Friday Facts #283 - Prepare to Launch

[CDarklock]

As you can see, if you have a factory without oil, you miss on about half of green science.

Except you don't really miss anything. Climbing the tree is an end in itself - it doesn't matter whether I can make what I just researched, so long as it's researched and I've unlocked more technology. It gives the same sense of accomplishment, and satisfies the completionist urge, and more importantly uses up time while the biters evolve and make it harder to go get your oil.

My first several games of Factorio were long, grindy sessions of dumping red and green science into a single lab and watching the metre go up. That's fun for me. Like an idle game. And when it said "oh hey you need oil products to make this," I didn't care, so long as I had something else to dump my red and green science into. Eventually I will get some oil and all of this stuff will be available. It's really very peaceful and casual. And then you say "well, I'll go find some oil" and you walk off into the world and aliens stick stuff up your eat your face.

There isn't really any time pressure on the early game. And maybe - just maybe - there should be.

[WarpZone]

I think one of my posts just disappeared.

~TEST~

[BlueTemplar]

[...]

Well, then a new, oil-based science tier between Green and Blue seems even more important !

[Drakken]

Wow!

There are a lot of changes to biters: no more stuck biters, belts look almost useless in comparison to the past for messing with them. I always thought that solution was gamey and am glad to see it minimized.

The fact that spawners used to absorb WAY MORE pollution than the number of biters they could spawn is absolutely huge! This change alone could greatly affect the way I was playing the game. I play trying to maximize the threat from biters throughout the game. I like to lose the majority of my playthroughs. I imagine the spawners near my base were absorbing huge amounts of excess pollution. Hell, I was struggling to survive before. I am excited to see what happens now. A more direct correlation between the amount of pollution I make and the number of bugs that come after me is exactly what I want! Thank you developers!

Now the pollution absorbing ability of desert has been brought closer to other terrain types. In the past I used 100% desert to up the pollution and biter challenge of my maps. The new more relevant slider that adjusts tile pollution absorption will allow me to play in other biomes. I find this welcome, but hope the values for the different terrain are provided so I can know what these changes are going to do to the difficulty of maps I play on. 50% on Deathworld with the ability to drop to 10%? That 10% sounds insanely difficult! How exciting is this?!!

Once you add in the new "working" settings for biter base frequency and size in the map generation screen, it is going to take me quite a while to find settings that will make my factorio experience the right level of challenge for me. I did a lot of playing around with terrain type in the past to make the game challenging enough to actually lose. This is going to be very very interesting. I have a feeling I am going to have to start at least a dozen games to test these new values out.

I love it when I barely am able to survive in the game as I slowly struggle to grow my factory through research and building. I know I am not a typical player but I want to thank the developers for considering everyone when making the game so adaptable.

I think vanilla settings are going to play quite a bit different than in past versions but perhaps the developers have been playing with things to balance out the effects of all of these changes.

I may be the only person who doesn't care whatsoever about fluid dynamics in the game. They work well enough for me. However, I don't build megafactories. I prefer the struggle against the biters to make small efficient factories where I get to endgame without getting overrun. I just hope with all of the changes the biters will be a threat throughout the game as often my defenses become too much for them once i get flameturrets placed.

I, for one can't wait to see what happens. I am eager to bursting to play .17!

[pleegwat]

I think, in 0.16 terms, you shouldn't so much think of 'green science with oil' as 'green science I can't use yet because I need advanced oil processing first'. I'm not sure if that problem is going away with 0.17 as it stands because while solid fuel in blue science is a generic oil sink and makes cracking less important, you still need to be actively producing blue science for the sink to work, so you still can't invest in oil if you're not doing blue science yet.

[arrow in my gluteus]

As you can see, there are a lot of things happening at the last moment, but it seems that there shouldn't be a big obstacle in the way of release next week.

What about the 65 unassigned bug reports?

I'm sure they're VERY thankful that you mentioned bug reports. I suspect they're so unfamiliar with releasing a successful game which has hundreds of thousands of sales, that they completely overlooked the concept of 'bug reports.'

Perhaps they're looking for an office manager?

