Version 0.17.60

[nafira]

[...] imagine someone knowing that earth is round, seeing people tell "For now, just think that Earth is flat". It's a non-sense not to tell them "Earth is like a ball, but physics is for later, you're too young".

Can we at least agree that Nauvis is flat ?

Lol sure
But it's not Earth and it's Factorio lore fiction

[netmand]

These new changes just got more exciting for me. Come on guys, a recipe that only outputs petroleum? How could you not like that? This change potentially enhances the game even after Advanced oil processing tech has been earned.

A way I've made supplying large amounts of metals was to make them at the mining site, so my trains are delivering 4k iron plate instead of 2k iron ore. Of course this sort of thing was too complex for me for oil outposts because there are too many materials involved, but no longer! why ship crude when you can ship petroleum:

Basic oil processing: 100 crude oil yields 45 petroleum which can contribute to make 4.5 plastic bars
Advanced oil processing: 100 crude oil yields 55 petroleum which can contribute to make 5.5 plastic bars

So shipping 25,000 crude from the oil outpost by tanker yields 13,750 petroleum using Advanced oil processing at the refinery/main factory which can contribute to make 1,375 plastic bars.

BUT shipping 25,000 petroleum from the oil outpost by tanker can contribute to make 2,500 plastic bars AND I don't have to deal with the logistics of the other materials (Water in, Light and Heavy Oil out). Of course at the outpost I'm using Basic oil processing but that doesn't matter since I'm still filling the tanker.

I dunno guys can we get out of some of our tunnel vision we have in proclaiming this change a total one way or the other? Can you come up with a way to make this change work for you?

This is the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do, and for 2 main reasons :
1- Oil will dry out and you'll not use your refinery properly
2- Some recipe need crude oil

There's plenty other reasons.

Sure, at start it's easy money. But you don't learn the basics with this method, and when the time comes : Boom headshot ! *player left*
The new guy will get stuck in a problem of transporting different fluids, mixing them, for different purpose (like Sulfuric Acid which has now many uses).


That's the whole point : this gives bad advice to the player and don't teach him how to handle Oil properly. This is why we are complaining.
It's not for us, because we already know, it's for them.
Personally I have no problem with that. But imagine someone knowing that earth is round, seeing people tell "For now, just think that Earth is flat". It's a non-sense not to tell them "Earth is like a ball, but physics is for later, you're too young".

Oil doesn't "dry out" and

I guess you've never beacon'd a pump jack.

Oh and, "the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do"? I object to you trying to tell me what I'm supposed to do.

You may have a valid point about other recipes needing crude oil, oh what would I do? what would I do? Incentive to play more of the game I need not.

[Adamo]

I personally do not like Steam's model, particularity for storing save games in a cloud. Although it is nice if you play on different computers is becomes a real pain trying to load in a 100M+ map, and post changes to a 100M+ map on a slower internet connection, or worst, more expensive when paying by the megabyte. For that reason, I use a stand along dumb box, that happens to be connected to the internet. The other draw back, is although I have won the game many times over and developed massive bases, they are not reflected on Steam as achievements.

Not only is this true, but I want to add that the only time I use steam to play the game is when I'm testing new mods. So I will load a game, make a couple things, and quit. It has almost no achievements and would make their statistics worse. When I actually play, I use my independent copy, where my saved games are saved in my own backup framework instead of Steam's, and it's not even logged into my account (since I don't like the ElAdamo account name, preferring just "Adamo".) It would only be logged in when I'm joining a public multiplayer game.

[meganothing]

The 0% is unreal, but how would you know ? you can't, that's my point. "on average new player launch rocket after 3 month" , (just imagine i'm not saying it's a fact, it's just show how much data is missing for initial assumption to be correct) "During winter this time is /2", "same during the every holidays ", the list of things that makes this very unreliable is wide and impactful, how would you measure anything meaningful from steam stats have been discussed in many publications, it's not that simple.

