Artillery needs to be moved back to Nauvis

[Tinyboss]

playing with extreme biter settings (either custom, or with available presets (Deathworld Marathon)) is now close to impossible.

Any change to support such a niche gameplay mode should have an absolutely minimal (or ideally, no) effect on the standard game mode. Moving one of the key features of Vulcanus back to Nauvis does not pass the test.

[r3xk3nnw4y]

On my first playthrough, I more or less completely abandoned nauvis. I stuck all my research for all sciences on vulcanus, and only had nauvis produce uranium. I think that could be a viable strategy for such punishing enemy settings as well. You can manufacture the full science set on vulcanus and don't really need uranium as an energy import. I only really imported uranium as fuel for gleba and later to kickstart Aquilo.

Perhaps you could try such a strategy, although I myself am not fond of the removal of artillery either.

A good solution would probably be to include a promuthium or similar level research that allows for synthesis of tungsten from steel and other things that can found on nauvis or better yet manufactured in space. Which will also allow for orbital bombardment, which sounds super cool for an endgame research. In addition it allows for an implicit post game side goal of reclaiming nauvis since you will now be able to make artillery supplies on world as well as orbitally drop artishells on the nests of need be

I do really like the sound of orbital bombardment, perhaps I am still a stellaris player at heart. Perhaps there should be two modes of operation: Kinetic, and atomic ? I always was a fan of the M.I.R.V. mod by Klonan.

But synthesizing tungsten, an exotic resource, out of essentially thin air sounds like a lame idea. Especially when it’s not at all needed for the main idea to work. You’d just need to reload at Vulcanus every once in a while.

Did I fail to properly communicate that tungsten synthesis is meant to be like a post end game unlock? Like you've been to the shattered planet amassed truckloads of Promethium and massed produced the Promethium science packs mastered glebas science packs and their spoilage management and are regularly conducting research productivity research with all 12 science packs. Yeah getting this early on would be lame, it would be really lame because you could just hunker down on nauvis with only like ~2.5 planets explored, but you've already seen everything in the mod pack by the time you reach this point. Sure you can unlock orbital bombardment much earlier which would be cool, but tungsten synthesis is meant to be something you get for doing everything else you can do. If nothing else maybe add the Promethium assembler for all I care that's required to perform this alchemical feat.

[jaylawl]

What's the point really? I'm sorry but importing tungsten is not that much of a hassle. Space platforms are effectively just elaborate trains and tungsten is plentyful on Vulcanus. The crappiest little space platform can passively provide all the tungsten you will ever need.

[r3xk3nnw4y]

What's the point really? I'm sorry but importing tungsten is not that much of a hassle. Space platforms are effectively just elaborate trains and tungsten is plentyful on Vulcanus. The crappiest little space platform can passively provide all the tungsten you will ever need.

Actually yeah, you're right. No need for tungsten synthesis, but we can keep orbital bombardment,

Cave Johnson we're done here

[jaylawl]

What's the point really? I'm sorry but importing tungsten is not that much of a hassle. Space platforms are effectively just elaborate trains and tungsten is plentyful on Vulcanus. The crappiest little space platform can passively provide all the tungsten you will ever need.

Actually yeah, you're right. No need for tungsten synthesis, but we can keep orbital bombardment,

Cave Johnson we're done here

I'm always +1 for... biter negotiation methods

[r3xk3nnw4y]

What's the point really? I'm sorry but importing tungsten is not that much of a hassle. Space platforms are effectively just elaborate trains and tungsten is plentyful on Vulcanus. The crappiest little space platform can passively provide all the tungsten you will ever need.

Actually yeah, you're right. No need for tungsten synthesis, but we can keep orbital bombardment,

Cave Johnson we're done here

I'm always +1 for... biter negotiation methods

As well as glebas natives. Comes in very handy when you've accidentally let the evo level get a little too high before you have a sufficient base set up on a world

[Illiander42]

The one problem with importing tungsten is that you are only allowed a single train station to bring it in from other planets. And it has a hard cap on how big it is.

As for artillery on Nauvis: It's the reason you rush Vulcanis first, so that you can take your time on the other planets.

And you can remote-control the tank in the meantime. It's no spidertron, but it gets the job done.

[Hares]

The one problem with importing tungsten is that you are only allowed a single train station to bring it in from other planets. And it has a hard cap on how big it is.

Not exactly.

1. You can load rockets without robots by pre-loading the rockets with required items in non-automatic-request mode. These rockets will be launched automatically when that item is requested.

   

   12-12-2024, 17-08-36.png (844.06 KiB) Viewed 430 times

2. You can also load rockets with robots, and have as many as you want.
3. You can fit as many as 30 stack inserters near your landing pad while also having cargo bays attached; you can dump the stuff on belts and sort it later. That's insane throughput if you use legendary-level inserters and enough cargo bays -- my rough tests showed >2.6k items per second at peak -- more than 10 fully-loaded 4-stacked green belts. I doubt you need that much tungsten for your artillery shell production.