Mmm, yeah, if you could just go ahead and come in on Saturday to finish up those bug reports, that would be great.

this one was adressed today, a sunday: viewtopic.php?f=23&p=399697#p399697

[CDarklock]

Well, then a new, oil-based science tier between Green and Blue seems even more important !

Why? It's just reducing the player's options before they have oil. That necessarily means there's less to do before getting oil, but it doesn't make you go get it any faster. Nor does it make the game any more fun.

I'm not generally a fan of the bondage-and-discipline approach where you punish the player for not doing what you want. I prefer informational approaches, where you communicate to the player that by choosing not to go get oil right now, they are making it harder to go get oil later.

Like a bulletin in the corner of the screen that says "alien activity in sector mumble" whenever the biters spread or evolve. That's going to make most players say "well, I wonder what that activity was, then?" and probably put up a radar or two. Maybe they go out and take a closer look. But it definitely makes you sit up and take notice. It tells you that while you are sitting around researching and building, the aliens are up to their own stuff. It gives you a sense that things are progressing. But what to do about it is still your choice.

[bobucles]

That's because "tier 2.5" is actually green with oil :
(I added the military techs.)
[pic]

If anything, that shows a perfect spot to cut green tech down the middle. Everything before oil is green tech, everything after oil fits in blue tech. The only thing Green tech would have is pumpjacks and solid fuel (and probably fire). That covers the absolute bare minimum to get a player started on oil. The blue science potion would only need solid fuel and have red circuits removed. That seems like a reasonable jump in complexity.

Filling out the more complex chemical recipes would be the purpose of blue science. That's where the red circuits and battery unlocks would be. Anything beyond that would go into the higher tiers.

Well, then a new, oil-based science tier between Green and Blue seems even more important !

I don't think you need that. There's already 7 flavors of science and the last few colors are basically empty. You don't need more tiers, they just need to be spaced out a bit better. So it's less like this:
[RRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGMBPHS]
And more like this
[RRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGMMMMMMMBBBBBPPPPPHHHSSSS]

[CDarklock]

There's already 7 flavors of science and the last few colors are basically empty. You don't need more tiers, they just need to be spaced out a bit better.

I think they're spaced out better than you're giving them credit for. If you look at the individual tiers of technology, as in the layered tree ( https://wiki.factorio.com/File:Technology_tree.png ), the top two tiers are all red and green. The third and fourth tier have a bit of blue, but a lot of black, and your first purple. Then the red-only research drops off altogether, and you start to get more parity. On the seventh tier, for example, you have 7 green, 7 blue, 6 green/black, 4 blue/black, 6 gold/black, and 5 purple (counting each of the three mining productivity levels individually). Those are all hovering around roughly an equal share of the research: 35 technologies with six different recipes.

But it's also worth considering how many science packs you need for each of these things. I haven't done the math on all that properly (like different levels of upgrades), but it seems like as you get deeper in the tree things cost a lot more. The atomic bomb and rocket silo, the only "all six package" techs, cost a combined total of six thousand packs - which is roughly the cost of all the red/green and red/green/black techs. Gold and gold/black tech comes out to about 4500, while purple comes out to 2150, and purple/gold acounts for over 1500 more. Blue and blue/black tech comes out to about 3500. Red alone is a little over 500.

So lumping in the black tech with the rest of everything, you get roughly: 500, 6k, 3.5k, 2k, 4.5k, and 7.5k for the respective levels of packs (counting purple/gold in its own category). And the green science accounts for about 25% of it, which isn't that far over the 20% you'd expect. The lack of expensive red science takes up the slack there, too. If you split out gold/purple as an outlier (containing as it does only the rocket silo and the nuke -- EDIT -- And Kovarex enrichment, and the relatively cheap logistics, sorry for omission -- END EDIT -- ), red and green tiers together are 6.5k, while purple and gold tiers together are also 6.5k, and the 3.5k blue tier looks just a little OVER what you'd expect.

It's clearly not perfect, because we seem to have a big deficit in purple, but I think purple has a bunch of leveled upgrades attached? And it's all ballparked, so I could be off by a few hundred here or there. This isn't easy to research. I may need to do a spreadsheet or something. Maybe someone else already did. Pretty sure someone at Wube already did, actually, although that certainly doesn't mean we get to see it.