Observe new player numbers, likely they spike whenever a steam sale is even if Factorio is never reduced in price. Shortly before the price increase a while ago there definitely was a spike. Wait for that spike to occur in rocket launch achievements. Bing. You got your approximation of how long new players on average need to reach rocket. Observe how big that spike is and you also got an approximation of how many of those achievements are because of new players and how many are from old players.

This glosses over details. The more often those spikes occur the more reliable your prediction gets. Naturally you have to observe and take into account other reasons why spikes might occur and try to make sure they are not relevant. The more careful you are the better your numbers get.

[netmand]

But this argument is counterproductive to my opinion, this basically means you prefer watching robots do a blueprint you got from internet/made once a few years ago when you started than play the game.

If you think placement of things generate gameplay, then robots are good when you copy/paste few parts here and there when you fiddle around doing one small build. This spares you the annoyance of switching materials lots of time.

You know I like you mmmPI, but this is wrong. The key to really doing factorio well is cutting and pasting. I almost exclusively build like this:

Make a small unit by hand. Use ctrl-c to copy, and ctrl-v to paste this into a line of stuff. Use ctrl-x to order my robots to pick up the line of things and then ctrl-v to order them to put it down where I want it to go.

This is peak factorio construction, and it's what I try to train my new players to do right away, because people are already very familiar with using ctrl-c/x/v to move things around in the rest of their computer work. Moving bots back does push this further away.

There was a time long ago I found people here that refuse to use bots. Now it's such an important part of the game. What seems weird to me is all this talk of objecting to pushing bots back like they were in the perfect position before... to be honest in my recent play-throughs of 0.17.x I tech'd into bots way before I had the factory to make use of them. If anything I'm ok for them to come later but it would be nice if they started with a couple of speed boosts already applied.

[Adamo]

That's the whole point : this gives bad advice to the player and don't teach him how to handle Oil properly. This is why we are complaining.
It's not for us, because we already know, it's for them.
Personally I have no problem with that. But imagine someone knowing that earth is round, seeing people tell "For now, just think that Earth is flat". It's a non-sense not to tell them "Earth is like a ball, but physics is for later, you're too young".

Just going to share a story of my friend, who is learning the game right now, and he was in the phase of struggling learning to do oil when this change dropped. I think it's related to this and similar points made in the thread.

At first, he thought I broke the oil with my carbon mod. Once I got it through to him that the refinery recipe was actually a vanilla change he stopped for about a minute (we were playing multiplayer), and then finally said, "what the hell. That's stupid. Now there's only one oil coming out of this? What's the point?"

Anecdotal, sure. Have I introduced the game to hundreds of people, for a large n in my statistics? Of course not. I'm at maybe a dozen or so. I've been playing at least two versions longer than anyone else has claimed in these two threads (in fact, I remember when oil was first introduced -- go take a look at the version 0.9 release threads for the history). So maybe my experience counts for something, maybe it doesn't, I dunno. But it's my opinion that new players who are going to play this game don't want it to be simplified, they want help understanding how it works, and they want the help from the game so they can feel independent, rather than having me hover around telling them what to do (which I don't do -- I just let them explore, and give advice where warranted).

[mmmPI]

But this argument is counterproductive to my opinion, this basically means you prefer watching robots do a blueprint you got from internet/made once a few years ago when you started than play the game.

If you think placement of things generate gameplay, then robots are good when you copy/paste few parts here and there when you fiddle around doing one small build. This spares you the annoyance of switching materials lots of time.

You know I like you mmmPI, but this is wrong. The key to really doing factorio well is cutting and pasting. I almost exclusively build like this:

Make a small unit by hand. Use ctrl-c to copy, and ctrl-v to paste this into a line of stuff. Use ctrl-x to order my robots to pick up the line of things and then ctrl-v to order them to put it down where I want it to go.

This is peak factorio construction, and it's what I try to train my new players to do right away, because people are already very familiar with using ctrl-c/x/v to move things around in the rest of their computer work. Moving bots back does push this further away.

