Gleba science pack research micronmanagement solution

[Feather]

TL;DR

Labs being able to target research AFTER the first one in the queue IF they are missing science packs

What ?

I see people having to baby sit research whenever a new delivery from gleba comes in and it just looks extremely annoying to do and if they don't keep track of it they just lose an entire shipment

They can choose between 3 things
NEVER researching gleba tech so they don't need gleba science packs
ALWAYS researching gleba tech so they don't need to keep track of the shipments
OR keep track of the shipments which just sounds like a huge hassle and will force them to drop whatever they were doing to prioritise gleba research and deprioritise it after all of the science packs have been used

By allowing labs to skip researches they don't have science packs for it would allow people a peace of mind, but this would introduce another issue of having to allow labs to research different techs at the same time

Why ?

I believe that reducing the time spent having to micro manage research in order to use up all of the spoilabe gleba science packs can only improve the player experience

[sarge945]

A simple solution would be:

• Allow labs to store all science packs, regardless of what research is being done
• Make Gleba Science Packs pause spoilage when in a lab

Making them not spoil in the labs doesn't really affect the gameplay too much, because once they are at the labs they are already in their "final destination", so to speak, so you've already completed the spoilage challenge for them, so it hardly affects the difficulty or challenge of spoilage or undermines spoilage as a mechanic.

[Feather]

1. that's already how science labs work? unless I'm missing something
2. it would encourage using labs as buffers/chests and that would force people to daisy chain their labs if they don't want the science packs to spoil, spreading science around all of the labs evenly would also become a big issue

doing that would introduce a lot of unintended side effects

[EustaceCS]

Trupen's embargo liftoff celebration stream showcased 200%+ Spoilage speed.
It was manageable.
Unless you're into some really unreasonable stuff in factory building (or unless Trupen (and we by extent) would get nerfed again), Spoilage is reasonable as it currently is without crutches.
(I still wonder if we can utilize Aquila cryoscience to do something with it though)

[Feather]

I know that spoilage is manageable, I'm not worreid about it, if I'm not going to be able to manage it it's a pure skill issue on my part (it takes an entire hour for gleba science to spoil iirc), all I'm worried about is having to micromanage different researches

'oh great the science packs arrived, let me open the menu and set the right research then do something else for a couple of minutes and after I'm out of gleba science packs switch it back again to what I was researching previously'

it just sounds mildly annoying

[EustaceCS]

It sure does. I myself find it mildly infuriating that whole queue pauses when I don't have enough WALLS (!!!) during doing a +bulletdamage quickie while amassing a buffer of yellow packs for more important researches.
And Wall recipe is getting more costy in 2.0+DLC, right?
So... you don't have to blame spoilage, it's more of a universal early-game QoL option.

[Feather]

yes, being able to automate research would just be nice in general
I don't know about the wall recipe, but you'll definitely need a lot more stone compared to everything else (everything except for stone gets insane prod)

[Berserker55]

TL;DR

Each lab treats the research queue as a list of priorities individually, if it can't research a selected technology, it carries onto the next one in the list; repeat.

What?

A way to tell science labs to "try" to apply their research to the current research and if that is not a valid target, try the next one, repeat until end of queue or a valid working target is found.

Why?

Factorio 2.0 fixed many gripes and long standing QoL issues, however, Space Age introduced new gripes, in that many researches have divergent requirements, or evaporating ones, like Agriculture Pack. I'd like to say things like "focus on this tech, but if you can't just do the next thing in the queue". It needs to be individually lab based, otherwise a single lab somewhere would hold the entire queue hostage.

Personal

I have a global programmable speaker that alerts me when agriculture science arrives, so I then switch the science, then another alert tells me it's time to switch back to something else.My gameplay gets interrupted like this every 5-7 minutes, depending on time of freighter arrival. It's annoying, but losing the packs to spoiling would be even worse. Earlier in my savegame I would have liked to be able to do fulgora and vulcanus science in parallel, as in, often only one pack was available as the other factories still needed to build/ramp up.