[bobucles]

Those are all hovering around roughly an equal share of the research: 35 technologies with six different recipes.

Are you counting incremental buffs as part of the technologies? We all know that incremental upgrades are fluff. The unlocks are what expose the player to new stuff, not incremental upgrades, and the vast majority of new things is in the green tier. Green tier introduces an absolute AVALANCHE of stuff. Trains alone are enough content to tie up a player for a considerable length of time, but the combination of trains, vehicles, oil, etc. etc. is basically throwing most of the game at the player all at once. There were previous problems with blue tier being a form of progression "wall". The sheer amount of green tier tech is a part of that, so it would make sense to split it up into more bite sized chunks.

The overall cost of tech is a balance tweak. It helps to pace the game I guess but I don't see how it's important.

[Panderturtle]

Is there a counter for official release time?

Nope.

The most exact time to count down to would be “probably next week”, so I guess you could say in a couple of hours, depending on time zone?

Anything beyond that would be pure speculation.

I expect it to be wednesday, since the last update was released on a wednesday too.

[Jan11]

I`m optimist. Sooooo release is on Monday. ;P Because we can play the whole week and (report bugs). ;P

[5thHorseman]

I'll admit I'm secretly hoping they drop it tonight and then just go to bed.

But I know they won't.

[spinba11]

They did a quiet release the day before on 0.15 but they dropped it on a Monday not a Sunday.

[Tricorius]

I don't think you need that. There's already 7 flavors of science and the last few colors are basically empty. You don't need more tiers, they just need to be spaced out a bit better. So it's less like this:
[RRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGMBPHS]
And more like this
[RRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGMMMMMMMBBBBBPPPPPHHHSSSS]

Incidentally, that is the exact sound I make when going into the green science slog. :p

I’m not overly concerned about the tech changes, but then I always convert my factory over to solid fuel early anyway. And I like to have solid fuel up before I start my trains.

I also tend to do military tech well before blue, since I generally play very heavy Death World settings.

I’d like to see a slightly smoother research curve, but really it wouldn’t change my play style much regardless.

[CDarklock]

The unlocks are what expose the player to new stuff, not incremental upgrades

I do not agree. I'll go into more detail in a moment.

Green tier introduces an absolute AVALANCHE of stuff.

NOT all at once. I decide what stuff to unlock and when I unlock it. I can tunnel straight down into the tree to combat robotics pretty early on, and take defender capsules with me when I go out looking for oil fields. They don't need oil processing, but half their prerequisites do.

And just one isn't that big a deal. But I can research two "fluff" upgrades and take ten. Just like I can research more fluff for my grenades and my SMG, so I can handle larger groups of biters.

Meanwhile, I cannot build a train. Or a car. Nor can I build walls, or gates. I don't have lights. I don't have turrets. I haven't got my toolbelt. I can't landfill. Two dozen technologies researched, and there has been no avalanche of stuff. Just one or two things at a time. There's lots of stuff I don't have until I want it.

If you lock it up behind another tier of science, you're not protecting me from it. I research the technology I choose when I choose to research it. At no point does technology sneak up on me and research itself. I am in zero danger from available research.

There were previous problems with blue tier being a form of progression "wall".

It still is. You cannot research blue tier tech at all unless and until you have oil processing. So anything you put in blue tier or above is absolutely forbidden to the player until an oil field is secured. If you put enough things in there, the game stops being fun because the player doesn't have enough cool stuff to do.

That's the important part, you know. There's a HUGE amount of stuff to do, but you can't reliably predict what any given player thinks is cool. Everything he thinks is stupid doesn't count. Just like you handwave the upgrades, and say they're just fluff. But basic grenades without any upgrades are... crap. You need two or three damage upgrades before they're really useful for anything except trees.

And maybe that's why you don't use grenades at all, because you prefer some other tactic. That's fine. You do you, man. But I'm using upgraded grenades, and I like the results. I don't care whether you use them. I certainly don't want whatever you use removed from the game so you have to use grenades, like I do.

