Factorio Forums

SaberCherry wrote:I'm not sure why there is so much resistance toward the concept of electric boilers. They would be a simple and space/resource-efficient way of storing solar electricity. For example, considering the attached image -

In this situation, the coal boilers could be replaced with electric boilers hooked up to a solar grid; the water input would be gated by a small pump that only activates when there is excess solar power - e.g., when a connected accumulator is full. The output is gated (via a delay switch) to only produce electricity when the accumulator (connected to the main power grid) drops below 10%, and it shuts down after the accumulator goes above 15% for a while. Ideally, the priority of electric boilers would be lower than other things, but with the correct gating that's not really necessary. As for the delay switch in the image, it consists of 2 boxes, some belts, and 4 inserters; the red-wire inserter activates at <10%, green-wire at >15%, and the power switch allows power through when the box is not full (<20 blocks). You can adjust the delay by changing the number of blocks in the box.

aubergine18 wrote:

factoriouzr wrote:+we should be able to copy and paste from a factory to an inserter and it should set the filter to the same good as being produced by the factory

I thought you could already do that, or maybe only to request container (which has same effect)?

Zeno wrote:Merging items based on remaining health is a bad idea. What happens when two high-tier items reach the merge state?
In theory you could build two highest-tier buildings (nuclear power plants) damage each to under 50% HP, and then "lose" one of the two of them mysteriously due to item merging.

You could definitely expect lots of false bug reports from newbies "Biters attacked my 10 boiler setup and i picked it up, and now i only have 7 boilers!" with item merging.

factoriouzr wrote:

aubergine18 wrote:

factoriouzr wrote:+we should be able to copy and paste from a factory to an inserter and it should set the filter to the same good as being produced by the factory

I thought you could already do that, or maybe only to request container (which has same effect)?

Every time I've tried it, it doesn't do anything. To requester works and its' great, I use it all the time, but I use the fast or stack inserters to limit how much of a product is made, eg. 4000 green circuits. This is beneficial with robots because I just copy and paste the factory with blueprints to increase production, but overall the item is still limited to 4000 for eg. To do the filtering I set <item> < <x> as a filter condition. It would be nice If I could copy and paste from a factory to the inserter and it would set both item in the condition part and the item in the filter part. Then the user can clear one if they don't want it or leave it as it will still work in most situations. Clearing is much faster then clicking the filter box and then finding the right tab, then finding the entity in the list and selecting it (as an example). Not sure if search works in this gui, but it's still faster to right click then to type or search for the entity.

For that matter we should be able to copy from an inserter to a factory and the factory should set the recipe from the inserter's item in the condtion part if one is set, else do nothing.

Stevepunk wrote:It's nice that they've focused on the mechanics so much in this game and have removed a lot of tedium.

But I think at least one person there should start focusing on the rest of the game. The game only has 2 biomes and they don't contain any different resources (only the trees look slightly different in desert and there's less of them).

There is only 1 enemy faction (the biters) and only 3 enemy types (biters, spitters and worms). Even the evolution system is limited to a few stages.

The world is infinite but there's no point to exploring it if everything is the same. And there's no point to different research paths if everything is the same.

Other games solve this problem by having different biomes and different rare resources limited to (or more common in) different biomes. Of course different biomes also feature unique terrain (such as impassable mountains), and often different wildlife (sometimes neutral and sometimes agressive).

There are often remnants of ruined civilizations lost to time and possibly ancient technologies.

Give us a reason to explore. A reason to make use of all the other parts of the game. A reason to research a particular line of tech or use a specific weapon based upon our starting location or which enemies are nearby.

Give us a reason to play the game more than once and take advantage of all the mechanics you've lovingly polished over time.

Games which I feel do level design well are:
Minecraft (biomes, ruins, unlock new areas through tech )
Civilization (biomes, ruins, rare resources, enemy variance, research choices based upon all of the above)
Rimworld (the best ruins - would like to see these type of ruins in factorio)
X3:TC/AP (not procedural but still features many of the above options)
Mount and Blade (the map is quite dull but different areas do produce different resources like X3, and the different enemy factions do make the game a lot more dynamic like Civ)

Mehve wrote:I don't think there's a lot of resistance, but the majority of items in Factorio have both simple uses and advanced uses, which is generally the sign of good game design. Whereas an electric boiler lacks the former, making it something of a niche item. Furthermore, I haven't seen any suggestion of NEW gameplay, merely it's possibility of helping to substitute for an accumulator while taking less space (in a game that can offers an infinite amount). That doesn't make for a good vanilla addition, I don't think.

AndrolGenhald wrote:

Antaios wrote:

Andrzejef wrote: 1) ...and I'm not really happy with rail planner tool (or current rail creation process). I do appreciate the notion, but still, I'd rather be able to craft and place curved rails myself too, especially that the tool mostly makes some strange rail loops that makes the process rather annoying.

