Silo throughput should increase with quality

[Milo_Thatch]

What

Rocket throughput doesn't seem to benefit from high quality beacons, silo or speed modules. source
I think we should see an increase in throughput over quality levels, even with huge diminishing returns.

Why

• It robs me of the pleasure of upgrading my silo builds with quality items, as they appear to be meaningless here.
• It's a time and resource sink that isn't rewarded with concrete results.
• It's inconsistent : Train, Platform and Bot throughput increases with quality. Why not Silos?

Visualization and two possible solutions

A legendary silo surrounded by legendary beacons with legendary modules seem to have the same throughput as a normal silo with three beacons and a crafting speed of 3. Don't look too hard at the exact numbers and slopes, I don't really care about them. My problem is silo throughput appearing constant over quality upgrades.

silo throughput2.jpg (562.08 KiB) Viewed 223 times

Suggestion 1 seem like the better choice, as it wouldn't nerf throughput too much for megabasers, would be invisible to normal players and would feel better to quality enjoyers.
I don't want to increase max throughput per silo, I don't want to increase rocket animation speed, I don't want to lower earlygame silo throughput. I'm not thinking of gigabases, only the fundamental reason why you bother with making quality items : the reward of better performance.

Other solution

According to my testing, Cargo Bays and Space Platform Hubs can serve about 3 and 9 rockets at a time, respectively. Those numbers don't appear to change with quality. Why not apply a multiplier there, depending on silo quality? That doesn't fix the beacon scaling but it's something.

Sorry by advance if the low precision of my testing made me reach the wrong conclusion, maybe there are, in fact, diminishing returns. It's just that I didn't see them past normal quality. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for the amazing expansion you cooked for me. I have been feasting for days and I'm just scratching the surface.

[Tinyboss]

What are suggestions 1 and 2?

Edit: Oh, I misunderstood. The graphs are the suggestions. I thought you were making specific suggestions about game mechanics and showing us the effect they'd have.

[Nemoricus]

If increasing maximum throughput is off the table, this means making silos worse, especially at the start of space exploitation where the current silo speed is already painfully low.

[PureTilt]

so your suggestion is to gut silo's speed?
i would rather have rocket animation speed be increased with a fraction of work speed

[Theragus]

Just found this post after someone made me aware of it over at viewtopic.php?p=647576#p647576

I too find quality rocket silos currently a bit of a dubious thing, and this post pretty much sums it up pretty well.

The scaling on the rocket silo for the first couple of beacons/modules is just WAY too good and after you reach a certain ceiling there's just no point anymore making better quality / faster silos.
Your throughput is always gonna be capped by the animation speed and to be honest, you hit this ceiling very quickly in comparison to the length of the game and the possible speed gains from quality beacons / modules / silos.

Higher Quality Assemblers / EMPs / Foundries / beacons etc... ALWAYS provide you with a better building in general, since your throughput is pretty much only capped by your own design and ingenuity, but with silos, there's no thought and no challenge to this required at all. Just place enough beacons or modules or research enough rocket silo prod and you hit the ceiling faster before you even build a single-quality silo.
The devs already said they wouldn't want to increase the animation speed since it would look pretty weird, which I agree with.

The solutions offered here kinda have the same issue as other proposals, if the animation speed stays the same, the only other variable we have is lowering the base crafting speed of the silo in general to promote quality, which is not very pretty in the early game where silos are tremendously expensive and pretty slow, also when you REALLY want that first Space platform...
Also, it would affect all existing / current setups by making them just plain slower which would not feel very good for a lot of players.

I would propose just removing the crafting speed scaling with quality entirely so that it has only the health increase effect like belts, etc...
In its current implementation, the quality crafting speed is basically useless anyway, so why not just completely remove the scaling?

Lowering the (theoretically maximum possible) crafting speed as shown in the graph wouldn't lead players down a potential trap to farm quality rocket silos when they in general have practically no effect.
It would lead players to the correct solution, just building more rocket silos, which is currently the only way to work around the animation speed ceiling.

[mmmPI]

If you say "quality is optionnal" as the dev said, you may want to still give player the ability to have a "very fast" silo, even without using quality. Hence potentially having no more "speed" possible to offer as reward for quality.

Especially if you are talking about full beaconned setup. Those are already super fast even without quality, what quality on the silo allows in this case is to have less beacons around your silo. Speed of silo does inrease with quality, it's just capped in the shown setup.

Also with research it's possible to have 300% productivity, so you may not always need the productivity module in the silo, and if speed is already capped, you can go for efficiency module or even in the surrounding beacons, since they don't increase speed currently. It's easier to have -80% consumption and the "max speed" with quality silo, since those have the same pollution/consumption but higher speed than the regular silo.

I think the arguments for change aren't compelling because imo they would reduce the gameplay complexity if "always more is always better", whereas currently there is a research for optimization. I would be more in favor of detailing more the current mechanism, like the throughput/crafting speed curve you made could be in the factoriopedia, so player visualize the speed 'cap' and plan around it rather than removing it. I think it makes "building silos array" less boring when you have a reason "not to put speed" everywhere. I think the diminishing return for beacons are somewhat of a similar mechanism.

For the 3/9 rocket a time, i think it's also part of visual sanity check, if there were "more" at a time with quality they would "collide" more often, going thru each others.