Friday Facts #376 - Research and Technology

[Ogro]

Greetings, just came to express my sentiments on the role play aspect of the trigger techs. I think people are forgetting the human looking playable character is a spacecraft survivor with engineering skills. He also builds freaking complex machines from scratch. I am very sure he grasps oil like substances and their extraction process without having to touch them first. Chances are him the crew had already "scanned" the planet for resources. Therefore, I think the role aspect being discussed is silly. Specially when there are more improbable stuff going on, like that magic backpack of his that store impossible weights and volumes inside it... I will have to play to judge the game aspect.
Since I am here, might also say that I agree the quality names do not sound Factorio like. Should use manufacturing terms like low and high grade. Considering the makeshift nature of the machines, it makes sense the quality is not uniform.

[blazespinnaker]

Can't be that skilled, they did after all crash their spaceship.

[Anachrony]

Greetings, just came to express my sentiments on the role play aspect of the trigger techs. I think people are forgetting the human looking playable character is a spacecraft survivor with engineering skills. He also builds freaking complex machines from scratch. I am very sure he grasps oil like substances and their extraction process without having to touch them first.

Then why does he need to do research first? Why even have a tech tree? Why not just have all the recipes from the very start, with no research packs?

[Mur]

The research tree for me is a guide to what I should be working for next, it lets me plan on how we should design the factory. If you don't see certain techs on the tree you might plan for other things then be blind sighted, delayed getting the next tech you should be working on or miss techs all together.

I think a much better solution would be the checkpoint techs like how Nullius does it. This lets the player have to show that they can do a task before they can move on and it feels like more of an accomplishment.

[FuryoftheStars]

Can't be that skilled, they did after all crash their spaceship.

They may have been struck by an astroid, passed through the tail of a comet, had an engine failure, or one of many possible mishaps that even the most skilled couldn't avoid.

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I think a much better solution would be the checkpoint techs like how Nullius does it. This lets the player have to show that they can do a task before they can move on and it feels like more of an accomplishment.

That's exactly what some of the trigger techs are (craft 50 iron plate to unlock the ability to create steam engines). But frankly, I would not want them on a regular basis throughout the tech tree. Personally, the way some mods have that setup feels artificial and serves no purpose beyond gating your progression.

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I think people are forgetting the human looking playable character is a spacecraft survivor with engineering skills. He also builds freaking complex machines from scratch. I am very sure he grasps oil like substances and their extraction process without having to touch them first.

I believe them to be smart enough to know about the concepts of everything on the tech tree, but being human, no one would be able to know how to just build it all right off the top of their head.

[Tertius]

... or one of many possible mishaps that even the most skilled couldn't avoid.

While hammering a nail into the wall to hang a picture, the engineer hit his thumb, whereupon the hammer fell into the control console of his spaceship and initiated an unscheduled landing. Because of his injured thumb, he swore to automate the hell out of everything in the future.

[FuryoftheStars]

... or one of many possible mishaps that even the most skilled couldn't avoid.

While hammering a nail into the wall to hang a picture, the engineer hit his thumb, whereupon the hammer fell into the control console of his spaceship and initiated an unscheduled landing. Because of his injured thumb, he swore to automate the hell out of everything in the future.

[adam_bise]

... or one of many possible mishaps that even the most skilled couldn't avoid.

While hammering a nail into the wall to hang a picture, the engineer hit his thumb, whereupon the hammer fell into the control console of his spaceship and initiated an unscheduled landing. Because of his injured thumb, he swore to automate the hell out of everything in the future.

LOL the most legit prologue to Factorio I've seen!

[AvengerStar]

It’s almost like people are choosing to not read the entire FFF content. Maybe because it would get in the way of holy outrage?

Put aside the unequivocal support for a second. It's ok for someone to be skeptical of incomplete information.

Tell you a story: I worked closely with Earendel on Space Exploration a while back, I was among the first to know about the beacon overload mechanic, one that disallows multiple beacons from affecting the same machine.