Agree with this too!, God I miss the individual curved rail and straight rail. Every time I'm laying out a complex intersection or station, trying to design a new blueprint, the rail planner has no bloody idea what I'm actually trying to do! Especially a frustration is in places where it's ambiguous where to put a corner, e.g. you want to add an S curve to switch tracks in one place on a vertical line, the rail planner will decide that you actually want it one tile down, or up, so you have to cancel, move the start point one tile down, or up, and try again. I'm constantly guessing exactly which tile the curved piece will start in without being able to see the curved piece, and then making the shortest turn possible so that I can, in essence, just place the curved piece on it's own anyway. SO FRUSTRATING! please give us both options, manual and auto.

I'm a little surprised to see people complaining about that, I thought it was an amazing improvement over all of the manual rotating. I have noticed the "where is it gonna curve" problem though, maybe right click to back up 1 rail would help?

Antaios wrote:

factoriouzr wrote: +we should be able to multiply the requester chest items requested via buttons in the GUI like (x2, x10, x100) and the default on copying from a factory to a requester chest should be exactly enough goods to produce 1 item, that way we have easy controls to set the number we want via the multiplication buttons

+1 to this, too. Always want to set the requester chest to x10 resources needed for a recipe on fast recipes.

Yes! This! I always end up manually adding a couple 0s on to all the requested items.

Extended wrote:Isn't this game about automation? I would absolutely love the war to be automatable too, by creating robot armies that we can send to attack the enemy! It would really be useful for the PvP mode too.

Setting a delay for turrets is a great idea to avoid turret creeping! But I also think that there should be better military technologies, because to my mind, they are currently not enough powerful.

I personally don't like the idea of merging items because I don't want to loose some without being able to choose. I'm not really happy with the rail tool either, it's inconvenient when trying to precisely place small pieces of rails, a manual alternative would be nice.

I hope that you also will make technologies for water in this version. For the space exploration, instead of making an extension pack, you could make a second game but cheaper for people who bought the first one.

Zaichik wrote:Another thing for gameplay:
The only mod I consider to be vital for my enjoyment of the game is the Long Reach mod. It just smooths out gameplay a ton. You might increase the radius at which you can interact with things in the base game.

sniderthanyou wrote:

ManoftheSea wrote:Merging items with different health:
Please do not. Could you instead add a mechanic to allow pocket repairs? Maybe it's a module in the armor, maybe it's a research that just enables the capability, but rather than potentially losing items because of picking them up unfixed, allow them to be fixed while an item.

+1, I was just coming to suggest the same thing. Even without pocket repairs, I would prefer to keep the existing system over the proposed merging.

Everything else looks great! I'm really looking forward to trying 0.15, especially with the new science packs.

factoriouzr wrote:Rail building:
I am also surprised, I thought the rail building was extremely annoying to the point That I rarely bothered with trains. I hated manually rotation the tracks and trying to line them up to go where I wanted. I'm glad there is no curved rail piece.

As a suggestion to the people who don't like the new system, have you tried rotating the end rail piece while in rail building mode? That has worked for me on many instances. Also if you can see that you have enough room to build the track in the way you want, but the autobuilder doesn't do what you want, I found that often times I can just build half of the track in one go, then do the other half in another operation. That way if the rail builder goes in weird directions, you can force it to go where you want part way on the track then when you finish the track it might get the right path for the second half.

Antaios wrote:

factoriouzr wrote:Rail building:
I am also surprised, I thought the rail building was extremely annoying to the point That I rarely bothered with trains. I hated manually rotation the tracks and trying to line them up to go where I wanted. I'm glad there is no curved rail piece.

As a suggestion to the people who don't like the new system, have you tried rotating the end rail piece while in rail building mode? That has worked for me on many instances. Also if you can see that you have enough room to build the track in the way you want, but the autobuilder doesn't do what you want, I found that often times I can just build half of the track in one go, then do the other half in another operation. That way if the rail builder goes in weird directions, you can force it to go where you want part way on the track then when you finish the track it might get the right path for the second half.

It's more that instead of placing the pieces of the rail exactly where I know I want them, I have to try and figure out how to get the rail placer to understand exactly where I want the rail pieces, which introduces frustration. It constantly feels like I'm on the verge of a mis-click that will result in some random squiggly mess, and I'm constantly adjusting the start point or cancelling with q because I just needed to reset the thing. When using the rail planner, to me, it just feels like I'm constantly fumbling about, whereas with the individual pieces, I know exactly what I want, and exactly how to put it there, bam, done.

rotating the end piece and laying the track section by section help me build the rail the way I want it, yes, but it's still me trying to force the planner into doing things it doesn't seem to want to do. I can get the rail planner to lay (almost, if I start in the right place) exactly what I want, by moving 1-2 rails forward at a time, but at that point I'd rather just have the individual pieces back. It also doesn't help when I want to edit sections of track to add in something small, it sucks not having access to the underlying pieces that actually make up the track.