[leftofzen]

Everything looks great except for the belts affecting biters change. I agree it was buggy/belts were OP previously, but now belts do nothing, they're useless. You need to find a middle ground where the belts slow the biters significantly, but not as much as previously. Judging by the GIF the belts are now useless. You yourself acknowledged this is emergent gameplay and you've effectively removed it.

[BlueTemplar]

I think, in 0.16 terms, you shouldn't so much think of 'green science with oil' as 'green science I can't use yet because I need advanced oil processing first'. I'm not sure if that problem is going away with 0.17 as it stands because while solid fuel in blue science is a generic oil sink and makes cracking less important, you still need to be actively producing blue science for the sink to work, so you still can't invest in oil if you're not doing blue science yet.

I don't understand what you mean, you don't need to wait until (blue science!) Adv. Oil Processing to use the "oily green" science stuff,
and why would you need to actively produce blue science for the solid fuel sink to work ??

Why? It's just reducing the player's options before they have oil. That necessarily means there's less to do before getting oil, but it doesn't make you go get it any faster. Nor does it make the game any more fun.

Because new players seem to be getting lost... How many times have I seen people thinking that bots needed blue science ?

If anything, that shows a perfect spot to cut green tech down the middle. Everything before oil is green tech, everything after oil fits in blue tech. The only thing Green tech would have is pumpjacks and solid fuel (and probably fire). That covers the absolute bare minimum to get a player started on oil. The blue science potion would only need solid fuel and have red circuits removed. That seems like a reasonable jump in complexity.

Well, I guess that, after thinking about it, red circuit-less Blue Science would still be better than what we have now...

I'd say that the stuff that should still be before it :
- (Pumpjacks, Refineries (obviously)), Solid Fuel
- Flamethrower (but NOT Flame Turret!)
- Rocket : Exploding Rocket staying in Blue, otherwise they end up in the same tier !
- Maybe Accumulators and Laser Turrets ?

(Blue Science itself, is technologically split between before and after blurple circuits...)

[BlueTemplar]

I can tunnel straight down into the tree to combat robotics pretty early on, and take defender capsules with me when I go out looking for oil fields. They don't need oil processing, but half their prerequisites do.

And just one isn't that big a deal. But I can research two "fluff" upgrades and take ten. Just like I can research more fluff for my grenades and my SMG, so I can handle larger groups of biters.

Honestly, defenders have no point of being that far away or being that weak.
For those 10 defenders, you need to spend total 1750 red & green and 850 military science !!!
For a pitiful result, as they do the same damage as regular ammo (while consuming piercing??), so they're very weak even against red biters !
And their damage cannot be boosted by tech !

Meanwhile, you could research bullet damage 3 for 250 red, 200 green and 100 MilSci, and have a bigger DPS upgrade against red biters from your machine gun !
(IIRC the defenders will benefit from techs upgrading damage too in 0.17, maybe they'll become slightly more relevant...)

[bobucles]

I decide what stuff to unlock and when I unlock it.

No, you don't. You don't get sulfur before chem plants, and you don't get red circuits before pumpjacks. You don't get logi bots, or modular armor, or fancy modules before red circuits. There are a great number of progression steps involved and you don't decide the order they get unlocked. But the thing is they're ALL under the same green umbrella as everything else. What's a player to choose? Maybe I'll just close my eyes and pick all of them, I guess.

There's a great deal of fan out at green tier, and a lot of things that CAN be explored. However, the main progression path at that stage of the game is OIL. It makes sense to put a goal marker on the progression path, and that's exactly why it should be the beachhead into blue science. Red circuits do point in the right direction, but they are a few too many steps ahead of the game. In fact having ALL the progression steps at the green tier is every step at once. You have to first learn the oil system, the fluid system and worry about oil balancing and all that. Solid fuel slows things down and takes a few steps back. You just make it, and you can't suffer by having too much of it. No deadlocks, no worries. It's the best entry point there is. Everything behind that, is behind that. There's no denying that. So why not put the things explicitly gated behind a major tech milestone at their own tech tier? It just makes sense.