Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

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pato
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Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by pato »

I dont think I have to explain this.

Since 0.14 Biters did not change in strenght at all but with every update Player weapons got buffed and added even stronger weapons (Uranium, Flame, Artillery, Mines)

While the power curve once was balanced (without unlimited research) Biters today have been degraded so much that gameplay against them is no longer fun without mods.

Please make Biters great again in 0.17!

- More Biter tiers and variations
- change evolution factor to endless (like everything else in the game) and let players limit the limit
- Biter should be like Ants and have a Ant like economy -> Queen making nests - nests produce eggs - eggs produce workers and soliders. workers harvest ?? WOOD ?? MUSHROOMS ??
- Allow biters to have resistances to froce players not to rely on Laser only
- Allow tweaks for biter behavior in map settings ( passive - normal - aggressive - relentless)
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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by Rseding91 »

The game is not meant to be a combat simulator (standard RTS game). It's fully intended that the player is more powerful than the biters and eventually they become something you don't need to think about and allow you to focus on just the factory portion of the game - the main portion of the game.
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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by pato »

Factorio is not a combat simulator but it has a combat feature with a whole research tree and a big diversety of arsenal.

You limit the Factorio experience to endless research and megabase play (increasing sience production) but you do not allow endless combat play which is also a valid game path (increasing ammo production)

both elements fit to the main factory theme and there clearly is a possibility to turn biters ON/OFF or peaceful.

Please reconsider your mindset

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by 5thHorseman »

Biters are supposed to be an ever-present threat. Turning them off or making them peaceful actually makes the military part of the tree useless.

Have you tried turning up the settings for them? I turn it down so they're even less of an issue. Turning them up should be similar.

Like @Rseding said though, that's not the thrust of the game. It's just a facet. like how water is a facet, but you don't have to clean your factory periodically to keep it from clogging up with grime.

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by quyxkh »

I think you've got a line on something there, but you don't quite make the argument.

You're focusing on the region where you can just overpower the little buggers and ignoring the region where vanilla can make it challenging to get there.

I agree with what everybody's pointing out, there has to be a "I beat the biters" region and the factory defaults should make it hard to "lose", hard to wedge yourself to where you can't get there.

I think if you want to argue that something needs to change, you have to establish that there are no settings where getting your military research ahead of biter evo is a real challenge, where the obvious plan, research mil until expansion's easy, can get you wedged, can leave you without the resources to actually build enough to expand. I haven't tried, but I'd guess there's still vanilla settings that achieve that, or at least make you worry.

Maybe Wube could playtest and tune the Deathworld settings to where a competent player can lose like that if they're not paying attention, that seems like a plan, no? Leave the harder regions for mods, I've tried Rampant and it makes for a completely different game.

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by pato »

quyxkh wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:01 am
I think you've got a line on something there, but you don't quite make the argument.

You're focusing on the region where you can just overpower the little buggers and ignoring the region where vanilla can make it challenging to get there.

I agree with what everybody's pointing out, there has to be a "I beat the biters" region and the factory defaults should make it hard to "lose", hard to wedge yourself to where you can't get there.

I think if you want to argue that something needs to change, you have to establish that there are no settings where getting your military research ahead of biter evo is a real challenge, where the obvious plan, research mil until expansion's easy, can get you wedged, can leave you without the resources to actually build enough to expand. I haven't tried, but I'd guess there's still vanilla settings that achieve that, or at least make you worry.

Maybe Wube could playtest and tune the Deathworld settings to where a competent player can lose like that if they're not paying attention, that seems like a plan, no? Leave the harder regions for mods, I've tried Rampant and it makes for a completely different game.
i dont think you got the argument.

The argument is the player is ahead of the biter evolution all the time. i didnt ask to change this.
As you can see from my graph after the player reaches laser tech, he allready reached the maximum strenght the biters will achieve after they reached 100% evolution. From that point the player strength increases exponentially (not only because endless research, but from standard upgrades alone)

I asked to change exactly this -> rebalance biter strenght to scale better with the player

point 2 allow endless games against biters like we have endless games with research.

