Friday Facts #427 - Combat Balancing & Space Age LAN

[XT-248]

How would I have enough personal laser defense modules in my armor's or Spidertron's equipment grid to consume most, if not all, of the 'new Space Age fusion reactor,' which can produce 2.5 MW, up to 6.25 MW, when one PLD only consumes 75 kW?

That’s just base tech. Shooting speed upgrades keep energy per shot the same so, power consumption increases.
Damage upgrades however, keep energy per shot the same too thus making lasers more efficient. Much more efficient.

Right. Losing 66% makes the personal laser defense (PLD) 66% worse regarding electric-power-to-point-of-damage-ratio efficiency. I am going to break down the different modifiers and how they all come together.


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IE: Without any laser shooting speed boost and at 1.5 laser shots per second, Pre-adjusted 30 base damage per laser shot for 75 kW per second. Post-adjusted 10 base damage per laser shot for 75 kW per second.

Regardless of the base damage, each laser shot consumes 50 kJ of energy, and PLD can shoot ~1.5 shots each second. ~1.5 shots per second * 50 kJ = 75 kW divided by a second (1 Joules = 1 Watt / 1 second).


Increasing the laser shoot speed confers a higher needed energy per second.

IE: With maximum laser shooting speed (going from 1.5 laser shots per second to 4.8 laser shots per second), Pre-adjusted 30 base damage per laser shot for 240 kW per second. Post-adjusted 10 base damage per laser shot for 240 kW per second.

Regardless of the base damage, each laser shot consumes 50 kJ of energy, and PLD can shoot ~4.8 shots each second. ~4.8 shots per second * 50 kJ = 240 kW divided by a second (1 Joules = 1 Watt / 1 second).


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I would have preferred that WUBE Went in the other direction and made the personal laser defense shoot slower (by making it harder to be biter proof by stacking PLDs as the WUBE thought it was too easy to stack more of PLDs) and kept the base damage at 30 and increased time between shooting from 1.5 seconds to 4.5 seconds.

This also makes the energy weapon technologies modifier scale worse by 66%* for personal laser defense.

Good luck getting anyone to accept that they should invest significant more resources into an exponentially expensive, repeatable technology to make up for the difference.

*scale worse by 66%: See next section.


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Now, the losses of power efficiency between post-adjusted and pre-adjusted base damage at maximum laser shooting speed at 6 energy weapon damage level (pre-space) are calculated. Energy weapon damage 6 level gives 230% cumulative modifiers. Both post-adjustment and pre-adjustment are assumed to have 240 kW energy demand.

30 base damage * ( 100% + 230% ) = 99 damage per shot for the 240 kW energy demand.
10 base damage * ( 100% + 230% ) = 33 damage per shot for the 240 kW energy demand.

That is still a straight 66% loss post-adjusted in power efficiency compared to pre-adjusted power efficiency, and I don't need to do any complicated math as 99 divided by 1/3 is 33.

To get post-adjusted PLDs back up to at least "99" effective damage per laser shot, I would need about ~890% increase in laser damage modifier from energy weapon damage technology, which is at 16 energy weapon damage for ~103 damage from base 10, and needs 512 thousand of all science packs (not counting from 7 to 15 science pack costs) to match a pre-adjusted PLD at a pre-space-pack technology level. To put that in full context, the pre-adjusted '99' damage from 30 base damage at energy weapon damage at 6 levels only costs 600 of the following science packs: automation/red, logistic/green, military/black, chemical/blue, and production/yellow—no space science packs required.


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The PLD adjusted base damage and increased HP buff and laser damage resistance to worms (the worst part of clearing dense hostile fauna in late-game); I might as well increase the number of spidertrons in my squad by at least 2 or 3 factors. Nothing changed regarding clearing strategies except having more equipment grid, by adding more spidertron to the fauna-clearing group, to play with.

Even with a modest increase to the spidertron's equipment grid and higher quality (damage? laser shooting speed?) to personal laser defense, I don't think there are enough boosts to match or exceed the adjusted PLDs' base damage. See the end of my post with an example of my spidertron clearing build.

