Factorio Forums

Scatter shell:
I was thinking this may be a bit too OP too, reducing the damage and range both sound like a good idea. don't worry, I won't completely kill it's effectiveness.

Laser: I'll probably up the firing speed then, it means it will do more damage (Because it fires more often) and eat through more ammo (Because it fires more often).

An alternate idea would be a beam weapon instead (I was considering having laser beam rifle too), the only issue is that, that part of the weapon specification is on the actual weapon, so would need to be a new weapon type.

Artillery: I have been considering a cannon that shoots robots, it can be any robot really, as long as it isn't a combat robot that follows the player, that crashs the game because for some reason it isn't tied to the player, meaning it has to either be a destractor, or something new.... or perhaps those robot drone tanks I made. A tank that shoots mini tanks, could be amusing. But I was thinking perhaps it should specifically be a drone cannon instead of just ammo for the artillery.

bobingabout wrote:...

All of it sounds good.

Sidenote:
The idea queen tank with a minion tank swarm is just awesome.

I... do not know why anyone would make a tank 3. That is to say, I certainly wouldn't make a tank 3, except out of curiosity, promptly get it blown up due to an overabundance of AoE and lack maneuverability and then never make another one again. When you get access to it, you have access to shields, so why not give it some power armor slots, if possible? One prolly wouldn't even need a fusion generator, because it has its own independent power plant.

Edit addendum: That said, just made one... and oh my gosh, scatter shells!

Edit addendum addendum: Also, I stand corrected. The damage resistances were measured superbly, and so far I've failed to blow myself up!

TrollofReason wrote:Edit addendum: That said, just made one... and oh my gosh, scatter shells!

Edit addendum addendum: Also, I stand corrected. The damage resistances were measured superbly, and so far I've failed to blow myself up!

Yeah, It is a significant increase in power.

I would love to make an equipment grid, but it is currently only possible on Player Armor. So I pretty much ballanced the tank to MK3 as well as I could.

Again, lovely tank! Now... could you please do something about the basic modular armor requiring electronic logic boards? Because it's silly. Here's why!

As said in previous posts, I tend to play on worlds with a great deal of water and segmentation. What I failed to mention is that I also play with max alien spawns and nests. If you've never done that, it basically leads to broken islands almost completely infested with aliens connected by narrows strips of land, and lots of choke-points. It also sometimes requires the Landfill mod, but that's something else. This makes my games a defender's dream, (and a persuasive argument for flying aliens) but those choke points also mean that in order to advance beyond my starting area, which I need to do to find the gold to make logic boards, I'm often up against concentrated walls of rage and pain. To advance, I need to island-hop. Clearing or at least establishing a foothold on one island after another using turrets. This takes time, and I can attest from personal experience that the ceramic-titanium armor is pretty much a worthless investment in resources in the face of the elemental spitters that begin spawning when I have access to that armor. It could be argued that I just need to make a tank, however, with all that water a tank can't always go where I need to go. At least, not without that tank being picked up, put down somewhere else and often CLOSER to the alien nests, and reloaded. All that, by the way, also takes time that I don't always have.

Point is: I need shields. I need a bit of relatively early tankiness without an actual tank, and I don't have that without shielding. But right now I can't have shielding without gold, and I can't get gold without shielding. ... Well, I mean, I CAN get gold. Obviously, I've gotten gold before, but only after hours of stalling and acquiring HE bullets. By the time I get those AND the gold, the basic modular armor is already obsolete, and I'm ready to make proper power armor.

A simple tweak to the crafting recipe in changing the logic boards to the circuit boards would be greatly appreciated, and makes a sort of sci-fi sense. The modular armor is just a vest with a backpack stuffed with a couple of portable solar panels, some batteries, and some simple yet effective shield generators that it uses in a very simple manner. It doesn't have to keep track of the biofeedback of power armor, regulate an alien-enhanced fusion reactor, or shape the particle/energy effects of more advanced shielding. It's a very crude, very cheap, yet effective middle ground between inert and powered armor. And it wouldn't be OP because it can't have both shielding AND a fusion reactor because A) fusion reactors require gold, and B) there isn't enough room for a reactor and a shield, anyway. Plus, C) once the batteries are dead, those shields can only recharge during the day.

