Increase Big Electric Pole Wire Reach to 32 to = Chunk Size

[Zaflis]

You'd need more than 800k people to agree with you to have a majority. Do you see why I find your "reddit proof for majority" hilarious?

That's not how gallup's work. Statistically very small sample is enough to give an idea of what is generally acceptable or atrocious.

[Bilka]

200 out of 150k isnt the majority either. Not to mention that the subreddit is a self-selected group, as I stated earlier. Or that "the majority wants X" is not how game dev works.

I mean, 2.5k people agreed with a cliff dick. Obviously this means that the majority wants more cliff dicks in the game so the next version will generate cliffs only in dick shape.

[Klonan]

0.18 changelog:

- Added the ability to place 2 electric poles next to eachother, so they align to chunks perfectly

[Koub]

[Koub] This is the moderator-me speaking. This is just a kind reminder that while a small dose of fun-making/trolling is acceptable, it should remain within a reasonable threshold. We don't want people to feel unwelcome to make suggestions. And on the other hand, the devs can legitimately decide not to implement suggestions, no matter how massive the community's support is : if the resulting game is bad, nobody will ever blame the community for having given bad suggestions, only the devs will get hatred for having implemented them.

[coppercoil]

Yes, reddit people aren’t majority. Nevertheless, do we always take decisions based on majority? How about arguments? How strong are arguments pro and contra?
I think one single man can propose some changes and we don’t need to count which army is bigger.
I think we can do lots of small improvements despite only few percent of players will enjoy for it. If some change will not break anything, things can be slightly improved for general consistency. That’s called polishing. That's good.

Sadly, “double pole” solution looks irrational, inelegant and redundant. It’s not a solution, it’s a workaround. I’m not a chunk-addicted player, but I haven’t read any serious thoughts against 32. Please quote it for me if I missed something really important.

[PyroFire]

Sadly, “double pole” solution looks irrational, inelegant and redundant. It’s not a solution, it’s a workaround. I’m not a chunk-addicted player, but I haven’t read any serious thoughts against 32. Please quote it for me if I missed something really important.

You missed the part where player suggested balance changes are not necessarily going to improve or add value to the game, it may in fact take value away.
Gotta be very careful about this sort of thing.
And often a player will be biased towards their own experiences and express suggestions or thoughts with that in mind - Nothing wrong with that, it's kinda hard not to do that, but again, designing based off this can often lead to bad outcomes.
A developer (the person designing the gameplay experience) generally has a very different perspective on the experience than that of a player, and this is absolutely one of those times.
Players do not necessarily know what they want to see out of the game as a player of that game, and often a suggestion will be driven by a feeling that something is missing or not quite right.
The actual suggestion is their attempt to self-diagnose and suggest options to address that feeling.

if the resulting game is bad, nobody will ever blame the community for having given bad suggestions, only the devs will get hatred for having implemented them.

Well said.


Serious thoughts against 32:

In this suggestion for the wire reach, it seems to be something about not having anything definitive to align your base against.
Power poles make it slightly awkward to align to chunk grid, and personally i see this as an interesting challenge to overcome.

Personally, i find symmetrical factories ugly.

You might ask, ok why make suggestions then if they are never acted upon - well, maybe you have some information or ideas that the developers simply haven't thought of or considered yet, for example: "the wire length being at 30 leads to ugly factory designs. Here's some screenshot examples of the ugliness" (it doesn't, so no screenshots of that exist, but i believe 32 would result in fairly distasteful factory designs).
But that hasn't been said or shown in this thread, so i must then agree that the devs decision of leaving it at 30 is the best decision.

And a serious reason why 32 is a very bad idea looking from a developers perspective:
Most of Factorio's replayability comes from getting close but not quite having that perfect answer, and always designing better and more efficient blueprints and better factory layouts.
If you had a simple definitive answer, "align ALL the big poles to the chunk grid!" then everyone's factory would look the same.
Everyone loses in this situation and people become bored of the game.

I do not see "because chunk alignment!" as a valid reason to trivialize what should be a fun design challenge, and something that makes your factory unique and personal to you and how you want to play.
Take that away and Factorio loses a very small piece of itself.

[theolderbeholder]

[...]Sadly, “double pole” solution looks irrational, inelegant and redundant. It’s not a solution, it’s a workaround. [...] Please quote it for me if I missed something really important.