I don't see why it would be a big deal to just allow us to lay individual track pieces again, as well as having the rail planner.

It actually would've been neat if the rail planner was similar to the blueprint tool or deconstruct tool from the beginning, a small research to get a planner tool that aids in laying large sections of mostly straight rail.

dasiro wrote:is an MK2 roboport too much to ask? Now I'm dropping 10 of them at high-throughput area's just because they can't recharge the delivery-bots fast enough and even then they're all covered in circles with dozens of bots waiting to recharge

Bart wrote:Sounds great, all these changes!

Although I am missing one important annoyance: when you hover the cursor over a chest, you can see the content of the entire logistic network. Unless you have too many different kinds of items. Please fix this, then my factorio experience will be perfect .

AcolyteOfRocket wrote:

The game took me 46 hours to finish.

No Spoon achievement for you then

The overall feeling was, that we shouldn't add much to the game content anymore or it will become too complex and big for the newcomers.

So does this mean you aren't going to double the types of science packs any more ? Told you it wasn't needed.

This means, that when we add nuclear power, dirty mining, and a few little things, that will be it for the vanilla part of the game.

The best way to improve the game as I see it, is to minimise the annoying parts of the gameplay.

You are going to remove combat ?

Decrease the bounding box of burner mining drills,chemical plants and pumpjacks so walking in between them is possible.

No that big a deal either way. Might not be worth the effort.

Increase stack sizes of belts,walls and pipes from 50 to 100, this is mainly for the later stage of the game with personal roboports, where making train stations and expansions meant having not enough of belts and walls way too often.

Nice.

Decrease crafting time of some items (engines and pumpjacks 20->10, advanced circuits 8->6)

Not that big a problem and the variation actually adds some interest to the game. I would advise against this, but I'm not going to cry over it.

Figure some way to have low level personal construction robots earlier in the game.

Yes please.

Change the oil so the minimum yield is dependent on the starting yield so better fields are also better later on.
There are more oil fields (compared to 0.13) which is a good change, but setting them up is quite a chore for big ones, so having fewer of them with higher yield would be better.

Not a big issue, I doubt the change is worth the effort.

MK2 personal roboport is a must, as the limit of 10 robots per roboport is not enough in later stages of the game when building bigger setups.

YES !

Concrete shouldn't be blue science (green only)
The electric furnace should be somewhat cheaper. (Especially when it is used in science packs now)

Not an issue for me..

Shift click (ghost placement) should go through trees and rocks as blueprints with shift do.

Yes please.

Enhancement to the belt building mechanics, so building by dragging makes continuous belt.

Also I suggest improvements to belt upgrading.

Limit turret creep as it is way too powerful now (especially with personal roboport) with a turret activation time. As it makes the expansion harder, the resource growth from the center should be higher.

Be careful with this, turret creep is not the fault of the turrets, its because the combat in this game is awful. Some prominent youtubers already turn off biters because they think biters are naff - thats not the biters fault either, it the combat overall that sucks. If you eliminate turret creep experienced players might just turn down biters and noobies might play another game entirely. Of course the new flamethrower helps, so please don't nerf it.

Merging items with different health. - We didn't do the item merging, as we didn't want the player lose his precious items as two 49% items would merge into one, which would prevent the player from repairing both for just a few repair. In reality, I feel that the annoyance of having 8 different stacks of laser turrets/walls in my inventory is not worth the rare possibility of losing an item or two.

You don't need to help turret creepers that much

MK2 version of boiler and steam engine. It is going to be a must with the nuclear power, but it should be usable with conventional coal power generation as well.

I'm not looking forward to nuclear power, I don't think the game needs it.

Zentay wrote:As for removing turret creep: put "siege worms" in biter bases that have huge range and damage and will target structures.

ssilk wrote:

Mehve wrote:

10) I hope boiler mk2 will be electric powered. It's strange that with everything that can be electricity-powered, only boilers sill are not.

Since there is currently no application for boilers EXCEPT for heating up liquid to make electricity, an electricity-powered boiler would be roughly analogous to a solar-powered flashlight.

