Friday Facts #376 - Research and Technology

[coppercoil]

I read "Quality clarifications". It seems 35-page discussion was just wasting of time and NOTHING will change (except the naming which is not a "strategic" issue). Kovarex just repeated his beliefs we did not agree. I feel disappointed.

[Jarin]

Thanks for the quality follow-up. 100% in changing the names to something less fantasy-inspired. The rest is enough to make me worry a bit less about it.

Loving the idea of the alternate technology unlocks, both from what it contributes to the base game, and for what modders can do with it.

[OohNachos]

I love this game, and I love this development shop.

Some of the responses to the latest FFFs show the wisdom in keeping radio silence during development. These guys are masters at refining the game loop: entertain new ideas, keep what's fun, toss what isn't. Improve. Grow. Prune. Clean. Shine. Repeat.

I am 100% stoked for the expansion, and can't wait for it to arrive. I'm glad, though, that when it comes it will be with the quality that we've come to expect and love (and maybe take for granted?) from this absolutely exceptional developer.

[Jarin]

Darn, nothing addressing quality being used to increase the light range of lamps. I was really hoping for that

Seconding this.

[bigyihsuan]

In my opinion discussing the names of the qualities is the ultimate bikeshed. The names can be very easily changed; what about the mechanics?

Personally I'm fine with the randomness; that's just another thing to automate around Plus, I don't think this is quality's final form anyway, since we're probably a ways out from release.

[IronCartographer]

When you don't put quality modules somewhere, everything works as before, so you don't have to sort everything everywhere as some people thought.
...
I can only design the game around what I enjoy, and I just don't enjoy having to keep track of a huge number of unique recipes, which all work technically basically the same.

To be clear: Many did understand that quality would only exist with modules in place, and still found the concept (in pursuit of optimizing megabase potential within the new ruleset) repetitive due to forcing recirculation loops in all of those places.

The compromise in pursuit of streamlining for accessibility and avoiding subjective tedium makes sense, but please look to additional ways the API and thus mods can implement quality within the crafting system (e.g. specifying the quality results/thresholds/deltas of a recipe with additional ingredients, etc.)!

[malecord]

Makes sense to me.

[FutureSpec]

I am in love with the Trigger Technologies idea! It feels natural and looks to improve even the base game.

I agree the Quality tier names are boring and un-thematic. The current names give me flashbacks of grindy-MMO type games.

[madpav3l]

I hope you keep the names or that it will be easy to mod back. The alternatives seem unintuitive to me. Is well-tuned better than refined or is optimized better?
Now I play Starfield, where weapons have tiers: Calibrated, Refined, Advanced and Superior, and without looking up the damage numbers I never know which is better!

[rldml]

Optimized has to be the last quality tear. Optimized is an absolute maximum value and cannot be increased

Optimization is a process.

state != process

Something in an already optimal state cannot be more optimized than it is already. That's the definition of the word "optimal"

You can optimize something a bit, take a break, then optimize it some more later. It's like saying "being improved is an absolute maximum value".

Yeah, but that means, whatever you optimizing there wasn't in an optimal state before and perhaps after your changes too.

As result of our debate i would recommend to avoid the word 'optimized' to avoid confusion.

[En-ymmarra]

Will you add an aerial / air / flying transport or will you touch that topic in some of the next FFF? You could write in the FFF "No, we will not add that, and that's why—"

Here is one of the ideas on the air cargo transportation in the real world:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjBgEkbnX2I
In short, the video discovers the usage of airships for a large amount of cargo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship
Also, an airship need to grab a counterweight to unload the cargo, because it can't deflate its gas chambers very fast. It could be water or another payload, so, speaking of Factorio, it would never stop transferring goods and you would need to balance the payload presence on each of the loading points.

And it would be cool to see airports and jets (at least the passenger jets) in Factorio.

[KuuLightwing]

Also I get the increased feeling that many of these changes are aimed at disrupting the gameplay based on using ratios and planning, and I'm not really a fan of this approach. Sure some people don't like planning or using ratios, and that's fine, but I don't know if it's worth to try to force that on everyone else. Infinite productivity research is essentially one of these things, and I don't know if I really am interested in redesigning parts of the factory every time a research finishes, so the corresponding subfactories will probably just sit there idling more and more as the research continues.

