some easy inventory management setting that automatically equips the best hand tools and armor in the player's inventory; make it easy to turn off just in case it causes issues in the power armor phase (i.e. someone's combat armor suit is a Mk. 2 PA, while his personal roboport kit is in a Mk. 1 PA and he needs to have the latter stay in the armor slot while keeping the former in inventory.)

Base mod:
4. Set the hand axe wear rate to zero in the base mod.
5. Put an iron axe in the start kit for the player, with the exception of the First Steps-01 mission unless you want to-
6. Remove the First Steps-01 mission, which is mostly about building the hand axe and hand mining enough to build a burner drill. The latter half can be blended into the First Steps-02 - destroy the burner drills (and I mean literally so that there is wreckage on the iron patch identified by character or tab balloon dialogue) and instruct the player to hand mine enough iron to build one. Congratulate him on his ingenuity should he go grab one from the coal patch and put it on the iron patch instead. This should be put between the inspection of the chest with the pistol in it, and the burner inserter rotation. (Copyedit pass: The above is from memory, Ima go play First Steps-01 and -02 to verify, brb. Good thing I did: the misrotated inserter pulled the plates from the furnace and put them on the belt leading to it We might have to add it after the rotation lesson instead.)
7. Have the Steel Processing technology automatically spawn a steel axe by default. (Modders can turn this off if desired.) Combined with the easy inventory management and zero wear rate, the only effect that's different from the engine change is the appearance of the old iron axe in the inventory after researching Steel Processing.
8. At some point in the First Steps-03 mission, instruct the player to build a steel axe. Character dialogue (the chat line) explains why it automatically appears in the tool slot and where the old iron axe went. Tab balloon dialogue can explain how easy inventory management can turned off. The same tab balloon dialogue can be programmed to appear on the event of Power Armor research complete because that's far enough down the road that new players might have forgotten about it, and the point at which they might wish to turn it off.

Option 1. Easy inventory management for tools but not armor - possibly separate options for both.
Option 2. In lieu of enabling the steel axe for First Steps-03, automatically have the Steel Processing research complete event delete iron axes from the inventory. This would make the vanilla game's behaviour identical to the current 0.17 baseline.

Finally, if anyone thinks I've been too emotional, please go back and actually read this post. (Copyedit pass: emphasis added.)

Edit: There is also a discussion of the pickaxe on the General Discussion forum.

Now gather around, because this explanation starts in the way back[,] when we thought of our industrious little avatars as crash survivors trying to overcome a hostile, alien world, and maybe, one day, even escape it. This was when Factorio was a different game.

He might be a bit more hyperbolic (and I might be a bit more hypergolic), but our arguments ascend from the same basic theme.

[featherwinglove]

I am listening (actually I am spending on this much more time than I should), but all I hear are emotions and very little reason.

As I go back over this thread to the parts that I hadn't read yet (previously I had read the first four pages and from 22 up), I am increasingly baffled by posila's claim here, to the point where I'm starting - just starting - to wonder if he wants Wube to join the mainstream woke-slide of the gaming industry (i.e. every publicly traded AAA developer has had its earnings and share prices plummet for the last six months) or get shitcanned for trying. This is from page 10 (linked back from the General Discussion forum).

Chiming in again to state how simultaneously re-encouraged and disheartened I am by some of the replies.

It is pleasing and reassuring to see that many players, including both mod developers and "standard" players, do not wish to see mechanics - especially on the level of the game engine itself to preclude modding - removed.

However, it makes me very unhappy to see people not only cheering it on, but going multiple steps further and listing more features they want removed, such as fluid temperature, evolution factor, basic/advanced oil processing, and even the new 0.15 science packs. Or saying things like "it's finally time for the game to move past the hindrance of the old playerbase". Or dismissing those who want complexity with - unsubstantiated - statements like that they are only a small percentage of the player base or that they "just hate change".

I'm pretty sure at least half of those are jokes poking fun at the stupidity of these changes.

