Make promethium spoil, and quickly

[h.q.droid]

because belt storage encourages boring builds while being about 6x as effective as not using it. Giving them spoil time would make vastly different builds more interesting, as more aspects of ships would matter instead of only size and belt density now, such as platform speed (both short term burst speed to arrive at high density promethium zones and sustained speed to maximize production speed) actually makes a difference. What a sandboxy game to punish thinking differently or taking more aspects into consideration. Other than making them spoil, making promethium science productivity scale with distance to the shattered planet and bypassing 300% max prod would also work.

Fast, immediate-to-science ships are already more efficient than belt storage ships for 10k+ SPM. At this scale (5000+ tons), ship weight becomes the limiting factor of speed. Belt storage means lower speed, longer cycle time, and ultimately more ships per SPM.

I prefer the idea of making promethium science productivity scale with distance to promethium spoiling. Currently going far and fast only increases promethium density but it quickly overwhelms legendary collectors and stops being useful. Plus, I'd prefer belt storage to remain viable.

For the first promethium ship, overgrowth soil is actually quite good since it lets you iterate at a relaxed pace and at <500 eggs per trip the efficiency is OK.

[mmmPI]

have you even tested how ineffective this is before commenting?

Yes it works fine, you don't need to worry at all about spoilage even if the proposition was implemented.

It adds actually putting thoughts into building a promethium ship, instead of just building a giant square with tons of belts. Less is more.

oh yeah because a 12x12 block of only storage bay is SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING than all the possible design for belt storage x).

[Tertius]

because belt storage encourages boring builds while being about 6x as effective as not using it. Giving them spoil time would make vastly different builds more interesting

With chunks spoiling you're adding a hard restriction, and hard restrictions lower the amount of possible and viable builds, so it's reducing build diversity. Not increasing it. You will probably get "better" builds, but you will get significantly less different builds and approaches in general once the community found out about the most efficient build strategy.


I don't feel my ship is cheesing. It wasn't trivial to build and balance. I'm using promethium belt storage to be able to immediately begin producing science as soon as the ship loads eggs. It continues to produce science on its way through the solar system up to the farming area, and the storage is consumed shortly into the farming. The eggs are consumed as well shortly before they spoil and on its way back the storage is being filled as well, so it can arrive at Nauvis again with a full buffer. That's a round trip time of about 2*30 minutes = 60 minutes. The ship loads 8500 eggs in one batch from 17 dedicated rocket silos, so it stays at Nauvis no longer than 1 minute. Speed 280-300 km/s within the solar system, slower outside of the edge of the solar system depending on distance / asteroid density. Will produce 15300 promethium science for one round trip. Storage space 9300 promethium chunks.

Everything normal quality. In my opinion the peak of what you can do in terms of efficiency with normal quality. For me, the meaning of efficiency is minimizing the downtime of promethium science production. For my ship, the downtime is about 50% - just the way back to Nauvis. [the platform itself isn't the peak of optimization - the reactor is too big and there is much unused space, but I was really too tired to spend more time on this].

If you make promethium spoil, you have to bring eggs to the farming area, but when you arrive there they're already 3/4 spoiled so in essence you spend the most time just flying back and forth and doing nothing with a tiny amount of actually producing science, which is silly. Or you're forced to create and bring "conserved" eggs with overgrowth soil and extract them with 1/4 efficiency, which is silly as well. You have to create overgrowth soil on Gleba, but you don't have stone/landfill on Gleba in quantities, so it's even more silly to have to provide Gleba with stone or landfill.

Finally, it's silly to see promethium chunks spoil in a few minutes on a platform while they didn't spoil in the shattered planet remains for probably billions of years.

So in my opinion, the current mechanic is perfectly ok. It's not taken to the extreme and the player has freedom in how he implements it.

The only thing that could be improved in my opinion would be a special promethium cargo bay with the same space/capacity ratio as an equivalent "good" belt storage. Cosmetics.

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[SirSmuggler]

I collect promethium in cargobays on my ship, not belts. Is it "efficient"? Probobly not. Do I care? Not at all.

I bring the prometium back to Nauvis where it's dumped to the surface, then it's shiped up to a different platform that does the science. Again, not efficient, but its my way and I like it.

If promethium suddenly was made to spoil, my way would no longer work at all and I'd be forced to play in a different way. That hardly sounds like increasing diversity in builds.

[CyberCider]

Which dark necromancer summoned this year old thread from the depths of the underworld? Are you celebrating its anniversary?

Anyway, when I had made this thread, I didn’t quite have a full understanding of space platform mechanics, because at the time Space Age had only released recently. I made it with the idea that ships could be increasingly made faster by making them smaller, aka more space efficient, aka higher quality and more cleverly designed. However, this is not actually true. Ship speed depends very weakly on size, to the point that it can be completely ignored. And that renders the entire point I was trying to make completely moot. So this thread is pretty pointless, and has no business being active at all.

Although despite not having any stake in the discussion myself, I must admit the side that the side in favor of belt storage is not making any good points at all. Calling freeplay a sandbox when the game literally had “sandbox” as a separate mode? Saying bad balance is ok just because it adds diversity? I sure am glad this isn’t a thread with an actually meaningful topic.

