Development and Discussion

[orzelek]

I'm playing with components and gearing up to start doing red research.
Would you consider making few changes that would make it slightly less annoying:
1. Make circuit wires available on basic tech. There is no good way to limit amount of produced blocks other then slots in chests. And even with reduced stack size on blocks it's still a lot of blocks that might never be used.
2. Make long inserters available on basic tech. Using burner assemblers with 4 products plus fuel recipes gets a bit.. tangled to say it gently

[orzelek]

Additional balancing question:
Is it by design that piercing ammo is green tech level?
(I'm concerned that I won't live that long.. biters are quire robust with exploration and normal ammo with one upgrade will not work well with spitters and med biters)

[lovely_santa]

I'm playing with components and gearing up to start doing red research.
Would you consider making few changes that would make it slightly less annoying:
1. Make circuit wires available on basic tech. There is no good way to limit amount of produced blocks other then slots in chests. And even with reduced stack size on blocks it's still a lot of blocks that might never be used.
2. Make long inserters available on basic tech. Using burner assemblers with 4 products plus fuel recipes gets a bit.. tangled to say it gently

1. With the reduced stack size you can stack them up to 200, like any other item in angels mods. And it's not as much as you think it is, if you look at the amount of buildings you're making with them. I know not all blocks are used as of now, this will change eventually.

2. Seems like you're playing with bobs mods, the burner stage is not fully supported yet, it needs some balancing still.. and the inserter overhaul might indeed have pushed long handed inserters a bit too far. I'll see what I can do.

Additional balancing question:
Is it by design that piercing ammo is green tech level?
(I'm concerned that I won't live that long.. biters are quire robust with exploration and normal ammo with one upgrade will not work well with spitters and med biters)

In one of the latest releases (v0.3.6), they actually are a expanding a lot slower and evolution should only be affected by killing them (no time, nor pollution) to make sure you can progress faster than evolution. It used to be behemoth spitters by the time you reached green science. Grey science is only manual, red science gives the turret, green science the red ammo for turrets and a cannon turret for your yellow ammo. Every tier gives something. I do believe we need some stronger ammo tho, but for that we need to do some more development to get some more features in exploration first.

[orzelek]

Additional balancing question:
Is it by design that piercing ammo is green tech level?
(I'm concerned that I won't live that long.. biters are quire robust with exploration and normal ammo with one upgrade will not work well with spitters and med biters)

In one of the latest releases (v0.3.6), they actually are a expanding a lot slower and evolution should only be affected by killing them (no time, nor pollution) to make sure you can progress faster than evolution. It used to be behemoth spitters by the time you reached green science. Grey science is only manual, red science gives the turret, green science the red ammo for turrets and a cannon turret for your yellow ammo. Every tier gives something. I do believe we need some stronger ammo tho, but for that we need to do some more development to get some more features in exploration first.

I'm fully aware of that - without this I'd be overrun already for sure. (And I did use 2x research multiplier but forgot 2x resource richness so partially self inflicted)
Fightning small biters with yellow ammo is... painful. And I think without my "make it easy" mod that multiplies amount of bullets per magazine 10x it would be annoying to a level of leaving it.
Making biters stronger has a sideffect - you spend tons of ammunition. I can easily go through 20000 bullets to clear 3-4 nests base. And it's necessarry to keep pollution cloud nest free or you'll get overrun or will need to maintain long turret lines.
I did prep terraina bit so I'm on a big island with two main connections outside. Jury is still out if I can actually get strong enough to go for resources outside of it. With RSO distances are quite big and I'm actually belting resources through like 800 tiles or so. I was fortunate enough that I had 2 patches of basic ones so I can survive a bit on iron/copper side and maybe even get to trains.