The endgame of Factorio is not only to manage a huge factory, but to manage logisitics. There is no better logistic challenge then to supply your walls (instead of research centers) with tons of ammo, repairkits, bots, mines, etc.
Why is this not in the spirit of Factorio? To me it clearly is

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by quyxkh »

pato wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:20 am
The endgame of Factorio is not only to manage a huge factory, but to manage logisitics. There is no better logistic challenge then to supply your walls (instead of research centers) with tons of ammo, repairkits, bots, mines, etc.
But to achieve that you'd have to nerf arty. Endgame Factorio runs up against the limits of your rig, more biters means less factory; arty keeps clean territory clean so you can have more factory.
Why is this not in the spirit of Factorio? To me it clearly is
Seems to me what you're advocating for here is removing the "biters beaten" region entirely, replacing the vanilla setup, an infinite science endgame ramping up KSPM until you tire of that and go the mods route or start in on hardcore combinator magic without caring about launches, or start hunting the LTN-in-vanilla grail, or whatever, with infinite slaughter.

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by Zavian »

You seem to be either missing the point, or alternatively looking something different to the devs vision for Factorio.

Factorio is about building a factory. Dealing with biters whilst you do that is only a small aspect of the game. Artillery and infinite research are late game researches. Yes, they make the player more powerful than the max power of the biters, but that also lets the player focus more on expanding his factory. As a player I want enough challenge from biters that I need to build defenses and research weapon upgrades, but not enough that I'm struggling to survive and expand or devoting all my time and (mental) energy to killing biters rather than expanding my factory. By the time infinite researches are available, I have already won the game, and am playing on, because I want to expand the factory ever more, so I want to devote even more of my time and (mental) energy to expanding the factory, and even less to clearing biters.

If you want to struggle against the biters all game there are a number of options to increase evolution rate, size and density of bases, research and production costs (which slow down the player, and give the biters more opportunity to overwhelm the player before he can get to lasers, artillery and infinite research), plus even more options through modding.

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by m44v »

Rseding91 wrote:
Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:38 pm
The game is not meant to be a combat simulator (standard RTS game). It's fully intended that the player is more powerful than the biters and eventually they become something you don't need to think about and allow you to focus on just the factory portion of the game - the main portion of the game.
My only issue with that, it doesn't really take that much work for the player to be more powerful than the biters, setting up the logistics for gun turrets with uranium ammo is quite some effort, but why bother? laser turrets is good enough, you don't even need any of the space science upgrades.

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by BlueTemplar »

quyxkh wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:01 am
I think if you want to argue that something needs to change, you have to establish that there are no settings where getting your military research ahead of biter evo is a real challenge, where the obvious plan, research mil until expansion's easy, can get you wedged, can leave you without the resources to actually build enough to expand. I haven't tried, but I'd guess there's still vanilla settings that achieve that, or at least make you worry.

Maybe Wube could playtest and tune the Deathworld settings to where a competent player can lose like that if they're not paying attention, that seems like a plan, no? Leave the harder regions for mods, I've tried Rampant and it makes for a completely different game.
RSO DeathWorld with oil outside the starting region is pretty much that (at least for an inexperienced player) - it makes nests much denser
(but still leaves some paths that are more free, unlike the 0.14 ? / 0.15 ? vanilla DeathWorld settings).
quyxkh wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 1:21 am
pato wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:20 am
The endgame of Factorio is not only to manage a huge factory, but to manage logisitics. There is no better logistic challenge then to supply your walls (instead of research centers) with tons of ammo, repairkits, bots, mines, etc.
But to achieve that you'd have to nerf arty. Endgame Factorio runs up against the limits of your rig, more biters means less factory; arty keeps clean territory clean so you can have more factory.
It's my understanding that there's a pretty big scaling space between your first rocket and running into UPS issues ?
Biters can also be a threat by being *stronger* - for instance it would be nice if there was a (placed far away) Leviathan tier worm that could compete in range with (unupgraded) artillery.

