Friday Facts #376 - Research and Technology

[KuuLightwing]

You just need to touch grass oil. I picture an engineer arriving at unknown world, having no clue what's needed and what's not. Stumbles upon oil — my goodness, time to remember how to build that oil processing stuff they taught us in the academy! Seems pretty natural to me.

Immersion is not a concern here, concern is that it makes some approaces less valid or even impossible. In the last save I set up an oil outpost defended by flamethrower turrets fed by oil from the same outpost. With the new mode, I'll have to just use gun turrets, then research flamers, then go back and rebuild the outpost with flamers, which just adds tedium and doesn't actually improve the game flow. I'm assuming the flamer research isn't available before oil because otherwise it would violate the stated design goal of making said change to begin with.

Your point is not helped by the fact all quality designs shown in FFF are belt based

Yes, but they all just simple designs dealing with the exactly one recipe. If you want to understand what the concern is specifically I suggest reading the rest of the post you picked a phrase from.

[mcdjfp]

If the number is low it can still have a huge impact. If you can't research something that requires blue circuits until you have crafted 1 blue circuit, then that requires you to actually start building some of the things you've researched to progress rather than just researching every single tech using a particular research pack and then figuring out what it actually does later.

If the requirement is one, then you might as well have the blue circuit tech as a requirement itself. Then at least I could be researching the next tech as I built my blue circuit production instead of having to wait until I finish my blue circuit production to begin researching the technology.

[agmike]

With the new mode, I'll have to just use gun turrets, then research flamers, then go back and rebuild the outpost with flamers, which just adds tedium and doesn't actually improve the game flow. I'm assuming the flamer research isn't available before oil because otherwise it would violate the stated design goal of making said change to begin with.

You touch oil, research what you need and build an outpost. Given that it sounds like your outpost was quite some ways away you likely had to scout for it first anyway, yes? And if not it's not a problem to touch it when it's close. Doesn't look that bad for me, given that it's essentially a research for free.

Yes, but they all just simple designs dealing with the exactly one recipe.

You're telling it as if complex stuff is not much easier with bots today. You can't say it's something specific to quality.

If you want to understand what the concern is specifically I suggest reading the rest of the post you picked a phrase from.

Please do point out where in your post you suggest a mechanic that inverts 90% chance of producing bad item metric you initially state you have problem with. You only suggest limiting it to base materials, which is already a possibility.

[Anachrony]

If the requirement is one, then you might as well have the blue circuit tech as a requirement itself.

That misses the point. It doesn't accomplish the same thing at all. The way things are now, you can research not only the things that use blue circuits, but the things that have those techs as prereqs, and the things that have those as prereqs, until you're researched every single tech that has the same research pack requirement, all without having actually used any of the new recipes yet. Having any requirement at all that you actually build something, no matter how small, breaks up the techs under a research pack into smaller segments, and requires you to actually start building some of it before you progress further down those paths.

[Cerberus]

I wonder if manually crafting something counts. Blue chips you can not do manually and neither can oil or steel, but uranium for example sure can.

[Anachrony]

I wonder if manually crafting something counts. Blue chips you can not do manually and neither can oil or steel, but uranium for example sure can.

It counts toward production statistics, which would be the most logical thing to base it on.

[KuuLightwing]

You touch oil, research what you need and build an outpost. Given that it sounds like your outpost was quite some ways away you likely had to scout for it first anyway, yes? And if not it's not a problem to touch it when it's close. Doesn't look that bad for me, given that it's essentially a research for free.

Just adds unnecessary tedium that doesn't improve my experience. Not saying it's the end of the world, but it's not an improvement.

You're telling it as if complex stuff is not much easier with bots today. You can't say it's something specific to quality.

Context was the user suggesting that quality discourages such designs, while I think the opposite is true.

Please do point out where in your post you suggest a mechanic that inverts 90% chance of producing bad item metric you initially state you have problem with. You only suggest limiting it to base materials, which is already a possibility.