I am unsure i was unclear or if you just disagre, i wanted to say that small CTRL C-CTRL V are the thing, that's what i praise in bots, when you design stuff, you just placed 4 filter inserter and wires and combinators and filter splitters, it function, now you don't have to do all those clicks clicks again just because you realise you have not left enough room for that one extra belt.

What i dislike is the way there were described as "needed for massive thing " and in a way the counterproductive way to present bots is that it gives incentive to seek for routine sort of if you aim at utilizing them at their fullest potential ( more abuse ), the blueprints system is genious don't get me wrong the bots too, though the interaction of them and human nature and whatever you want to call it, from experience, the multiplayer base when just random people would meet up and discuss to organize, was different before than when 1 or 2 person that launched/owned the server paste their BP all along and newbs just act as some sorts of super robots , that replace the gosth and handcraft things before the real robots.

Usually when i arrive on one of those map ( which are many just not the most popular ) i'm a bit sad, there's not much to do, you don't engage with player, the overall experience is less fun.

In solo play , it can give a strong incentive to just have a blueprint of a starter base+mall, and use them every time, doing always the same thing in the same order. why wouldn't you bots are so fast to get, just 3 hours in, ( if you do that rather start with a mod that gives you early bots).

Advocating for early bots saying you need it for your 12 array of stone furnace is to my eyes saying you want the game to adapt to your 'mistake' a new player don't have that need, a very experienced player (should i hope) get a starter base running to produce some robots and never do those 12 array of stone furnace by hand, you do less than that and you tech up, not that it should be FORCED onto player, but that's how i feel the game is atm and it's manageable/ part of the organisationnal challenge. ( when you realise that or are able to predict what you need as starter setup you feel you have learned a useful skill )

And sure the pushing back construction bot behind blue science is annoying for me too but when i started it was like that, in my mind it has always been, speedrunners didn't used bots at that time, they were more optionnal, i am used to make a temporary setup for robots manually fed when i'm lazy it last 1 hour and it's fine. I don't have it on blueprint since when i start with 25 conbots i don't even build it.

The argument that make sense for me as to why they are delayed is for new players, i think it makes the game better that it is designed so that the things arrived one after another, you may have to use trains before robots, i do understand it's heresy to make train setup manually once you've played a bit, but when you start the game, if you are given many easy bots , you will screw up your map faster by making gigantic bad junctions/station/solar area that are harder to debug.

It's like the gun on a monkey, it's less dangerous with just a stick in a way ( not that i like feeling like a monkey every starting game but i know this is not made for ME just for people like me when i started and it's ok because now i can use mod for starter bots or just command)

[Adamo]

OK, I think we're actually on the same page, here. You might like it on our server network. I have the same experience when I go to public servers, too. Everyone just uses the main blueprints available throughout the community. It leaves me wondering: if we aren't designing machines, what are we even doing? Where's the artistry? There are some things I like to do on public servers to counter that spirit, though, which we can talk about in another thread.

But I think at least it's good to give those construction bots to players early, so they understand that this game ISN'T a tedious game of laying down things by hand, but instead that it's about design, and there are tools for using the ground like a landscape to design your machines.

My experience with that tells me that early players see the robots and go "OK, I see, that would be very helpful when I want to make bigger machines", but then still spend time doing things by hand while they figure everything out. But at least it's in the back of their mind now that the robots are the future.

[nafira]

Oil doesn't "dry out" and

I guess you've never beacon'd a pump jack.

Oh and, "the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do"? I object to you trying to tell me what I'm supposed to do.

You may have a valid point about other recipes needing crude oil, oh what would I do? what would I do? Incentive to play more of the game I need not.

Of course it doesn't dry but it's losing a lot (nearly everything). It gives so few that it barely useful to have them when you can have 6000% Oil when expanding a bit, while your old 7 pumps gives you 170% ...
And I know theoretical number of beacon you can have (even if perfect disposition is never achievable), but the goal for a beginner is to factorize infrastructure to be efficient. It's one of the things he has to learn.

Play as you want once you know the game, but don't learn the game the wrong way.
The goal (I think) is to guide the player to many solutions : belts, bots, trains, manual actions, plan, etc. to help him understand what suit him the best.

