The quality system needs a redesign

[h.q.droid]

What do you call recipe cheesing ? Because i don't see that word used in OP

I mean the practical way to cheese rare mech armor without having gone to Gleba, that is by changing recipe manually when a quality roll fails. Like roll one uncommon EM plant, then put it manually into the output slot of a quality machine. The machine will stall when quality roll fails, then you can change recipe to recover the raw materials and roll again. Or just save / load. It's not very practical for legendary, but doable for rare. Rolling a bunch of mech armors / rocket silos / EM plants this way can get you enough raw materials to make a rare spaceship.

Can't be automated though since there's no automated way to insert stuff into the output slot.

[mmmPI]

I mean the practical way to cheese rare mech armor without having gone to Gleba, that is by changing recipe manually when a quality roll fails. Like roll one uncommon EM plant, then put it manually into the output slot of a quality machine. The machine will stall when quality roll fails, then you can change recipe to recover the raw materials and roll again. Or just save / load. It's not very practical for legendary, but doable for rare. Rolling a bunch of mech armors / rocket silos / EM plants this way can get you enough raw materials to make a rare spaceship.

Can't be automated though since there's no automated way to insert stuff into the output slot.

What would be the point of doing this ? If you are going to reload the game everytime the roll is not a quality upgrade i think you'd be better off just making another factory and another one that would be much less annoying. Is it to "save on raw material of low quality" ?

I do not see this as cheesing to me it's a slow process and if you have to reload the game it's as if you stop your entire factory since its progress will be rolled back several time.

I agree with what you said ealier than uncommon/rare and epic legendary are different game, that some things that work "before gleba" like quality module in mining drill for quality scrap mining can get you easily with a lot of "rare". But you'd probably want to use recycler to go beyond. But having said that to me there's no point in the "cheesing" mentionned , as in Fulgora you can make your mech armor from "rare" material if you have already plenty of them.

I think now the suggestion to remove the possibility to use "quality material" to make "quality item" appears even worse, it would remove all use for quality material, but if you try to get a "rare" armor, and you only get an "uncommon" you'll be more tempted to reload the game, because otherwise you can't even recycle it and try again, you have "uncommon material" that can't be used for anything.

[h.q.droid]

What would be the point of doing this ? If you are going to reload the game everytime the roll is not a quality upgrade i think you'd be better off just making another factory and another one that would be much less annoying. Is it to "save on raw material of low quality" ?

That's the point, you DON'T have to reload with the change-recipe cheese. You just stick an uncommon / rare seed product into the *output* slot of your quality assembler, and change its recipe if the roll fails. Your factories or teammates continue running in the background. Depending on Fulgora island sizes, it can be much faster than quality scrap recycling with rare module 2s if you roll heavy stuff like mech armors, rocket silos and nuclear reactors and recycle them for quality materials. It's like 100% quality manual crafting.

And that makes uncommon material useful since you can "manually craft" them into rare products once you have a seed.

[mmmPI]

That's the point, you DON'T have to reload with the change-recipe cheese. You just stick an uncommon / rare seed product into the *output* slot of your quality assembler, and change its recipe if the roll fails.

How is that going to help you get a mech armor of high quality faster if you need to seed it with a mech armor of the desired level of quality already ?

[h.q.droid]

That's the point, you DON'T have to reload with the change-recipe cheese. You just stick an uncommon / rare seed product into the *output* slot of your quality assembler, and change its recipe if the roll fails.

How is that going to help you get a mech armor of high quality faster if you need to seed it with a mech armor of the desired level of quality already ?

You seed with an uncommon, get a bunch uncommon, then recycle them for rare.

[mmmPI]

You seed with an uncommon, get a bunch uncommon, then recycle them for rare.

I don't see how it makes the processs faster because you can't guarantee you get a bunch of uncommon in a row, just that you will change receipe and try again if you don't have it, but this you know only when the receipe has completed right ?

[h.q.droid]

You seed with an uncommon, get a bunch uncommon, then recycle them for rare.

I don't see how it makes the processs faster because you can't guarantee you get a bunch of uncommon in a row, just that you will change receipe and try again if you don't have it, but this you know only when the receipe has completed right ?

Yes. Technically, it's rolled when the production started, but I haven't found a way to leak that RNG state reliably.

[mmmPI]

Yes. Technically, it's rolled when the production started, but I haven't found a way to leak that RNG state reliably.

I know that's why i used the expression, "you only know when the receipe has completed".

