The Kids have won.

[quyxkh]

[thoughful stuff]

Yeah, I hear you especially on the trains, who's going to see having the game do something like that for them as an improvement and who's going to mourn the loss of a (in this case truly great) puzzle is always going to be a real question for people making games.

For the fluids, I figure fluid sim is why we have supercomputers that appear on the national budgets of global superpowers, whatever Wube have to do to get acceptable performance out of *their* fluid sim, for the maps their players build, is what they have to do. It's kinda like temperature, I really liked the original boiler setup where you had to chain them to keep the temperature high enough as the flow rate increase (at least that's how I recall it now) but also had that "it's a fluid sim" in my head and that kinda settled any "but why? I liked that" issues those changes had for me. And as puzzles they were just ordinary, swapping them out for different ones is just the normal noises in here.

I still see the splitter filtering and balancing as separate, but you tying them like that made me realize, hey, used to be you needed some circuitry for common filters but ordinary balancing was built in, now ordinary filtering is built in but you need some circuitry for balancing. Duh. "How… how did I not see that?". Okay, yeah, probably because the new filters don't afford anything like the opportunities for cleverness XKnight found with the old balancing, but there were easier ways to do what his contraptions did, finding his solutions wasn't really a gameplay thing, more of a toybox-play thing. So, yeah, thanks for that, I wouldn't mention those as losses for the game itself now.

p.s. one note, though, I think there's another way of thinking about posting solutions besides just "good players cooperating" and "good players competing", I really do think the best puzzles shouldn't be spoiled and cited evidence that I'm not alone. There's simply no way I was the only one who found that train solution, there's far cleverer people than me here, and there's similarly-challenging or in some cases just cleverly-unobvious puzzles in the other games I mentioned that have produced complaints for just as long, that I *know* I'm not the only one to solve, but nobody spills the beans. Because kids grow up, and at their best games can help them do it.

[mmmPI]

Yeah, I hear you especially on the trains, who's going to see having the game do something like that for them as an improvement and who's going to mourn the loss of a (in this case truly great) puzzle is always going to be a real question for people making games.

I think it's "worse" on MMO"s where changes are for the whole community with no alternatives, whereas for factorio all the previous version of the games and even some mods are available to download. I mean the mourning part shouldn't sound disproportionate to me, it's more about not enjoying 100% of the new things, which hey happens, rather than loosing forever on the ability to play a enjoyable game. The "old school" experience is still there. And i play diablo 2 not even resurrected, no trading, no ladder, no new fancy things, i mean it =)

For the fluids, I figure fluid sim is why we have supercomputers that appear on the national budgets of global superpowers, whatever Wube have to do to get acceptable performance out of *their* fluid sim, for the maps their players build, is what they have to do. It's kinda like temperature, I really liked the original boiler setup where you had to chain them to keep the temperature high enough as the flow rate increase (at least that's how I recall it now) but also had that "it's a fluid sim" in my head and that kinda settled any "but why? I liked that" issues those changes had for me. And as puzzles they were just ordinary, swapping them out for different ones is just the normal noises in here.

Temperature is one of those thing i was wishing to see more used in the expansion, but it's not the case with fluid, and as such i'm now negatively anticipating its removal, as it doesn't seem to serve much purpose. To me the old setup was 14-21 for some reason, with 14 for those 1x1 boilers and 21 for engines, but i may be wrong. It very well may have been because temperature needed to be increased progressively or maybe it was the limit after which a pump wouldn't provide enough water, or the pipe bottlenecked, i can't remember precisely, i'm not missing those all that much, but had a lot of fund with some of elAdamo's mod that messed with temperature and heat pipes so you have heat powered furnace. Feels like it's used on Aquilo a lot, but not for "fluid" maybe the best part only made it somehow in the expansion. You have to balance out heat loss that are difficult to math precisely because it's the sum of all machines active and consuming a bit of the heat, versus a "feeding" mechanism that can have various degree of complexity and react or not to unexpected changes.

I think from math / puzzle standpoint, it's more of a redirection. The simulation of temperature is the same as fluid to me. It's what require the supercomputers x).

I still see the splitter filtering and balancing as separate, but you tying them like that made me realize, hey, used to be you needed some circuitry for common filters but ordinary balancing was built in, now ordinary filtering is built in but you need some circuitry for balancing. Duh. "How… how did I not see that?". Okay, yeah, probably because the new filters don't afford anything like the opportunities for cleverness XKnight found with the old balancing, but there were easier ways to do what his contraptions did, finding his solutions wasn't really a gameplay thing, more of a toybox-play thing. So, yeah, thanks for that, I wouldn't mention those as losses for the game itself now.

I have yet to find a reason to use the connected splitters, seems to me that those are fancy tools not strictly required for the game, as in lower verus higher level langage, the game has introduced things that have built in powerful function, but i'm used to the old ways and can't always see where it would simplify my life or maybe even introduce new paradigm x). It was quicker for me to understand how to use the filter splitters than the connected one. But i'll take that as an opportunity to learn the tool, who knows what clever tricks players will come up with while the others rant

p.s. one note, though, I think there's another way of thinking about posting solutions besides just "good players cooperating" and "good players competing", I really do think the best puzzles shouldn't be spoiled and cited evidence that I'm not alone. There's simply no way I was the only one who found that train solution, there's far cleverer people than me here, and there's similarly-challenging or in some cases just cleverly-unobvious puzzles in the other games I mentioned that have produced complaints for just as long, that I *know* I'm not the only one to solve, but nobody spills the beans. Because kids grow up, and at their best games can help them do it.

Oh i agree there are other ways of thinking about why beside the cooperation vs competition mindsed. You are making it sound like it could be a choice of wisdom by those who have the higher knowledge to not "spill the beans" if i'm interpreting that correctly. Maybe, maybe the same happens without anyone deciding it on purpose, due to attention filter or whatever the name in english, something like the "3-2 assembly design for green circuit" will be encountereed by 90% of the players, but the "1-6 ratio for red circuit" maybe only 70% or 60% of players will face it because some will have started to use module and some will have given up the game already, and when you come to blue circuit, only maybe 20% of the original playerbase will still follow the "main path". That's an extreme simplification, but meant to illustrate that the "first and few basic steps" are necessarily those in common for the most players, and as you grow in complexity , when you approach the better and best design, you will also have lower and lower player count following it. And when you're deep in the rabbit hole of optimization or something, there's not many people around and you're not really making guide to other players, because it would take forever to explain the pre-requisite to understand the guide and have very few audience. Thus leading to a situation where what is "being transmitted" is what is useful for most players, and not necessarily the "most advanced knowledge", or the "best designs and more encompassing solutions". A bit of the same observation than the number of tutorial for a math thing on youtube seem to be inversely proportionnal to the complexity of the task, unlike the duration which cannot just be a coincidence x).