[DeadMG]

TL;DR

The lab should do any of the researches in the queue that it has packs for.

Why?

Working with Agricultural Science has a bit of a pain point. You want to research something with AS- fine. You start that research but then you run out of packs. You decide to do another research you have packs for but now your next AS delivery appears. You have to keep manually switching back and forth to keep your labs running. Other sciences don't have the same issue because you can just let the pack you're shorter on buffer up for a while, then use them all at once, but AS spoils so you can't do that.

Letting the lab run any research in the queue it has the packs for will make sure they are not idle and eliminate the need for the player to switch back and forth manually.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged several threads with the same suggestion.

[MeduSalem]

+1

I agree, that for Quality of Life reasons there absolutely needs to be something done about this. Because the micromanagement currently is madness.

It is one of the things where I ask myself that when they play-tested it they surely must have come across this issue and why haven't the implemented anything to help the player deal with it.


Because currently you cannot just go mindlessly about your stuff and then "ah damn I ran ouf ot packs, I need to switch back" all the time. It is like working while looking up to the clock every 2 minutes. It is annoying. ^^

I even have set up an alert already that measures the belt contents to alert me whenever a shipment arrived. Just so I don't forget to switch on the research and yet I still sometimes forget to look at the alerts when there are other things blinking.


So yea, I agree that the best/easiest solution would be that if you are out of packs for the current research then it should "skip" to the next in the queue and see if it can do that one; and if it can't then go to the 3rd in the queue and see if it can do that and so on so forth.

It could even be its own research tech that you have to unlock how far "ahead" in the queue it can look to see if it can do that research. More than 3-5 look-aheads aren't necessary anyway because I never really queue up more than that.



Either that, or maybe make it a circuit network thing or something. After all it is factorio; it would be nice to make it a creative solution.

Like a combinator that outputs the list of currently queued researches; and you then can make a decision using the combinators based on the science pack contents of the lab/belt/chests or whatever which research it sets for the labs.



At least anything to alleviate it would be welcome, because I can imagine the constant "tech"-juggle drives people nuts after a while.

I know some other games (Like for example Hearts of Iron 4) where you have to do such things constantly to maximize the research, and they are all annoying because of it. ^^

[Stargateur]

when a lab change research it's reset the productivity progression bar. AFRAID there is no good solution for this. My take is, the player should do science on all planet and only late game do potion transfer to nauvis for very late game research. This way you reduce a lot the waste of gleba. Or remove the fact that gleba potion spoil.

Maybe a good solution is being able to research different technology by lab. So select technology search on lab like a recipe, so rework the research system from a global one to a local one.

[EustaceCS]

I know some other games (Like for example Hearts of Iron 4) where you have to do such things constantly to maximize the research, and they are all annoying because of it. ^^

Excuse me, what?
HoI IV is known for a metric ton of unreasonable things related to tech research - but necessity to do research juggling is not among those things.
You can still get needed tech early there, you'll just have to sacrifice something to do so. Which is "intended" to keep the game remotely historical.
(Tibet getting AND using nukes in 1943 or maybe even earlier is both a sympthom of a global problem with this approach (which is unrelated to tech juggling) - and a sign of things being quite fine at tech juggling front)

[MeduSalem]

Excuse me, what?
HoI IV is known for a metric ton of unreasonable things related to tech research - but necessity to do research juggling is not among those things.
You can still get needed tech early there, you'll just have to sacrifice something to do so. Which is "intended" to keep the game remotely historical.
(Tibet getting AND using nukes in 1943 or maybe even earlier is both a sympthom of a global problem with this approach (which is unrelated to tech juggling) - and a sign of things being quite fine at tech juggling front)

I am not talking about ahead-of time stuff. I did lots of math on it back in the day it is almost never worth it without an ahead-of-time penalty reduction. Paradox ensured a decent pacing with the penalties and I always totally avoid to research stuff ahead of time unless you get some bonus from a national focus. Not much different in their other games like V3 or whatever.