Grinding for Q5 across the board is a quick way to make players wait longer before clearing out hostile fauna and have to make more investments (technologies and production lines for Q5 equipment/Q5 Spidertron/etc.). I don't find the idea of making Q5-everything an obligation fun, and at the same time, it is necessary to obtain more resources for factory growth by clearing out the local fauna on the respective worlds.


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Maybe you’re just not using enough of them?

spoiler

battle-armor.png
(Shields? Those are in the spidertron).

Sure, this requires recharging. But last time I tried a single charge was enough for quite a few bases. And it can be tweaked for total damage vs DPS.

That is 23 personal laser defense modules in total, which consumes 1,725 kW or 1.7 MW without laser shooting speed unlocks.

23 * 240 kW (max laser shooting speed) = 5,520 kW/5.5 MW.

The new 'Space Age Fusion Reactor' can provide about 6.25 MW at Q5. I can only begin to guess the new optimized loadout without knowing how big the new Space Age Fusion equipment is.

I can tell you right away that there aren't enough personal laser defense modules in that example you gave to out-demand the new 'Space Age Fusion Reactor's' power yield.


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My typical late-game clearing spidertrons, usually in a group and using the same loadout each, typically have three personal laser defenses, one walking extension, one legacy fusion reactor, and the rest are filled with Shield Mk 2 modules (six * 150 shield HP = 900 shield HP).

I would need nine personal laser defenses (at the same energy weapon damage and laser shooting speed investment after the personal laser defense nerf) to match the current PLD level of damage yield and lose out on no less than four Shield Mk II modules (going from shield 900 HP down to 300 HP) and removed the walking extension. The lowered shield HP makes it easier for the spidertron to die from range hostile damage.

The walking extension is there to help dodge incoming damage from spitters and worms (especially the more dangerous ones). While I can still dodge the behemoth projectile without the walking extension, it will be a trickier proposition.


To maintain the same efficiency level of killing, walking speed, and shield HP with the new adjusted PLD damage. I would need nine PLDs, six shield Mk 2, a walking extension, and one of either Q2 or Q3 of the 'Space Age Fusion Reactor' (9 PLD * 240 kW = 2.16 MW).

That is approximately 84 (16* new space age fusion reactor + 8 walking extension + ( 9 * 4 ) = 36 for PLDs + (6 * 4 ) = 24 for Shield Mk 2s) equipment slots in total, and the current Spidertron only has room for 60 slots. I assume an extra increase in Q# is another 10 rows of equipment room. That means I need a Q4 Spidertron, which is an expensive investment given the grind involved.

*Assuming no change in grid size going from legacy to 'Space Age Fusion Reactor.'


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The proposed balance changes only further highlight the downside of the PLD damage nerf, as it will most certainly negatively impact anyone who opts out of quality mechanics while owning Space Age or doesn't.

I hope WUBE developers are smart enough to realize this is an untenable situation for those who didn't buy Space Age or chose not to opt in the 'quality mod' while owning Space Age and limit the PLD balance change to only those who both buy Space Age and opt to quality mod.


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To be clear, I understand WUBE's need to nerf the PLD.

I think a straight damage reduction put forward in this blog is heavy-handed, especially when you look at the complete picture of all changes that impact PLD put together (spawner base HP, worms increased HP, worm laser resistance damage, lower base damage for PLDs, etc.). I might as well automate the replacement, set up patrol routes for new spidertrons, and walk away while letting Factorio run in the background to do something else for a few days before returning to grow the factory.

A combination of higher energy demand, a slower rate of shooting, and a less severe reduction to base damage (the exact numbers/modifiers/damage-resistance/HP/etc. can be tweaked as more time goes on) would be a better-balanced approach.

[Tertius]

Everyone comparing PLD pre-nerf to PLD's post-nerf, aren't getting the point, The entire point of a nerf is to push your play style *away* from using PLDs as your primary offensive weapon.

That's correct, that's usually the idea behind nerfs in balancing: make the alternatives more viable.

