Friday Facts #309 - Controversial opinions

[Therax]

Pipes should work like electricity

For those who would like to experiment with instant transport pipe networks, there is https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pipelayer.

The main reason we're not doing this is that bot movement logic is currently written such that calculations are needed only when something changes (a robot completes its task, its target is moved, etc). Having to keep bots separated would add a lot more calculations that need to be done while a bot is en route, which would probably result in a lot of complaints from people with huge bot-based factories that the game got all slow.

One option which has been proposed in the past is to add a throughput limit to chests, e.g. a max_interactions_per_tick prototype property. This would be much less expensive performance-wise, since it would be a simple integer increment that happens only when a robot interacts with the chest, and nothing is added to robot movement logic.

[jodokus31]

Miners shouldn't output directly to belts

Miners are different and have to be placed en masse.
Inserters are a very nice concept and you have a lot of possibilities, but why use it for an entity with only 1 output and add tedium?
I would even go so far, that train (un)loading should not be dependent only on inserters into 1 tile chests. That's an unnecessary obstacle to use trains. Here it would totally make sense to support a small warehouse with loaders to belt, which only can be used with a cargo wagon. Just as alternative train usage.

Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses
...
I think you should have to defend your railway lines, power poles, etc.

While it think, it would be nice, that you have to wall off to be safe, I think rails and power poles should not be destroyed by biters. This way, you can create a railworld of safe islands, while travelling through the wilderness Maybe you could invent an indestructible big pole or a pole protection?

Power-user hotkeys

Yes, please.

Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients for the in-progress recipe

Yes. I'm already paranoid to not interrupt a recipe...

[voddan]

I support almost everything @wheybags said about biters and combat. The current version feels dull and dumb. Biters are an exiting constraint on the player, they add danger and time pressure to the gameplay. If anything, I would prefer smarter and more adaptable biters that can communicate and gang up on me and my factory. At the very least, biters should be as smart as normal bugs, e.i. explore their environment and find holes in my defenses.

[bobingabout]

Okay, there's a lot to talk about here.

Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature:
I'd still want the personal and game based blueprint library, so you can just grab a blueprint from a previous game, or share a blueprint with multiple players within the same game, but the import/export part of it, I don't mind seeing moved to a mod.


Combat/Biters:
Weapons shouldn't lock on
Some weapons like the shotgun and flamethrower shoot at the cursor without locking on right?
I guess it just depends what type of weapon you're using... I can't really see how anything could change to make things better.

"I think that clearing the bases inside your pollution cloud should provide only a very temporary respite from attacks. Biters should very regularly expand back into your pollution cloud, meaning you always have to defend."
I think the inconsistencies between map spawns and expansions is annoying...
Map spawn: (I'm going to talk about what it's like with my mods as it will highlight more differences)
Near your starting position: small warms and vanilla bases
Further away: medium and large worms with elemental bases
Long distance: Behemoth worms and super bases.
It's also possible to have a single base spawn span multiple sectors with a field of solid red on your map.

Expansion:
Distance doesn't matter. with a low Evolution Factor, you just get small worms and vanilla bases no matter how far out you go.
With a high EF, you get a mix of smalls and behemoths, vanilla and super bases all mixed up, both close to home and at extreme range.
On top of that, expansion spawns are small clusters of around half a dozen entities, no massive multi-sector fields.

Suggestion:
Allow bases to just expand out, build another spawner on the perimeter of an existing base, add more worm turrets, bases should grow so an unmanaged enemy base can literally just cover the entire map. Perhaps the chance that this happens could be influenced on EF and how much pollution that specific base has absorbed.
Also...
Option 1: when choosing what to spawn, just respect the distance limitations
Option 2: like how units are spawned from bases, have a multiple values to determine EF and probability that they start to appear and are phased out.


Miners shouldn't output directly to belts:
I don't mind if you change this in vanilla, I would just like for mod support for the old option to be available.
in fact I've considered asking (or attempting to write myself) for the feature that miners require an inserter to pull items out.

Boilers shouldn't have a water output:
In theory this is just a change to the pipe connections, so mods would be able to just re-implement the old style anyway, but personally, I can see the benefit of both versions. Part of the reason why a boiler is 2x3 was because of the pipe layout. perhaps if you change the boiler design to be inline, you could change it's size too. I'm personally thinking 2x2.

Pipes should work like electricity:
1: Flow animation is already broken. I've watched it before and even though there's obviously a very fast flow headding north in a pipe, the graphic in the window just wiggles up and down.
2. Perhaps the capacity could still indicate a maximim flow through the pipe, even if it is changed to function more like electricity. It would require a few setup calculation every time someone changes the pipe configuration, but still significantly improve performance.