No, what I am rather talking about is... I think you are aware of the possibility if you have an empty research slot to save up to 30 days worth of research in HoI 4, right? ^^

Did you know that the most efficient research strategies actually involves having one research slot empty whenever you can so that you can constantly save those 30 days up and then switch around your active researches such that the 30 days of saved research are applied to something you want to get researched even faster than you usually could? ^^

You can only do that once per tech however.

But it is still totally worth it because that way you can totally out-research the AI or other human players in MP (not that I would play MP). For some key economy techs it can totally develop an advantage; because if you get construction speed improvements 30 days earlier, or if it can delay hitting the production cap you can produce more equipment and whatnot.

But as mentioned, it is a truly painful process to always jiggle around the techs every time a tech unlocks.

If you want to know more about it, google for "tech juggling" together with HoI4. There are some guides that cover it.

And no, contrary to the wrong popular belief of some people who discussed the tech-juggling meta one does NOT sacrficice any research days on other techs if you do that. The total amount of time to research the entire tech tree remains the same. You only exchange days around such that you get certain key techs earlier, moving some less important techs further back in time. But in total at the end of the campaign it took you the same amount of time to research everything. Or at least roughly, because there are a few techs which improve research speed and if you tech-juggle them then obviously you get that benefit 30 days sooner; so if you tech juggle you can cut off a few days of research from the total research time of the tech tree, but it is barely noticable. The economic effects however are more noticeable because are way more techs regarding that and it stacks up. ^^


I mean sure, you are not forced to play like that, it is more something power players force on themselves. I like to play efficient, so I often end up doing it because I know the differences from playing with tech juggling and playing without.


Anyway, this is totally off-topic and I did lots of discussion on the matter.

What is important for Factorio is that I got the same feeling immediately when I had to start juggling techs back and forth to maximize the science pack usage.

[vark111]

remove the fact that gleba potion spoil.

This is my preferred solution. In fact I prefer this solution so much that once I'm done hitting all the achievements I care about, I'm immediately going to install (or create) a mod that specifically does this if Wube doesn't.

[EustaceCS]

Excuse me, what?
HoI IV is known for a metric ton of unreasonable things related to tech research - but necessity to do research juggling is not among those things.
You can still get needed tech early there, you'll just have to sacrifice something to do so. Which is "intended" to keep the game remotely historical.
(Tibet getting AND using nukes in 1943 or maybe even earlier is both a sympthom of a global problem with this approach (which is unrelated to tech juggling) - and a sign of things being quite fine at tech juggling front)

No, what I am rather talking about is... I think you are aware of the possibility if you have an empty research slot to save up to 30 days worth of research in HoI 4, right? ^^

Did you know that the most efficient research strategies actually involves having one research slot empty whenever you can so that you can constantly save those 30 days up and then switch around your active researches such that the 30 days of saved research are applied to something you want to get researched even faster than you usually could? ^^

Oh. Daisy-chaining 30-days-stored slots.
Clever trick. With questionable net gain since reserved slot(s) is actually not being used to research anything. Maybe that's why I never seen it in guides, videos (from not the worst specialists in the game), wikis and other intel sources...
Anyway, as I said, you can still get needed tech early there, you'll just have to sacrifice something to do so. Which you've just described.
But I still don't see what does it have to do with Gleba or this theme specifically.

[MeduSalem]

But I still don't see what does it have to do with Gleba or this theme specifically.

It is just about the pure amount of additional clicks you have to do that eventually can get on your nerves. That is what made me remember it.


Albeit in Factorio it is definitely worse, because without some circuit logic detecting how many science packs you still have left you can easily miss the point where you want to switch back to some other research. And the same again if a new shipment of agri packs arrived.