After about 22h with decent pollution cloud:

Base.jpg (243.04 KiB) Viewed 9410 times

I can manage running two labs of one type with production cores... thats kind of bad I think. I have an impression that research cost is on high side with blocks involved.
I'll see how far I can get or if biters will win

[lovely_santa]

Making biters stronger has a sideffect - you spend tons of ammunition. I can easily go through 20000 bullets to clear 3-4 nests base. And it's necessarry to keep pollution cloud nest free or you'll get overrun or will need to maintain long turret lines.

That's why only killing them increases pollution, for when you need 'room' and they shouldn't realy expand tbh.. it's just making it hard on yourself. I do wanna make some better ammo, but there are some more complications underway before that...

I can manage running two labs of one type with production cores... thats kind of bad I think. I have an impression that research cost is on high side with blocks involved.

I do feel it's a bit costly, it's still a proof of concept. We're still focussing on getting the components ready before giving attention to blocks (which use the components).

[orzelek]

Making biters stronger has a sideffect - you spend tons of ammunition. I can easily go through 20000 bullets to clear 3-4 nests base. And it's necessarry to keep pollution cloud nest free or you'll get overrun or will need to maintain long turret lines.

That's why only killing them increases pollution, for when you need 'room' and they shouldn't realy expand tbh.. it's just making it hard on yourself. I do wanna make some better ammo, but there are some more complications underway before that...

I have 7% evolution factor and I think about half of that or more maybe comes from biter expansion bases that I needed to destroy. They expand plenty enough.
And with nest inside pollution attack waves that come are harsh.
Maybe having full set of bobs makes it more difficult since enmies mod is active?
Elemental spawners with 1500 hp and physical resist take quite a lot of shots to take down. Thats part of why so much ammo is needed to take out enemy base - you sit there shooting at it and turrets take out the biters that attack. Ammo goes down quite fast in that scenario.

[lovely_santa]

Making biters stronger has a sideffect - you spend tons of ammunition. I can easily go through 20000 bullets to clear 3-4 nests base. And it's necessarry to keep pollution cloud nest free or you'll get overrun or will need to maintain long turret lines.

That's why only killing them increases pollution, for when you need 'room' and they shouldn't realy expand tbh.. it's just making it hard on yourself. I do wanna make some better ammo, but there are some more complications underway before that...

I have 7% evolution factor and I think about half of that or more maybe comes from biter expansion bases that I needed to destroy. They expand plenty enough.
And with nest inside pollution attack waves that come are harsh.
Maybe having full set of bobs makes it more difficult since enmies mod is active?
Elemental spawners with 1500 hp and physical resist take quite a lot of shots to take down. Thats part of why so much ammo is needed to take out enemy base - you sit there shooting at it and turrets take out the biters that attack. Ammo goes down quite fast in that scenario.

yeah, it's for sure not balanced with bobs enemies, and the expansion factor alsoe doesn't work in your favor... as long as you're having fun!

[orzelek]

Making biters stronger has a sideffect - you spend tons of ammunition. I can easily go through 20000 bullets to clear 3-4 nests base. And it's necessarry to keep pollution cloud nest free or you'll get overrun or will need to maintain long turret lines.

That's why only killing them increases pollution, for when you need 'room' and they shouldn't realy expand tbh.. it's just making it hard on yourself. I do wanna make some better ammo, but there are some more complications underway before that...

I have 7% evolution factor and I think about half of that or more maybe comes from biter expansion bases that I needed to destroy. They expand plenty enough.
And with nest inside pollution attack waves that come are harsh.
Maybe having full set of bobs makes it more difficult since enmies mod is active?
Elemental spawners with 1500 hp and physical resist take quite a lot of shots to take down. Thats part of why so much ammo is needed to take out enemy base - you sit there shooting at it and turrets take out the biters that attack. Ammo goes down quite fast in that scenario.

yeah, it's for sure not balanced with bobs enemies, and the expansion factor alsoe doesn't work in your favor... as long as you're having fun!