This was before additional module slots or higher tiers with larger areas of effect were brought to the table, so at the time, I thought it was a bad idea, that it'd stifle scalability on a mod that absolutely demanded it for progression. When those further adjustments were prototyped, I understood the purpose of the mechanic as a whole, and now I actually prefer that system over vanilla.

I still think I was right to object. Even with absolute trust, we can't read the minds of developers. Hell, what they have planned to synergize with quality might ironically hamper it. I've said last thread, there are some aspects of quality that I like, I think it could work. But there are some other parts that I think don't, and I've yet to see them addressed.

My stance on the matter could change, even as early as this upcoming FFF. But there could just as well be absolutely nothing by the time the expansion launches, in which case I hope future revision or a mod refines quality further. I'm fine if I end up blowing hot air for nothing. I still talk about it because I care. Let folks care.

[Mendel]

What I meant is some kind of research that would make the fields to only deplete to less yield but never dry up completely after researched, and even more research would keep the yields slightly less low still. Something like the miners would just dig deeper or something.

Maybe something like this ? :

A not cheaty infinite ore mod. Adds ore patches that appear when ore fields are depleted that can be mined with a pair of advanced mining drill to upgrade mining outposts and provide source of expensive but steady infinite ore.
Adds an high tech infinite ore mining from rare deep core cracks spawned in the world that require heavy refining.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/vtk-deep-core-mining

Yes! That seems very promising! Thanks!

[Tricorius]

... or one of many possible mishaps that even the most skilled couldn't avoid.

While hammering a nail into the wall to hang a picture, the engineer hit his thumb, whereupon the hammer fell into the control console of his spaceship and initiated an unscheduled landing. Because of his injured thumb, he swore to automate the hell out of everything in the future.

I’ve never identified with my avatar more than right now.

[mpl560]

1. Poor quality
2. Acceptable quality
3. Fine quality
4. High quality
5. Flawless quality

[gGeorg]

Grade 1
Grade 2
Grade 3
Grade 4
Grade 5

- many proposals has been lack of clarity where exactly some terms like "improved" and "enhanced" would fall. Should be self evident.

- It's all function.

hit the bulls eye

I have applied even more KISS - Keep It Stupid Simple :
Quality levels are known as:
Q1 ; Q2 ; Q3 ; Q4 ; Q5

Quest for you : What is a name for a sword with bonus damage 3 in AD&D ?

a] Fine quality
b] High quality
c] Sword +3

c] is correct

[draslin]

We're not talking about thousands of an inch variances here, we're talking about significant advantages over lower quality items. If you want a car to run at 100 mph and it can only run at 90mph because of substandard manufacturing, that is a failure. Particularly if what you paid for was a car that could do 100 mph.

By any measure, Quality is a step towards better simulation of IRL manufacturing. What you see is a very significant simplification of fault detection and containment - it is not an over complication.

Does it make for grindy game play? Well, hard to argue against that, as it is purely a matter of taste.

I don't think Quality is a step towards better simulation of IRL manufacturing, by any measure. IRL, your design doesn't accidentally gain more trunk space, or more cylinders (V6 to V8 engine) or alternately lose trunk spaces and cylinders. Particularly not when the whole process is automated.

[draslin]

As near as I can discern, you don't even make high quality resources to build your high quality products, its just random. My approach has you produce high quality materials at the base level.

The system they proposed (and is already working) has the concept of feeding higher quality intermediates in to lock in at least a given quality output. The quality modules just give you a chance to boost higher than this periodically.

So, if you had stacks of legendary ingredients that you tossed into an assembler making Spidertrons, you’d be guaranteed to get out legendary Spidertrons.

And I’m sure they have at least a few other ways to influence this and make it more deterministic. Or at least to push the probabilistic model higher.

As I’ve mentioned countless times, whining about this mechanism now, when we still only have the barest information about the expansion is kinda silly. I’m expecting that WUBE isn’t too worried as they ALREADY have a bunch of mechanisms in the code that address a lot of the common complaints.

They aren’t stupid people. They are way smarter than me, for sure. And if I can see some possible shortcomings, I’d assume their thousands of hours of play testing have uncovered some things they have figured out solutions to.

