Friday Facts #92 - Personal roboport

[Takezu]

picking up and placing down the same drill from one patch on to another, is manual, you mine the drill run over an place it down. it's not as slow as hacking on the ore with a pick but it's manual nonetheless. also all crafting is manual, up to the first 10 since packs that goes into the first lab, for automation. Hence the name of the research, after Automation one (and logistic one for the matter of splitter/underground belt) you are able to automate almost everything to a degree, mainly the restriction of craftable items in the assembler one which prevents you from automating inserters, for example, until automation 2. Befor that manual labor is not avoidable. And thats the point where for me early game ends and mid game begins.
And i don't know, i beginn usually by hacking some trees placing Drill/furnace next to each other on iron and go mine some stone for additional furnaces and drills.
Don't know which is faster, waiting for the drill or making up to four to six (1/2 coal 1/2 iron 1 stone 1 copper) drill and let them run while planing out the basic layout of the factory to be.
But truth is early game is manual, if i move manually the drill around or mine some ress for more drills looks different but amounts to the same.

[Koub]

Wow. I would more be like "marathon mod FTW", especially for the beginning, because I find sad that some items are of use 10 minutes in the game.

[orzelek]

Wow. I would more be like "marathon mod FTW", especially for the beginning, because I find sad that some items are of use 10 minutes in the game.

I'd agree with you - working with coal and no power could be made much longer if we would get something similar to steampunk mod integrated into game.
It would be still automation but without electrical power.

[Takezu]

The coal age is not much fun to me. and routing coal half across the satrting area to get anything into gear, sounds not very funfactor raising to me.
Ends only in more useless junk that ends up in wooden box shoot with a shotgun in the end.
As it stands now, it's good to get power going, but not for much more. Sounds to me better then having x thousend coal useless on a belt scattert half across the base to keep things somewhat running.
And thinking of it, feeding coal in a drill to mine iron automated would mean to add 2 belt lines and one inserter where one of the belt lines would need to run at one of the tree non outputsides, So or so one belt line at least will end up on the ore and drills have no additional radius like the electro miners, so every belt on ore is lost access.

I think a style like marathon is good for a mod or an additional gamemode, but not so good for the basic gameplay by itself. Not every one has the patience and endurance for that kind of gameplay.

[vampiricdust]

I create custom scenarios & give myself 28 boilers, 20 steam engines, 50 poles, 100 belts, 50 inserters, a few splitters, a few underground, some pipe to grounds & pipes, 4 electric miners, 10 stone furnaces, a science lab, and two assembly machines. Burner stuff is rather boring & tediously slow.

I personally like starting my games with the idea I'm there on purpose but didn't want to haul an entire base with me.

[Plop and run]

The priority thing does look odd. I used to have one copy of each relevant building in my inventory and just place blueprint ghosts of them, so I don't need to refill my inventory again and again. Is this unavailable with the new behavior?
Another scenario is when I have plenty of belts in the inventory for outpost building, but ghost-place them when inside my base for the same reason.

[Lupoviridae]

I had been sort of hoping that this whole "Personal RoboPort" thing would be available from gamestart as a way to clear trees without manual labour, but then again I can see why it's instead posited as a mid game thing.

That still leaves the problem of manual labour of tree-clearing, in a game whose central principle is to avoid manual labour.

Get a flamethrower early into green potions and burn them all down. It gives you something to do with light oil, and it satisfies the inner pyromaniac.

[Okeanos]

How about a train wagon there acts like a roboport, another train wagon there is capable of acting like a chest where the robots can drop the trees/pick up rails for construction of the railroad in front of the train.

Or even better give train wagons something similar to the modular armour so you are able to modify the wagons to become:
- Roboport wagons
- Defensive wagons with gun or laserturrets
- Radar wagons scouting around the train
- Acumulator wagons powering the other wagons on the train
- Provider/requester wagons supplying the bots with supplies/space for things de constructed.
- Assembly wagons there is able to produce stuff e.g. new rails to put in front of the train.

I would love to build a big parasite train there is able to drive through the land by cutting down all trees and collecting all resources in range in order to keep moving forward.

Just make the modular wagons extremely expensive so they first are available at the end game

[CreeperDaReeper]

Or even better give train wagons something similar to the modular armour so you are able to modify the wagons to become:
- Roboport wagons
- Defensive wagons with gun or laserturrets
- Radar wagons scouting around the train
- Acumulator wagons powering the other wagons on the train
- Provider/requester wagons supplying the bots with supplies/space for things de constructed.
- Assembly wagons there is able to produce stuff e.g. new rails to put in front of the train.

iiiTHIS!!!
Sorry, but that sound like it would be freakin' awesome. Someone please tell me this would be possible!