Robots should take up space and time:
For god sake, stop nerfing robots!
Okay, I'm not exactly opposed to robots requiring "Time" to perform an operation, but if it takes time for a robot to place a building, shouldn't it also take time for the PLAYER to place a building?
you argue that it would stop laser turret creeping. although I personally have performed turret creeping, I have NEVER performed it using blueprints. you just put down a large electric pole, with a substation next to it, then grab a laser turret, then wiggle the mouse over the power are. Don't nerf bots to try and stop a strategy that can be done almost as easily without using them.

Items should have volume and mass:
Isn't this why you have stack sizes? Nuclear silos have a stack size of 1, because they're huge, while electronics have a stack size of 200, because they're tiny. If you do go with a weight based system, you need to remove the stack size system, then change everything away from slot number based to weight based, because otherwise your efforts are pointless.
Also consider that this exact change caused me to stop playing Empyrion, it looks good on paper, but is annoying. also if things are built "on site" that would actually push away from a belt/inserter system and more towards a bot based system, because, "fuck that annoying ass shit", or as my brother says "Too much rigmarole."

Power-user hotkeys:
Although I keep forgetting what keys it actually is to connect and disconnect a train, I use this feature extensively, I actually have a train depot in my base, and although there are a bunch of pre-constructed trains in this depot, I often jump in a locomotive, and back it up to one of these trains, and run doubleheadded, then disconnect the train later, and do all kinds of crazy things. I have split a bi-directional headded train in two before to have 2 smaller trains that share the same rather complicated schedule, then rebuild one of those halves into the full original train again. (actually, if anything, this just highlights the need for a better scheduling system)
but to look at the "power-user controls" as you call them, my only complaint is that if you're in the late game, and all the buttons are bound, if you install a mod that adds more (EG Klonan's unit control mod) you have to remove something to add more, because there's only limited size.
ADD SPACE FOR MORE OF THESE!!!
I've quite often seen requests for a second panel on the left of the hotbar.

Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients for the in-progress recipe:
Yes, give back the ingedients. The specific "cheat" case of productivity modules shouldn't punish everyone else.

[Zool]

By the way, some of us will be playing on Pyrewood Village, Alliance

In case you need heals on your way into the deadmines, feel free to whisper „Arnadiana“ for some support

[Dune]

Adventure mode TOGoS

I'm not sure that making vanilla Factorio more fun for people who want to focus more on exploration is itself controversial, but all these features take time and energy to build and maintain, and "Factorio isn't supposed to be about exploration", so it hasn't been a priority.

Make this an expansion. Once the game is released, different idea become possibilities that players can use or not as they see fit.

Re Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses: What if biter corpses created a soft-path block? Kind of like walls, biters would attempt to path around them. This would spread biter attacks out and make them attempt to attack different areas and would accomplish this with a very simple and lore-friendly mechanic.

This is a great idea Mylon. To add to that, dead biters / biter buildings would become impassible to all but tanks. They could be chewed through, as biters often do with trees and rocks, if they find there is no other way to their destination.

[Kryzeth]

Weapons shouldn't lock on
Weapons should all work like the shotgun

So if every weapon becomes like the shotgun, then how would you shoot over walls? The shotgun just damages everything it touches, including your own buildings.

Would you make it so all weapons can shoot over walls, making your buildings immune to bullet damage from same force? But then how would you destroy the useless burner miners, burner inserters, and pistols that you don't want if you can't shoot your wooden boxes?

[Astrella]

Some of these would be neat to explore in mods, but I'm not sure how easily all of it would be implemented.

[Deadlock989]

So if every weapon becomes like the shotgun, then how would you shoot over walls? The shotgun just damages everything it touches, including your own buildings.

Would you make it so all weapons can shoot over walls, making your buildings immune to bullet damage from same force? But then how would you destroy the useless burner miners, burner inserters, and pistols that you don't want if you can't shoot your wooden boxes?

The mod I'm working on does this. All bullets, from hand weapons and turrets, are physical projectiles. This necessitates making them pass over friendly entities because otherwise your own defences shred your own walls.

I think getting rid of unwanted items is the absolute worst reason for the existence of teleporting lightspeed bullets that can never miss. I worked around it by providing cheap incinerator machines. I also left explosive damage alone so if you're really pissed off with that one pistol taking up one inventory slot in a chest 17 kilometres away, you can still use a rocket launcher, or a flamethrower, or drive over it with a tank. As for the other "useless" machines, they can be recycled into parts, with a chance of component loss.