I will echo what several people have hinted at or outright said - making the game simpler is not an inherently good thing, especially for a game like Factorio, where the whole game is built on the idea of solving a sort of puzzle. Just because you may increase the general appeal of the game by some - probably not very large - amount is NOT a good reason to start alienating the existing playerbase by going back on what makes the game both appealing and unique.

The idea of "simpler = popular = better" is what has all but ruined the modded Minecraft community as mods started trying to out-simplify (and then, as they were no longer able to distinguish themselves on their mechanics, out-numbers-race) each other and the playerbase started to grow more and more demanding of such simplicity, and increasingly hostile to what they derisively call "the old guard" of having to actually design solutions.

Please do not start Factorio down that path in the search for "easier new player experience".

+1 Someone finally said it

And beat me to it. I'm really late to the party, but like I said in my first post, I was quite surprised how that first post, made blind to the rest of the discussion (I had read only the FFF itself at the time, and the first page, including the OP edit to clarify what was engine and what was base mod) landed so perfectly in the context of the discussion.

The vast majority of us, older players atleast, bought Factorio knowing, or not, the amount of math and complexity behind it

When you scroll through Steam reviews and see Cracktorio it’s almost always followed by why the game is addicting, the complexity and that Factorio formula.

Seeing all these features that makes me turn to Factorio over other games on a daily basis is disheartening.

I think he meant to have the word "murdered" or some such after the word "features".

Can only hope the devs backtrack and decide not to change these features

And now I've an excuse to talk about this.

Factorio is a hybrid puzzle/power fantasy game. The puzzle lies in the math, limitations of various things like AM ingredient limits, and the reward for creating and solving puzzles of your own within the tools and limitations supplied by the game (like an in-game video decoder). The power fantasy is building the biggest factory with the best numbers the fastest.

This hybrid nature has split the player base, and the easiest tell between the two is how they see bots fitting into the game. A power fantasy type sees anything that slows down their arrival at the bots as a bad feature because, for them, the game doesn't start until bots are unlocked. So mining axes and ingredient limits in AMs are pointless because they don't matter to bot play or hinder bot play which hampers the power fantasy. To them, a good change is any change that makes it easier for the numbers to go up faster.

Conversely, the puzzle types see removing calc details and simplifying features as bad because it dumbs down the puzzle complexity and opportunities, usually. To them, any change that removes logical/puzzle type barriers to reward is bad. Which usually means they want to make it harder for the numbers to go up faster, but again, based on puzzle mechanics. Simple drudgery for the sake of drudgery sucks to them too.

But you can see that these two types are basically opposed to each other, and most of the drama regarding feature changes is split down these two player bases wanting the game to cater to them more at the expense of the other. The changes in this FF is a gift to the power types at the expense of the puzzle types.

I'm not sure where I fit in, 'cus it's not like I'm really in either type. As for the "tell", I actually don't use the bots all that much once they become available: I use them to augment the existing logistics system where it bottlenecks (the most memorable time I did this is when I foolishly belted the cables for green and blue circuits in my very first free game when 0.12.33 was current. ...irony of "free" game here, first game I started after I paid for Factorio, prior being First Steps which was free in the monetary sense.) My most recent use of bots was to sort out a Science Cost Tweaker SK4 factory in the Muddy Mountains, the production of which is mindbogglingly complex. Rythe has no idea how to classify me.

(And the exploratory/experience types are just thankful for any crumbs that land their way, and the limited mining axe progression/initial manual mining is a part of their play)

Never mind. Actually, reading the above made me want to augment my previous reply block

And from this FF, I've gotten the vague sense that maybe Wube just wants the game to be done at this point, particularly for Kovarex, who might be hitting project burnout and needing a long deserved vacation before moving onto something new. I think Kovarex is normally better than this when it comes to understanding his game, but a chunk of the rational for getting rid of mining axes was literally "Our UI is so flawed that some people are trying to mine by picking up the mining axe from the inventory slot and clicking on the ground with it attached, so let's get rid of mining axes."

That makes no sense, but it is what you get when you start rationalizing the easiest/quickest solution to think up when running into these end-project issues.

Now, if posila could please explain how the above constitutes "all ... emotions and very little reason", I'll start believing in miracles. Not the right kind, but still...