For you it's direct production, so be it.
For me it's banks with deposit and withdraw platform, and a central base to start, outsourcing production once expansion is advanced. I use bots and belts.

Devs made it clear with bots debate : they want people to explore the whole game, without taking any input on "the OP'ness" of a solution (look at Nuclear Power, which is more than simple and powerful).
They'd rather make a system very good like rail (it was a nightmare in 0.15), and signal UI than "nerfing" the game. This is where I'm judging that they pretty much failed on this recipe. One output doesn't seem in spirit of the game nor in the will of this update about Oil. It doesn't change the very beginning, nor the end, but the journey is harder and unfair.


Now, as Koub said it in FFF305, let's wait and see. I'm pretty confident they will reverse or adapt it, and it won't prevent me from updating to 0.17.60.
If not, it won't change anything for me, just for others in the process of learning.

[netmand]

Oil doesn't "dry out" and

I guess you've never beacon'd a pump jack.

Oh and, "the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do"? I object to you trying to tell me what I'm supposed to do.

You may have a valid point about other recipes needing crude oil, oh what would I do? what would I do? Incentive to play more of the game I need not.

Of course it doesn't dry but it's losing a lot (nearly everything). It gives so few that it barely useful to have them when you can have 6000% Oil when expanding a bit, while your old 7 pumps gives you 170% ...
And I know theoretical number of beacon you can have (even if perfect disposition is never achievable), but the goal for a beginner is to factorize infrastructure to be efficient. It's one of the things he has to learn.

Play as you want once you know the game, but don't learn the game the wrong way.
The goal (I think) is to guide the player to many solutions : belts, bots, trains, manual actions, plan, etc. to help him understand what suit him the best.

For you it's direct production, so be it.
For me it's banks with deposit and withdraw platform, and a central base to start, outsourcing production once expansion is advanced. I use bots and belts.

Devs made it clear with bots debate : they want people to explore the whole game, without taking any input on "the OP'ness" of a solution (look at Nuclear Power, which is more than simple and powerful).
They'd rather make a system very good like rail (it was a nightmare in 0.15), and signal UI than "nerfing" the game. This is where I'm judging that they pretty much failed on this recipe. One output doesn't seem in spirit of the game nor in the will of this update about Oil. It doesn't change the very beginning, nor the end, but the journey is harder and unfair.


Now, as Koub said it in FFF305, let's wait and see. I'm pretty confident they will reverse or adapt it, and it won't prevent me from updating to 0.17.60.
If not, it won't change anything for me, just for others in the process of learning.

I may have learned this game the wrong way. Who's wrong anyways?

[nafira]

That's the whole point : this gives bad advice to the player and don't teach him how to handle Oil properly. This is why we are complaining.
It's not for us, because we already know, it's for them.
Personally I have no problem with that. But imagine someone knowing that earth is round, seeing people tell "For now, just think that Earth is flat". It's a non-sense not to tell them "Earth is like a ball, but physics is for later, you're too young".

Just going to share a story of my friend, who is learning the game right now, and he was in the phase of struggling learning to do oil when this change dropped. I think it's related to this and similar points made in the thread.

At first, he thought I broke the oil with my carbon mod. Once I got it through to him that the refinery recipe was actually a vanilla change he stopped for about a minute (we were playing multiplayer), and then finally said, "what the hell. That's stupid. Now there's only one oil coming out of this? What's the point?"

Anecdotal, sure. Have I introduced the game to hundreds of people, for a large n in my statistics? Of course not. I'm at maybe a dozen or so. I've been playing at least two versions longer than anyone else has claimed in these two threads (in fact, I remember when oil was first introduced -- go take a look at the version 0.9 release threads for the history). So maybe my experience counts for something, maybe it doesn't, I dunno. But it's my opinion that new players who are going to play this game don't want it to be simplified, they want help understanding how it works, and they want the help from the game so they can feel independent, rather than having me hover around telling them what to do (which I don't do -- I just let them explore, and give advice where warranted).