Edit addendum: Which bring me to kind of a sub-point... remove the gold requirements from the higher levels of portable solar panel, or just remove them entirely. They're neat to have, and more advanced solar panels prolly DO have gold in them, but they're totally extraneous given the resource/advancement curve.

TrollofReason wrote:But right now I can't have shielding without gold, and I can't get gold without shielding

The recipe for module armor is just the vanilla recipe with the red and blue circuits replaced with Bob's circuits. You might have to tweak the recipes yourself. In general, gold is a significant barrier to all of the high tech stuff in Bob's... multipurpose furnaces, rank 3 chemical and rank 5 assembly machines, modules, modular and powered armor. It's too bad there's no recipe to get tiny amounts of gold from some other ore, the way you can get silver and cobalt using lead and copper in chemical furnaces.

EDIT: Maybe the old fashioned "panning for gold" method makes sense. A ridiculous amount of stone (50-100), plus water, gives a gold ore.

Hey Bob... First of all, thanks for the mods! I really enjoy playing factorio with them

Not sure if this is a bug/feature with your mods or with vanilla, but here goes: I've been trying to build a mob farm, to get a lot of those small alien artifacts... My issue is, that the mobs seem to be a lot more agressive, when I'm near them: as opposede to far away: ?

Here's my mods: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/156 ... o/mods.zip (Bobs mods + treefarm)
Save: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/156 ... o/Save.zip

edit: cropped the images.

Hello! These are really great mods! I do, however, have a bug report and a suggested fix:

When wearing the new armors defined by the Warfare mod, the player sprites revert back to the poor old armorless default. This is because this mod hasn't taught the game its new armors should also affect the player sprites.

To fix this, I suggest adding the following (or a logical equivalent) somewhere in the mod code:
This will allow Factorio to properly display the armored player when wearing the new armors. Note that I have moved Basic Modular Armor into "category 2" armor sprites, down from vanilla's "category 3" power-armor sprites, as I feel the newly added armors sufficiently populate the "category 3" armor visuals enough to lump basic modular armor down in with the more basic armors.

A few observations as of v0.12.8:

In general this mod doesn't give me the same feeling of "progression" compared to the rest of the suite. Turrets are fine because they mesh into base appliances, but the new ammo basically just consists of two massive leaps: you have your cheap vanilla bullets, then a massive logistical challenge to finally get Cordite for better, but boring, bullets and nothing else is ever made of these materials, and finally a large research wall and "fake" progression (more on that later) for the alien special ammo. Perhaps add intermediate steps such as basic "blackpowder" tier (sulfur+steel/lead+whatever with maybe 1-2 intermediates, no parallels like bullets+magazines) and elevate cordite to Titanium tier (make nitroglycerin require MK3 plants due to its "instability" if your other mods are installed?)

With bobenemies installed I feel research progression is planned rather poorly: by the time you can afford to make special ammo said special effect is pretty much obsolete, because the current biters are highly resistant to its damage type. This is especially true for the red/green tier, requiring you to kill the biggest, baddest aliens to even research it and with no higher tier enemies on the horizon you can't even "invest into the future". From a pragmatic standpoint once you have AP and high-ex/acid you're set.
How to fix this, no idea. A cheap cop-out would be to give higher ranking special ammo ever increasing total damage, adding another layer of power creep when you inevitably buff the biters to match. The problem is rooted in the combat system itself though, as it simply isn't viable to carry half a dozen types of ammo to exploit enemy weaknesses, unless something ridiculous like a 95% resistance to everything else forces you to. Changing the drops or biter "types" would destroy the dynamic of learning to use their own adaptations against them.