I've actually decided to go back to the "easy" way - without components. I'd like to launch a rocket at least and do that below 100h or so
Components seem to need peaceful mode or no biters at all. Seeing as every block needs previos tier block and then all of that goes into research resource consumption will go over the top pretty quickly.

[Voidedfactory]

While I'm waiting for another mod of mine to get an update from the community since it's original creator is a bit behind (and he left it open for someone else to update it in his mod portal), I thought about just starting with Angel's mods (not ANgel's and Bob's, that's a bit too much). And now, I have one main question.

Why the hell are certain prerequisites not properly connected?

Take cliff explosives, for example. The base game's formula is used (grenades, explosives, steel barrel), which is fine, but steel barrels are only earned through fluid handling, which is not slated as a prerequisite for Cliff Explosives.

What's worse is explosives. Those require water, sulfur and coal (as usual). But Sulfur requires hydrogen sulfide and oxygen. But where can I get hydrogen sulfide? Behind Sulfur Processing 2, which again is not a prerequisite to Cliff Explosives. Bizarrely, Sulfur itself is available with Sulfur Processing 1, but not it's required hydrogen sulfide! Just, why? And beyond that, green catalyst carriers require advanced chemistry 1, which requires the gas/oil extraction and gas processing. Which, again, are not prerequisites.

As a reference, this is the direct line of researches to get Cliff Explosives, from bottom to top: Cliff explosives, Explosives, Sulfur Processing 1, Basic chemistry 2, electronics, basic chemistry 1, Military 2, Automation, Steel, Military 1, Green Science.

On top of those, this is what else you actually need that is not indicated in the tech tree: Fluid Handling, Sulfur Processing 2, Advanced Chemistry 1, Gas Processing, Oil Processing, Gas and Oil Extraction, Water Treatment.

Look, I understand that Angel's is supposed to be more complex. I can accept that. And I hate to sound super-duper upset and everything about this, but it's ridiculous to require that much convoluted work to get to even one item when said work, according to the mod, isn't even required for the item in question. At bare minimum, I would think the requirements for sulfur would all be available when sulfur is, or sulfur itself is moved back to be with it's other required ingredient. Certainly the other requirements to actually produce just the explosives should probably be re-arranged or whatever is needed so that it all flows, and that lack of flow is kinda killing my will to keep trying these mods because of how disconnected this part is; that, and the fact that if this one bit is this bad, how much worse is the more complex stuff going to be? If all of these researches were proper pre-requisites, it'd feel like a lot but I'd know exactly what I need to get and then work on how to get it. Instead, I'm looking at cliff explosives, working down to find what I need to make, and getting dumbfounded when I unlock sulfur but then can't even make it and then have to look around for what else I actually need (and thank goodness I have FNEI or else it could be worse) (I feel like I'm repeating myself, but eh.)

My only two guesses as to why it isn't is either A.) the game itself does not allow items to have that many prerequisites directly below (or above, if you're looking at the vanilla tree) the item in question (which doesn't seem that hard since Spidertrons require six different researches to even research), or B.) all the technology placements are done around players just running through all the research they can with the science they can currently make, and then figuring it all out later, which doesn't really make sense to me on the surface, either.

(but seriously, if nothing else, please fix the sulfur/hydrogen sulfide placement. Literally makes 0 sense for them to be where they are and not either switched around or placed together.)

[kingarthur]

While I'm waiting for another mod of mine to get an update from the community since it's original creator is a bit behind (and he left it open for someone else to update it in his mod portal), I thought about just starting with Angel's mods (not ANgel's and Bob's, that's a bit too much). And now, I have one main question.

Why the hell are certain prerequisites not properly connected?

Take cliff explosives, for example. The base game's formula is used (grenades, explosives, steel barrel), which is fine, but steel barrels are only earned through fluid handling, which is not slated as a prerequisite for Cliff Explosives.