[DarkyPupu]

The devs don't think one controversial subject is enough, so they feed a bunch of them at once

The poll would be a nice thing to have to see in a reasonnable way what people want or not.
In the meantime, i answered on Reddit : https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... s/exthg9x/

Here's a summary, quite short voluntarily because there're already 3 books of text on the topic :
Inserters should not chase items -> No, and i think more randomness would actually be cool in the game. I use some maintenance / degradation mods to simulate this, up to some point. IRL nothing works forever 100% uptime and forever with constant output.
Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature -> The problem is not the feature, it's the fact some structures (ex: nuclear plant) are ridiculously complex to have good ratio without blueprint or looking on the net. If you could figure it yourself in the game, there wouldn't be need for you to cheat.
Weapons shouldn't lock on -> No, it's good as it is.
Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses -> Definitely yes, i use Rampant mode only for that.
Clearing bases should not leave you safe -> Yes, as long as it's not useless grinding either.
Miners shouldn't output directly to belts -> No, it's good as it is.
Boilers shouldn't have a water output -> No, it's good as it is.
Pipes should work like electricity -> No, it's good as it is.
Adventure mode -> Yes, definitely something which lacks on the game currently.
Robots should take up space and time -> Yes, or some power consumption or whatever which doesn't make them free and cheating.
Items should have volume and mass -> Why not.
Power-user hotkeys -> Why not.
Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients for the in-progress recipe -> I don't care, it's like the 0.000001% of my games.

[boksiora]

How to solve the bots problem ?

Just make max bots to 500 and make tiers on bots count that can be only increased with space science

[Kryzeth]

I think getting rid of unwanted items is the absolute worst reason for the existence of teleporting lightspeed bullets that can never miss. I worked around it by providing cheap incinerator machines. I also left explosive damage alone so if you're really pissed off with that one pistol taking up one inventory slot in a chest 17 kilometres away, you can still use a rocket launcher, or a flamethrower, or drive over it with a tank. As for the other "useless" machines, they can be recycled into parts, with a chance of component loss.

I mean, I was just asking a legitimate question, not arguing for or against the change.

The devs don't seem to want to put any type of "recycling machine" or "incinerator" into the base game, otherwise, we would already have one. Explosives, fire, and trample damage could definitely do it, though you wouldn't be able to use these until early midgame. Which I guess is fine.

I personally don't care one way or the other for this change; I don't play with biters, so no need for guns. Just wondering how we were going to get rid of useless items if this change was ever implemented lol.

[Quarnozian]

Inserters should not chase items

I actually made a video specifically testing possible train loading problems to highlight the issue with inserters hunting for items. If you only watch the bottom right two loading stations (Both with stack inserters), you'll see that when the stack inserters are only being given a half-belt of items, they will finish faster.

https://youtu.be/MvuySqBgRqg

So... there's ways to fix the problem without dev intervention.... but it would be nice if the inserters would "look ahead" when their current belt is empty, and be ready to catch fast moving items that are about to enter their zone.

edit: Side note... I'd love if inserters would drop items at 10 degrees to the right instead of the "precise center" of the belt and having the belt decide to shunt it to the right side. This would make item placement on belts a lot more predictable.

Right now, if you have a belt moving away from the inserter, it places on the right side of the belt. EXCEPT, if there's a belt coming from the left, turning it into a left curve away from the inserter. In that case it places it on the left side of the belt... WHY?? Based on the way the belt is curved, it should be even more likely to place on the right side of the belt.

another edit: Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature
No... Maybe turn it off by default in the game settings, similar to research queue. (It'd be as easy as hiding the buttons for importing and exporting blueprint strings.) I've had my entire blueprint library vanish from a game update. The vast majority of them were my personal blueprints, so I didn't have backups... but I was at least able to salvage the ones I had shared.
If we have to rely on mods to do this, would it be dev supported? (like the original Upgrade Planner?)... or would we have multiple modders making different versions of the blueprint tool... and end up where import strings might only work for one or two tools, and other tools would have a different way of serializing the blueprints?
That could be a nightmare.

Mining furnaces and assembling machines should return the ingredients for the in-progress recipe
Could just add a "disable machine" button, and machines can't be mined (picked up) or have their recipe changed until you've told the machine to turn off, and it finishes its current job.


NEW ARGUMENT: Fluids should flow into and out of the machines at a steady speed.

For example, a recipe uses 100 fluid, and takes 5 seconds to complete. Ok, so it's using 20 fluid per second... or one fluid every 3 ticks. While the machine is operating, it should consume 1 fluid every 3 ticks. Do the exact same thing for output.