Turrets:

Mostly fine, though I feel the range on high tier guns and laser could be reduced, and that of snipers increased. Snipers are a little weird, because depending on the situation they are either a complete waste of resources or utterly broken: if you can afford to build a wall of them (see AMASS series...) or establish a foothold by other means, their range and damage bonus lets you massacre pretty much anything with no real resource cost or danger to your investment. On the other hand, if you're shy on materials for building a decent amount of them or your defenses are set up in a way where getting run past/over is a serious risk, you'll want guns/lasers for that "self-sustaining death radius" effect. On the topic of lasers, I really hate how each and every one of these LIGHT-firing weapons uses relatively slow missiles, while kinetic projectiles are hitscan. They don't overkill and the pewpew is nice, but they're plasma casters and not lasers. Same in vanilla, so technically not your problem to fix.

Player+Power Armor:

The handheld weapons are decent. Sniper rilfe has the same potential issue as the respective turrets, only you can choose where to aim it. The rifle doesn't have much of a purpose, but serves as a decent middle ground for downing larger biters without emptying a stack of bullets into them. The laser rifle seems rather weak for the amount of research, tech and potential god modules/diamond axes that go into it. I would prefer a line-AoE "death ray", BFG/energy ball lobber or, if you ever decide the sniper is too overpowered, have that capacity moved to the laser. Or allow us to paint targets for nukes with it a la Starcraft
Haven't tried rockets, and don't really see a reason to as long as high-ex sniper rounds are a thing. As in vanilla having to set up explosives production solely for personal ammo seems like a waste when you could just mass up cheap bullets to share with your turrets, and your mod adds liquid oil, T3 circuits and T4 metal (tungsten) to the mix for the upgraded version.

Flamethrower ammo: yes, both the dev team and you have commented on it, no, that's not an excuse for either of you At least give it a cookie-cutter MK2 ammo that deals 2-3x regular damage, and a red alien variety with the same percentage bonus as going from unupgraded vanilla piercing shotgun shells to fully upgraded AP shells.

Power armor still feels like "if you can afford it, you don't need it anymore", same as vanilla, nothing wrong in that regard. One thing that bugs me is that it requires massive raiding trips or high evolution to get the higher-tier components. This is fine for the combat functions, but if I'm playing a green/pacifist run I would still like access to sustainable roboports or WARP SPEED!!! without literally sitting afk next to an array of MK8 pollution creating machines for an hour. Upgraded solar panels are a ripoff (MK4 isn't even achieveable for a true pacifist!) and all batteries are still better replaced with fusion reactors and caution. Upgrades for the roboport and discharge defense (lol) would also be nice to have, but on the combat side everything seems all right (that is to say, a fully decked out max-tier power suit is close to godmode, but that also applies to vanilla)

Tanks:

Definitely an upgrade, perhaps a bit too much. Due to collision damage, autorepair and not costing a ton of alien research on top of regular tech the MK3 tank might be a superior option over high-tier powersuits, though having both is even better. The "cannon" seems a little underwhelming for a main weapon, at least when not loaded with scattershot (which deal twice as much damage in total according to the tooltip), it doesn't take the power creep well, has low ammo count and deals much less burst damage than the sniper rifle. The artillery seems to be lacking in ammo types unless I missed one, with only the highest-tier green poison shell available. Where are the cluster bomb and high-impact (read: anti-base) rounds? The laser weapon is actually good here, mostly as a "kill everything around me" button. The gatling gun with AoE rounds is much the same, but chews through your ammo supply like crazy. While probably not possible, it would be nice to have one of them as secondary fire or an automatic turret that attacks the nearest enemy. Also, is it just me, or is the poison damage-over-time effect really weak?

Overall a nice addition to the game, now I can't wait to see a flock of 100+ "bob-grade" Destroyer bots orbiting around me while I flash-step through enemy bases

Kongensholm wrote:Hey Bob... First of all, thanks for the mods! I really enjoy playing factorio with them

Not sure if this is a bug/feature with your mods or with vanilla, but here goes: I've been trying to build a mob farm, to get a lot of those small alien artifacts... My issue is, that the mobs seem to be a lot more agressive, when I'm near them: [...]

Probably a combination of two vanilla "features": First of all, being very close to a base triggers a kind of "panic mode", massively increasing the spawn rate. Secondly, enemy aggro/AI target selection prioritises base assets close to the player as well as players themselves. Bases that are too far away from players might even fall (almost?) entirely inactive, similar to the "instant-despawn-perimeter" or unloading chunks in Minecraft.