The way I see this playing out is that you basically have two factories (or in my case I’d solve it with two separate busses).

- productivity bus: this is basically my current play style which drives everything toward efficient science as consistently as possible
- quality bus: I’ll be building a looping bus that aims for the highest common denominator that I can currently make across all raw (plates, bricks, etc) and intermediates (circuits, engines, whatever)

The productivity bus is built on consistency, productivity, and speed. It’s meant to drive science as quickly as possible so I’m not tech bottlenecked.

The quality bus is there to supply me first, and the factory second. It will only build stuff where quality matters. And as I tech up, the highest common denominator will slowly morph a bit and raise. But it is there to make me stuff like legendary armors, personal roboports, construction bots, ammo, etc. It’s also there to build the highest level of stuff I can in my HUB. I want it building the highest quality miners, assemblers, etc that it can.

I also expect to have a few mini-modules that I want to internally improve themselves. I look forward, for instance, to building a module that is optimized to build and increase quality solar panels and accumulators for use in my solar builder train (or sent on the legendary Spidertrons meant for building which my HUB is producing).

I already like having a construction train that contains solar panels, accumulators, and a few other things to build my solar module blueprints. It seems pretty cool to me that over time that train will be loaded with higher and higher quality buildings. Which means over time I can stamp down fewer, more powerful, dense solar fields, and slowly pack up and recycle older low quality solar fields.

Will there be an achievement for pumping out a gigantic amount of energy completely from legendary solar panels and stored solely in legendary accumulators. Man, I HOPE so! That would, truely, be a legendary sort of achievement, dontchya think?

I think that is *pretty damn cool* and a fun upgrade, efficiency, and optimization puzzle that has its core roots in pure automation. I honestly can’t think of anything more Factorio than that.

I think a lot of people are caught up so much in the “loot box” nonsense that they aren’t considering the possibilities quality is going to bring to their creativity and optimization.

Le sigh, I'm not whining, I'm expressing an opinion, as are you. At no point have I said that the mechanic itself is worthless or somehow devoid of cleverness and game value, I'm saying it doesn't make sense logically. Why, in a completely automated factory, are the machines deviating from their programmed actions to add improvements and features to products? Moreover, nothing they've written has suggested that there are any guarantee's about the quality that comes out of an assembler on any given product. This is so jarring to me, logically, its like Optimus Prime showing up in Lord of the Rings.

[mmmPI]

Le sigh, I'm not whining, I'm expressing an opinion, as are you. At no point have I said that the mechanic itself is worthless or somehow devoid of cleverness and game value, I'm saying it doesn't make sense logically. Why, in a completely automated factory, are the machines deviating from their programmed actions to add improvements and features to products?

When you know more about semi-conductor manufacturing, that sounds completly logical, there are many other industries where the concept of quailty by iterations and sorting the sample that are good as base for further development exist. Maybe what you wanted to say is " it doesn't make sense to me" ?, because it has a logic, maybe you are not getting it.

Moreover, nothing they've written has suggested that there are any guarantee's about the quality that comes out of an assembler on any given product. This is so jarring to me, logically, its like Optimus Prime showing up in Lord of the Rings.

Same here, this is wrong, you meant "nothing that you read/understood" , because it was written this in the FFF 375 :

but an important part of the mechanic is, that the quality of the ingredients is the base for the quality of the product, so getting higher quality intermediates is valuable too.

Maybe it's the picture with the % of probability that you didn't understand, i don't know.

[adam_bise]

We're not talking about thousands of an inch variances here, we're talking about significant advantages over lower quality items. If you want a car to run at 100 mph and it can only run at 90mph because of substandard manufacturing, that is a failure. Particularly if what you paid for was a car that could do 100 mph.

By any measure, Quality is a step towards better simulation of IRL manufacturing. What you see is a very significant simplification of fault detection and containment - it is not an over complication.

Does it make for grindy game play? Well, hard to argue against that, as it is purely a matter of taste.

I don't think Quality is a step towards better simulation of IRL manufacturing, by any measure. IRL, your design doesn't accidentally gain more trunk space, or more cylinders (V6 to V8 engine) or alternately lose trunk spaces and cylinders. Particularly not when the whole process is automated.

