Early game quality balance

[fencingsquirrel]

Early game quality is pretty lackluster: there's no reason at all to use it on default settings and on harder settings you at best can get some quality mining drills, weapons, or armor. And even still before Aquillo, it tends to be very far down on the list for anything that isn't gear or spaceship related.

So here's some changes that I think would be cool for 2.1:

1) Quality is the least impactful module despite being the most expensive tech. While the actual tech cost doesn't matter on default, it's not like "Quality 1" is useful on default either. Bumping it down to the tech cost of the other modules would help a lot on settings where early quality is more useful.

2) I think lower quality levels could be a bit easier to attain, and offsetting this would be to make higher quality harder. Legendary quality is more of a late game vanity grind than something that's useful anyways.

So I would say two changes should be made here

A) Change the quality chance for the modules from:

Quality I: 1%
Quality 2: 2%
Quality 3: 2.5%

to

Quality I: 2%
Quality 2: 2.5%
Quality 3: 3%

To make the early game better.

B) Dividing the quality module% by the ingredient quality:

So if you have epic recipes or recycle material with a total module quality of 40% it acts instead like 10%. And commons still act like 40%

This makes trying to upcycle an epic or build up from an epic, into a legendary ~4 times harder.

As a side-effect, actually using Quality 3 modules are better than high quality Quality 2s.

[Hurkyl]

Early game quality is pretty lackluster: there's no reason at all to use it on default settings and on harder settings you at best can get some quality mining drills, weapons, or armor. And even still before Aquillo, it tends to be very far down on the list for anything that isn't gear or spaceship related.

I always felt like the go-to application early on is higher quality productivity modules for your labs and silo, and maybe some other things like purple/yellow science or blue circuits. Quality productivity module 1's are basically free if you research quality and do purple science, and the rare prod 1's just as good as common prod 2's. (technically better, since they have a smaller speed penalty)

And quality furnaces for your platform, since they're basically free too and a major space hog.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I always had the impression the ntention is that quality items were supposed to be scarce early on, something to be saved for where they can have the most impact.

[fencingsquirrel]

Yeah I was just talking about very early on. It is unlocked at green science and all other modules have a a lot of use at that point. Outright skipping module 1s is the best case in most scenarios, which feels odd.

Regarding scarcity of quality items, sometimes "purely optimal balance" isn't even really desired. If it's optimal to have a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of quality stuff early game and that is the design goal, most people will actually build 0 quality stuff. Just the way that many people play the game. I think it's better to aim for a "moderate" amount of quality early game so most people can enjoy it's use.

I also felt like the intention was that lower quality would be useful en masse if you wanted, and as you get increasingly rare stuff it would be more selective.

Even with the changes suggested, making your entire factory uncommon rarity, the absolute lowest boost in quality, would still be suboptimal for a very long time. Quality is just really bad right now.

But I also do no feel the overall balance in the midgame is that bad, hence the minor changes to higher level mods (1,2,2.5% to 2,2.5,3% is not drastic at all)

[CyberCider]

Quality largely not being accessible early on makes complete sense to me. It’s simply very strong, even without epic and legendary unlocked. I mean, you must keep in mind that quality is mostly a megabase oriented mechanic. Of course it doesn’t really have much purpose in a run to beat the game, that’s by design. The biggest reason to use quality before beating the game is just because you want to and you think it’s cool.

But it’s not like there are no benefits whatsoever; The other guy already gave several examples of useful early quality, and I believe there are more. Stick quality modules in the right places throughout your whole factory, set up the filtering correctly, and over time you will build up plenty of quality intermediates. Enough to make an impact, but still few enough to have to choose where you really need them. I’ve talked to some people who are really into that playstyle, they say it works quite well. I think it’s just the right tradeoff between complexity and reward for that stage of the game. The ability to do quality “on demand” and without involving your whole base is unlocked on Fulgora, because it really is a powerful thing.

[Tertius]

But it’s not like there are no benefits whatsoever; The other guy already gave several examples of useful early quality, and I believe there are more. Stick quality modules in the right places throughout your whole factory, set up the filtering correctly, and over time you will build up plenty of quality intermediates.

I tried that, and I was not successful. My general approach is to use productivity modules and speed beacons as much as possible to reduce factory size and input requirement. Not very early game, but starting with mid game. Less input requirement means mines last longer, which is important for early and mid game. Quality adds nothing but speed for the most part, and if I use production+speed modules, this saves much more than higher quality production machines.