Hello, Thank you for the report. I'll give an reply to most of what you said, but I'll try to be brief here.

Firstly, I'd like to point out that this is one of the mods that is probably only in the half complete phase.

Ammos... I have been considering more ammos, to fill the gaps, I just havn't put a lot of thought into what yet, but you're right, there is a hefty step up between the levels. I think the only ones I've added so far are in the T4 range, then jump to T6/7/8 (The coloured alien artifacts make up those tiers)

And the enemies... well, I do plan to re-jig the enemies a little, adding at least another step to the bob enemies, creating something harder to kill like the behemoths after the fire/poison level.

Turrets... The Sniper turrets have been re-written over and over... this is pretty much the point where fewest people were complaining about them. Otherwise they were overpowered for one reason or another (fire speed... damage, or range).

Power Armor and modules. I think the armor itself is ballanced enough... Solar panels, well, the base game version was a waste of space anyway, I added them mostly for completeness. The roboport didn't exist last time I touched the modules, and the discharge defence... I just didn't bother with because it's one of those "Toys" I could never get working. I'll probably revisit these later.

Tanks... Well, this is the initial release for the tank expansion. I know that the scatter shot is overpowered compared to the rest, and everything else does need a bit of ballancing. Also, the tank doesn't auto-repair...

I'm sure you mentioned lasers there too, I should buff the laser overall, I know it stinks on the tank, so I was going to make the tank laser better, but perhaps I should just buff the laser ammo instead.

One of the other things I was considering was a Beam variation of Laser (instead of the basegame's light projectile method, like what the destroyer combat robot uses), but I havn't had much luck with it so far, the weapon seems to fire blanks.

That's all.

For the sake of diversity I, personally, would like sniper turrets to have even higher range but less dps. They already outrange everything the biters can throw at you, so increasing that range further only makes exploiting this in practice a little less bothersome (less pick-and-replace creeping, same end result of killing any base with 0 casualties). That said I can understand your concerns, and 900+ damage per shot might be a little over the top (that's the handheld sniper when fully upgraded)

Sorry for not being clear on tank autorepair, it is true the tank itself does not. Being inside it however you can fill a cheap power armor purely with a roboport and power supply, and your upgraded bots do the rest. The return-on-investment for bots is much greater than high-rank shields even if you don't use them heavily in your base, and the tank adds to that.

As for lasers, I think you misunderstood me regarding the tank, that actually is the only one I would ever consider using (and turrets ofc, if running on solar). The handheld laser rifle and power armor modules are pathetically weak for the amount of tech and resources you have to sink into them, and the rifle has no real strategic niche or role. On the tank the laser replaces the smg/rilfe/auto-shotgun as your primary weapon in some cases, as the Gatling gun uses much more ammo than the handheld varieties. Beam lasers would be great though, if you can get them working.

Actually I think the problem with lasers, and rockets much the same, is a generally lopsided benefits system for different weapon types. Even in vanilla, without your plethora of new guns, ammo types and turret upgrades, there is a massive incentive to focus exclusively on bullet weapons until you can afford massing laser turrets or decking out a power suit (by which time the auto-shotgun wins out due to higher dps and AoE capability).
Think about it, if you use bullets you can invest in the respective research early on, this will then carry over to your base defenses, and with your mod you can even fill tactical niches with the same tech with the sniper rifle/turret (circumvents heavy enemy armor, the main weakness of the smg in vanilla) and alien ammo (AoE and high dps, the shotgun gets these too, but that costs you an additional set of weapon upgrades); if you invest into rockets or lasers you only get a toy for yourself, your base defense still requires bullets and/or turret damage research. Then add to that the running costs of the ammo: bullet upgrades you pay once, and then can make do with iron, copper and oil for the most part. Every single rocket costs a circuit, and the laser rifle shoots DIAMONDS! Given these costs I would at least expect an unupgraded rocket to deal as much damage as a sniper round.