Not sure you're going my way ^^ since my last sentence can be interpreted either way ("learn by yourself, at the right time" or "it's to complicated, piss off").

Anyway, I'm quite with you on that : people should learn by themselves, guided by the system itself (because it's quite well implemented, otherwise it needs a change), and with a bit of advice if needed (for complicated things like trains and logic). And this recipe goes against this method.

"You learn from your successes, but you learn more from your failures", that's one of my favorite saying, and I think it's quite the spirit of the game : try, enhance, rebuild, go bigger, fix, adapt and do it again an again.

Edit for netmand : I never built a bus base ^^ I've probably missed some points too. That's why we start new maps and try new things right ? I've 500+hours and still learning many different methods, combining my experiences to enhance each build.

[Nytewulfe]

Setting up the oil refining has always been my least favorite part of the game. The thing that I did to enjoy the rest of it.

That being said, I was quite nervous about such a big change to the game, and downloaded the new release with trepidation. The old way was what I was used to. I had invested many hours into creating a blueprint that would allow me to set up the refining as quickly as possible so that I could get robots up and running to finish the job.

Up until this release, oil refining felt like "make-work" to me. It feels complicated not because it serves the game, but because it just "has" to be complicated. Part of the reason why it felt this way was the dearth of products that the oil is used in. Heavy oil is used in flamethrowers and can be used in the flamethrower turrets and fuel blocks. Light oil is the same. I do not cast aspersions or otherwise on these game design decisions. I merely explain how I felt about it, and what I did to work around the problem.

Petroleum Gas is where it was at. All the important products came from this. I generally set up the initial refining, got bots researched, then advanced oil so that I could set up my 10:1:7 ratio cracking and then get back to the game at hand. The greater efficiency of converting light oil into fuel blocks as apposed to petroleum gas into fuel blocks was irrelevant against the ability to set-it and forget-it. It was not *that* much less efficient, even if you consider the electricity needed to power the structures.


17.60 frees the game up for more player choices. One *can* power the majority of their oil industry off of Refineries refining oil into petroleum gas with a token group of refineries to provide heavy oil (or you can just use Coal Liquefaction if you choose to do so instead). It takes a lot of refineries to do it, though. I was falling behind with fifteen of them running full bore. 45 PG per structure is just not a lot. Modules will help this. I have not added them to the structures yet.

You can also choose to jump start your oil industry with the basic refining then convert over to Advanced Oil Processing, embracing all the complexity of the oil refining process in its glory. I will experiment with setting up light oil conversion into Fuel blocks at this point.

Or you can mod the game.


Player choice is Factorios strength. The reason why I keep coming back.

It stinks a little that bots got pushed back to Chemical Science, but it is not *that* bad and hey, unless I made a bee-line specifically for them, I did not get them up and running that much faster in a regular game, than I did last night. I just constructed a simple blue science mini-factory to get it started, then added on it, when the bots started pouring out of my assembly units.

I have never gotten better value for my dollars on a game purchase ever. Factorio is my go-to game. I put it down for a bit, but always end up picking it back up.


To the game designers, mods, and all those that provide the support needed to make this game available. Those that check the forum, and those that do not. I love you guys! Please, keep it coming.

[Adamo]

There was a time long ago I found people here that refuse to use bots. Now it's such an important part of the game. What seems weird to me is all this talk of objecting to pushing bots back like they were in the perfect position before... to be honest in my recent play-throughs of 0.17.x I tech'd into bots way before I had the factory to make use of them. If anything I'm ok for them to come later but it would be nice if they started with a couple of speed boosts already applied.

I think you're missing the context of that we've been (and devs have participated) in many discussions where the general agreement has been that coming up with some way to introduce bots, or some sort of less-advanced bot, to the early game would be a good thing. Those of us who have been around for years and talked or listened should be familiar with this. We've all been waiting for a solution on that or to be part of the solution. And instead, now, this other change has pushed them back. It's not a direct result of this change, but the push-back is a secondary result based on the context of the history of development and development discussions.