Just put the axe back in and I'll start believing in miracles of the right kind.

[Oktokolo]

I am pretty sure, that he not only could reimplement the axe, but will also realize, that the axes indeed do not improve gameplay at all.

That's just your opinion man.

Of course it is. I will only state your opinion if it happens to be mine too. So don't expect that to happen often as we seem to disagree a lot.

Let's meet half way, shall we?

Nah. Just keep the axes axed.

[featherwinglove]

I am listening (actually I am spending on this much more time than I should), but all I hear are emotions and very little reason.

I am pretty sure, that he not only could reimplement the axe, but will also realize, that the axes indeed do not improve gameplay at all.

That's just your opinion man.

Of course it is. I will only state your opinion if it happens to be mine too. So don't expect that to happen often as we seem to disagree a lot.

Let's meet half way, shall we?

Nah. Just keep the axes axed.

See, posila, this is what "emotions and very little reason" actually looks like. Notice the brevity of this message from Oktokolo to refute only headers without actually discussing any of the points of argument. Further, he hurls the elephant "the axes indeed do not improve gameplay at all" without even the slightest attempt to explain why they don't. The arguments in FFF#266 are pretty flimsy after having been thoroughly and somewhat independently dismantled by at least three different people, including myself. That's what reason looks like.

I'll agree with him and Mike5000 on the circuit networks though. I didn't say anything before 'cus it's off topic and I hardly ever use them.

[featherwinglove]

Then there are role-playing people, who say pickaxe removal breaks the immersion for them. Wrong game, I am sorry.

I kinda saw the logic in that, until the question from the latest FFF arises: Why are you guys making a cutscene controller that modders can use?

[5thHorseman]

Then there are role-playing people, who say pickaxe removal breaks the immersion for them. Wrong game, I am sorry.

I kinda saw the logic in that, until the question from the latest FFF arises: Why are you guys making a cutscene controller that modders can use?

It's not FMV with actors and mocap. It's panning and zooming. I don't understand why they even call them cutscenes. They should call it camera control.

[featherwinglove]

Then there are role-playing people, who say pickaxe removal breaks the immersion for them. Wrong game, I am sorry.

I kinda saw the logic in that, until the question from the latest FFF arises: Why are you guys making a cutscene controller that modders can use?

It's not FMV with actors and mocap. It's panning and zooming. I don't understand why they even call them cutscenes. They should call it camera control.

These days, mocap is usually used to do cutscenes with the character keeping control of the camera (lots of that in the CoD franchise), so that doesn't really make an argument against use of the term. In-game rendered cutscene camera control was first used (to the best of my knowledge) in Command & Conquer when computers had a thousandth the RAM that Factorio needs (if it was used in Dune 2, I missed it; if it was used in other games, I probably haven't played them.) The first time I remember camera move cutscenes used in a way matching their description was Warcraft 3, which was that franchise's transition from being RTS to being RPG, a move which caused me to basically drop it like yesterday's laundry. They also used it way too much in my opinion. Another great example of a game saving production resources by using the in-game renderer (although in a completely different scene from that of gameplay) was Wing Commander V: Prophecy, which cut its budget so much I was nearly as surprised as Steven Petrarca when Mark Hamill walked onto the set.

I do agree with the use of the term camera controller, and I think they do that. The concept is pulling the camera from control of the player character or creative mode movement. It seems to me that the most frequent use of this will probably be in multiplayer when somebody chats like "Get a load of this! /view" with the "/view" being a request to borrow the recipient player's camera (probably every camera on the team.) Could be an unusual ore patch, a new workshop design, cliffs forming a happy face, or whatever.