What? No I did not suggest such a thing. You must have mistaken.

Problem arises when you try to iterate through multiple production steps using quality modules in each of them. This makes it necessary to sort items by quality after every step which would make belt designs way more complex while barely affecting bot designs. The point was made, again, to demonstrate that quality encourages such designs rather than discouraging them as was suggested.

[Gemma]

My reaction to the quality naming scheme was that it might break immersion a bit, not because I take the game or myself seriously, but because that naming scheme isn't found anywhere else in the game. It feels out of place, like a naked man in winter stretching outdoors before a neighborhood run. (He will be getting arrested, because it is winter.)

The first alternative I thought of was a simple color-based naming scheme: green, blue, purple, orange. It feels a bit more at home, because we already use those names for science packs, even though they aren't their official names. But, I think it runs into the problem of being both too arbitrary (why is orange higher quality than green?) and not descriptive enough (purple isn't the technical name for anything). Still, I think it's slightly more interesting than something like, "standard-good-great-excellent-perfect," which is probably the obvious generic choice.

As one of those players who uses beacons sparingly, (only because I prefer more organic designs) I don't have any problems with quality as an idea. It seems like a fun thing to work on in the late-game that I'm sure I'll dabble in to some degree. I already don't construct my base with blueprints, so that part doesn't bother me. To the contrary, I'm looking forward to seeing the progression visually in expansion bases where old, pre-quality setups are still standing with newer quality neighbors mixed in amongst them as the base grows outwards.

[blazespinnaker]

I'm still not sold on the implementation of quality. Primarily, in what world is a 90% failure rate acceptable when manufacturing a product?

There is no failure rate in quality/factorio. No DOA. so, it's 0% failure rate, not 90%.

As for variance in quality, getting it exactly right is nearly impossible.

Think about recall rates on vehicles.

What you generally have in manufacturing is everything that gets produced falls within some standard range of specifications. Getting something perfectly right, would be 'epic' (ugh) indeed.

[blazespinnaker]

The new research thing seems like a pretty minor change, imho. Not clear to me that will make much of a difference in the game.

If you are moving along with reasonable efficiency, you generally like to start drilling/mining/crafting/producing ahead of time anyways before the science gets unlocked.

[wizcreations]

The new “trigger” technology unlocks brings the one feature I preferred from Satisfactory into Factorio. This will make the game so much more manageable for a casual player like me! Great change!

[Anachrony]

I'm still not sold on the implementation of quality. Primarily, in what world is a 90% failure rate acceptable when manufacturing a product?

I don't know if it applies equally to all product types, but the whole quality mechanic makes me think about microchip manufacturing. It's fairly common for microchips to have manufacturing defects, especially at the smallest, bleeding edge sizes. But single defect doesn't necessarily make the whole thing valueless. In many cases they can test what's working and what's not, disable what's not working, and sell it in a different product category depending on how much of it is working.

[blazespinnaker]

What really surprised me was this statement:

In our playthroughs, the parts of the factory which were dealing with the quality were less then 5% of the whole Factory, so don't worry about being forced to solve all the mixed quality items everywhere.

5%? I mean.. is quality everywhere or not.

[mcdjfp]

That misses the point. It doesn't accomplish the same thing at all. The way things are now, you can research not only the things that use blue circuits, but the things that have those techs as prereqs, and the things that have those as prereqs, until you're researched every single tech that has the same research pack requirement, all without having actually used any of the new recipes yet. Having any requirement at all that you actually build something, no matter how small, breaks up the techs under a research pack into smaller segments, and requires you to actually start building some of it before you progress further down those paths.

I do understand the difference. I don't see limiting my research choices as a good thing in general. I want to be able to build the blue circuit factory, and build it properly while researching the item that I wanted the blue circuits for. There are certain circumstances such as the new planets, or the steel axe situation where it does make sense.