   

   12-12-2024, 17-19-53.png (476.36 KiB) Viewed 430 times

4. Otherwise, you can immediately use contents of landing pad via robots by requesting enormous amount of items.

[jaylawl]

I would like to add some cursed, forbidden knowledge i acquired to this:

you can load rocket silos directly from trains

[Illiander42]

The one problem with importing tungsten is that you are only allowed a single train station to bring it in from other planets. And it has a hard cap on how big it is.

• You can fit as many as 30 stack inserters near your landing pad while also having cargo bays attached; you can dump the stuff on belts and sort it later. That's insane throughput if you use legendary-level inserters and enough cargo bays -- my rough tests showed >2.6k items per second at peak -- more than 10 fully-loaded 4-stacked green belts. I doubt you need that much tungsten for your artillery shell production.
• Otherwise, you can immediately use contents of landing pad via robots by requesting enormous amount of items.

Ignoring the first two as they're not what I was talking about. It's all landing pad emptying limits.

You need to bring in misc buildings, artillery shell parts, and 6 different science packs. The science packs will dominate that, and are what you scale most in a megabase. If it wasn't for the biter lab I'd be looking at putting my labs on spaceships to dodge the bottleneck.

30 legendary stack inserters is still a hard limit that you cannot work around. (And you don't want to unload to belts, you want to unload to super-high-throughput train stations because chest->chest is still faster than chest->belt. I've not done the geometry to see which lets you fit more roboports in)

And logi bot throughput is not infinite. It's limited by roboport charging rate and how many you can pack into the circle defined by how far a robot can fly on half its charge. And since robot energy usage is dominated by how far they travel, that puts a hard limit on how much you can pull out of a landing pad.

Is this limit quite high? Yes. But it's there. And one thing I know about Factorio is that we always go bigger.

[Hares]

Then you should probably open an idea/suggestion for post-lategame high-thoughput item reciever and keep discussion in-topic.

BTW, why do you need to import 6 sciences? 5 other planets (inlcuding shattered) - 5 science packs.

[CyberCider]

Then you should probably open an idea/suggestion for post-lategame high-thoughput item reciever and keep discussion in-topic.

BTW, why do you need to import 6 sciences? 5 other planets (inlcuding shattered) - 5 science packs.

Space science may not come from another planet, but it still needs your landing pad.

[jaylawl]

The one problem with importing tungsten is that you are only allowed a single train station to bring it in from other planets. And it has a hard cap on how big it is.

• You can fit as many as 30 stack inserters near your landing pad while also having cargo bays attached; you can dump the stuff on belts and sort it later. That's insane throughput if you use legendary-level inserters and enough cargo bays -- my rough tests showed >2.6k items per second at peak -- more than 10 fully-loaded 4-stacked green belts. I doubt you need that much tungsten for your artillery shell production.
• Otherwise, you can immediately use contents of landing pad via robots by requesting enormous amount of items.

Ignoring the first two as they're not what I was talking about. It's all landing pad emptying limits.

You need to bring in misc buildings, artillery shell parts, and 6 different science packs. The science packs will dominate that, and are what you scale most in a megabase. If it wasn't for the biter lab I'd be looking at putting my labs on spaceships to dodge the bottleneck.

30 legendary stack inserters is still a hard limit that you cannot work around. (And you don't want to unload to belts, you want to unload to super-high-throughput train stations because chest->chest is still faster than chest->belt. I've not done the geometry to see which lets you fit more roboports in)

And logi bot throughput is not infinite. It's limited by roboport charging rate and how many you can pack into the circle defined by how far a robot can fly on half its charge. And since robot energy usage is dominated by how far they travel, that puts a hard limit on how much you can pull out of a landing pad.

Is this limit quite high? Yes. But it's there. And one thing I know about Factorio is that we always go bigger.

Do you have any concepts on how to unload from the cargo landing pads to trains without intermediate belts? I wasn't able to find a way around the grid alignment they both the landing pad and rails have.

[Khazul]

This is particularly true for artillery - artillery basically solves Nauvis defense, once you have it set up you just never need to worry about it again at all. There's not really anywhere else for Nauvis defense to go after that, so having it available so early in the game would really remove the sense of progression there.

I get the impression there are broadly two types of players - those who like to progress ASAP into a well organised approach to build that scales and those who play very adhoc. The latter probably care nothing about the changes to artillery and cliff explosives. The former now might go so far as to utterly f***** hate it because it just completely screws them over at a game stage where they are used to having it and getting organized and starting to scale up. Ad-hoc players just wont care and will argue it is a great and logical change.

Pushing it the point where they are at for me does the opposite of what you claim - it breaks progression and make progression feel very clunky.

[IsaacOscar]

For some reason this is a popular topic.
So I vote we keep the changes. I like having rewards for progressing, in this case building a factory on vulcanus. It motivates further play, and makes me feel like my time was worth it.

My nauvis base was surviving fine with lasers before I got artillery, although I did have to remotely construct a few pumpjacks, and I got lots of annoying alerts. Of course with artillery, I get attacked far less often so it is definitely a nice to have, but not an essential.

Of course the developers could've not moved anything, and instead made entirely new stuff for the rewards on other planets, but the the game gets even bigger and we'd have to wait even longer for it to come out.