Of course, the rates would vary depending on modules, but if it's a recipe that only consumes and produces fluids (Advanced Oil Processing, for example), then this would be a good alternative for "returning ingredients" when it comes to fluids.

Another new argument: Fluid machines should be able to directly accept and supply fluid barrels.

Let inserters drop barrels into machines, and it directly places that barrel into the input reservoir of the machine. Once the barrel is emptied, it moves to a new slot that holds empty barrels, and if the empty barrel slot is full, then the machine stops working as if its backed up on finished products.

For supplying fluid barrels, If the machine is making a liquid and has empty barrels in its slot, then one barrel will be used as a fluid reservoir for each fluid output. If the machine is drained by pipes, then the fluid barrel simply act as the machine's internal fluid buffer. (allowing it to hold 50 extra fluid before the machine stops functioning). However inserters can instead pull out full barrels of fluid if someone does not wish to use pipes

Imagine a train with 400 barrels of crude oil per car pulling up next to a refinery, and being able to sit there while inserters slowly fed all 200k crude oil into the refinery, and refilled the train car with the empty barrels. Oh man, so efficient! It'd be silly to use the 25k fluid wagons when the cargo wagons hold 8x as much fluid.

[DarkyPupu]

How to solve the bots problem ?

Just make max bots to 500 and make tiers on bots count that can be only increased with space science

That's quite artificial way to limit, unless you find a reason for this which also would affect lots of other similar things in the game. I think making them using more real resource, creating pollution, or adding evil rabid pigeons to the game which would target them, would be better.

[Tomplus]

'Items should have volume and mass'

I like this solution very much, it is a great solution to make the game more difficult, so it could be an addition.
Alternatively, some objects should be built in special machines. For example, trains should be built in a locomotive and wagon factory.

[Kewlhotrod]

fire wheybags, thanks.

[jswim123]

I personally would love Adventure Mode - that's the one aspect of Satisfactory that I like better than Factorio. I'd be so stoked if you could incorporate it into Factorio somehow.

[ownlyme]

Blueprint import/export should be a modded feature
If this means you open up your gui a lot more, sure.. but otherwise - hell no. Imo most of the blueprint strings look stupid anyway because they do everything with underground belts and beacons.

Weapons shouldn't lock on
This sounds like a rabbithole for modders.. but i actually enjoyed some of the top down shooters. On the other hand, it was really tricky for me to make towers that don't hit other buildings and it didn't even work for shotgun towers at all.
So i'm primarily worried about the friendly fire aspect of this feature.

Biters should be more aggressive, and probe your defenses
I personally do this too. it would simply be too expensive to build towers everywhere and i still spent 90% of my time to refill my (gun-) turrets, which made me deprecate the save game at some point.
It's also kinda fun to build your towers intelligently by observing where attacks usually happen.
Not to mention that you have more space to just leave your base with your car.

Clearing bases should not leave you safe
I thought they'd expand back into your artillery range anyway?
Seems like you're unhappy with the artillery, maybe remove it from the game? I'd just use it to constantly bombard choke points anyway and never really used it for it's original purpose.
Maybe the artillery(-shells) could also be a lot more expensive, as it's primarily a convenience tool to clear bases instead of doing it manually.
Alternatively, the whole pollution cloud mechanic could be removed, and replaced with a worldwide pollution count
Please don't do this. This would remove a lot of immersion and modding possibilities, aswell as making it impossible to make "green outposts".

Miners shouldn't output directly to belts
Consistence is so overrated. this would make building mining outposts 900% more complicated and soon literally everyone would use the "outpost planner" mod.
It also saves a lot of space ... and i really love how miners behave!

Boilers shouldn't have a water output
But why?!
That would make it ridiculously complicated to set up a row of boilers and i don't even want to know how my nuclear heat exchangers layout would end up looking.
The overlay even shows you where the water is attached and where the steam comes out.
"I understand that the current setup allows for some interesting layouts, but IMO it is not worth the usability cost."
Wtf? it's rather the other way around. Changing this would cost a ton of usability.

Pipes should work like electricity
No.
Electricity should work like Pipes
... Ok not really but you could add some Voltage and Amperage mechanics because the electricity network is one of the most boring things in this game.
Flow limits are great and it adds an immersive drop of complexity to nuclear power plants. Providing the water for your whole base through 1 single pipe is just lame.

Wow, the points by wheybags really fueled my anxiety that you're going to ruin the game..