I mean the practical way to cheese rare mech armor without having gone to Gleba, that is by changing recipe manually when a quality roll fails.

That is not correct, i hope it's clear now.

[mmmPI]

Regarding the suggestion in this thread to remove the ability to craft finished product of "high quality" from "high quality material" that would yield a system where material of higer quality would have no use at all i see no answers.

[Premu]

I really have to disagree with the notion that basically everything beyond legendary is useless...

While setting up a large scale production on Fulgora without legendary quality yet, I'm really happy to have a lot of rare and uncommon accumulators, for example. They are much more space efficient.

And for your early space platforms rare assemblers and plants help a lot in keeping them small. A free 60% speed increase is always appreciated!

[h.q.droid]

Just thought of more examples of middle-quality useful things:

The ideal quality of a turret depends on the turret's distance from ship border, as lower range saves ammo / energy but you do need to actually shoot the thing before it hits.

An uncommon rocket could require one less shot to kill a big asteroid, and quality modules in explosive / rocket makers would start making sense.

[coffee-factorio]

In addition to rockets, the standard gun turret as well, if it hasn't been mentioned. Not in the context of base defense, because you're pinning hundreds of those things over kilometers. But in asteroid defense? Your last line of defense is either a large pool of damage upgrades, or something that buys you the effect of having them. If you roll overproduction, you might be able to buy something that ends up letting you go places safer on account of needing some kind of defense with a decent amount of turrets.

Tanks are good. I'd avoid h.q. droids cheese because a developer can make a statement on that if they feel like it's being abused that's final. How you use your free time in a game that gives you an achievement for a hundred hour win, is up to you though. In the context of fair play, regular quality tanks have a massive amount of applications if you decide to keep them, as construction vehicles. The range bonuses on an uncommon and rare tank massively increase it's effectiveness v. everything but demolishers. If you see cause to try, do it with something you won't miss!

If you decide to dispose of them. The high impact of the vehicle combined with it's large health pool make it a fantastic decoy, and if the situation calls for more discretion than following it in than just load it with some bullets you don't mind losing and use it as an FPV drone in remote view. Unlike triple distractors, it will probably kill something of tactical worth like the worms covering a nest. But tanks are rather expensive so, it doesn't seem like a winning strategy long term.

Has anyone mentioned lightning collectors & big electric poles on Fulgora? You need to be a bit careful. They are double edged, because you can make corner cases in your lightning defense in the early game that can endanger robots. But you can also potentially connect islands that way and put accumulator farms off your starter base. This is true even before you get a recycler.

[Brkfstfd]

The Quality system has clearly increased Engagement time with the Factory - so I think it is wildly successful as an addictive game mechanic.

There are many ways to play the game. The amount of discussion on different strategies to deal with Quality intermediates, effectiveness of Rare vs Legendary, etc serves as a perfect illustration of the Engagement. There does not seem to be a Right answer - and that’s good. It means we’re having Fun.

Quality is totally fine. As someone that likes it I could probably cosign on the opinion that it's more detached from a tangible process than other things in the game. It's probably less cool to work it all out than say, oil processing and a big train network. It maths with probabilities so it's naturally going to turn off people that have the 'Spike' psychographic profile. It makes sense that Spikes are probably going to see the only optimal thing to do being going straight to legendary as soon as it is trivial to do so. It must feel like a largely redundant system to them even though it is not. In most games my psychographic profile is 'Timmy' though and that's no different here. I like stomping around my automated space base empire and making it incrementally better at any given moment and quality fits just fine within that scope.

I'm currently working on what I would call my first megabase (bought the base game almost exactly a year before SA came out) and am now in the process on Vulcanus and Fulgora of scaling up red/greens/blues and that includes moving everything up to legendary. I've used plenty of rare and epic along the way to this point. Uncommon not so much for sure.

[sparr]

This makes base planning difficult from the start, especially when you're aware that in a dozen or so hours, you'll need to rebuild everything because you'll gain easy access to legendary quality.

This might come as a surprise to you, but most players don't unlock legendary quality in a dozen hours, let alone discover the tricks for "easy access" / duplication, let alone actually build out all the necessary stuff to do it. You're describing extreme end game content that most players won't ever reach at all.

[Kyralessa]

There are plenty of mods already that make legendary available right away, or sooner, or make everything automatically legendary, or whatever permutation one desires. Here's a starting point:

https://mods.factorio.com/search?query= ... =relevancy