New "Complex" difficulty

[Trebor]

TL;DR

Add ‘Complex’ difficulty to recipe and technology difficulty dropdown.

What ?

Add one or two new items to the recipe and technology difficulty dropdowns on the advanced tab of the map generator window. Add a selection "Complex" for complex recipes/technologies and optionally "Expensive Complex" for expensive complex recipes/technologies.

Why ?

The "Complex" difficulty is different than the "Expensive" difficulty because "Complex" recipes can have different inputs and outputs and "Complex" technologies may be structured differently.

An example of a complex recipe would be the basic oil recipe used in 0.17.59 where the normal recipe for basic oil would be that proposed by FF305.

An example of a complex technology tree would be the technology tree in 0.17.59 where the normal technology would be that proposed by FF305.

[BlueTemplar]

Thank you for making this thread !

Other ideas for that mode :
NUCLEAR for ROCKET/SATELLITE :

[...]
EDIT : Following the "mandatory complexity" logic, one would want to require used up uranium fuel cells for nuclear fuel, and nuclear fuel for rocket !
(A manually-fed kovarex-less non-properly-ratioed nuclear reactor is arguably less complicated than an advanced oil processing setup with cracking and solid fuel output.)
Would making building and powering a nuclear reactor mandatory to win make the game actually better, though ?

I strongly suspect a lot of us would vocally say "Yes", and that exact idea is why my FTweaks mod makes the satellite require one unit of nuclear fuel (to both require nuclear progress and simulate an RTG).

Hmm, maybe you're right ? (And push uranium even farther than oil on the map? In any case, this could be a nice game mode, with a different kind of difficulty change than DeathWorld / Marathon / RailWorld !)

As a nitpick that you might be aware of (and that I almost forgot about - thought about posting about a satellite-RTG too),
winning the game doesn't require a satellite in 0.17 anymore.

[BlueTemplar]

CONCRETE for OIL and LUBRICANT for REF.CONCRETE and REF.CONCRETE for NUKE/ROCKET:

[...]
[*] Refined concrete might be crafted with the use of Lubricant and might be used in Silo/Reactor construction. This is to provide additional stimuli to use Heavy oil and to prolong the Steam/Solar power supply era a tiny bit[/list]
[...]

I don't think the changes to Basic Oil Processing are the way to go. I think it's attacking the problem of the Oil Spike from the wrong angle.

The way I see it, the problem with the Oil Spike is in three parts:

1. It's the first time the player needs to get serious about fluid handling.
2. It's the first time the player needs to deal with multiple outputs from a single recipe.
3. It's hard to tell which of the multiple outputs is blocked.

For solutions, I offer the following suggestions:

1a. Add or move a few recipes that need fluids to before oil refining. The obvious example would be concrete. Make refineries and chemical plants require it and force the player to build a production line that needs a fluid input. You have the fluid-accepting Assembling Machine 2 by that point, anyway.
1b. Split oil extraction and refining into two technologies. The extraction technology would enable building pumpjacks and a fluid-fuelled boiler for the power plant that can take anything the flamethrower turret can, with the associated bonuses, so as to provide an incentive to go to more sophisticated fuels once you get oil refining. Main point is to give the player practice handling fluids other than water. The rest of the basic oil stuff (refinery, chemical plants, solid fuel, basic processing) would be moved to the refining technology.
2. Add recipes to earlier parts of the game that produce multiple outputs. Let the player get their head around the concept in the familiar context of belts and inserters before trying it with fluids.
3. Put a red ring around the output icon on refineries and chemical plants in Alt-view mode if it's blocked, or include a red blockage indicator light above each output on the model (well, sprite) that turns on when that output is blocked. Inside the window for a machine's details, turn the backgrounds of blocked outputs red for all machine types.

Implement all three (well, four) of these and I think that would more-or-less solve the problem.

[...]
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RebalancedOilProduction
[...]
Refined concrete has had its water requirement replaced with lubricant to give further use to HO. The concrete requirements of rocket silos and nuclear reactors are then replaced with refined concrete.
Refined concrete water requirement replaced 1 to 1, for 100 lubricant.
Nuclear reactor and rocket silo concrete requirements replaced 1 to 1, for 500 and 1000 refined concrete, respectively.
[...]
Refinery's stone brick requirement is replaced with regular concrete, to encourage further practice with fluid handling for the water required in concrete.
Refinery's stone brick requirement replaced 1 to 1, for 10 concrete.
[...]