Adventure mode
I downloaded [Z] Adventure and probably will do it again, but it was really buggy for me (not a single riddle worked) and all of the ruins looked super generic.
While i still think this is a good idea, there's a lot of polishing that needs to be made - like custom entities that are exclusive to ruins and some cool interactions with them, maybe there's a mall where suddenly a ton of biters come out? An really useful assembler/etc that's actually worth integrating into your base? (like whistle stop factories)
Radars
I don't really think forests should block the line of sight of radars, but the mountain part actually makes sense, but this might be hard to put into factorio as the whole map is really flat and a mountain might look out of place.
If there's something hidden in the forest it shouldn't appear on the map but if you zoom in manually you should be able to see it.
Bridges and tunnels
Bridges - yes (but put some love into it). Tunnels - tough one. I really like OpenTTD, but that game also has a non-planar world which makes tunnels actually make sense.
Caves: YES. This sounds like it would open up a lot of possibilities, maybe you could mine some rare materials under ground (like in Harvest Moon or Lego Rock Raiders), or find weird places and enemies (this might require quite some work from your graphics department.)

Robots should take up space and time
I agree, logistic bot factories are kinda stupid, I never used them except 1 time where i placed some temporary setup.
The construction speed when you have 50 construction robots in your inventory is actually very useful and satisfying, for the biter-base killing i actually wrote a small mod for myself that makes this impossible.

construction_time_0.17.3.zip

(9.47 KiB) Downloaded 145 times

Items should have volume and mass
I don't think you can fix this. It makes no sense being able to transport 20k iron plates around either and it's somehow part of the factorio experience how it works now.
I actually wrote a mod that adresses part of this issue - https://mods.factorio.com/mod/OverloadedTrains , maybe something similar might also work for the character (lower movement speed with many/heavy items in the inventory)

Power-user hotkeys
Okay... maybe? but don't entirely remove the ability to keybind this. Thanks for the hint that there's a hotkey for manual train driving, that sounds useful

[VECCTOR]

The main reason we're not doing this is that bot movement logic is currently written such that calculations are needed only when something changes (a robot completes its task, its target is moved, etc). Having to keep bots separated would add a lot more calculations that need to be done while a bot is en route, which would probably result in a lot of complaints from people with huge bot-based factories that the game got all slow.

One option which has been proposed in the past is to add a throughput limit to chests, e.g. a max_interactions_per_tick prototype property. This would be much less expensive performance-wise, since it would be a simple integer increment that happens only when a robot interacts with the chest, and nothing is added to robot movement logic.

100% Agree. I made this exact suggestion back when there was a whole "Bots vs. Belts" FFF.

If a "congestion factor" for bot speed is too resource draining, then just limiting the number of bots that access a single chest is good enough. It's completely absurd that 1000 bots can access that same chest at the same time. Having a pickup and dropoff time would also be good.

Managing and planning belts is a key skill and interesting gameplay element in factorio; it shouldn't just go away once you unlock bots.

[Hiladdar]

First off, none of proposed changes come anywhere close to the controversy of the oil changes in 305. The closest one is the changes to blueprints. Here are my comments regarding the proposed changes.

Inserter chasing items: Yes do it. It should be a UPS improve!

Blue prints: Keep as is, do not change. But if you do, do it as an option in during the setup of a map. I.e. you can crash land either with your blueprints print computer, or without your blueprint computer.

Biters / Combat: First on combat, I like the way it currently works. Automatic targeting for shorter range, manual for further out. That can be dependent based on the armor you are wearing or components in the armor. For biters, In my opinion biters should evolve based on the amount of pollution they absorb, when their worms and bases are destroyed, and time, all adjustable from the set up screen. The major change from the current game is this, pollution generated vs pollution absorbed. Biter aggressiveness many biters, spitters, worms and bases are destoryed. Biter tactics could be tied to biter evolution, i.e. the biters evolve in intelligence as well as size, power, and speed.

Miners: Keep as is, if it is not broken, do not fix it.

Pipes transmit fluids like electricity: Good thing about this would be UPS gain, bad is loose of complexity, so personally I am neutral on this point.

Bots occupying space: No change, in my opinion this will be a massive UPS hit. What we currently have works, so no need to fix it.

Boilers: Better tutorial will fix this problem.

Items with volume and mass: The way this is currently implemented is via stack size. I can come up with several other ways to calculate this, by attaching a mass and volume attributes to entities and intermediates, and each container having a max volume / weight. What we currently have works, so no need to fix it.

Mountains, Adventure mode and so on: I see this as a major rewrite of the procedural world generation engine. There is a game called Dwarven Fortress that is also a building game within another genre that has that. Mountains and water depth could be implemented as a major release such as version 1.0 / 2.0 or downloadable content. My opinion on building underground, underwater, or adventuring is the same as implementing Mountains and water depth.