Back to the topic at hand, I'm not really sure what posila means by "role-playing people" either, since stories have been attached to RTS games in an RPG-like way since the dawn of gaming. Unlike Minecraft, I've never seen Factorio modded into the full RPG tradition, and I can't see why anyone would because it would remove all of Factorio's base-building functionality for what? Mid-1990s graphics with the zooming capabilities of an early-1990s Mandelbrot plotter? If that's what he's referring to, yeah I agree, wrong game. But that doesn't make any sense because no one's done that. The closest we have is the introduction of story elements, character classes/leveling, and the ability to mod tech tree transfer between games, which does not an RPG make. So I strongly suspect that the "role-playing people" he's referring to are basically those who like to make story mods ...which kinda includes Wube with the vanilla campaign, as relatively insignificant as it is (it strikes me more as an advert for story modders - I find myself curious as to when the full plot of Outpost 2: Divided Destiny can be remastered in Factorio, although the mechanics of the game would still be very different, we already have a mod to build the starship, another to manage colonists, another to manage vehicles, and finally, turning biters into the Blight is relatively simple, probably simpler than implementing wreckage salvage scenarios. Outpost 2: Divided Destiny has never been described as a role-playing game.)

Edit: Somehow missed naming the game Warcraft 3, how the did that happen?

[posila]

sounds like you're admitting there's a problem (which is at least progress - the extent of any recognition of that in the entire rest of the thread was roughly one "that's a bummer", so thank you for recognizing that.

I was intentionally very unspecific, because different people requested different things and we haven't settled on final solution yet.

Factorio is like programming. In FORTRAN. An obscure dialect of FORTRAN with only one level of subroutines allowed. And you can have arrays and you can have floating point but you can't have floating point arrays. In fact forget FORTRAN. Factorio is like a crappy BASIC on an 8080.

In my mind, given your analogy, it's supposed to be an assembly language. You have basic building blocks that you can solve problems with, but there is no standard function library that would provide you any solutions. You can copy&paste macros you or other people have written in previous projects (and personally, I don't like this part of the game). And that's why some of us think logistic bots are little bit too powerful.

Back to the topic at hand, I'm not really sure what posila means by "role-playing people" either, since stories have been attached to RTS games in an RPG-like way since the dawn of gaming.

I didn't mean RPG video-game genre. I meant role-playing as in D&D role-playing; or when you hold a Lego minifigure and pretend she is entering a car to leave for work and in other hand you hold Lego robber who is about to rob the first figure, and then you grab Lego Superman and "fly" him in to save the day. That kind of role-playing. There's nothing wrong with that, we just don't desing the game for that kind of play. To be specific, I was thinking about following thread 63171 when I wrote it. I think Factorio is very immersive game, due getting into "state of flow" induced by problem solving nature of the game.

There's nothing to scratch my reclamation itch, but that doesn't matter as much. So yeah, I've actually made not just one, but a stack of twenty titanium axes, thinking it was going to last long enough that I could ignore it, and the last one broke at a rather inconvenient moment, and I kinda felt silly that I wasn't paying enough attention to how many I had left.

You had memorable experience with a pickaxes. That's nice, but that haven't really answered the question. I mean, this is equivalent of "I went to fight biters and ran out of ammo" or "I went to build a mining outpost, but forgot to take miners with me" ... it doesn't seem to be experience unique to pickaxes. I wanted to direct you to explain what kind of interesting different gameplay pickaxe as _item with durability_ brings to the game.

For "half way" suggestions to be realistic, it requires to not rely on any GUI slots; and it would be good if it had similar mechanics to some other item. In that case the two item types might share significant amount of code, which would make it much more reasonable to create and maintain.

Now, if posila could please explain how the above constitutes "all ... emotions and very little reason", I'll start believing in miracles. Not the right kind, but still...

Soooo ... the first quote (from Reika): all three paragraphs are in essence "I feel emotion X, because of what others wrote." Rest of the quotes say they like "math, complexity and puzzle aspects of the game", but they don't say how pickaxes add complexity or puzzles to the game, and I think they weren't talking about pickaxes, actually. So the other thing that was removed from the engine - mining hardness - was adding complexity by obscurity.

I have come to this thread around page 15, after I heard there is some controversy around this FFF, and found out people completely misunderstood what and how was changed (or removed) - mainly because FFF didn't communicate it well. I think I managed to make it clear what actually changed, and most people calmed down. There is nothing more I can do for the rest, so I won't be active in this thread anymore.