However, if it comes to Factorio, the alternatives are vastly different, because they need interaction with the weapon. You need to shoot or place them. The controls to do that are atrocious. It's no fun to shoot, because perform aiming with the keyboard controls is so bad. Using combat bots is so tedious because of the short live of them.

About keyboard controls in combat: There is C for shooting wherever the mouse is, and SPACE for shooting the nearest enemy. If you have some AoE weapon, shooting the nearest enemy while trying to dodge it is like shooting yourself. But without a more powerful weapon, you cannot destroy worms and nests. If you use C, you cannot move while shooting, because WASD and C are both used with the left hand. Additionally, moving the target (mouse: right hand) and shooting (left hand) is with different hands, so it's disconnected from each other (at least for my brain).
Standard for shooting is the left mouse key, and this is mentally connected to the mouse pointer. However, you cannot bind left mouse key with shoot, because you would shoot down your factory while not in combat.

I'm sure you can practice all that in long sessions and learn to use the existing keyboard shortcuts while dying a lot, but honestly, I'm not willing to do that. It's tedious and frustrating. Additionally, SPACE and C are so near to all the other useful keys, I cannot count how often I did damage my factory by accidentally hitting SPACE or C.

For all this, combat is not important enough for me to get more used to it.

In my opinion, the game could perhaps switch to some combat mode and change keyboard bindings to a more standard and shooting friendly setup while in combat. In combat you never build stuff, and while building the factory, you're never shooting stuff. I know people actually build stuff while being in combat (walls, pipes, turrets), but when I try to do that, either these things are destroyed immediately without being of any use, or I myself is being destroyed.

I am not the combat guy. For me, this automatic PLD is just perfect, because it fires automatically and doesn't need any interaction. I just need to get near to the enemies with the PLD getting rid of the most near biters, dodge the spitters and target the nests with rockets or flamethrower. That's my strategy. I used to set turrets nearby, build distraction walls and whatnot, but all this preparation is just too tedious to be fun. I want to build, not combat. If the PLD gets too weak, I'm probably not able to get near enough to the nests to reach them with a manually targetting weapon.

About the tank: the navigation controls makes it impossible to use. It's just impossible for my mind to take the direction in mind to press the correct navigation keys. If I'm driving south, essentially the controls are reversed. This is not working for me. I'm driving in every direction with that except the direction I want to drive. Left! No, right! Oh, that was too much! More left! More right! Argh, wrong direction! Additionally, to the atrocious driving I must aim with the mouse, then shoot with C. Sorry, not able to do that. As I said: combat is not important to me to invest hours to get into that and build a completely new mind map for that- if that is even possible, but I doubt.

In the end, interactive combat adds tedium instead of fun, and by making combat more difficult by nerfing the only automated weapon, it adds tedium instead of fun.

[kaspar42]

What the name of the desktop case seen in the first picture of the LAN party?

[r3nt5ch3r]

What the name of the desktop case seen in the first picture of the LAN party?

These are Alienware Aurora. Do not buy this. Alienware is crap.

[Kyralessa]

These are Alienware Aurora. Do not buy this. Alienware is crap.

Agreed. Worst PC I've ever owned is an Alienware. Every so often it just forgets it has a hard drive. Like, it starts up and says there's no hard drive.

So I shut it down, wait a while, boot it again, and it's fine.

I think it's a non-deterministic PC.

[rodrigobahiense]

I can't understand the motivation behind nerfing PLD.

It seems they expect the end-game to be "fortress defense," but that's way less fun than "manually" clearing nests with overwhelming power.

What's the purpose of having incredibly advanced tech if you struggle to fight monsters? This is nonsense.

[Koub]

Maybe the PLD was never meant to be the "I win" option from blue science all the way to endgame in the first place. Maybe the devs wanted it to be a transition weapon, or just the defensive weapon that takes care of the defending biters while we destroy the nests and worms by other means.
I won't lie : I was a huge fan of the PLD, especially because it was so versatile and powerful. I will miss its omnipotence. Hopefully, we'll have alternatives to make the combat not-more-tedious.

[CyberCider]

The only thing that I'm wary of is that Spidertrons are extremely limited in damage options and PLD's still feel required since rockets tend to do self-damage, IMHO They should have gun turrets and an auto cannon, Or perhaps late game you should be able to remotely control tanks for support.