Uh, no. Have you seen the science cost of Concrete (or even Steel Furnaces)?! This would probably delay conbots even more than the FFF proposal !
Today, one can decide to rush blue science without going through the expensive green science techs like concrete, solar, rockets... I'd like to be able to keep this option !
Now, what might work, is to split concrete into two techs :
- basic concrete : cheap green tech (maybe even without the steel furnace tech requirement?)
- advanced concrete : expensive green (or maybe even cheap blue?) tech, and maybe including the previous lubricant proposition ?

Ok, so the techs can be split and regular concrete can be made cheaper to research, although I do seriously question how "expensive" the concrete tech is.

Advanced Materials Processing is 75 RG
Concrete is 250 RG.
Total : 325 RG.

While
Automation 2 is 40 RG
Engine is 100 RG
Fluid Handling is 50 RG,
Oil Processing is 100 RG,
(Plastics is 200 RG,
Advanced Electronics is 200 RG.)

So adding Concrete(+AMP) as is as pre-requisites for Oil Processing would have postponed it quite a bit, and felt a bit out of place comparing to the cost of previous techs...
(I guess Engine is so expensive because it allows Cars, Trains, and Oil ?)

Fixed.

Concrete is also now split into 2 techs. The original concrete tech has been made cheaper and only unlocks regular concrete and its hazard variant. It is also now a prerequisite of the oil processing tech.
Tech costs: 50x red & green

The second tech has been named Refined concrete, requires blue science and concrete, and unlocks refined concrete and its hazard variant. Uranium processing and rocket silo techs have had their prerequisites updated to the new refined concrete tech.
Tech costs: x75 red, green, & blue

Sounds great !
(EDIT : And Refined Concrete requiring lubricant rather than water, right?)
(EDIT2 : I wonder whether artillery turrets shouldn't require refined concrete, considering how late and powerful they are ? (And Artillery wagons - (lube-greased) electric engines ?))

(EDIT : And Refined Concrete requiring lubricant rather than water, right?)

Yep!

(EDIT2 : I wonder whether artillery turrets shouldn't require refined concrete, considering how late and powerful they are ? (And Artillery wagons - (lube-greased) electric engines ?))

Could certainly do the refined concrete for arty turrets. Not sure about the engines for the wagon variant. While it makes sense, it also makes sense for everything in the game that moves (that isn't burner) to have electric engines. I actually use this mod for some of that: Basic Electric Engine

And of course, if one really wanted to get technical, engines for burner vehicles (locos, cars, etc) doesn't make much sense, either. But, game mechanic limitations, etc, I know. One problem at a time!

[BlueTemplar]

SULFUR and LUBE in the SAME (advanced) RECIPE :

The use of heavy oil in real life, after removing a mountain of sulfur from it, is for lubricants

Ooooh that would be really cool: pipe heavy oil into chemical plant, out comes "a mountain" of sulfur and a pipe of lubricant. I haven't tried the mod so I don't know if it includes this or something like it but I really like the idea.

This sounds an interesting option for an advanced recipe ? (Maybe require another input, like water ? Vanilla lubricant always seemed a bit too simple...)

I like this better than my sulfur as a byproduct from the refinery idea. It feels more fitting, and the player still has a recipe with one fluid in and one fluid and one item out, but in a slightly more workable package (chemplant vs refinery).

Sounds good, but I see a potential problem: you're now tying lubricant and sulfuric acid productions together. Need lube? You're going to end up making more sulfur whether you need it, or have the room, or not. Same vice versa with sulfuric acid. I think it isn't as bad with HO <-> PG as I feel those have more options to deal with the excess.

You'd have the same issue with it coming directly from the refinery (which is where I think it actually happens?), which is why I didn't go down that path in my sulfur mod.

Yeah, I had considered this and thought of doing a mod for it, so did some research on it (winding up at hydrodesulfurization) and saw that typically this appears (?) to be done during the refining process. So our refinery would give us the current 3 products plus sulfur. {...} this then puts us in a situation where we're now outputting 4 items, at different rates, and it'd all be a nightmare to balance, I think.

I do not think sulfur would ever back up if it was an ingredient in blue science; that sucks down enough of everything that the lubricant will be the thing backing up, not the other way around.