[RockPaperKatana]

because belt storage encourages boring builds while being about 6x as effective as not using it. Giving them spoil time would make vastly different builds more interesting, as more aspects of ships would matter instead of only size and belt density now, such as platform speed (both short term burst speed to arrive at high density promethium zones and sustained speed to maximize production speed) actually makes a difference. What a sandboxy game to punish thinking differently or taking more aspects into consideration. Other than making them spoil, making promethium science productivity scale with distance to the shattered planet and bypassing 300% max prod would also work.

Fast, immediate-to-science ships are already more efficient than belt storage ships for 10k+ SPM. At this scale (5000+ tons), ship weight becomes the limiting factor of speed. Belt storage means lower speed, longer cycle time, and ultimately more ships per SPM.

I prefer the idea of making promethium science productivity scale with distance to promethium spoiling. Currently going far and fast only increases promethium density but it quickly overwhelms legendary collectors and stops being useful. Plus, I'd prefer belt storage to remain viable.

For the first promethium ship, overgrowth soil is actually quite good since it lets you iterate at a relaxed pace and at <500 eggs per trip the efficiency is OK.

That's tiny. I have a 600k espm promethium storage ship and it's boring as hell.

[RockPaperKatana]

because belt storage encourages boring builds while being about 6x as effective as not using it. Giving them spoil time would make vastly different builds more interesting

With chunks spoiling you're adding a hard restriction, and hard restrictions lower the amount of possible and viable builds, so it's reducing build diversity. Not increasing it. You will probably get "better" builds, but you will get significantly less different builds and approaches in general once the community found out about the most efficient build strategy.


I don't feel my ship is cheesing. It wasn't trivial to build and balance. I'm using promethium belt storage to be able to immediately begin producing science as soon as the ship loads eggs. It continues to produce science on its way through the solar system up to the farming area, and the storage is consumed shortly into the farming. The eggs are consumed as well shortly before they spoil and on its way back the storage is being filled as well, so it can arrive at Nauvis again with a full buffer. That's a round trip time of about 2*30 minutes = 60 minutes. The ship loads 8500 eggs in one batch from 17 dedicated rocket silos, so it stays at Nauvis no longer than 1 minute. Speed 280-300 km/s within the solar system, slower outside of the edge of the solar system depending on distance / asteroid density. Will produce 15300 promethium science for one round trip. Storage space 9300 promethium chunks.

Everything normal quality. In my opinion the peak of what you can do in terms of efficiency with normal quality. For me, the meaning of efficiency is minimizing the downtime of promethium science production. For my ship, the downtime is about 50% - just the way back to Nauvis. [the platform itself isn't the peak of optimization - the reactor is too big and there is much unused space, but I was really too tired to spend more time on this].

If you make promethium spoil, you have to bring eggs to the farming area, but when you arrive there they're already 3/4 spoiled so in essence you spend the most time just flying back and forth and doing nothing with a tiny amount of actually producing science, which is silly. Or you're forced to create and bring "conserved" eggs with overgrowth soil and extract them with 1/4 efficiency, which is silly as well. You have to create overgrowth soil on Gleba, but you don't have stone/landfill on Gleba in quantities, so it's even more silly to have to provide Gleba with stone or landfill.

Finally, it's silly to see promethium chunks spoil in a few minutes on a platform while they didn't spoil in the shattered planet remains for probably billions of years.

So in my opinion, the current mechanic is perfectly ok. It's not taken to the extreme and the player has freedom in how he implements it.

The only thing that could be improved in my opinion would be a special promethium cargo bay with the same space/capacity ratio as an equivalent "good" belt storage. Cosmetics.


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Ok so you have a tiny ship as well instead of taking a look into what belt storage ultimately encourages. Try building bigger, try my mod that makes promethium chunks spoil or the mod that increases science productivity by proximity to the planet.

[RockPaperKatana]

I collect promethium in cargobays on my ship, not belts. Is it "efficient"? Probobly not. Do I care? Not at all.

I bring the prometium back to Nauvis where it's dumped to the surface, then it's shiped up to a different platform that does the science. Again, not efficient, but its my way and I like it.

If promethium suddenly was made to spoil, my way would no longer work at all and I'd be forced to play in a different way. That hardly sounds like increasing diversity in builds.

unfortunately I think it's just normal that builds will break with new balance. This is 100% a suggestion for 2.1 where tons of stuff will break like space casinos and LDS washing.

[Tertius]

Ok so you have a tiny ship as well instead of taking a look into what belt storage ultimately encourages. Try building bigger

Nope, I will not build bigger. That's not a part of the game I'm interested in. I'm quite sure I'm not the only player with this view of the game. My build is already bigger than many others for the same purpose of just farming some promethium and do a little bit of that science just for the sake of it. If I need more I build 2, 3, 4... platforms of that size but I will not build a much bigger platform than that. That's just not my plan with Factorio.

You need to make a game mechanic proposal that fits small builds like mine as well as yours and be better for both of them. It's not simply "add spoiling". You need a whole bunch of balanced changes throughout the whole item tree involved in promethium science if you want to do a significant change. The change must scale and be balanced from small to biggest builds. Keep in mind large builds are not the common case, so you cannot alienate a big part of the player base by forcing a restricting game mechanics upon them that's meant for the largest builds only. Only few players really build for millions of SPM.
The distribution of player numbers is likely to follow a Gaussian bell curve with a maximum somewhere in the middle.