Last I checked, spidertrons are counted as “flying” entities, which makes them immune to explosion splash damage. Splash damage of their own and each other’s rockets shouldn’t damage them at all. Nukes are an exception though, so maybe you were referring to those

[KuuLightwing]

<snip>
...or just the defensive weapon that takes care of the defending biters while we destroy the nests and worms by other means.
<snip>

Frankly that was kinda how I was using it personally. Sure, I was clearing small nests with just PLD sometimes to save rockets, but when it came to big clusters, I used spidertron rockets as a primary offensive method and used PLD to thin out the retaliating horde. And with how big the swarms get and with inclusion of behemoth biters, it still took a while until PLDs melt them.

[Themuse061]

Personal laser have been nerfed but (I suppose) they were never intended to be used as offensive tool. For me that role is reserved for tank, rocket launcher, nuke and for automatable kind there is spidertron and artiley. (Shame that spideys have been nerfed by proxy) I think that we need more interesting and semi or 100% automatic biter nest removal tools and we need to buff the current ones. (personally i hope for buffing artilery range before research, as this would less to less tedium in moving the shooting outpost. Also artillery barrages are cool)
For SE i hope this will be a non issue, as new enemies will motivate devs to add new turrets. Right now tesla turret or some other turret could be the saving grace. Also quality is capable of negating this issue, but devs said that it should be optional, soo
But i think that we need to be worried (as other have pointed out) about the vanilla players, especially casual. PLD is not as worrying for me, there are good mid game alternatives to them (i personally never used them too often, preffered tank to them with explosive ammo). The biggest problem is buffing nest HP, this could make them even more tedious to fight in a game focused not on combat, but on automation. I hope that nest max HP will be modifiable simillar to other enemy settings during map creation. Some new players are already struggling with bitters, even without this buff. For experience players fighting bitters with spidertrons is going to be ever more tedious if you dont have researched some infinite techs. Right now using spidertron focused on explosive rockets is not so interesting and fast.
Also, devs please make combat bots somehow auto-deployable. Main two problems with them for me are 1) needing to have them constantly in cursor (or hotbar, but still) 2) The main one. If you deploy bots when at limit they are wasted. This is requiring you to be constantly aware of how many bots are out. And you cant even wait for the sound of them destroying when out of time cuz you still neeed to restock them when bitters destroy them. For that, i prospose some solutions

• Make them be deploable by hotbar button, simillar to personal roboport

• Make the player not be able to over-deploy bots, when at limit. So when you click mouse and try to deploy 5 destroyers when you have 17/20 bots nothing happens

• Make the bots auto-redeploy when they die, but be able to "dismiss" them by right clicking deployed bot allert

• Or at least show the current and max robot count near cursor so you can easily see it. Also color code it. Green when you can deploy robots without waste, orange if it will waste some destroyer from 5 deployed and red if at max robot count

I personally like the personal laser buff, but am worried that it will lead to more newbies bouncing off and increased tedium for veterans
That was my take on this problem. Now lets compare PLD damage to combat bots. All of that is pre-balancing

Defender capsule
Base damage: 8
base speed: 3/s
base dps: 24/robot

Destroyer capsule
base damage: 10
base speed:3/s (not upgadable)
base dps: 30/robot

Personal laser defense
base damage:30
base speed: 1.5/s
base dps: 45/one PLD

Data taken directly from vanilla game. For info about upgrades i will jump into sandbox game, and research it there
Now lets compare them. I will use (damage/speed/dps) notation to save space. so unupgraded PLD is noted like this (30/1.5/45) per one PLD

At blue techyou have access to
PLD, Power armor 7x7, projectile speed and damage 5, laser speed and damage 4, robot count 4 so 30 robots
your damage looks like

Defender (14.4, 6.3, 90.72) per one robot so X30 its (432, 6.3, 2721.6). I might add that you will not have 100% of that as some robots wont have the range, and the bitters have varying resistance for physical
PLD (63, 2.28, 179,55) per one, so at full offensive armor (9 PLD, 3 accu, 7 solars ) its (567, 2.28, 1292.78) I might add that in this grid your PLD wont shoot 100%, as there is little power
So at maxed out blue science tech defender capsules are better than PLD, but still more cumbersome and resource-intensive to use

Onto Yellow tech. Max robot count is 50, projectile upgrade level is 6 (dmg +120%, speed +150%), laser is also 6 (dmg +100% on destroyers, +230 on pld and +220% speed on pld.)