Let's just make sure I am not promoting something I did not want to: my idea was that we make sulfur from heavy oil, or we make lubricants from heavy oil, not sulfur and lubricants at the same time (as two products coming out of a chemicals plant). Having two important outlets for heavy oil (shifting sulfur from petroleum gas to heavy oil) would help to balance the simple refinery, especially if only petroleum gas and heavy oil is made here (no light oil).

Hope this clarifies it.

Indeed I thought your post was quite clear, and I take complete blame responsibility for the idea of producing sulfur and lube at the same time.

And thank you for posting the images, that is exactly my mental picture (with the addition of my little player character half buried underneath) when I read your description of a mountain of sulfur!

[...] So, if you want to put sulfur somewhere, either continue with the magic we have now, and put it anywhere that makes sense for gameplay (heavier oils are better for making chemical sense), or, reconsider the process altogether and realize that sulfur should be removed as a solid (well, really, as hydrogen sulfide, and then converted to a solid or to sulfuric acid) as part of the refining process, without destroying the oil it came from.

Unfortunately, having sulfur removed from refineries would make it a 4th blocking factor in the multiple outputs problem, so, as much as I like realism, I'd have to vote "magic" here, on the grounds that in direct conflict, game design trumps realism.

A solid as a blocking factor is much less problematic than a fluid... what would be the gameplay implications of having Basic Oil Processing to output Sulfur + Gas ? (In case Chemical science needs sulfur.)

Otherwise, still for Chemical Science requiring Sulfur,
one suggestion (that happened by mistake) in the last thread was about having Heavy Oil processing in the Chemical Plant to output Sulfur while making Lubricant.
At the time, I had considered that it would make a nice "advanced" recipe for Lubricant/Sulfur, probably also requiring Water as an input,
but if Chemical Science needs Sulfur, then why not having it replace the "basic" Lubricant (that always seemed a bit too simple to me) and Sulfur recipes at or near Basic Oil Processing ? (Probably without requiring Water...)
EDIT: No, wait, you would still need a second Sulfur-making recipe to not end up swimming in Lube...

[mmmPI]

100000% sold on the idea to add a new "complex" difficulty settings for the exact reasons mentionned.

[kbk]

Definitely in favor of this idea. It will be most delectable if this is implemented as a core game content and if this also covers not only just oil processing tree but more other game activities too. For instance, it might also include

• adding more Explosives/Solid/Rocket/Nuclear fuel as corresponding ammo and capsule ingredient,
• adding engines/fuel consumption for Offshore pump/Pumpjack recipe,
• adding trace amounts of Lubricant to Fast inserter recipe (albeit, I guess, highly controversial),
• driving low-tech building raw requirements (i.e. Boiler, Assembly machine 1, Lab) closer to those of high tech (Steam turbine, Beacon) in general,
• adding some LDS as high-end building material (Centrifuge, Silo, Reactor),
• buffing maintenance costs for labs, assemblers via random consumption of repair packs or gear wheels for repairs,
• buffing maintenance costs for smelters through catalysed/multiple ingredient smelting, e.g. Steel smelting with Coal as mandatory coingredient
• adding more acid-catalysed drilling (Copper),
• introducing probabilistic assembly (prematurely broken circuits, modules, ammo, gears) and waste recycling (smelting those for semi-random results) similar to centrifuge Uranium production and used Nuclear cell recycling,
• etc etc

There are some bad news though, as most additions mentioned here are either already implemented within a variety of mods or are inherently moddable, so I suppose defending the whole idea before devs will be extremely complicated.

[rhynex]

TL;DR

Add ‘Complex’ difficulty to recipe and technology difficulty dropdown.

What ?

Add one or two new items to the recipe and technology difficulty dropdowns on the advanced tab of the map generator window. Add a selection "Complex" for complex recipes/technologies and optionally "Expensive Complex" for expensive complex recipes/technologies.

Why ?

The "Complex" difficulty is different than the "Expensive" difficulty because "Complex" recipes can have different inputs and outputs and "Complex" technologies may be structured differently.

An example of a complex recipe would be the basic oil recipe used in 0.17.59 where the normal recipe for basic oil would be that proposed by FF305.

An example of a complex technology tree would be the technology tree in 0.17.59 where the normal technology would be that proposed by FF305.