In fact, changing things around randomly can even be good as it makes things more fresh, and required me to rethink things vs. when I played 1.1. Of course if you have an existing save you want to keep playing, then space age is probably not the best choice anyway.

Also there's a mod (which I've not tried) https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SpaceAgeWithoutSpace for all the people who bought space age despite not wanting to leave nauvis.

[mouzy]

I get the impression there are broadly two types of players - those who like to progress ASAP into a well organised approach to build that scales and those who play very adhoc. The latter probably care nothing about the changes to artillery and cliff explosives. The former now might go so far as to utterly f***** hate it because it just completely screws them over at a game stage where they are used to having it and getting organized and starting to scale up. Ad-hoc players just wont care and will argue it is a great and logical change.

That's definitely true, but that's why cliffs are optional. For players who like to be able to build extremely organized right from the beginning cliffs will just always be an annoyance and there's no reason they should ever need to exist, so they can be fully turned off.

For artillery, it doesn't really change anything about organization - you can still build an organized build, it just needs more resources put into defenses until you get artillery.

[IsaacOscar]

I get the impression there are broadly two types of players - those who like to progress ASAP into a well organised approach to build that scales and those who play very adhoc. The latter probably care nothing about the changes to artillery and cliff explosives. The former now might go so far as to utterly f***** hate it because it just completely screws them over at a game stage where they are used to having it and getting organized and starting to scale up. Ad-hoc players just wont care and will argue it is a great and logical change.

That's definitely true, but that's why cliffs are optional. For players who like to be able to build extremely organized right from the beginning cliffs will just always be an annoyance and there's no reason they should ever need to exist, so they can be fully turned off.

Cliffs are absolutely essential for a fun and beautiful factorio experience! The only reason for them to be optional is because of all the players who winned when they were added... (although having customisable map gen settings is very common for games, but giving an in game GUI to modify recipes and technologies would be ridiculous...)

[Khazul]

I get the impression there are broadly two types of players - those who like to progress ASAP into a well organised approach to build that scales and those who play very adhoc. The latter probably care nothing about the changes to artillery and cliff explosives. The former now might go so far as to utterly f***** hate it because it just completely screws them over at a game stage where they are used to having it and getting organized and starting to scale up. Ad-hoc players just wont care and will argue it is a great and logical change.

That's definitely true, but that's why cliffs are optional. For players who like to be able to build extremely organized right from the beginning cliffs will just always be an annoyance and there's no reason they should ever need to exist, so they can be fully turned off.

Cliffs are absolutely essential for a fun and beautiful factorio experience! The only reason for them to be optional is because of all the players who winned when they were added... (although having customisable map gen settings is very common for games, but giving an in game GUI to modify recipes and technologies would be ridiculous...)

I dont mind clearing cliffs etc - I only mind it when it delayed into late mid game way past the time it was needed and forces you build in a way you dont like to build at that game stage. Kind of same with artillery (to keep this on topic - my bad, but the two kind of go together in terms of impact on mid game). Delaying artillery to essentially post Vulcanus is not breaking in the same way, but I do think it does drag out a game stage on Nauvis for way longer than it should be dragged out for a clean feeling progression. I can semi understand it if Artillery can be used vs demolisher, but I assume as they are not static, it cannot be except manually. I guess that it what they wanted, ie force people to get up close and personal with demolishers. I am fine with that, but not fine with the impact on Nauvis as by that stage on Nauvis you may be dealing with mass nests which take a long time to clear with even a tank and/or turret pushes etc.

I think artillery would have been better had they come up with some atmospheric excuse to justify that basic Nauvis artillery didnt work on Vulcanus without further research if Demolishers are the reason for this. Maybe just the manual control of it is delayed to Vulcanus research so you couldnt manually target Demolishers, but you could still mass clear nearby nests for expansion back on Nauvis. Also remember that when you do start clearing nests with artillery, your walls better be up to the resulting mass backlash from angry homeless biters...

[Illiander42]

I'm an organised player who rushes bots and a grid and I love cliff explosives and artillery being on Vulcanis. It gives me a reason to go there. (And the 2.0 map gen basically removes all the problems with cliffs)

But that's why I hate that you can't have more than one landing pad per planet. Because it puts a hard limit on how much you can import, and with the biter-labs being Nauvis-only, I can't move my labs onto spaceships to let them scale around that limit.

Artillery being off-planet gives you a reason to rush (and to also rush your initial Vulcanis setup). Because if you wait too long then your remote-controlled tank won't be able to keep behemoth worms off your defences.

Cliff explosives and artillery being on the same planet does make it a complete no-brainer for where to go first though.

[Tinyboss]

And logi bot throughput is not infinite. It's limited by roboport charging rate and how many you can pack into the circle defined by how far a robot can fly on half its charge. And since robot energy usage is dominated by how far they travel, that puts a hard limit on how much you can pull out of a landing pad.

Is this limit quite high? Yes. But it's there. And one thing I know about Factorio is that we always go bigger.

True, but you ought to at least reach that limit yourself before asking for it to be lifted.