Yes, I am pretty sure you missed being trolled by Klonan.

[Jap2.0]

Wasn't the roboport or substation or something's range/aoe increased to fit perfectly with chunks, or an I misremembering?

[eradicator]

But for long term planning for megabasers it matters a lot. It matters so much in fact it's one of big motivational hurdles wether you want to play the game at all or not.

That is a ridiculous argument and you know it. There are tons of things that don't "chunk align", medium pole ranges, any type of 3x3 entity, etcpp. The interesting part of building a megabase is supposed to be to master the games rules, not to demand to change the rules.

You must be aware of how most people are are more "vanilla-purists" when it comes to magabases. Showcasing a base that was built using mods is 1 good way to lose others interests. Why put so much effort into something that nobody will care about? "Play the game the way you want" is actually total lie when it comes to mods. The moment you put loaders and warehouses and god modules is when your playthrough is worth nothing in others eyes. Then any little mods matter too.

This is a general toxicity/attention addiction problem that many gaming communities and society as a whole suffer from. The goal should be to make people less addicted to attention and more tolerant towards other people, not to the carter to the haters who shun anyone who doesn't play by their rules. As for comparing "god modules" with "+2 pole range": Do you prefer apples or oranges?

I am generally against making the game "fit the engine". 32 is just a number that works well with computers, it's not in any way a better game rule and the only people who care about it is people who "play the engine" instead of the game. It's also a slippery slope where the next thing people demand is medium poles with 8 range to fit the engine, then a tiny tweak to inserter speed to make chest-chest movement fit better into 60 ticks, etc. etc., it's never gonna end. If you're unable to ignore the engine, then you're not playing the game.

[coppercoil]

You missed the part where player suggested balance changes are not necessarily going to improve or add value to the game, it may in fact take value away.

These changes WILL add value to the game for some players. Polishing does not need to be useful for everyone, does it?

Personally I don’t need 32-tile pole. I have no single chunk based construction, so I hope I'm not biased. Though, if some players are obsessed with it – why not? Why it’s bad? Factorio is so universal game, that can fit many different playstyles. You like symmetry? Great, go ahead. You don’t like symmetry? Great, do spaghetti. Nobody should care if XXX found YYY to be boring. If YYY does not provide screenshots “here’s ugly, here’s not”, that doesn’t mean they are wrong. Maybe, there’s just different taste. Is taste XXX better than YYY? Meh. There’s no serious argument for any taste.

If you had a simple definitive answer, "align ALL the big poles to the chunk grid!" then everyone's factory would look the same.

Do not align poles and your factory will look different . What’s the problem? If there are some people building equal factories AND they are happy with that, so what’s the problem? Everybody has a freedom to use any aligment. Unless, there's no freedom to align...

I do not see "because chunk alignment!" as a valid reason to trivialize what should be a fun design challenge, and something that makes your factory unique and personal to you and how you want to play.

Not every difficulty is challenging. Is there possibility to turn off cliffs? Why?

Yes, I am pretty sure you missed being trolled by Klonan.

Should I say that's fine while I dont think so? Should I lie?
Actually, I should have said “I don’t care”. But what if... I would care? How do these people think? Am I able to understand them? What would I think in their place?..

[boskid]

I think making big-electric-pole wire reach equal 32 would be bad. This would allow setups that would have exactly 1 big-electric-pole in every chunk in repeating pattern, but since power poles can have at most 5 copper connections to other electric poles, in most cases placing 1 big-electric-pole in each corner (or at any other offset) would mean 4 connections are for connecting with other big-electric-poles, there is only 1 connection spare for chunk itself (from 4 poles, 3 spare connections are for other chunks). This means now if you want to power something inside chunk you need to use other poles to cover chunk. If you want more than 1 connections from inside of chunk to big-electric-pole, then there will be risk some big-electric-poles will not get connected, and with repeating pattern this can lead to disconnected networks (ref: 70042). Value different than chunk size requires usage of more electric-poles and should in most cases break perfect grid pattern and prevent this issue from appearing to some players.

[lstndfnd]

Can we get this please with the 0.18 version?!

The only reason I want this is so that power poles and radars can be fully blueprinted for long distance and not leave gaps/overlaps in the radar coverage. As for the wire connections. I use substationsor medium poles for powering the factory. So big pole rarely make their way through my base. Only along the train rail network.