[Nolorwolf]

For all people complaining how early game is slow, I must agree... But there is a easy fix.

Early game as it is now is great for new players playing this 1st or 2nd time, but older players want to get to a part where creativity takes place -mid game.

Easy solution is to offer alternative start as a option on world start:
- In your inventory you would have 1 Lab, 1 Pump, 5-10 Boilers, 2-4 Steam Engines, 2 Electric Mining Drills, 20 power poles and 4-8 Furnaces.
- You would also start with Automation I, Logistics I, Military and Armor Crafting I.
- They could instead of pistol, give you a basic armor and a rifle with 20 bullets.

You could experiment all you want with this (maybe include Steel, some belts, etc...), but I think it would benefit experienced players greatly without hurting Factorio's story at all.

It would also sort this "early game balancing" issue forever, as early game is fine, just not in your 10th playthrough.

Please comment on the idea, in my mind it's a perfect fix but maybe it's not so great for some reason

[ssilk]

iiiTHIS!!!
Sorry, but that sound like it would be freakin' awesome. Someone please tell me this would be possible!

Everything is possible.
But it looks, like it is suggested many times:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=9291 More wagons types [Roboport, Turret, Battery, Logistic...]
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ort#p27985 New Locomotives and Wagons
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=6012 Modular Locomotives, really cool looking

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ain#p10932 Developers comment to this idea, which is in most cases a good indicator, if it has a chance of beeing implemented or not

[cpy]

How badly will be mods broken in 0.12?

[Syriusz]

I think, that idea of heaving active provider slots is not so great, because you still need to move that items to slots, and you will do it only when you will not have space. Instead I would really like to have regular slots with min AND max number of items.
For example:
-you want 1 or 2 stacks of inserters: min=50 max=100. You pick up more inserters than 100? robots remove them. You have less than 50? Robots bring them to you.
-You clear forests, (with robots or manual), you do not want wood in inventory, so you put min=0, max=0, and robots do not bring them to you if they can, and remove any wood that you picked up.
-You clean belts, and do not want to have 10 stacks of ore? put ores to min=0 and max=0...
-You want exactly 1 stack of bullets in your pocket- min=100, max=100...

If devs do not want to have 2 buttons on bar, then maybe it could be one only one value that acts as min and max, so you would always have exactly amount of items you request.

Also it could be good idea to make new logistic chest, witch have min and max values, but logistic robots would bring items to max value and construction robots and logistic robots would empty to min value. If you would have more than 1 chest that provide and request amount of items that you cannot provide, then they would be filled proportional to their max value...

And to people that don't like burner phase, there are mods that give you items for electricity phase.

***
I'm not native speaker, so if I wrote it in some convoluted way or in any other way not understandable I'm sorry.

[Mur]

...I....I can't look away....
Drones, drones everywhere

[cube]

How badly will be mods broken in 0.12?

Completely :-)

[CreeperDaReeper]

~ snip ~

The suggestion was for modular train cars like modular armor. One train car that can have modules added into it to change its function. That's what I was referring too.

[bobucles]

The personal roboport looks amazing, but running dozens of free energy drones from the player instead of a dedicated drone vehicle seems kinda cheaty. There's no way a suit can generate power of that magnitude! But then again we're talking about a player inventory that can hold enough rocket defenses to hold the eye of terror.

What would work better, a player roboport or a vehicle based one? The former goes with you anywhere, while the latter lets you go most places but be fully loaded for battle.

[kiba]

The personal roboport looks amazing, but running dozens of free energy drones from the player instead of a dedicated drone vehicle seems kinda cheaty. There's no way a suit can generate power of that magnitude! But then again we're talking about a player inventory that can hold enough rocket defenses to hold the eye of terror.

What would work better, a player roboport or a vehicle based one? The former goes with you anywhere, while the latter lets you go most places but be fully loaded for battle.

If a player can carry hundred of bots and not feel a thing, than it's pretty overpowered. There's no real reason to use vehicle roboport.

[ssilk]

How badly will be mods broken in 0.12?

Completely

Hm. This is important to know. I will create a new board for 0.12 compatible mods. The old ones can then be moved to expired.

[Peter34]

The personal roboport looks amazing, but running dozens of free energy drones from the player instead of a dedicated drone vehicle seems kinda cheaty. There's no way a suit can generate power of that magnitude! But then again we're talking about a player inventory that can hold enough rocket defenses to hold the eye of terror.

What would work better, a player roboport or a vehicle based one? The former goes with you anywhere, while the latter lets you go most places but be fully loaded for battle.

The problem with Vehicles is that they're not an early game thing, since setting up Engine production is non-trivial and resource-intensive.