What's worse is explosives. Those require water, sulfur and coal (as usual). But Sulfur requires hydrogen sulfide and oxygen. But where can I get hydrogen sulfide? Behind Sulfur Processing 2, which again is not a prerequisite to Cliff Explosives. Bizarrely, Sulfur itself is available with Sulfur Processing 1, but not it's required hydrogen sulfide! Just, why? And beyond that, green catalyst carriers require advanced chemistry 1, which requires the gas/oil extraction and gas processing. Which, again, are not prerequisites.

As a reference, this is the direct line of researches to get Cliff Explosives, from bottom to top: Cliff explosives, Explosives, Sulfur Processing 1, Basic chemistry 2, electronics, basic chemistry 1, Military 2, Automation, Steel, Military 1, Green Science.

On top of those, this is what else you actually need that is not indicated in the tech tree: Fluid Handling, Sulfur Processing 2, Advanced Chemistry 1, Gas Processing, Oil Processing, Gas and Oil Extraction, Water Treatment.

Look, I understand that Angel's is supposed to be more complex. I can accept that. And I hate to sound super-duper upset and everything about this, but it's ridiculous to require that much convoluted work to get to even one item when said work, according to the mod, isn't even required for the item in question. At bare minimum, I would think the requirements for sulfur would all be available when sulfur is, or sulfur itself is moved back to be with it's other required ingredient. Certainly the other requirements to actually produce just the explosives should probably be re-arranged or whatever is needed so that it all flows, and that lack of flow is kinda killing my will to keep trying these mods because of how disconnected this part is; that, and the fact that if this one bit is this bad, how much worse is the more complex stuff going to be? If all of these researches were proper pre-requisites, it'd feel like a lot but I'd know exactly what I need to get and then work on how to get it. Instead, I'm looking at cliff explosives, working down to find what I need to make, and getting dumbfounded when I unlock sulfur but then can't even make it and then have to look around for what else I actually need (and thank goodness I have FNEI or else it could be worse) (I feel like I'm repeating myself, but eh.)

My only two guesses as to why it isn't is either A.) the game itself does not allow items to have that many prerequisites directly below (or above, if you're looking at the vanilla tree) the item in question (which doesn't seem that hard since Spidertrons require six different researches to even research), or B.) all the technology placements are done around players just running through all the research they can with the science they can currently make, and then figuring it all out later, which doesn't really make sense to me on the surface, either.

(but seriously, if nothing else, please fix the sulfur/hydrogen sulfide placement. Literally makes 0 sense for them to be where they are and not either switched around or placed together.)

seriously needed a wall of text to bitch about the damn tech prerequisites. there are at minimum 6 angel mods all making changes to the tree and that doesnt account for the fact that angels without bob mod is a rather recent edition. shit gets missed. adding the prerequisites isnt an issue when someones aware it needs done but for whatever set of mods you loaded up clearly is using an older version of said prerequisites and nobody had updated it yet. factorio devs only have to worry about there 1 mod and it has had a major tech change change in a good long time.

[valneq]

Why the hell are certain prerequisites not properly connected?

There are several reasons for that. Primarily because Angel's mods don't follow the vanilla recipe design philosophy.

In vanilla there is typically 1 and only 1 way of making a specific item. When the recipe is set in stone, the "from raw" is unique for every recipe and you can conjure up a tech tree that resembles these facts very nicely – thus guiding the players to finding that one way of making the item. The only exception that comes to mind is oil processing: Basic oil processing, Advanced oil processing and Coal liquefaction have very similar output fluids, be it with different ratios.

Furthermore, in vanilla, most recipes have 1 and only 1 output, and therefore no undesired by-product. The notable exception, again, being oil refining – and in addition uranium processing. But in both cases you could argue that none of the outputs is really undesired.