V6 and V8 are different products. Like assembling machine 1 and 2
A regular V6 would have less horsepower than one made from better-balanced cams. A regular assembling machine 1 is slower than an assembling machine 1 made from more precise, or "rare" gears.

[KuuLightwing]

V6 and V8 are different products. Like assembling machine 1 and 2
A regular V6 would have less horsepower than one made from better-balanced cams. A regular assembling machine 1 is slower than an assembling machine 1 made from more precise, or "rare" gears.

You can't get 250% performance from a V6 by just balancing cams better

[draslin]

We're not talking about thousands of an inch variances here, we're talking about significant advantages over lower quality items. If you want a car to run at 100 mph and it can only run at 90mph because of substandard manufacturing, that is a failure. Particularly if what you paid for was a car that could do 100 mph.

By any measure, Quality is a step towards better simulation of IRL manufacturing. What you see is a very significant simplification of fault detection and containment - it is not an over complication.

Does it make for grindy game play? Well, hard to argue against that, as it is purely a matter of taste.

I don't think Quality is a step towards better simulation of IRL manufacturing, by any measure. IRL, your design doesn't accidentally gain more trunk space, or more cylinders (V6 to V8 engine) or alternately lose trunk spaces and cylinders. Particularly not when the whole process is automated.

V6 and V8 are different products. Like assembling machine 1 and 2
A regular V6 would have less horsepower than one made from better-balanced cams. A regular assembling machine 1 is slower than an assembling machine 1 made from more precise, or "rare" gears.

Fair enough, but the point I'm making is that the random quality is like saying you're building a V6 and somehow end up with a V8.

[draslin]

Le sigh, I'm not whining, I'm expressing an opinion, as are you. At no point have I said that the mechanic itself is worthless or somehow devoid of cleverness and game value, I'm saying it doesn't make sense logically. Why, in a completely automated factory, are the machines deviating from their programmed actions to add improvements and features to products?

When you know more about semi-conductor manufacturing, that sounds completly logical, there are many other industries where the concept of quailty by iterations and sorting the sample that are good as base for further development exist. Maybe what you wanted to say is " it doesn't make sense to me" ?, because it has a logic, maybe you are not getting it.

Moreover, nothing they've written has suggested that there are any guarantee's about the quality that comes out of an assembler on any given product. This is so jarring to me, logically, its like Optimus Prime showing up in Lord of the Rings.

Same here, this is wrong, you meant "nothing that you read/understood" , because it was written this in the FFF 375 :

but an important part of the mechanic is, that the quality of the ingredients is the base for the quality of the product, so getting higher quality intermediates is valuable too.

Maybe it's the picture with the % of probability that you didn't understand, i don't know.

Ok, point 1, I'm not getting it. I think you're not getting what I'm saying. So let me try again. I'm saying, lets take your semi-conductor as the example, I'm trying to make a semi-conductor of X specifications, I sort the output based on whether or not the output meets that specification. Which means I reject the failures, and accept a fraction of the output. Fine, no problem there. That is basically what I'm proposing should be the model.

Its a raw material for other products, which must meet minimum specifications for the product it will be used in to work properly. But you don't take that semi conductor and turn it into micro-chips with a similar process.

You design an exact chip, with a specific number of transistors, for a specific purpose. During production you do not magically get a more useful/powerful chip because additional transistors appeared in the final product. Nor do you set out to make a V6 engine and occasionally get a V8.

It is the complex multi-component apex product magically becoming better that bothers me, not the base materials. After all, everything is made of something on the periodic table of elements, getting that specific material out of the raw material of the universe is a necessarily messy/wasteful/variable process with no guarantee of how much work is necessary to get a final product of the desired purity. Same as you combine those elements into new materials. But once you start making components out of those materials, things get almost completely deterministic. You aren't going to get a tricycle when you are building a bicycle, or a quad-cpu motherboard when you are building a dual-cpu motherboard, etc. Yes you may iterate on the product, but that will require re-tooling of the factory to build it and it doesn't happen by accident.