I'm also wondering about the arty/nukes balance : unlike what the graph shows, right now nukes are something like 3 times more expensive to research (and you have to find uranium too !) - I'm not sure that they are even better than artillery !
And add the ICBM's please ! :D
Zavian wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 2:35 am
[...]
As a player I want enough challenge from biters that I need to build defenses and research weapon upgrades, but not enough that I'm struggling to survive and expand or devoting all my time and (mental) energy to killing biters rather than expanding my factory.
[...]
If you want to struggle against the biters all game there are a number of options to increase evolution rate, size and density of bases, research and production costs (which slow down the player, and give the biters more opportunity to overwhelm the player before he can get to lasers, artillery and infinite research), plus even more options through modding.
Yes, and as a player that *specifically* picked the DeathWorld setting, this is pretty much what I want and expect !
(Which I doubt I get in 0.16, we'll see how it is in 0.17 with the new world generation...)
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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by GrumpyJoe »

pato wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:20 am

i dont think you got the argument.

The argument is the player is ahead of the biter evolution all the time. i didnt ask to change this.
As you can see from my graph after the player reaches laser tech, he allready reached the maximum strenght the biters will achieve after they reached 100% evolution. From that point the player strength increases exponentially (not only because endless research, but from standard upgrades alone)
So, if you let biters scale with infinite research, they have a curve similar to the player, but they´d still be behind that curve.
You wouldn´t build much more defenses, as common wall BPs all look the same, not much room to increase turrent numbers.
If they get too strong for that, they´d be ahead of the curve, which you didn´t ask for.

If they cant overwhelm you cos they´d always be just a bit behind your curve... where is the difference? You would kill bigger biters, thats all.

The only solution i see for your problem is something like Bob´s Enemys, where late game biters have different resitances, you have to diversify ammo types in your turret requester chests.

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by pato »

GrumpyJoe wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:56 pm
pato wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:20 am

i dont think you got the argument.

The argument is the player is ahead of the biter evolution all the time. i didnt ask to change this.
As you can see from my graph after the player reaches laser tech, he allready reached the maximum strenght the biters will achieve after they reached 100% evolution. From that point the player strength increases exponentially (not only because endless research, but from standard upgrades alone)
So, if you let biters scale with infinite research, they have a curve similar to the player, but they´d still be behind that curve.
You wouldn´t build much more defenses, as common wall BPs all look the same, not much room to increase turrent numbers.
If they get too strong for that, they´d be ahead of the curve, which you didn´t ask for.

If they cant overwhelm you cos they´d always be just a bit behind your curve... where is the difference? You would kill bigger biters, thats all.

The only solution i see for your problem is something like Bob´s Enemys, where late game biters have different resitances, you have to diversify ammo types in your turret requester chests.
This is wrong. The difference is, you have to diversify your defence and utilize more turret types and mines. You have to scale up Military Production and solve the logistic challenge to supply your turret lines.

Infite Research = scaling up science and rocket production = the same
Infinite Combat = scaling up weapon production = the same

This is the difference. You have a second endless gameplay path and you can choose between those two or combine them by adjusting map settings.

I really dont understand why killing biters all the time is something different then makeing endless sience for you.

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by GrumpyJoe »

pato wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 1:52 pm
I really dont understand why killing biters all the time is something different then makeing endless sience for you.
And this is why this argument will go in circles forever, unless someone breaks that:
Rseding91 wrote:
Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:38 pm
The game is not meant to be a combat simulator (standard RTS game). It's fully intended that the player is more powerful than the biters and eventually they become something you don't need to think about and allow you to focus on just the factory portion of the game - the main portion of the game.

I fully understand where you coming from, but its not the devs intention.
However, you can have it as difficult as you like with mods.

or, without mods.
Just turn evolution, expansion and pollution slightly up each map and see how far you can push it, im sure there IS a point at which you wont even come close to a rocket before you´r overrun

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by pato »

The devs intention should be what the players want.
Natural Evolution Enemies and Rampant mod have more then 150.000 downloads combined. This shows that there is demand for Biter focused gameplay.

Factorio might not be a RTS but it cleary is a Tower Defense game and as such there should be a focus on this part also.

It is not my point to make the game impossible with scaling up evolution or expansion speed.
I cleary suggest this as an ENDGAME feature like endless research is also an ENDGAME feature.

Non of these should have an impact on the normal gameplay until you reach said engame.

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by GrumpyJoe »

pato wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 4:08 pm
Natural Evolution Enemies and Rampant mod have more then 150.000 downloads combined. This shows that there is demand for Biter focused gameplay.
Bob´s mods average about 3-400k, logistics has 500k. Angel´s smelting/refining/petrochem ~300k.
Should we make that mandatory for vanilla?
Thats all the versions combined anyway.
Every patch a modder released over the years. Rampant has 40 version numbers for 0.16 alone.