If/when you add new turret types this will turn into an even bigger problem: in the current state of affairs the new turrets would be absolutely useless, as by the time you unlock them the existing (and already upgraded) gun turrets will be better. If you buff up the biters in response it will feel like a "gear treadmill" as you have to get the new weapon type ASAP, whereas the rest of your factory can run perfectly fine with MK2 assemblers even if you have stores of nitinol. Sadly the best solution in my eyes would be to break the existing synergy and heavily nerf bullets, shifting their versatility to other weapon types, and I don't really like that approach myself.

Hey
i have a question about Bob´s Warfare
is there a way to play it without MCI(Metals,Chemicals and Intermediates) ?
can you put an update file in Bob´s Warfare?
there is an update for modules and enemies
i would appreciate it

And Thanks for the Incredible Mod´s you have made and sorry about my english

wali01 wrote:is there a way to play it without MCI(Metals,Chemicals and Intermediates) ?

This question has been asked a few times, and I do understand the desire to do this.
Unfortunately, there is currently no way to do it, and programming a change would be a little difficult. The original requirement was due to the Nitrogen chain required for Nitroglycerine. This would make less sense if Nitrogen (Which is in the MCI mod) wasn't there, However, at some point I will likely give it a try (using a simplified recipe, likely from Sulfuric Acid.)

It will also require small changes all over the place because the mod was written to assume certain things exist that are in my MCI mod.

I don't know when though, I havn't had much time for modding recently.

Get with Factorio 0.12.19 an Error
How can i fix them?

Mods Installed:
bobassembly_0.12.7.zip
bobconfig_0.12.2.zip
bobelectronics_0.12.6.zip
bobenemies_0.12.5.zip
boblibrary_0.12.3.zip
boblogistics_0.12.7.zip
bobmining_0.12.3.zip
bobmodules_0.12.9.zip
bobores_0.12.7.zip
bobplates_0.12.10.zip
bobpower_0.12.6.zip
bobtech_0.12.4.zip
bobwarfare_0.12.9.zip
Ore Expansion_1.0.2.zip

DOSorDIE wrote:Get with Factorio 0.12.19 an Error

Bobwarefare_Error.jpg

How can i fix them?

Mods Installed:
bobassembly_0.12.7.zip
bobconfig_0.12.2.zip
bobelectronics_0.12.6.zip
bobenemies_0.12.5.zip
boblibrary_0.12.3.zip
boblogistics_0.12.7.zip
bobmining_0.12.3.zip
bobmodules_0.12.9.zip
bobores_0.12.7.zip
bobplates_0.12.10.zip
bobpower_0.12.6.zip
bobtech_0.12.4.zip
bobwarfare_0.12.9.zip
Ore Expansion_1.0.2.zip

bobingabout wrote:As the error says, the small clouds are registered twice... once in Enemies mod, and once in Warfare mod.

This is because to fix a display error, I needed to change what the entity was registered under.

To fix this you need to use both Enemies 0.12.6 and Warfare 0.12.9 together.

In short, make sure you use the latest version of all my mods you are using, that usually irons out any compatabillity bugs.
0.12.5 of enemies that you are using registers the small poison cloud and small fire cloud the old way. 0.12.9 of warfare mod registers them the new way, therefore they are defined twice.

Either you need to use 0.12.5 of enemies or older with 0.12.8 of warfare or older, OR use 0.12.6 of enemies(or newer when there is one) with 0.12.9 of warfare(or newer when there is one).

bobingabout wrote: To fix this you need to use both Enemies 0.12.6 and Warfare 0.12.9 together.

Damn ... i oversee the new Enemy Version when i downloaded all newer version ...
Thanks for the fast reply ...

You're welcome

What purpose does the Advanced night vision equipment serve? The stats suggest that it is a more expensive, more power hungry variant with no other changes. There is no control file suggesting a HUD enhancement, or otherwise, so it seems pointless.

Ranakastrasz wrote:What purpose does the Advanced night vision equipment serve? The stats suggest that it is a more expensive, more power hungry variant with no other changes. There is no control file suggesting a HUD enhancement, or otherwise, so it seems pointless.

The default gives a green tint. MK2 gives a yellow tint, MK3 gives a white tint. It's a lot easier on the eyes.

Hey Bob, is there a way for your biters to not attack one another... it's hurting my herding efforts for my giblet farm.