[theolderbeholder]

See, posila, this is what "emotions and very little reason" actually looks like. Notice the brevity of this message from Oktokolo to refute only headers without actually discussing any of the points of argument. Further, he hurls the elephant "the axes indeed do not improve gameplay at all" without even the slightest attempt to explain why they don't. The arguments in FFF#266 are pretty flimsy after having been thoroughly and somewhat independently dismantled by at least three different people, including myself. That's what reason looks like.

I'll agree with him and Mike5000 on the circuit networks though. I didn't say anything before 'cus it's off topic and I hardly ever use them.

featherwinglove, meet sarcasm, sarcasm, this is featherwinglove.
...being beaten with a cluestick is not bodliy harm at ll.

[featherwinglove]

I was intentionally very unspecific, because different people requested different things and we haven't settled on final solution yet.

You can start by putting the axe back.

In my mind, given your analogy, it's supposed to be an assembly language. You have basic building blocks that you can solve problems with, but there is no standard function library that would provide you any solutions.

That would change if we can put component settings into blueprint strings.

You can copy&paste macros you or other people have written in previous projects (and personally, I don't like this part of the game). And that's why some of us think logistic bots are little bit too powerful.

I don't like copy and pasting builds much; I usually design fresh, and often wind up with wildly different builds even on the same map. I don't think logistic bots are too powerful, but I do think construction bots are too powerful when they become available, but not so once I'm into complex science. I've also played with a no-hand-placement mod that forces the use of bots, a mod I didn't spend much time with because, despite putting some difficulty into the building of things (i.e. in Factorio, it's generally easier to create than destroy, which is back-to-front vs. reality and common sense.) I didn't even need grenades for the trees.

There's nothing to scratch my reclamation itch, but that doesn't matter as much. So yeah, I've actually made not just one, but a stack of twenty titanium axes, thinking it was going to last long enough that I could ignore it, and the last one broke at a rather inconvenient moment, and I kinda felt silly that I wasn't paying enough attention to how many I had left.

You had memorable experience with a pickaxes. That's nice, but that haven't really answered the question. I mean, this is equivalent of "I went to fight biters and ran out of ammo" or "I went to build a mining outpost, but forgot to take miners with me" ... it doesn't seem to be experience unique to pickaxes. I wanted to direct you to explain what kind of interesting different gameplay pickaxe as _item with durability_ brings to the game.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild fans probably have a lot more to say about that. The titanium pickaxes were very interesting because when I first got titanium processing, I had an impressive stack of ore piled up because I had cheap mining machines working on it for days (56 minute days). But as anyone who has played with Bob's knows, processing it is a bit of a pain, and the titanium axe was such an improvement on the previous state of the art that I could hardly wait. Again, Mountains mod so I have to clear metres of caked up sediment from resource patches - I turned off stone patches because there's no shortage of stone in the modpack, and there are plenty of other sources for when I run out of Mountains. In that modpack, I find myself frequently in the situation where I'm fighting biters while buidling a mining outpost which involves using axes to clear trees and Mountains. And that's way more interesting than Minecraft, where usually I just break out into a cave and get blown up by a creeper. (That's interesting enough that I still go back to it every couple of months, but I hope you get the idea.)

For "half way" suggestions to be realistic, it requires to not rely on any GUI slots;

That doesn't make any sense to me because you should still have something in the exact same spot of the interface to indicate the player's mining speed, even without an axe implementation. With mining speed tied to technology, it also makes sense to tie it to armor and armor equipment, which I think is a great idea. There's probably a mod that does that already.

and it would be good if it had similar mechanics to some other item. In that case the two item types might share significant amount of code, which would make it much more reasonable to create and maintain.

Since the axe was already in the game, it makes more sense to me to use axe-like mechanics for other similar items. There are several mods already doing this so yeah, just put the axe back already.

Now, if posila could please explain how the above constitutes "all ... emotions and very little reason", I'll start believing in miracles. Not the right kind, but still...

