Version 2.0.24

[x2605]

[*] Land mines on space platforms now damage the space platform tiles in a radius.

No... I loved making reactive armored ships. Why they are changing a thing so extremely? not like Wube.
One of fun contents of 2.0 is planned to be removed?

[blastinburn]

[*] Land mines on space platforms now damage the space platform tiles in a radius.

This is a terrible change, for the primary reason that it's a huge gotcha for anyone that hasn't been checking the patch notes. It inconsiderate to everyone that currently has a game in progress. If nothing else this should not be pushed past experimental for this reason alone. I've seen mentioned that saving this change for 2.1 when bigger changes will happen and things can be more expected to break is a possibility and that would be much more respectful of ongoing games.

As for the change itself, it feels like an unthought knee-jerk reaction, see how quickly people figured out how to make donut ships. As it stands, this change either means A) you stop using landmines, B) you stick them on little spikes out of your ship making it uglier, C) use it to make invalid shapes.
It would honestly just be a better and less exploitable change to disallow building landmines in space at all, which I think would be excessive but not completely unwarranted and is absolutely a better solution than this player trap and exploit that has been created.

I do agree platform landsmines needed a nerf, due to the arming time they're primarily fallback defense, but they are effectively a get out of jail free card for avoiding damage to your actual buildings. (especially on later platforms when they share so many materials with missles and railgun ammo)

I think more reasonable nerf would be detonating nearby landmines at the same time (to limit how many "chances" you can fit into a single area), destroy the tile they are on so their activation is more expensive, or have them do damage without immediately destroying tiles so the occasional fallback gets repaired but too many going off at once will cause significant damage to your own ship meaning you have to be properly defending it.

[eugenekay]

Would people be complaining so much about the Landmine change if..... they had required Gravity to begin with? Or if Landmines were completely removed from Space now, since they're "land mines"?

I think it is a good change to avoid a cheesy mechanism but still make it "Possible", with drawbacks, but because it is change it is bad.... Try to enjoy the game, not be angry at the Internet folks. You'll be happier in life.

[GregoriusT]

Would people be complaining so much about the Landmine change if..... they had required Gravity to begin with? Or if Landmines were completely removed from Space now, since they're "land mines"?

I think it is a good change to avoid a cheesy mechanism but still make it "Possible", with drawbacks, but because it is change it is bad.... Try to enjoy the game, not be angry at the Internet folks. You'll be happier in life.

The Problem with this change in particular is, it causes a whole lot of side effects that the devs did not think about whatsoever before dumping it onto us, such as illegal Donut Ships being possible now.

If Landmines didnt cause Mid Platform Destruction, this change would have been fine.

[atomizer]

It's really not difficult to come up with better solutions that would cause much less trouble and confusion:

1. Mines don't work against asteroids. Keeps them useful against hatching eggs; should be explained in a new tip entry.
2. Mines are buildable but don't work in space. Ideally needs a corresponding warning and/or a tip entry.
3. Mines are no longer buildable in space. Existing mines removed by migration, restriction clearly visible in tooltip.

[credomane]

Anyone else been having slow download issues from Wube's servers lately? I don't even know what sub-forum to ask in. So doing it here. Downloading mods go at a snails crawl taking several minutes to download a 12.8KB mod. Talking almost bits per second not even bytes per second it goes so slow. Downloading the factorio zip file straight from the website is the same way. Buddy across the country has been having the same download speed issues with Factorio and they are on the other side of the country with totally unrelated ISP from me.

If I cancel the download and restart it then some times it will download at a mostly normal speed but for the most part I'm just stuck waiting 30+ minutes for mods to update on an idle 1GB/s internet connection. Not on my end either as Steam is unaffected. I can start a game download and it will fly down at 60MB/s while the factorio download continues to trickle in at a few bytes a second before, during, and after a Steam did a game download/update.

Any clue what's up? Been doing this off and on since Thanksgiving weekend.