Defender capsule (17.6, 7.5, 132) per one, so per 50 its (880, 7.5, 6600)
Destroyer capsule (20, 3, 60) and per 50 its (1000, 3, 3000)
PLD (99, 4.8, 475,2) per one. Now depending on the grid 9 PLD is (891, 4.8, 4276.8) and 16 (1 fusion, 10 bat) PLD is (1584, 4.8, 7603.2)

So in summary (reminder: all of that is pre-balancing)
On maxed out blue tech (if you skip bitter's physical resistance) defender drones outdamage PLD
On maxed out yellow tech PLD outdamage destroyer capsules 2X

Also, someone need to make an excel graph out of that. I should have done that but i was already to deep

[GregoriusT]

Now that people are saying it, yeah PLD could have been nerfed by just "not targetting nests and worms at all", basically only protecting you from the onslaught of freshly hatched Biters when attacking their Nests. Also I feel like a 50% nerf would have been better.


As for the Failienware Machines, I am quite certain the reason they were chosen is because Dell is one of the very few companies that can deliver a batch of a hundred or so identical Gaming PCs for a LAN Event without any Logistics Issues. I would never recommend Dell for anything but this super niche special case, because of how terrible their products are.

[XT-248]

Maybe the PLD was never meant to be the "I win" option from blue science all the way to endgame in the first place. Maybe the devs wanted it to be a transition weapon, or just the defensive weapon that takes care of the defending biters while we destroy the nests and worms by other means.
I won't lie : I was a huge fan of the PLD, especially because it was so versatile and powerful. I will miss its omnipotence. Hopefully, we'll have alternatives to make the combat not-more-tedious.

I outlined implicitly in my earlier post why I used PLD exclusively, not because it is an "I win" option but because the other options are terrible for different reasons or require constant production/logistics.

At least with PLDs and a large squad of Spidertron, everything is taken care of immediately in the attacking area with little risk of running out of ammunition/firepower or self-attrition from friendly fire.


I challenge you to find an alternative option without using mods that can do something equivalent without ammunition/needing-logistics, any potential chance of friendly fire, and dealing with mobile local fauna in the attacked area while attacking.

I would be interested in an alternative to PLDs if it exists.

[bobucles]

Maybe the PLD was never meant to be the "I win" option from blue science all the way to endgame in the first place. Maybe the devs wanted it to be a transition weapon, or just the defensive weapon that takes care of the defending biters while we destroy the nests and worms by other means.
I won't lie : I was a huge fan of the PLD, especially because it was so versatile and powerful. I will miss its omnipotence. Hopefully, we'll have alternatives to make the combat not-more-tedious.

As a defense tool, the PLD achieves its protection via overwhelming offense. It's a bit ironic.

A good defensive tool doesn't have to eliminate everything that moves, it just has to help players survive the most common ways they get killed. What gets players killed? Goo, and getting surrounded. There's no goo defense, exo helps but it merely overpowers the debuff. There is an AoE zapper to help survive getting surrounded. Putting extra targets on the field helps immensely, so drones can help. Unfortunately they also put goo in more random places, and there's no suit tools for deploying drones or evading goo.

The planet system means players will encounter different threats, and will need different tools to survive those threats. I hope there's some good suit upgrades to play with.

[Hantu]

As a defense tool, the PLD achieves its protection via overwhelming offense. It's a bit ironic.

It's not so much ironic as it is what differentiates PLDs from personal shields, which we already have.

If Mk. 2 power armor stacked with PLDs and a handful of batteries is a bit crazy so what? You've min-maxed your power armor for maximum disco to the point you need to micromanage charge levels and give up any mobility or shield buffs. At that point I'd expect your disco to be a bit dangerous.