[Koub]

Can we get this please with the 0.18 version?!

The devs said no, so ... no.

[Jim-Bar]

Can we get this please with the 0.18 version?!

The only reason I want this is so that power poles and radars can be fully blueprinted for long distance and not leave gaps/overlaps in the radar coverage. As for the wire connections. I use substationsor medium poles for powering the factory. So big pole rarely make their way through my base. Only along the train rail network.

Just passing by to say that I support this too. Maybe it's not everyone's preference, but I wanted to show some of us would benefit from a wire reach extended to 32.

[MrBadDragon]

I think the major issue with chunks being 32 and power pole grid being 30 is that 32*4 = 128 which is not evenly divisible by 5, or 6.... My solution is to build a blueprint with 5 spans in a chunk over 4 chunks.

However, this does not evenly span 3 chunks, or 5 chunks or 2 chunks which means some jiggery pokery if you want to have grids of different sizes. end of the world? no. grumble inducing? yes.

[GotLag]

There's no reason to increase the wire reach just because the chunk size is 32. It has no gameplay advantage of disadvantage to be 32 vs 30.

If nobody ever told you chunk size was 32x32 then you wouldn't even know it was a thing.

Just ignore the fact chunks exist and build as you want. It doesn't change anything.

Maybe you can ignore it, players can't. There's new reddit posts appearing every now and then, even 2 in the past 2 weeks. It's partly because cityblock railways are becoming a common thing in megabasing, and placement of radars really matters. You don't want gaps, and if there is reveal area overlap it's not optimal for power consumption. So radars should be in the corners and that's really measured by chunks. There is even a mod to measure it conveniently, without needing to show the far more distracting F4 grid
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ChunkyChunks

I would like to point out that ChunkyChunks lets you change the grid size to, for example, match the reach of big electric poles.

[Oktokolo]

I would expect non-chunk-aligned radar coverage to fully remove the desire for chunk-sized factory blocks.
Chunk-alignment of radar coverage and odd pickup-behaviour of inserters at chunk borders are implementation artifacts that would be great to have fixed.
It probably will never happen for inserter behaviour. But making radars chunk-agnostic (circular coverage centered around actual position, radius non-divideable by chunk size) should be possible without too much performance impact.

[PyroFire]

... for some players ...

Can we get ... The only reason I want ...

I support this too.

grumble inducing? yes.

This is what mods are for, and in this case it's one line.

data.raw["electric-pole"]["big-electric-pole"].wire_reach=32

Someone feel free to turn this into a mod if it doesn't already exist.

... odd pickup-behaviour of inserters at chunk borders ...

First i've heard of this. More info? This could go in a bug report.

I would expect non-chunk-aligned radar coverage to fully remove the desire for chunk-sized factory blocks.
Chunk-alignment of radar coverage ... are implementation artifacts ...
... making radars chunk-agnostic (circular coverage centered around actual position, radius non-divideable by chunk size) should be possible without too much performance impact.

Excellent observations.
That's a good point to make, should radars have a circular field, or stay with their existing square one?
Tough call, perhaps this could be its own suggestion.
Though noting yes circular field is ever so slightly more costly due to circle math, but it's probably* negligible.

[Oktokolo]

... odd pickup-behaviour of inserters at chunk borders ...

First i've heard of this. More info? This could go in a bug report.

Inserters behave subtly different when inserter, pickup traget, and drop target are not in the same chunk. They are also updated by chunk - leading to the effect that they look like grabbing from the same pickup target in a round robin fashion until you have two of then wich reside in different chunks...
That subtle inserter behaviour is hard to fix - and will not get fixed anyway:
[0.17.11] Item gets not in chest on chunk transition (one way only)
[0.17.9] Inserters not working properly
[0.17.8] Inserter Priority
[0.16.51] Inserter/chest behave different on chunk border

[Icchan]

Now that one can align blueprints to the chunk grid with absolute reference and build them from the map, this change is more than needed. Robo ports align to grid, radars have absolute grid reference, so there's almost a requirement to place them within specific chunks, inserters work in optimized manner if they exist in the same chunk etc...

It all yells for grid aligned modular factories and blueprints

Yeah, this is what mods are for, but fixing an underlying issue of why we can't have more than 5 connections on poles or how to make the automatic connections more intuitive would be great...