In Angel's mods there is often multiple ways of getting to a desired item. You just found one of these cases: sulfur.
Furthermore, in Angel's mods many recipes have multiple products. Usually only one of these is what you actually need. The rest is undesired by-products that you can often not handle at a given tech level. So many by-products get flared off or clarified initially. In order to process them appropriately, you need additional technologies. Sulfur is one of these cases that appears as by-products in the form of sulfuric waste water and acid gas. Each having about 15 to 20 (or even more, depending on exact mod composition) ways of being generated.

I don't know why you are convinced that hydrogen sulfide gas is strictly necessary to make sulfur. It is not. There are several optional ways of getting to solid sulfur that don't require hydrogen sulfide gas at all. The simplest ones that come to mind are:

1. Sulfur ← Sulfuric Waste Water ← <ore> hydro-refining ← <ore> crushing
2. Sulfur ← Sulfuric Waste Water ← Clean coal to coke and sulfuric waste water ← Coal crushing
3. Sulfur ← Sulfuric Waste Water ← Oil separation
4. Sulfur ← Sulfuric Waste Water ← Natural gas separation

I usually start out with the coal to coke route to produce the first sulfur. But that's just my choice.

As you found, there is other ways: From acid gas, which itself has a dozen different sources, then there are options via polluted artificial fish water from fish breeding. Or, once you have some sulfuric acid, you can jump-start sulfur production via coal filtering of slag slurry – which gives back more sulfur than you put in.

After unlocking chemical science, I would argue that the most reliable way of getting sulfur is via sulfur processing 3: sulfur air scrubbing produces both sulfuric waste, as well as acid gas (by processing the used lime filter), and has essentially only lime and water as an input to the process. In pretty much all other cases, sulfur is just a by-product of a different process.

Depending on the recipe or production chain you want to use, you will require a different set of technologies. Hardly any one of them is strictly necessary for cliff explosives, so gating cliff explosives behind them all is undesired – and gating cliff explosives behind a specific production chain is neither.

Additionally, as kingarthur already said: Angel's mods are not one mod that you can optimize until everyone is happy. They are a combinations of mods that do different things in different combinations. In many cases, compatibilities with external mods need to be taken into account, and different mod settings (overhauls) within Angel's mods change up some production chains entirely. The tech tree sometimes just makes compromises so as to not always being a completely different beast. It does not always change up the dependencies between different technologies. This may or may not be a good way of dealing with dependencies.

But no matter how you try to do it, a tree is never able to represent options between vastly different production chains.

None of the things I said imply that I am happy with the tech tree. There are issues that can and should be addressed at some point. But I hope that you understand that things are not as simple as they are in vanilla.

Currently, Angel's mods are heavily being worked on (component mode and tech overhaul) – and once these are more or less done, the tech tree might get some more love to iron out some of the issues that can be addressed. Fluid handling for barrels being necessary for cliff explosives for example

[MakeItGraphic]

Most or some of it is a result of splitting stuff to several mods and making it modular. Making one package would make things easier to handle and streamline.
But in general yeah there are techs that are semi redundant depending on the config you are running, or in different orders as needed. Again it's pretty difficult to account for all possible cases and configurations. One package that's just there would make things easier.

I agree with this. Would also make compatibility patches easier to implement.

[lovely_santa]

You can always post missing prerequisites here. The issue with adding them, that in some cases we forget to add a configuration and end up with technology being unreachable. I do want to add all required prerequisites tho...

[mrvn]

Why the hell are certain prerequisites not properly connected?

Depending on the recipe or production chain you want to use, you will require a different set of technologies. Hardly any one of them is strictly necessary for cliff explosives, so gating cliff explosives behind them all is undesired – and gating cliff explosives behind a specific production chain is neither.

This makes me whish for an OR expression for tech dependencies. Cliff explosives should depend on all the techs producing sulfur ORed together. Any one chain that produces sulfur is sufficient.

This not only goes for technologies but also for buildings and recipies. Currently they both are unlocked by a single technology. This leads to buildings being unlocked that can't be used, might not even have any recipe at all. Or recipes where you can't produce the ingrediences or don't have the building for it.