There are better ways to balance PLD against other combat options than decimating the damage. Change the grid sizes, change the recipe prices, reduce the damage by a moderate amount (like make them 2/3 as effective instead of 1/3 as effective...), increase the power consumption and/or have them effect your armor's recharge rate, do what we did with turrets way back when and make PLD a "merged" PLD that does 4 times the damage, costs 4+ times the resources, and takes 4+ times the space so it's harder to stack silly amounts of them. Force Spidertrons to use a vehicle variant of PLD or specifically change how PLDs work in Spidertrons. Make PLDs only target enemies that attack. Split equipment grids and limit the space for offensive modules. Make enemies on DLC planets laser resistant so the vanilla game isn't screwed by changes, or make nests still more laser resistant so PLD can defend you from biters but you still need to deal with the nests. Or do several of these things that moderate their utility without removing their usefulness as anything other than a weak offensive supplement, and even that's only when you stack them to the exclusion of all else.

Or like people have said in several places, tune other military options to compensate the lost automation in personal defense, like making military robots more automatic, possibly requiring a roboport variant or only functioning with personal roboports, and/or make using them less wasteful. Or make Discharge Defense automatic. Give vehicles survivability upgrades and let them double dip on offensive options they way turrets do, but change how PLDs interact with the world when someone is in a vehicle.

The assumption is Space Age is bringing something to compensate for this... but it's silly to announce crazy balance changes without announcing the changes that make them not crazy. Personal Tesla Turret is one theory but there's not really a reason to nerf PLD if the plan is to add something better than the pre-patch PLD in the same stroke. This change specifically seems like one where Wube is missing the forest for the trees and decided to balance PLD around the small subset of players who are a combination of extremely good at the game and in denial that they cheese combat because they don't actually like fighting biters but can't bring themselves to turn them off in the world options.

[Alice3173]

Initially the 66% nerf to PLDs seemed huge, but then the more I thought about it, I realised:

Everyone comparing PLD pre-nerf to PLD's post-nerf, aren't getting the point, The entire point of a nerf is to push your play style *away* from using PLDs as your primary offensive weapon.

You're meant to compare the nerfed PLD to other weapons, you're meant to consider them *combined* with late game weapons, the fact you can use PLDs by themselves with no help from other weapons, and the fact that the mind set is just "it'll take 30x longer to destroy spawners" is the part of the problem, You've completely forgotten other weapons exist.

In general, the way to handle one method of gameplay being more appealing than all others is to uh... Make those other methods of gameplay more appealing, not totally gut the appealing one. If most people resort to stacking PLDs for combat then it's clear there's a fundamental issue with the game's combat that makes people want to rely on PLDs over other methods.

After reading plenty of arguments for and against the PLD nerf, I still feel this was handled quite poorly. If they wanted to nerf the PLDs there are some methods people have suggested which area far superior to simply nerfing the damage into oblivion and making the PLDs borderline useless. Personally I think that decreasing the range by 33-50% and increasing the power draw per shot, perhaps even doubling it, would be a far better idea. (And maybe preventing it from targeting nests, though I disagree with preventing it from targeting worms. Worms still attack you and thus need to be defended against while nests don't do anything directly offensive.)

The latter even lines up well with transitioning from normal turrets to laser turrets as well. Before you unlock nuclear power, switching over to laser turrets tends to really stress your power grid. So until the late-to-endgame, it would make a lot more sense for PLDs to easily overwhelm your armor's power generation. A shorter range also means that you can't simply easily stroll through a biter settlement and melt them all since getting too close to worms and late/endgame biters and spitters (especially in the middle of a biter settlement that's spawning biters and spitters constantly) can be quite dangerous.

[numzero]

1 Joules = 1 Watt / 1 second

It’s the other way around, 1 watt = 1 joule / 1 second.

Now, the losses of power efficiency between post-adjusted and pre-adjusted base damage at maximum laser shooting speed at 6 energy weapon damage level (pre-space) are calculated. Energy weapon damage 6 level gives 230% cumulative modifiers. Both post-adjustment and pre-adjustment are assumed to have 240 kW energy demand.

