Ban quality modules from asteroid crushers

[CyberCider]

Asteroid reprocessing can essentially be used as a superior alternative to recycling. The chance to return an asteroid in higher quality is 80%, which is considerably higher than the recycler's 25%. Even the basic asteroid crushing recipes can also return asteroids, and their chance to do so is increased by asteroid productivity infinite tech. It starts at 20%, which is already not bad, but very quickly surpasses 25% with only a few levels of research.

Why is this important? Because asteroids can be processed into iron, calcite and coal (and smaller amounts of copper). Calcite can be processed into stone via lava processing, and coal becomes plastic. Calcite and coal are the only solid ingredients of said recipes, which means they fully transfer their quality onto those resources. This means that asteroids can be used as a backdoor to mass amounts of high quality iron, stone/concrete and plastic. Iron is the most important one of these, obviously, but a different interaction allows plastic to "transfer" its quality to copper and steel via LDS casting (which I also think is stupid by itself, but I'll leave that topic for another post...). And a single productivity research will increase all of their yields simultaneously.

This makes asteroids a very viable source of all basic resources in high quality. In my opinion, too viable. It far too easily overshadows other methods of obtaining quality basics. It has everything: versatility, simplicity, production capability, and scalability. Not to mention the fact that a quality upcycling method which doesn't even touch recyclers is something that shouldn't exist, and is clearly the product of an unforeseen interaction between unrelated game mechanics. It's unbalanced and should be removed, by way of forbidding quality modules in all asteroid crusher recipes.

[theolderbeholder]

If you like the game to be more difficult for you, make it more duifficult FOR YOU. Try to leave everybody else out of your personal preferences, thank you very much.

[aka13]

It has nothing to do with difficulty, but rather with cheese.

[BlakeMW]

If you like the game to be more difficult for you, make it more duifficult FOR YOU. Try to leave everybody else out of your personal preferences, thank you very much.

I don't think you understand the concept of game balance.

Like for a game to be balanced, some things can be better than others, but shouldn't be too much better.

The basic idea here, is that with a recycler to lose 75% of stuff every pass, so after 3 passes there's only 1.5% of the original stuff left.

With asteroid reprocessing only 20% of stuff is lost every pass, so after 3 passes, 51% of stuff remains. The nature of quality upcycling makes asteroid reprocessing dramatically better, not just a bit better, but orders of magnitude better.

[h.q.droid]

If you like the game to be more difficult for you, make it more duifficult FOR YOU. Try to leave everybody else out of your personal preferences, thank you very much.

I don't think you understand the concept of game balance.

Like for a game to be balanced, some things can be better than others, but shouldn't be too much better.

The basic idea here, is that with a recycler to lose 75% of stuff every pass, so after 3 passes there's only 1.5% of the original stuff left.

With asteroid reprocessing only 20% of stuff is lost every pass, so after 3 passes, 51% of stuff remains. The nature of quality upcycling makes asteroid reprocessing dramatically better, not just a bit better, but orders of magnitude better.

Simply false. Anything at 200%+ productivity is better than asteroid reprocessing in terms of productivity. That includes upcycling rocket part components and upcycling battery in cryo plants.

For casual players a big factory shouldn't be necessary to bootstrap legendary stuff and quality reprocessing fills in the gap nicely. And it's more fun to setup than save-scumming.

[Dr. Dog PhD]

Not to mention the fact that a quality upcycling method which doesn't even touch recyclers is something that shouldn't exist, and is clearly the product of an unforeseen interaction between unrelated game mechanics.

Why does the whole of the quality mechanic need to be routed through a single building? The game generally allows multiple valid solutions to problems.

And "unforeseen interaction between unrelated game mechanics" is typically called emergent gameplay and is not automatically a bad thing.

[CyberCider]

Why does the whole of the quality mechanic need to be routed through a single building? The game generally allows multiple valid solutions to problems.

And "unforeseen interaction between unrelated game mechanics" is typically called emergent gameplay and is not automatically a bad thing.

Maybe I should have worded that better. There’s nothing inherently wrong about this method being different than the others. But the point that I made in the rest of the post still stands: It’s unbalanced. All the values/stats related to quality are designed and balanced around the recycler’s return rate, thus any alternative with a better return rate will result in significantly stronger production than should be possible.

I am familiar with the concept of emergent gameplay. But I believe it should still be subject to balancing, if it produces something with a significant enough effect on the gameplay.

[aka13]

Seeing as how everything got nerfed to the ground which was "playing the game wrong" directly in the beta, and this was known since the beta, this counts as "playing the game right" by whatever powers that decide so, and I would be genuinely surprised if anything would be done about it this late into 2.0.

[angramania]

I don't think you understand the concept of game balance.
Like for a game to be balanced, some things can be better than others, but shouldn't be too much better.
The basic idea here, is that with a recycler to lose 75% of stuff every pass, so after 3 passes there's only 1.5% of the original stuff left.
With asteroid reprocessing only 20% of stuff is lost every pass, so after 3 passes, 51% of stuff remains. The nature of quality upcycling makes asteroid reprocessing dramatically better, not just a bit better, but orders of magnitude better.

Recycler has 4 module slots instead of two. Corresponding machine can have from 4 to 8 slots. And very high productivity for some recipes. Quality will be increased on both steps comparing to single step of crusher. Crusher way require later techs and much more complex setups. So final ratio is very different from 51/3.
Why not "balance" steel furnaces instead, they clearly two times better than stone ones. It's too much better!

[Nemoricus]

A question I would like to see answered is how many machines it takes to sustain a given production rate of quality items via conventional and asteroid reprocessing routes. This would include asteroid collectors and the machines needed to run a platform.