Might sound so. Indeed the point are not the boilers, but the storing of the hot water in tanks.
See https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?tit ... r_in_tanks

A completely filled tank with water at 100 degrees stores 212 Megajoules! This is the equivalent to 42 Basic accumulators, but the tank needs only 3x3 tiles of space. This way you can store much more energy in a much smaller place: 23.5 MJ / Tile vs. 1.2 MJ / Tile

I don't know, if that is really up to date, but if not it should not have changed too much. Also eventually interesting: https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?tit ... r_in_tanks

And this becomes much more interesting with nuclear energy (and other energy creation ideas: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=31440 ) : Players wants some energy storage.
See below "Storing energy" in viewtopic.php?f=80&t=31440 . There are more, but I just linked the most actual ones.

You need also to know, that solar panels are one of the most discussed subjects about balancing: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=18613 Solar panels less of a no-brainer

There are many ideas about making storage much more important. See viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342 Events (Environmental Disasters and Weather) / Biome-Types
And in discussions around nuclear energy there is a lot of agreement, that nuclear energy should be "slow" in the way, how fast it reacts to changes in power usage. This means: you need fast storage of energy.

So to conclude it: Electric boilers to create hot water is in my eyes a good idea to have some kind of "emergency energy backup". [And AFAIK such boilers needs to be implemented into the game, cause it cannot be modded easily: Implementations based on the current boilers would eat up too much CPU; you need some Lua-Script that shifts the consumed energy (by a accumulator-entity or so) into the boiler.]

But I don't want to hide: Another direction to store energy (also quite interesting) would be producing for example ethanol out of the air (CO2 + H2O + Power --> CH2 (methylen-group) + some O2 , air-cleaning and producing pre-products for oil and fuel , I mention this only, cause this is currently researches in reality and the results are really promising).

And we don't need to mix this up: Energy production is in my eyes a cool thing, when we speak about different speeds in availability. Every kind of energy should have their pros and cons. Hot water for example is - correctly built - very fast available, nuclear energy should be in my eyes much slower.

Drury wrote:It will literally not work. That kind of contraption shouldn't even start. It's literally this.

Hehe... Well, the boilers have of course the same priority-level as accumulators, so that the don't consume energy, when not enough energy available. And more complex switching: Use circuits and power-switches.

Koub wrote:I'd love an ability to use construction bots (or alike) at early stages of the game. Even just being able to lay blueprints and make them built at arm-reach automatically, as you get through ghost buildings would be super neat.
Also copy-pasting and cut-pasting sections of the base, like when you realize you've misaligned a whole bloc of your factory by one tile, and you have to tear ir down to rebuild it by hand (because, well, robots are blue science y'know ).

Well, also my opinon.
There is this big subject, which needs (in my opinion) to be known to understand the relations to other fields:

viewtopic.php?f=80&t=4682 Planning (Signs, Cloning, Ghosts, Blueprinting and more...).

Read the points about "Cloning", that is a technique which is relevant BEFORE blueprints are available. The basic principle with cloning (it's just a name, replace it with anything you like) is, that the player is able to copy a (small) areas and paste it anywhere in reach. It's not told, how to place objects, it could be some kind of "magic" or kind of robots, or you need to use "capsules"; I don't know, the details are not relevant here.

What's relevant? Well, that mentioned subject is quite old. In my eyes it should work currently like so:
- Copy/paste should work from begin on with ghosts. Meaning: You can currently place single ghosts. I see no problem to place multiple ghosts at once. That is also a super useful-planing tool for multiplayer.
- Some research and items are needed to have the ability for ghost-placing: You place a ghost and if you come near enough to that ghost and holding a tool and have the right items, it is placed.
- I think also blueprints before you have construction bots is a good idea. With the stored blueprints in the blueprint-books from former game, you can improve early game a lot. I think creating such books, that enable fast early game for example, would keep many players engaged. In my opinion this can become the same "level of fun" as mods already have.
- Some research might increase the radius of this tool. And when I speak about a tool: Perhaps it's not a tool, it's robot-capsules, that work for a minute until destroyed. Again: The "How" is not relevant yet.

aubergine18 wrote:

factoriouzr wrote:+we should be able to copy and paste from a factory to an inserter and it should set the filter to the same good as being produced by the factory

I thought you could already do that, or maybe only to request container (which has same effect)?

Indeed you can do both.

Keks wrote: personally I think a Pause toggle for personal Logistics slots, Personal trash slots and your Personal roboport sending out construction Bots and Actinng as a Provider chest would be nice.

There are a lot more suggestions: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=20566 Changes for the Personal Roboport
One of them are such a switch. Another one was, that the bots don't wait for orders and get lost (e.g when driving train). I don't know, how much of the issues are currently fixed, but with each version it was better.

Stevepunk wrote:There is only 1 enemy faction (the biters) and only 3 enemy types (biters, spitters and worms). Even the evolution system is limited to a few stages.

The world is infinite but there's no point to exploring it if everything is the same. And there's no point to different research paths if everything is the same.