[EustaceCS]

Albeit in Factorio it is definitely worse,

Goodness gracious, Factorio is worse than the game which is excellent for UI shittiness benchmarking.
I probably once again ended up at the wrong side of the mirror.
Let's return to this comparison once/if HoI IV would get queue'able researches, OK?
While decades pass, I suggest pondering if it's appropriate to try to make a very specific trick giving very little for a lot of effort pass for a commonly used practice.

On-topic, what problem are we trying to discuss, anyway?

They can choose between 3 things
NEVER researching gleba tech so they don't need gleba science packs
ALWAYS researching gleba tech so they don't need to keep track of the shipments
OR keep track of the shipments which just sounds like a huge hassle and will force them to drop whatever they were doing to prioritise gleba research and deprioritise it after all of the science packs have been used

Option 4: overproduce Gleba packs and make some room for spoilage discarding at non-Gleba research destination. Will need few platforms working as express deliveries. In this case you might need a source of spoilage on Navius anyway due to one Research related endgame tech...
Option 5: relocate your main research hub to Gleba.
Option 6: blitz through mandatory Gleba tech, forget until post-Aquilo, do Gleba-related (spoilers: there aint many) repeatables until satisfied, forget until next urge to do Gleba-related repeatables.

Depending on how hard would you like to commit, different options are differently viable.
I didn't made it to Gleba yet, but I as filthy casual am considering variant 5: keep research (and ONLY research) on Gleba.

Upd.
Option 7 exists. Crazy enough. But I'm really tempted to try it in my current playthrough.

You see, nothing prevents you from building research labs on space platforms.
As all generic (read: space + Nauvis) packs can be created from widely available omnipresent swarm of asteroids, and since you need to do something to transfer planet specific packs between planets for combo researches anyway...
Why not making your main research hub interplanetary?
Space platform en route still can do researches (among other things).
So fill your platform's cargo with 1h worth of Gleba packs and go visit other planets while labs do lab things!
And if you'll be ready to expand your science-per-minute - just build one more.
And one more.
And one more...

Comes with a benefit of letting you dedicate more planetary space for actual crafting. Ergo, less Demolishers wrangling, less icebergs heating... less dying to that dastardly pixel of terrain which none of three neighbouring lightning attractors covered all of a sudden...

[MeduSalem]

Option 4: overproduce Gleba packs and make some room for spoilage discarding at non-Gleba research destination. Will need few platforms working as express deliveries. In this case you might need a source of spoilage on Navius anyway due to one Research related endgame tech...

Which in the long run, until there is no better way to deal with by it is probably the way I will end up doing it. Produce enough agri-science packs that the research can keep pace; or even overproduce and don't care about whether some rots. ^^

Can't say I will like the premise much, but long term better than having to switch back & forth between researches. Also better than skipping out on Gleba researches only because the research babysitting is annoying.

Eventually I will likely slap a QoL mod on which deals with that sort of stuff automatically. Because I am sure there will be someone who will be even more annoyed about it than me and who will sit down to make a mod for it. xD


Btw Options 5 and 7 aren't really changing anything. Sure you can do science on Gleba or on a Space Platform and it might reduce the travel delay and spoilage times.

Yet unless you produce enough agri packs you will again have the same issue that research might pause every so often and that you will be tempted to change active research.

[kythlyn]

TL;DR

Labs being able to target research AFTER the first one in the queue IF they are missing science packs

OP's suggestion seems reasonable and simple enough to at least ease the pain of Gleba's science. But this whole situation brings to mind other ideas, such as assigning research in the labs themselves like a recipe rather than through the current interface. The current interface is functional but pauses the game and takes the player out of the factory (which could very well be by design to give players time to read, but I digress). On topic, this would allow players to set up a dedicated factory to deal with gleba science and spoilage, while simultaneously doing research elsewhere that does not require agricultural science packs. Off topic, the player could also set up a variety of science factories for multiple infinite sciences, which I think could be a very significant feature for endgame builds and megabases.