I ask this. What is the point of the research queue if everything is gummed up by these new limits? I doubt we will be able to queue things up until the unlock requirement is met.

[wizcreations]

Better names for quality:
Poor
Basic
Normal
Fair
Good
Well Made
Superior
Excellent
Exceptional
Masterful
Master Craft

I’m sure you can use these as inspiration to come up with better names for the quality levels. It really is not too hard to avoid the “rare” naming convention.

[blazespinnaker]

We also wanted to let you unlock something super powerful for the end-game, which led us to the idea of the research productivity.

One of the things I found interesting with SE was that some late game technology is too OP, like teleporting resources. It's possible that making those things reduced your max level productivity (because of a key, non replenisable resource it used), but I never tried to figure it out, because even just one of them sort of ruined the mod for me.

I'm curious if there will be anything like that in the DLC. In a way, logistics + artillery + islands are sort of like that in vanilla, because they push back biters with minimal effort, but at least they just ruin a part of the end game, not the whole end game.

[Cerberus]

I wonder if manually crafting something counts. Blue chips you can not do manually and neither can oil or steel, but uranium for example sure can.

Just realized what I wrote is untrue anyway, you can't because you need acid

[Anachrony]

I do understand the difference.

Previously you said that a small requirement makes no difference, suggesting that you didn't understand what it accomplishes. Now you've moved on to acknowledging that it makes a big difference, just that you don't like the difference that it makes. It's possible that if you only just came to understand it and have only begun to theorize about the gameplay implications that you don't fully appreciate the positive aspects yet.

I ask this. What is the point of the research queue if everything is gummed up by these new limits? I doubt we will be able to queue things up until the unlock requirement is met.

What makes you think that? A tech is a tech, regardless of the research costs. Nullius essentially already has this feature and has the research queue enabled by default. There at least you can queue them like any other techs. I don't see why Wube's implementation would be less user friendly than a mod.

Your research options as you perceive them are already limited by not having all the research packs at the start of the game. As it is now it's possible to get into a situation where you unlock a bunch of research all at once and then are blocked on research for a long time until you build stuff. I don't see how it's inherently worse to break that up into smaller stages, in fact there are a lot of benefits to doing so.

[Cerberus]

The new research thing seems like a pretty minor change, imho. Not clear to me that will make much of a difference in the game.

If you are moving along with reasonable efficiency, you generally like to start drilling/mining/crafting/producing ahead of time anyways before the science gets unlocked.

Well they wrote themselves what the point is. It is not so important for the starter planet indeed. It is for the new planets. If you could research everything from that planet while not even having been there, the only point of the planet would be a simple mining outpost, and the developers are right with that reasoning. You could just set up all new technologies you have already and come back. Same if they lock everything behind the planet-specific science pack: you could set up the mining outpost, set up delivery to starter planet, and come back and research everything on the starter planet. It sounds to me way more fun if there are a multitude of things to do on that new planet. Like small Factorio games within the main Factorio game. And this new trigger system ensures you do everything on the new planet, because you need to be on the planet for the first steps (the triggers) AND the last steps (producing the actual science pack and setting up logistics to ship it to the starter planet). And I'm assuming interplanetary travel will be non-trivial so you can't just go back and forth like it's nothing (so not comparable to visiting one of your normal outposts on the same planet).

It's just that, if they do this for the new planets, they can as well do it for the standard planet. For consistency, and to make the player already familiar with the system.

[Joe Black]

Ich liebe es sehr lange Forschen zu müssen. So kann ich mein eigenes Spieltempo welches sehr langsam ist zu haben. Ich hoffe sehr ihr lässt die individuelle Startoptionen mit dem individuellen Einstellen der Basis Forschungs-Preisen (ich hab ein Faktor von 0.1) auch in zukünftigen Versionen.

I love having to do very long research. So I can have my own pace of play which is very slow. I very much hope that you will continue to allow the individual start options with the individual setting of the base research prices (I have a factor of 0.1) in future versions.