Soooo ... the first quote (from Reika): all three paragraphs are in essence "I feel emotion X, because of what others wrote." Rest of the quotes say they like "math, complexity and puzzle aspects of the game", but they don't say how pickaxes add complexity or puzzles to the game, and I think they weren't talking about pickaxes, actually. So the other thing that was removed from the engine - mining hardness - was adding complexity by obscurity.

Whoa, waitaminnut. What the even is "complexity by obscurity"? Mining hardness made perfect sense to me, and wasn't obscure at all because it did a pretty good imitation of what I learned of the Mohs hardness scale as a wee lad. If your tool material was hard enough, it worked with little trouble. If it wasn't hard enough, the target broke it. The only "obscurity" was the depth into the API documentation you had to go to find an explanation.

I have come to this thread around page 15, after I heard there is some controversy around this FFF, and found out people completely misunderstood what and how was changed (or removed) - mainly because FFF didn't communicate it well. I think I managed to make it clear what actually changed, and most people calmed down. There is nothing more I can do for the rest, so I won't be active in this thread anymore.

It should be obvious that people do understand what's happening with the axe, and that some of them are so upset that they will stop updating their Factorio installations. There's nothing you can do about that? Or is it really that you don't want to do anything about it. The former would speak ill of your competence, and the latter of your integrity. I therefore do not find the answer very satisfying.

featherwinglove, meet sarcasm, sarcasm, this is featherwinglove.
...being beaten with a cluestick is not bodliy harm at ll.

Not sensing sarcasm in Oktokolo's post, and even if that's what it was, it tends to come from an emotional place. The most extreme cases are when Jesus (Matthew 12) or God (Job 38) were extremely PO'd and wanted to go easy on their opponents.

[Mike5000]

In my mind, given your analogy, it's supposed to be an assembly language. You have basic building blocks that you can solve problems with, but there is no standard function library that would provide you any solutions. You can copy&paste macros you or other people have written in previous projects (and personally, I don't like this part of the game).

I can do anything in assembly language. It takes a really crappy high-level language to restrict what programmers can do.

In assembly language if I can do A and I can do B then I can do A and B. I might have to buy more memory or work harder to squeeze them both in or work smarter so they don't conflict but that's all part of the fun.

In Factorio there's always another dev jumping up shouting "OP!". I'd be happy to pay a reasonable price in terms of science and construction materials for e.g. a buffer chest cargo wagon but for no good reason Factorio devs say "OP!".

And that's why some of us think logistic bots are little bit too powerful.

If a bot can build a nuclear reactor or deliver a stack of them to a player, why can't it deliver a lump of iron ore to a chest for cycliing back into the smelter array? How does the game benefit from forcing us to carry around two hundred storage chests of ore and metal garbage until yellow science comes along?

OP! OP! OP!

Not.

Arbitrary restrictions are for balancing scenarios and campaigns. In the base game they're just design flaws.

Every container should use the same code. It should support logistics requests at a reasonable additional cost (which would be green or blue science not yellow) and without relying on modders to work magic with a hidden logistics chest.

[featherwinglove]

I can do anything in assembly language. It takes a really crappy high-level language to restrict what programmers can do.

"Show me some LOGO." - Dick "Vin" Miller, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Past Tense I"

(not actually referring to the really crappy high-level language )

In Factorio there's always another dev jumping up shouting "OP!". I'd be happy to pay a reasonable price in terms of science and construction materials for e.g. a buffer chest cargo wagon but for no good reason Factorio devs say "OP!".

There really does seem to be a disconnect growing between the devs and the modding community, which really doesn't make a lot of sense to me, especially since there's overlap. And the users as well. They're just brushing off our concerns even after what must be close to six hundred forum posts regarding this FFF, including stuff like this:

I'm just going to go sit in the corner and cry now...

It sure seems that it would have been better just to hide superfluous details from the UI rather than destroying so much hard work.

Pretty much every change on that list says "Oh, and we're going to break Bob's mods by doing this"
...
That's a lot to dump on me from just one FFF... It's probably more than everything else previously in 0.17.

And this:

The more I re-read this FFF the more I think it is completely misguided.
...
This grab bag of unnecessary changes breaks thousands of hours of modding work. For what? Nothing. By all means hide some of the more obscure attributes from the UI but don't break things for no reason.