Im not saying dont include mod functions into base game, especially if its escapeable by just playing without biters, but it also shouldn´t be somewhat mandatory just because its successful.
How many of those 150k are happy to just have those mods as addition?
At the point where you worry about alien endgame, you should be long past Steam achievments.
And for purists that "like their game clean, because modding is cheating" (or any other reason i´ll never understand), most of these mods are actually making it more complex. There are very few that "give you 200belts at 100item/sec for the price of 10 iron gears" (exaggerated)

Also, take in consideration that there still alot of features to be implememnted and thus the devs wont focus on something they dont see their game going towards.
Factorio might not be a RTS but it cleary is a Tower Defense game and as such there should be a focus on this part also.

So what tower do you defend if you chose to play with biters disabled? I dont see that "clearly" so clear
It might have been inspired by many other games, but what it became is imho more clearly NOT about combat.
Last edited by GrumpyJoe on Sun Feb 17, 2019 5:14 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by theolderbeholder »

GrumpyJoe wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 4:41 pm

Bob´s mods averages about 3-400k, logistics 500k. Angel´s smelting/refining/petrochem ~300k.
Should we make that mandatory for vanilla?
For the love of the gods, PLEASE NO!
:mrgreen:

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by BlueTemplar »

Again, if the devs are so against it, why have they included a DeathWorld setting (and a Wave Defense scenario) ?
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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by GrumpyJoe »

i have not played wave defense, but it sounds like the goal is not the endgame (as in rocket)? correct me if im wrong
But ive played deathworld. Its harder, but survivable and i get it that after you survived and teched up, its still somewhat boring.
Tho its not contradicting the devs in them saying this game is not about biters afterall.

It could just be another base game setting that ticks a box, making green aliens scale in HP and damage ( i think their numbers can be tweaked enough). If you dont like it, dont tick it. Im ok with that.
I totally get where this is coming from, its just an aspect that isn´t really balanced and I even agree on that and understand some people might be concerned

What I dont get is, why try to make a game fit into a drawer thats already full?

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by quyxkh »

BlueTemplar wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 8:42 am
It's my understanding that there's a pretty big scaling space between your first rocket and running into UPS issues ?
I think so, I guess pretty much any rig could handle a 1KSPM base with the newer releases. It's "only" ~150k/min mining. I know somebody going by "Thundergun" got a 4KSPM design running acceptably on vanilla, on 0.15 no less, with a 5-year-old budget i3, it converts to 0.16 well and runs >60UPS on my ever-so-gracefully-aging midrange.
Biters can also be a threat by being *stronger* - for instance it would be nice if there was a (placed far away) Leviathan tier worm that could compete in range with (unupgraded) artillery.
By the time you're using arty to expand, upgrading arty is a negligible expense. Either there's an endgame biter challenge or there's not, as it is now you've got arty and depleted-uranium vulcans, they've got nothing. Add anything minor, now they've got next to nothing. Add anything major, you've got a different game.

OP, if you want a game engine that spends its CPU and bandwidth delivering a military-ops challenge, get AI War, I'm serious, it spends its time figuring out how to hurt you. Pick from the large selection of harder AI's and play on the harder settings, you're in for a war. Its graphics are, um, not compelling, but they're plenty serviceable and there's at least an aesthetic sensibility to it. Get good at that game and you've got cause for pride, you'll feel like Ender Wiggin. But to deliver that, it has to just subsume Factorio's puzzles, it takes their solutions for granted.

Or,
GrumpyJoe wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 5:39 pm
What I dont get is, why try to make a game fit into a drawer thats already full?
"What he said".

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Re: Player Power Curve vs Biter Power Curve imbalanced

Post by Koub »

pato wrote:
Sun Feb 17, 2019 4:08 pm
The devs intention should be what the players want.
Natural Evolution Enemies and Rampant mod have more then 150.000 downloads combined. This shows that there is demand for Biter focused gameplay.
That means over 1 million players are not interested for harder biters. So biters should stay as they are :ugeek:.

TBH, with default settings, I struggle surviving the biters at least early game. Not everybody is good at fighting.
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