The big drawback of this would be that the tech tree would get kind of dynamic since displaying all the interactions between techs would be hard to impossible. Researching tech A might add new buildings to be unlocked by tech B that wouldn't be visible while tech A isn't researched (since without A they wouldn't unlock). Recipes and entities would have to be separate nodes in the tech tree so that you can click on "Ore crusher mkIII" and see what tech chains would unlock it. There wouldn't be just one way to unlock it. But any of the chains would include everything so you can build it.

[lovely_santa]

Announcement

To reduce the amount of angels mods, we decided a while ago to combine the smaller mods. For now this affects 6 Addons that are combined into 2 Addons. We kept the settings in order for you to enable/disable certain parts of the mod, so you don't gain/lose features. You will NOT loose any progress on your existing save! The steps to convert your old game over are as easy. You delete the old mods from your mod list and add their replacement mod instead. Depending on your configuration, make sure to check out the settings. If you configured it correctly, you can load up your old save and it will work out of the box.

Some details about the mods:

• The mod Angel's Addons - Warehouses is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Storage Options
• The mod Angel's Addons - Ore Silos is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Storage Options
• The mod Angel's Addons - Pressure Tanks is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Storage Options
• The mod Angel's Addons - Petrochem Train is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Mass Transit
• The mod Angel's Addons - Smelting Train is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Mass Transit
• The mod Angel's Addons - Crawler Train is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Mass Transit

Kind regards,
The Angel's dev team

[facc00]

Good morning, love your mods. I wanted to request a search option for the crawler. Things get a bit unorganized in there and sorting isn't an option. Thanks in advance.

[jodokus31]

Good morning, love your mods. I wanted to request a search option for the crawler. Things get a bit unorganized in there and sorting isn't an option. Thanks in advance.

Not exactly, what you asked for, but it helps me with finding stuff in big inventories:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/manual-inventory-sort

[Valeryn4]

In Angels, expansion, evolution and pollution are disabled by default ...
How to set the right settings so that biters would sometimes attack, in mid-game

Does Rampat Mod work with Angel and Bob's Enemies?
How does the evolution take place if it is disabled by default?

[Ezarkal]

Announcement

To reduce the amount of angels mods, we decided a while ago to combine the smaller mods. For now this affects 6 Addons that are combined into 2 Addons. We kept the settings in order for you to enable/disable certain parts of the mod, so you don't gain/lose features. You will NOT loose any progress on your existing save! The steps to convert your old game over are as easy. You delete the old mods from your mod list and add their replacement mod instead. Depending on your configuration, make sure to check out the settings. If you configured it correctly, you can load up your old save and it will work out of the box.

Some details about the mods:

• The mod Angel's Addons - Warehouses is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Storage Options
• The mod Angel's Addons - Ore Silos is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Storage Options
• The mod Angel's Addons - Pressure Tanks is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Storage Options
• The mod Angel's Addons - Petrochem Train is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Mass Transit
• The mod Angel's Addons - Smelting Train is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Mass Transit
• The mod Angel's Addons - Crawler Train is depricated and is now part of Angel's Addons - Mass Transit

Kind regards,
The Angel's dev team

Good idea for the mod combination, but you should turn this announcement into a topic of it's own and sticky it.
-It took me a while to find it, while trying to figure why were these mods now broken
-In a few days, it will just be buried in this thread and nobody will find it.

Many thanks for the awesome mods. Factorio would not be the same without you guys.

[scuzball01]

Hi,

First off, thank you for the awesome mods. Its given me countless hours of entertainment, which I actually had to step away from for a bit and pay attention to my family, but now I am back and starting up a new round of Factorio and was wondering if there were/are/or will be any standalone versions of your mods? In particular, I'd love to be able to use the buildings/tech you designed for smelting, but with just the simple base game. Has anyone else done this?

Thanks,
Keith