And this:

This is a goodbye from me to FFF's, after several years of reading and enjoying. This FFF and the one early this year about bots vs belts have so soured me that the best thing is to just stop reading and stick with playing a version I can enjoy.
...
Modders, YouTubers and players commenting via the forums did an immense amount to improve Factorio. A shame that Wube now seem determined to forget that.

Wube, I don't come here for AAA trash fires. If I had wanted that, I would have went to Blizzcon, the Game Awards, bought Fallout 76, Battlefront 2 EA, etc. etc.. You're better than that. Or at least, I thought you were.

And that's why some of us think logistic bots are little bit too powerful.

If a bot can build a nuclear reactor or deliver a stack of them to a player, why can't it deliver a lump of iron ore to a chest for cycliing back into the smelter array? How does the game benefit from forcing us to carry around two hundred storage chests of ore and metal garbage until yellow science comes along?

OP! OP! OP!

Not.

I couldn't agree more. Logistics robots should precede construction robots, as they do in real life. (We actually have fully robotic logistics in some factories that have been showcased in the Off-topic forum; no examples of fully automated construction bots.) I've considered tweaking my mod packs to implement this, as construction bots nerf Bob's axe progression to the point of knocking out the last few steps completely.

Arbitrary restrictions are for balancing scenarios and campaigns. In the base game they're just design flaws.

Every container should use the same code. It should support logistics requests at a reasonable additional cost (which would be green or blue science not yellow) and without relying on modders to work magic with a hidden logistics chest.

That would actually live up to the name of "Cleanup of mechanics" instead of the nonsense we currently have under that title. This wouldn't be the first time a game studio has completely lost the plot of their own IP and peed on their audience starting with those in the front row, but this is certainly the last place I expected to observe it. That's a big part of the reason I bought Factorio. Please don't make me regret it, Wube.

[featherwinglove]

It seems like the devs don't really care what their current playerbase thinks, and just starts a discussion post to gain the respect and sales "interacting with the community" gets a company without actually listening to the community, going by the lack of a mention in #277.

I'm pretty sure this is the wrong FFF number, you're meaning either #266 or #267, right? (I would have sent a PM, but you have that disabled.)

[Avezo]

I wish to talk again about my idea of tiered assemblers removal...

Actually, after watching MojoD megabase streams for a while with that expanded vanilla stuff mod, tiers might be amazing! It's jsut that, still, as assemblers are now, their tiering makes very little sense nor progress feelings. Imagine that there were just 2 tiers, basic items, and super-endgame ones, needing A LOT of space science? I think it would add a lot to vanilla game and expanded it greately beyond space science and firing the first rocket. But just that, a single space-tier. No crazy 100 tiers from some crazy mods.

The original point still stands tho, tiered assemblers as they are now, shall be gone IMO, and all 'assemblers', like chem plants, refineries, centrifuges, furnaces (oh...), etc, should have base craft speed 1, period.

Allow space-tiered assemblers with higher base crafting speed for endgame only.

[featherwinglove]

Restore the axe. The idea of removing it completely needs to be taken out back and shot. ("completely" = not even replacing it with a manual mining speed indicator in the GUI and rendering it impossible to be restored using mods.) Details here:

Rythe et. al., The Problem With Pickaxes - Digging Out Factorio's Core
Friday Facts #266 - Cleanup of Mechanics

Included in these threads are some really shoddy logic from the devs which may provide some insight as to how Fallout 76 and Blizzcon 2018 came about in the planning stages. Please join me in those threads to help them come to their senses.
[Koub] Merged from the roadmap topic. This discussion has spread in enough topics.

[featherwinglove]

This post is a bit of a head scratcher for me...

I wish to talk again about my idea of tiered assemblers removal...

Actually, after watching MojoD megabase streams for a while with that expanded vanilla stuff mod, tiers might be amazing! It's jsut that, still, as assemblers are now, their tiering makes very little sense nor progress feelings. Imagine that there were just 2 tiers, basic items, and super-endgame ones, needing A LOT of space science? I think it would add a lot to vanilla game and expanded it greately beyond space science and firing the first rocket. But just that, a single space-tier. No crazy 100 tiers from some crazy mods.