[Usul]

Please go all the way and update the rocket to the new look in all Icons (achievements, purple SA-Icon denoting SA-content in the wiki and mod portal, Steam Library Banner, Discord channel logo, and many many more places)

[IsaacOscar]

Please go all the way and update the rocket to the new look in all Icons (achievements, purple SA-Icon denoting SA-content in the wiki and mod portal, Steam Library Banner, Discord channel logo, and many many more places)

See my bug report 123418, if you find other places using the old rocket list them there,

[meganothing]

Anyone else been having slow download issues from Wube's servers lately? I don't even know what sub-forum to ask in. So doing it here. Downloading mods go at a snails crawl taking several minutes to download a 12.8KB mod. Talking almost bits per second not even bytes per second it goes so slow. Downloading the factorio zip file straight from the website is the same way. Buddy across the country has been having the same download speed issues with Factorio and they are on the other side of the country with totally unrelated ISP from me.

If I cancel the download and restart it then some times it will download at a mostly normal speed but for the most part I'm just stuck waiting 30+ minutes for mods to update on an idle 1GB/s internet connection. Not on my end either as Steam is unaffected. I can start a game download and it will fly down at 60MB/s while the factorio download continues to trickle in at a few bytes a second before, during, and after a Steam did a game download/update.

Any clue what's up? Been doing this off and on since Thanksgiving weekend.

Quick test: 4 MB/s just now. Wube servers probably are in Europe, so am I. Maybe lines to your part of the world are congested.

[credomane]

Quick test: 4 MB/s just now. Wube servers probably are in Europe, so am I. Maybe lines to your part of the world are congested.

Definitely them. My download got canceled few minutes ago and trying to visit factorio.com/download to try again gave me a "Heroku" error page on 3 different ISPs. Home, Work and Cellular. It came back up after a minute and I was able to download the game at 55MB/s. So definitely not a congestion issue or a me problem.


[edit]
Dang it. I wasn't paying attention and downloaded the setup exe. Now trying to grab the zip only and their stuff is back down to <50KB/s. Guess I'll see if the exe is easy to extract without having to install it.

[cagricelebi]

Hello,

Will this release ever be released as stable? Do you have any expected time?

Changing the ratio is something but changing mine behaviour is really important. These 2 balancing options (land mine self damage and rocket fuel ammonia recipe change) will definitely break some factories, and even cause irrepairable damage to some platforms (some maybe mid-flight).

Thanks.

[The Phoenixian]

Hello,

Will this release ever be released as stable? Do you have any expected time?

Changing the ratio is something but changing mine behaviour is really important. These 2 balancing options (land mine self damage and rocket fuel ammonia recipe change) will definitely break some factories, and even cause irrepairable damage to some platforms (some maybe mid-flight).

Thanks.

Unless there's an unrelated crash, it wouldn't surprise me if changing mine behavior is the reason why this branch and 2.0.25 aren't stable. The fact that the mine balance fix opened up a major exploit just hours later has me suspecting they found they needed a more sophisticated solution to the problem.

[TurningGears]

According to the discussions in this thread, it would probably be the cleanest solution to just remove mines from being available on platforms.

[Skellitor301]

I'm personally not a fan of saying no landmines for space platforms mainly because the arguments don't make sense. Explosions can work in space, it's no secret that you can direct an explosion claymores come to mind, reactive armor on tanks is a legit thing using directional explosives to increase the likelihood of a projectile being deflected, the idea that you can place a landmine on the dirt and cause a small amount of damage but suddenly causes a ton of damage on a metalic platform that's 10x thicker than the mine itself? The idea of making it require gravity doesn't make sense because, again, explosions don't need gravity they work in space regardless. I understand the idea of seeing it as a cheese method, but when we have real life examples of the same idea being used effectively, and it effectively makes a ton of builds deep in the game effectively self destructive, that's a hard sell for the sake of some wanting it to be more of a challenge. Is it effective? Yes. Is it cheesy? eeeeh? I would say it simplifies things sure but I wouldn't say it's fully a cheesy solution due to the single use factor. At best I would say landmines could do reduced damage to asteroids so you'd need multiple to destroy asteroids. Thus making it so you still can have some risk, but still landmines can have a use and not effectively destroy peoples satellites and ships, some ships and satellites are effectively unsalvageable causing a huge loss for some players due to the nature of orbital mechanics and building in space.

The other factor to this that kinda rubs me the wrong way is this does push that certain playstyles are not valid. I'd rather have the option to not use something than be forced to adopt a playstyle where challenge is greater than quality of life.