[mmmPI]

I read "Quality clarifications". It seems 35-page discussion was just wasting of time and NOTHING will change (except the naming which is not a "strategic" issue). Kovarex just repeated his beliefs we did not agree. I feel disappointed.

On the other hand it's tough to change a feature that you playtested and you like because some other person who didn't played with it anticipate their dislike.

[Néomorphos]

Great FFF!

I wasn't really sold on the quality feature last week, but the more i think about it, the more it makes sense to me.

Now speaking of the new researchs for improved recipes, I start to see a trend I am not sure how to feel about.
Basically, it looks like the game is becoming a lot more granular in its progression, and the progression goes much much further than before.
So I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing, especially since it's for the end-game which is currently already very granular. But I wonder if having lots and lots of micro-scale granular progression would feel more grindy in the end-game, than it currently is?

For context, I never really got into mega-bases* as I found it to be quite grindy / unrewarding, so that's also where my point of view comes from.
To put it in other words : mega-base surely need some refreshment, but I'd say it also needs some kind of onboarding from the "normal game".

*(I did a few mega-furnaces and mega-factories of a specific item but never a full production chain)

[Zaflis]

I like the idea of NOT designing a full factory around specific ratios. When it's a continuous progress of monitoring and adapting to factory's needs it's less monotonous and refreshing to do megabasing.

[CrimsonSky]

Ok, so after my massive rant from the previous FFF, this is a nice breath of fresh air. I am still not a fan of the quality system, though I do appreciate the fact that the devs at least had the guts to admit that their feature wasn't quite as well received as they hoped. I'm still going to wait for the DLC to come out to see how good or bad the feature truly is, so I'm going to keep an open mind until then.

As for the research, I am actually kind of a big fan. In the vanilla game, it always felt like you were researching the technologies in the same way: put potion in lab and wait until it cooks up. Now, you can need to complete secondary objectives to unlock the research, which is pretty cool -- and they're also not too obtuse or grindy from what I've seen. The only problem I've seen is oil processing, where you have to put a pumpjack in the oil, unlock oil processing, go back to your factory to craft the refineries and plants and then finally return just so you can use the oil you had already discovered. It sounds pretty annoying, though not necessarily game-breaking.

Similar to my last post, I will offer a suggestion for this mechanic: perhaps in order to unlock space travel, you need to go out exploring in the world and find some sort of ruined spaceship kind of like the one from the beginning of the game, though it is set-up like a mini-structure similar to the ruins from SE. After going inside, you can find some sort of item that lets you research rocket silos/spaceships/whatever. I think this will encourage exploration further than just resource gathering and also add a feeling of dread that you aren't the only engineer who crash landed on Nauvis. Also, in order to not make it super frustrating, have multiple ruined spaceships spawn per world, and maybe we could toggle how common/uncommon they are similarly to resources, trees, and stuff like that.

[maxp779]

Great update guys looking forward to next week!

Glad you're sticking with quality as it is, seems like a cool mechanic.

[dasiro]

this isn't an RPG, it's a game that is highly focused on design, production, automation and optimization so "random" is a base element that people want to either eliminate and/or design/produce/automate/optimize. a production line always starts with the most basic resource and should end with the perfect end-product. Introduction of random on so many levels is a nightmare and not because of the challenge it poses, but for the inconsistency. In order to achieve the end-goal there's just WAY too much hassle and it will make the effort even more of a GRIND instead of a challenge.

A lot of people with autism LOVE the consistency the game has now, but RANDOM = HORRIBLE so I'm guessing a lot of them will have the same feeling about this huge change

[DudebroPyro]

state != process

Something in an already optimal state cannot be more optimized than it is already. That's the definition of the word "optimal"

Ah, optimal != optimized
I agree that optimal means it's reached the peak of optimization. "Optimized", however, just means that it has had some optimization work done on it. It's like, again, the difference between "perfected" and "improved" - you can improve something and then improve it some more, but you can't improve something that's been perfected.

So I don't see a problem with the word "optimized" itself - but I do see your point when applied to the word "optimal".

[DanGio]

I also wonder how the dependency technologies work with this trigger system : what happens if I try to mine uranium before researching concrete ?