So if I add quality modules into the intermediate production process, I have to remove productivity and speed boosts, which doubles and triples the factory size for higher input and decreased output. This doesn't make sense if your goal is to just siphon the occasional quality intermediate. And then you sit on increasingly large heaps of meh-quality intermediates you don't have a use for except to store them. That's dead weight. Or you replicate every production line for every quality, up to 5-fold for all 5 quality tiers in the end. That's not what I'm able to do, just too tedious. Or you build auto-factories with recipe switching that creates an item to craft the intermediates away as soon as enough have accumulated. This would be a valid approach, if there was not that one exotic ingredient that never shows up, so you're not able to craft all the other intermediate heaps away except for trivial quality items you don't have a use for in the long run.

Higher quality production machines are useful if you're able to also add higher quality production modules, so you don't have to produce that many production modules. But for every other use, you can just add one or two more machines.

The only quality items that make a real difference beyond just some speed are the solar panel (for platform), accumulator (for platform and Fulgora) and lightning collector (on Fulgora), because they collect and store more energy per item. And the thruster, because it's the only item that can make a platform go faster than ~300 km/s. And the asteroid collector to some extend, because already uncommon almost doubles the input because of the increased amount of arms, but you can also just put 2 collectors next to each other to get 2 arms. Usually normal already collects enough for everything except for the largest promethium collecting platforms. Quality beacons are nice, because they have increased effect transmission, so there is synergy with the modules they provide. But just nice and not important until late game when you want them to carry expensive quality speed modules. And it is just the same as the inherent speed bonus of quality production machines. And it has its limits because you cannot speed boost machines infinitely since you're unable to provide ingredients fast enough. This effect duplication is what I mean when I complain the quality mechanics lacks direction.

Quality personal equipment is nice but not really useful, because you do most stuff in remote view later on.
And for the bigger inventory size - it's not available when you need it most (early game, no bots) and available when you don't need it any more (late game, bots everywhere).

[fencingsquirrel]

@Cyber, ninja'd xD

Well this thread really isn't quite about buffing quality so much as making a more natural progression. Epics and especially legendaries would be more difficult while uncommons would be less difficult. So quality early game would be easier, but making your legendary shattered planet ship, or your quality beaconed epic biolabs would be harder.

I doubt the devs intended most players would skip quality altogether before gleba/aquillo, or the lower qualities and modules wouldn't exist. But I'm not a factorio dev, so I can only guess.

[Hurkyl]

But it’s not like there are no benefits whatsoever; The other guy already gave several examples of useful early quality, and I believe there are more. Stick quality modules in the right places throughout your whole factory, set up the filtering correctly, and over time you will build up plenty of quality intermediates.

I tried that, and I was not successful. My general approach is to use productivity modules and speed beacons as much as possible to reduce factory size and input requirement. Not very early game, but starting with mid game. Less input requirement means mines last longer, which is important for early and mid game. Quality adds nothing but speed for the most part, and if I use production+speed modules, this saves much more than higher quality production machines.

So if I add quality modules into the intermediate production process, I have to remove productivity and speed boosts, which doubles and triples the factory size for higher input and decreased output. This doesn't make sense if your goal is to just siphon the occasional quality intermediate. And then you sit on increasingly large heaps of meh-quality intermediates you don't have a use for except to store them. That's dead weight.

FWIW, I work backwards.

E.g. if I have a stock of quality productivity module 1's, I'll probably decide I want to use them as ingredients to accelerate my production of quality productivity module 2's.

So, if set up a couple blue/red circuit assemblers with quality modules -- common recipe only -- I can get the intermediates I need to combine with the quality productivity module 1's. And if I don't go deeper than that, this ensures I'm making all of the various quality items in the right proportions (on average) to be used in the recipe.

If I do go deeper, I want to again effectively go the same depth along all branches in the recipe chain. If you don't, you wind up getting different proportions of uncommon/rare for the different ingredients to your recipe and you can't pair everything up correctly. So, e.g., it doesn't make sense to make blue circuits from quality ingredients unless I'm also making red circuits and productivity module 1's from quality ingredients.

Although at some point (especially if you want to target a wider variety of finished products) you would want to start setting up backpressure to avoid overproduction of quality intermediates. I think that will be interesting to math out how to line things up so the factory autodetects the right thing, but I haven't gotten around to working at that level of detail yet.