30 base damage * ( 100% + 230% ) = 99 damage per shot for the 240 kW energy demand.
10 base damage * ( 100% + 230% ) = 33 damage per shot for the 240 kW energy demand.

That is still a straight 66% loss post-adjusted in power efficiency compared to pre-adjusted power efficiency, and I don't need to do any complicated math as 99 divided by 1/3 is 33.

You didn’t need to do all this math obviously. Upgrades are relative thus, 66% reduction is 66% reduction, with or without upgrades.

23 * 240 kW (max laser shooting speed) = 5,520 kW/5.5 MW.

The new 'Space Age Fusion Reactor' can provide about 6.25 MW at Q5. I can only begin to guess the new optimized loadout without knowing how big the new Space Age Fusion equipment is.

I can tell you right away that there aren't enough personal laser defense modules in that example you gave to out-demand the new 'Space Age Fusion Reactor's' power yield.

I can only wonder why are you directly comparing vanilla PLD to a Q5 reactor.

The proposed balance changes only further highlight the downside of the PLD damage nerf, as it will most certainly negatively impact anyone who opts out of quality mechanics while owning Space Age or doesn't.

*Anyone who was relying on PLDs to wipe everything moving around. You may be surprised but, not everyone does that. The loadout I shown is cool but, I made it well after the rocket (and I’d never risk using that outside a spidertron) and more for fun than anything.

[numzero]

Additionally, SPACE and C are so near to all the other useful keys, I cannot count how often I did damage my factory by accidentally hitting SPACE or C.

Ugh. Yes. While this is easy to change it’s definitely not good defaults.

Standard for shooting is the left mouse key, and this is mentally connected to the mouse pointer. However, you cannot bind left mouse key with shoot, because you would shoot down your factory while not in combat.

In some games it’s the right button. It could be combined deconstruct/shoot depending on the target’s force (not sure whether that’s possible currently).

In my opinion, the game could perhaps switch to some combat mode and change keyboard bindings to a more standard and shooting friendly setup while in combat.

Having modes sounds reasonable too however the game shouldn’t decide when to change or you will misclick thinking you’re still in the other mode. But having keymaps changeale like hotbars currently are... that sounds interesting.

About the tank: the navigation controls makes it impossible to use. It's just impossible for my mind to take the direction in mind to press the correct navigation keys. If I'm driving south, essentially the controls are reversed.

Er, it’s kinda standard for 2D? How else would you control a vehicle not limited to 4 (okay, 8) cardinal directions? (controlling a spidertron with WASD does limit it to just that BTW, only the remote doesn’t). Though driving backwards does have a clear control problem: the tank and the car have the opposite controls! Both have good reasons (holding “right” in the car steers it right while holding “right” in the tank turns it clockwise; those are the same while driving forward but the opposite while driving backward) but, the result is just confusing as hell.

[GregoriusT]

Additionally, SPACE and C are so near to all the other useful keys, I cannot count how often I did damage my factory by accidentally hitting SPACE or C.

Ugh. Yes. While this is easy to change it’s definitely not good defaults.

I map shooting to the forward-button on my mouse, and rotate clockwise to the back-button, it makes a lot of things easier and more intuitive.

[Jap2.0]

I challenge you to find an alternative option without using mods that can do something equivalent without ammunition/needing-logistics, any potential chance of friendly fire, and dealing with mobile local fauna in the attacked area while attacking.

My understanding is that pretty much the entire point of biters existing is that they are a resource sink and require you to set up supply lines/logistics to deal with them.

[Ranakastrasz]

I challenge you to find an alternative option without using mods that can do something equivalent without ammunition/needing-logistics, any potential chance of friendly fire, and dealing with mobile local fauna in the attacked area while attacking.

My understanding is that pretty much the entire point of biters existing is that they are a resource sink and require you to set up supply lines/logistics to deal with them.

Yep. But more importantly, it links pollution back into the gameflow, and forces some level of progression, to avoid it being as much a sandbox.