I apologize because I am not sure if it is suitable to post a mod idea here but I created a mod to make similar things in "expensive" mode. instead of inventing a new "complex" difficulty, expensive mode can be enriched. currently expensive mode affects a handful of recipes by increasing ingredient amounts, not types. it is meaningless just by increasing amount. I also want something complex and fully support your idea.

another idea is to create worlds and assign recipes to worlds. all recipes ingredients/outputs might work on worlds like "Normal", "Expensive", "Complex" or "Angel", "Bob" and so on. it will be easier to switch from one mode to another like "Angel/Bob" world to "Vanilla" recipe world or "Expensive Vanilla" recipe world and so on. they would not affect game recipes anyway. the current map would stick to a world instead of recipe list.
modders can design these recipe worlds together (like "Angel/Bob" world) so inconsistencies would be solved there as, not on mods.

meanwhile wube thinks over this (or ignores) expensive mode can be enriched, which I did with a mod.

examples from my ideas (mod):

current yellow science : 1 flying robot frame, 3 low density structure, 2 blue circuit => 3 yellow science in 21 seconds (1/7sec)
my mod's yellow science : 1 flying robot frame, 3 low density structure, 2 blue circuit, 1 effectivity module, 1 uranium 235, 30 refined concrete => 2 yellow science in 20 seconds (1/10sec)

current module-3 : 5 module-2, 5 red circuit, 5 blue circuit
my mods module-3 : 5 module-2, 5 red circuit, 5 blue circuit, 15 uranium 238, 5 uranium 235

a few other things
rocket control unit : 1 blue circuit, 1 speed module, 1 electric engine unit, 1 lab
logistic robot : 1 flying robot frame, 1 iron chest, 2 red circuit
construction-robot : 1 flying robot frame, 1 repair pack, 2 green circuit
flying robot frame : 2 battery, 3 green circuit, 1 electric engine unit, 1 steel, 1 inserter
stack inserter : 1 fast inserter, 15 gear, 2 red circuit, 20 lubricant, 7 iron stick
fusion reactor : 50 blue circuit, 50 battery, 10 effectivity module-3, 1 centrifuge, 10 uranium 235

more ideas which I had implemented in my mod and playing:
I use old BOP and also different oil cracking recipes.
all ground entities require brick (chemical plant, assembler, underground belts, underground pipes)
all poles require cable, not copper
all modules are uranium based (uranium is heavily used in recipes)
all fuel using entities are based on stone furnace or steel furnace (tank, train, burner inserter)
production science uses lubricant (or sulfuric acid)
low density structure requires steam, also water is only used by boilers and a few base recipes. steam should be used in general.
rocket fuel requires additional copper, sulfur and plastic (now outdated with 0.17.60 changes)
and other stuff..

new ideas:
military elements that move (rockets) requires solid fuel

edit: when I mentioned above such complex things in elsewhere I got bad reaction. people think it is job of modders, not developers to make game challenging. I got reaction like "play angel/bob if you want complexity". not many people want such a game and 0.17.60 proved that wube is not going toward that direction.

[nosports]

i honestly don't know if there is a need for an additional recipe category...

You can mod all recipes to oblivion

[Jon8RFC]

Hopefully this ends up being a back-burner, pet-project for one of them, and I think it would add more replay value to the vanilla game.

If it's at all possible to be a retroactive toggle, then that'd be awesome. Once you're bored with your current save, you can just take it up a notch rather than start over entirely.

I'd think this fits better in vanilla than as a mod, purely because of improving the replay value.

[Reika]

Just so you know, my ideas, as well as some suggested by other people, have made it into a mod, TurmOil: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/TurmOil

[BlueTemplar]

Right,

In case anyone wants it:

Pre 0.17.60 Oil



And in case anyone wanted to test other suggested alternatives that the devs decided weren't better than the path they went:

Heavy Oil and Gas from Basic Oil
Sulfur Production from Oils
Adamo Carbon
Light Oil Only
Heavy Oil Chemical Science
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/TurmOil

[FuryoftheStars]

Right,

In case anyone wants it:

Pre 0.17.60 Oil



And in case anyone wanted to test other suggested alternatives that the devs decided weren't better than the path they went:

Heavy Oil and Gas from Basic Oil
Sulfur Production from Oils
Adamo Carbon
Light Oil Only
Heavy Oil Chemical Science
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/TurmOil

Whoop... how did I miss that I just stuck the url only in there for Reika's mod? I fixed that, now.

[5thHorseman]

Just so you know, my ideas, as well as some suggested by other people, have made it into a mod, TurmOil: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/TurmOil

Fan. Tas. Tic. Name.