[CyberCider]

I tried that, and I was not successful. My general approach is to use productivity modules and speed beacons as much as possible to reduce factory size and input requirement. Not very early game, but starting with mid game. Less input requirement means mines last longer, which is important for early and mid game. Quality adds nothing but speed for the most part, and if I use production+speed modules, this saves much more than higher quality production machines.

So if I add quality modules into the intermediate production process, I have to remove productivity and speed boosts, which doubles and triples the factory size for higher input and decreased output. This doesn't make sense if your goal is to just siphon the occasional quality intermediate. And then you sit on increasingly large heaps of meh-quality intermediates you don't have a use for except to store them. That's dead weight. Or you replicate every production line for every quality, up to 5-fold for all 5 quality tiers in the end. That's not what I'm able to do, just too tedious. Or you build auto-factories with recipe switching that creates an item to craft the intermediates away as soon as enough have accumulated. This would be a valid approach, if there was not that one exotic ingredient that never shows up, so you're not able to craft all the other intermediate heaps away except for trivial quality items you don't have a use for in the long run.

Higher quality production machines are useful if you're able to also add higher quality production modules, so you don't have to produce that many production modules. But for every other use, you can just add one or two more machines.

The only quality items that make a real difference beyond just some speed are the solar panel (for platform), accumulator (for platform and Fulgora) and lightning collector (on Fulgora), because they collect and store more energy per item. And the thruster, because it's the only item that can make a platform go faster than ~300 km/s. And the asteroid collector to some extend, because already uncommon almost doubles the input because of the increased amount of arms, but you can also just put 2 collectors next to each other to get 2 arms. Usually normal already collects enough for everything except for the largest promethium collecting platforms. Quality beacons are nice, because they have increased effect transmission, so there is synergy with the modules they provide. But just nice and not important until late game when you want them to carry expensive quality speed modules. And it is just the same as the inherent speed bonus of quality production machines. And it has its limits because you cannot speed boost machines infinitely since you're unable to provide ingredients fast enough. This effect duplication is what I mean when I complain the quality mechanics lacks direction.

Quality personal equipment is nice but not really useful, because you do most stuff in remote view later on.
And for the bigger inventory size - it's not available when you need it most (early game, no bots) and available when you don't need it any more (late game, bots everywhere).

Well, by “where it matters”, I mostly meant productivity modules and a small stockpile of machines/modules intended for use on your first spaceship. And I found quality personal equipment to be quite helpful when setting up new planets. Anyway, this post is about “early game”, which I interpreted as before beacons are unlocked and during the time when productivity modules only give a few % boost instead of tens of %. Besides, you can still freely use productivity in labs and science pack assemblers, which provide the biggest gains anyway.

I doubt the devs intended most players would skip quality altogether before gleba/aquillo, or the lower qualities and modules wouldn't exist. But I'm not a factorio dev, so I can only guess.

They definitely intended for you to be able to skip quality without feeling like you missed anything important. That was part of their vision for the mechanic. But “skip” isn’t really what I said either. I said that early game (before Fulgora pretty much), quality can only have niche applications instead of widespread use across most of the factory. The game would simply become too easy if you could access larger amounts of uncommon/rare items before even leaving Nauvis. Uncommon may be the second lowest quality level, but it’s a substantial improvement over common. Quality can benefit you early on, but only to a degree that makes sense for early on. And that degree is, well, not very much.

As to why quality modules are even unlocked before recyclers: Having access to a small amount of quality items early on makes for a lot more interesting gameplay than if you had none. Because there is some strategy in deciding where to use them, and which ones you will produce to begin with. Nothing like that really existed in 1.1, and I think it can really enrich the gameplay. And the ability to give any recipe 2+ extra byproducts is quite cool, imo it’s good that players get to have fun with that mechanic early on.

Even if “most people” don’t pursue these things, imo that’s ok. They’re here for those who will enjoy the process. That’s just the kind of mechanic quality is. Not really part of the normal gameplay, just an extra side quest you can do if it looks cool to you.

[Tertius]

Although at some point (especially if you want to target a wider variety of finished products) you would want to start setting up backpressure to avoid overproduction of quality intermediates. I think that will be interesting to math out how to line things up so the factory autodetects the right thing, but I haven't gotten around to working at that level of detail yet.

Yes, that's all possible. I did this, I tried production lines with quality, did much math, and at one point I realized it's not fun, so I stopped. You're running to stand still. After you did quality, you're at the same spot as you were before, just with higher numbers. Everything the same, just higher numbers. No challenge, no problem to solve, no task to accomplish. Just an end in itself.