I've never seen more than about ten tiers, and that's stacking early game mods (No Hand Crafting, Burner Manufacturing Unit, Assembly Machine Zero simultaneously installed) on top of Bob's (six tiers) underneath post-game mods (Avatars and... ...I'm sure there's another, but I'm not about to go digging through my Mountains installation to find it.)

and all 'assemblers', like chem plants, refineries, centrifuges, furnaces (oh...), etc, should have base craft speed 1, period.

That would take away most of the motivation to research some of the later technologies, and there is already scant enough motivation for AM3 that hardly anyone ever researches it - it's almost always better to slap down half a dozen AM2s instead, and maybe stuff them with speed 1 if you're desperate for some extra performance. It would also stymie vanilla players who find themselves in a real-estate premium for whatever reason (cliffs and forests come immediately to mind.)

Allow space-tiered assemblers with higher base crafting speed for endgame only.

I'm hoping (and I'm about half way there) that assembly machines and/or recipes can be limited to particular surfaces (and for my next (and almost certainly last mod pack, assuming it uses Space Station, it's easy enough to honor-system that) so that certain items can only be built in space.

[featherwinglove]

Restore the axe. The idea of removing it completely needs to be taken out back and shot. ("completely" = not even replacing it with a manual mining speed indicator in the GUI and rendering it impossible to be restored using mods.) Details here:

Rythe et. al., The Problem With Pickaxes - Digging Out Factorio's Core
Friday Facts #266 - Cleanup of Mechanics

Included in these threads are some really shoddy logic from the devs which may provide some insight as to how Fallout 76 and Blizzcon 2018 came about in the planning stages. Please join me in those threads to help them come to their senses.
[Koub] Merged from the roadmap topic. This discussion has spread in enough topics.

This post was intended to mention the issue in the Roadmap topic, as it is important enough to Factorio's future to deserve a mention there. It was not intended to start a discussion there, but to let people there know there was one happening and how to find it. (See the links? They work don't they?) With its removal, Wube has crossed a line from mere insanity to totalitarian censorship. Not only that, but a joke I made in a thread announcing a Let's Play series in the Off Topic forum has led to the deletion of that Let's Play link, so Twitchi of Youtube and his futurism parody is also excised from our presence.

I feel like a damned fool for shilling this company and this game to the extent which I have. This behaviour has made me seriously regret my purchase of the game and investment in this studio.

[Oktokolo]

With its removal, Wube has crossed a line from mere insanity to totalitarian censorship.

Merging of multiple threads about the same feature or bug is common here. Nothing special about that.
Koub does a good job untangling mixed threads and combining redundant threads about an issue into one one already existing thread, so that the devs (and everyone else) can see them all at one place and discuss it there.
It raises the chance, that the devs read your posts and that new participants know which solutions and opinions have already been stated.
To help him doing his job, try to separate different topics into different threads and post into already existing threads discussing the same issue.

[featherwinglove]

With its removal, Wube has crossed a line from mere insanity to totalitarian censorship.

Merging of multiple threads about the same feature or bug is common here. Nothing special about that.
Koub does a good job untangling mixed threads and combining redundant threads about an issue into one one already existing thread, so that the devs (and everyone else) can see them all at one place and discuss it there.
It raises the chance, that the devs read your posts and that new participants know which solutions and opinions have already been stated.
To help him doing his job, try to separate different topics into different threads and post into already existing threads discussing the same issue.

I agree with everything you're saying, but you missed the point and didn't respond to it: The post on the roadmap thread was not to make the developers aware of these discussions, it was to make the players who don't have time to read everything else aware of the axe removal, which is not mentioned in the OP. They are important enough to be there, so why aren't they? Had a discussion too specific about these topics started there, I would have asked it to be moved here.

I've basically repeated my previous post with different phrasing. If anything is still unclear, let me know and I'll try again. Dang it seems like people are far too easily confused in this day and age.