[DanGio]

Now, as Koub said it in FFF305, let's wait and see. I'm pretty confident they will reverse or adapt it, and it won't prevent me from updating to 0.17.60.
If not, it won't change anything for me, just for others in the process of learning.

Agree. I think it's lullaby time.

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Copy blueprint

[mmmPI]

Observe new player numbers, likely they spike whenever a steam sale is even if Factorio is never reduced in price. Shortly before the price increase a while ago there definitely was a spike. Wait for that spike to occur in rocket launch achievements. Bing. You got your approximation of how long new players on average need to reach rocket. Observe how big that spike is and you also got an approximation of how many of those achievements are because of new players and how many are from old players.

This glosses over details. The more often those spikes occur the more reliable your prediction gets. Naturally you have to observe and take into account other reasons why spikes might occur and try to make sure they are not relevant. The more careful you are the better your numbers get.

I do not contest the general usefulness of statistics, but i would like to highlight some stuff that in this context makes some of the applications you propose difficult.

The approach from general statistic is providing different information than if you have the equivalent of cookie that would give metadata, such as, when this achievement is reached, the game was purchased for this amount time, the player launched the game XX amount of sessions, of average lengh XXX, the average number of player in the game ?, the countries from which player came from ? the region inside the country where the player came from ? the neighbourhood ?

The gradation might seems irrationnal but the deeper you go the more valuable is your information. On a different aspect, you would need to know which youtubers the person follows, that can give good information no ? , also how old they are ?, what are their academical background ?, how they sit when they play ?

The concern it raises is willing to rely on statistics at all cost for 100% safe decisions measured and stuff will lead to those need of more precise information on what people do with the things they buy.The different method you can come up to extract meaning from datas are less efficient if the datas are not registered with metadatas that will allow to extract the meaning later on, those implies sending infomation regularly to valve ?

I'd rather find another solution that doesn't involve Wube needing Valve to do whatever thing over the internet on my computer as a normal developement procedures something like human being expressing themselves debating listening sharing stuff would better suit my little preferences in the matter. and I think you will learn more doing that from what new player experience when they play the game.

I think it doesn't impact 'positively' the 'end product' when you design with statistics in mind; " it doesn't fit anyone well, it almost fit everyone" is a risk.

(and there is still a limit on the amount of useful information you can extract from some datas given their metadatas ; even if it's technically possible in theory it might be too late for this case or take too much time to be of any use )

[pato]

I hate these changes about flame turrets only useing crude oil.
This was super unnessecary. The damage bonus was not big anyway so why did you remove it?
I want to choose which oil i burn for turrets.

I dont like the other changes as well, but if you really need to do this please change back the flame turret ammo like it has been

[Serenity]

I hate these changes about flame turrets only useing crude oil.
This was super unnessecary. The damage bonus was not big anyway so why did you remove it?

That wasn't changed. Only the handheld flamethrower. Turrets don't use ammunition canisters

[Adamo]

I hate these changes about flame turrets only useing crude oil.
This was super unnessecary. The damage bonus was not big anyway so why did you remove it?

That wasn't changed. Only the handheld flamethrower. Turrets don't use ammunition canisters

He was specifically talking about the turrets, not the handheld flamethrower. Turrets now use crude oil since all we have is crude oil until blue science.

[Serenity]

Doesn't sound like that at all and other people have confused that before

[vanatteveldt]

Pretty sure it's too late for my opinion on the oil changes to have any weight, but here goes:

1. I agree with the devs that (1) blue science has always been a huge difficulty bump (the "oil wall"), and (2) that it's weird that players are supposed to learn managing multiple outputs before they can actually manage these outputs.

2. I think it's a bad change to supply only PG, for reasons listed by other people (the "basic" recipe gives the "advanced" product; it magically flares off the other parts without really showing it; it just postpones the difficult part)

3. I like removing solid fuel from the science pack recipe.

My preferred change would be to add a flare stack, either as a separate recipe or as part of BOP, and give a very clear hint that/how a player is supposed to use them. They can still choose to make fuel or lubricant, but they can also just ignore it and flare it. I would also add cracking as a separate science.