I suspect that asteroid reprocessing ends up with more complex builds, especially since you also have to route items through a landing pad.

[Arcus]

This whole suggestion subscribes to an overly narrow view of "balance" where anything "overpowered" must be hammered down into homoegenity.

The way things currently is better for gameplay diversity. You're still asked to engage in recycler loops and upcycling for planetary specific materials, and there's nothing inherently special or interesting about iron upcycling loops compared to any other material. Platform design is a different design challenge from building recycler loops on the ground, for all the reductive insistence that it's just "copypasting a million crushers".

Asteroid upcycling provides a nice incentive to pursue asteroid productivity research similar to how you're incentivised to pursue high levels of processing unit productivity and LDS productivity.

Do the base game materials eventually become trivial to mass produce in legendary quality? Yes. But it's not really a balance issue in Factorio where you can pummel most challenges into dust with enough mass production.

[aka13]

Glad that shipping ammo to platform, or asteroid storage did not get hammered, and we get a lot of diversity there.

[R060]

Glad that shipping ammo to platform, or asteroid storage did not get hammered, and we get a lot of diversity there.

Except people still ship ammo (rocket missiles) to the platforms instead of crafting them at the rate they consume them, or just wait for 2 hours for them to be replenished and just copy-paste the ship 100 times. I don't understand the goal of all this "balancing", except that game now feels more ugly for the sake that «kovarex wanted players to build space factories not space cargo ships», with later kinda the whole point of building them isn't it.

[aka13]

Yeah, I am convinced as well that this is the reason asteroid crushing rerolls are still in, so that ships can reliably craft quality ammo for the flying factory aspect.
The dropping from orbit is an unintended side-effect.

Would be pretty funny if orbital drops got nerfed

[CyberCider]

Except people still ship ammo (rocket missiles) to the platforms instead of crafting them at the rate they consume them, or just wait for 2 hours for them to be replenished

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do that. Why would you even do it for rockets specifically? Those are easy to produce in flight fast enough to fill a small buffer. I thought red and uranium bullets were the main reason this change was implemented.

[aka13]

It was implemented, because speedrunners pre-shipped rockets, bulllets and all the other good stuff and won the game on the final beta test. Stack sizes for ammo were cut in half and shipping made expensiv(er) than it was.

[R060]

Except people still ship ammo (rocket missiles) to the platforms instead of crafting them at the rate they consume them, or just wait for 2 hours for them to be replenished

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do that. Why would you even do it for rockets specifically? Those are easy to produce in flight fast enough to fill a small buffer. I thought red and uranium bullets were the main reason this change was implemented.

Bullets higher than yellow are useless. Those you actually can just make on the platform to finish off small asteroids. Rockets, the explosive ones, while fired damage big asteroids and all around them, which means they are actually more efficient in killing all asteroids. And to make lots of them you need pretty big platform, since it's just 1 yellow rocket per 4 seconds and 8 seconds to convert it to the 1 red rocket. And not forget the ammount of iron smelting you need to do, which is 6 electric furnaces at minimum to satisfy just one Mk3 yellow ammo assembler.

Or you can just store lots of them in the hub inventory and copypaste their production on the planet to multiload how many platforms you want on Gleba/Vulcanus/Nauvis, reach the destination, load all the lolipop chunks onto the belts and run away. (Those who think that this is incorrect way to play the game - no, it is not, since no one decided to nerf it and instead mines were nerfed in a way that makes them useless to backup you from the situation when eggs decide to hatch on the platform in-flight).

Back on topic though. I hate quality, not because "it is hard", no it is not. It's just dumb and lazy and overall introduces more problems by trying to be "less items to players be less confused about", despite technically being absolutly different items with their own recipies, ID's and so on. So yeah, go ban quality modules. Or don't. Nobody cares. If 2.1 will not learn the lessons and completly changes to the way Space Exploration worked (which it is, but with more budget), I think I just go back to the 1.1 and start playing SE again. The base game tends to be just the SA without SA and in many ways inherits many bugs because of those "mods" that you pay for in DLC.

[CyberCider]

Bullets higher than yellow are useless. Those you actually can just make on the platform to finish off small asteroids. Rockets, the explosive ones, while fired damage big asteroids and all around them, which means they are actually more efficient in killing all asteroids. And to make lots of them you need pretty big platform, since it's just 1 yellow rocket per 4 seconds and 8 seconds to convert it to the 1 red rocket. And not forget the ammount of iron smelting you need to do, which is 6 electric furnaces at minimum to satisfy just one Mk3 yellow ammo assembler.

Well, there is no real downside to a platform being huge. If it’s a promethium platform, then it’s probably already massive anyway. I don’t know why someone would put in so much effort to avoid it. I was under the impression that the main problem with importing bullets to ships was the fact that it allowed players to have much higher firepower than they would if they used yellow bullets produced in space. And higher firepower actually allows you to fly faster.

Besides, if you need rocket turrets, that means you’re on your way to Aquilo, which means you’ve been to the 3 mid planets. So you have foundries and space calcite, T3 speed and efficiency modules, beacons of course… And the means to make quality items, but you seem to not be a fan of those. Anyway, all of these things will let you make rocket production a lot smaller. And if you’re post Aquilo, then you’ll even have fusion power to power more speed modules, and cryoplants to make explosives faster.

[Nemoricus]

The base game tends to be just the SA without SA and in many ways inherits many bugs because of those "mods" that you pay for in DLC.

What bugs does base Factorio 2.0 inherit?