Factorio Forums

NotABiter wrote:I just tried this mod out. Below are some issues I noticed (not including lack of access to half-pure matter et al as it's already been brought up earlier in this thread). Use as you wish.

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Issue: Water is infinite, free, and comes out of an offshore pump very fast. Allowing the conversion of water to EMC very quickly results in "EMC farms" surrounding every lake in sight generating 50000 EMC each every few minutes or so. (Actually I'm exaggerating a little bit - there's no need to have that many EMC farms because with just a dozen or two you'll have more EMC than you know what to do with - just run around control-left-clicking on the condensers and soon your inventory will be stuffed with 50K stacks of EMC.)
Suggestion: Don't allow conversion of water to EMC. (Converting EMC to water is OK.)

Issue: There's too much EMC. Here I'm not talking in terms of value, but in terms of item quantity. Even with full inserter bonuses, it takes forever to move the hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of EMC "coins" that a single item may yield/cost. This might not be a problem in itself (and the logistic challenges created might even be a good thing in terms of gameplay), but because EMC stacks are huge (50K) and because the player character can just walk over to one machine, pull out 50K one instant and jam it all into another machine the next instant, this makes the player character something like 10000 times faster than a fast inserter which kind of wrecks the whole principle of Factorio (automation) as it encourages the player to just manually gather and distribute the EMC. (Technically this issue is true elsewhere in Factorio, and results in problems there as well - e.g., the player character "helping" the logistic system, especially bots, because the player character has massive throughput with all of those inventory slots, but the issue is much more severe than usual with this mod.)
Suggestion: I'm not sure if the game engine would even support something like this, but... Have more than one EMC value (e.g., yellow coins are worth one, red are worth 10, blue are worth 100, green are worth 1000, purple are worth 10000), and when outputting/inputting EMC produced/accepted, produce/accept a mix of the coins, and on both input and output sides "make change" as necessary to keep the number of coins minimized and always let inserters (unless they are smart inserters with a filter) pull the highest value coins first. (This suggestion would probably still work even without the automatic "making change" feature, but might result in some blocking issues similar to oil where you have more of one type than can fit so no more of any type can be produced.) You might also want some "change conversion" machines that a player could use to aggregate various types of EMC coins without doing any actual item<->EMC conversion. --- Or scratch all of that and instead just don't allow the player to carry any EMC at all. (With respect to mining, it would mean that either the player character can't mine entities containing EMC, or the EMC vanishes when they do so.) The story could be that EMC is like a radioctive material - far too dangerous to actually touch with human hands.

Issue: The pricing of gear wheels is a bit odd. Iron plates are worth 5 EMC, it takes two iron plates to make one gear wheel, so one would expect a price of 10 EMC (or so) for gear wheels. Instead they are priced at 2 EMC. As far as I can tell, though odd, this isn't much of a problem if Equivalent Exchange is the only mod in use because there doesn't seem to be any way to exploit it (other than getting cheaper gears via EMC). However, if used with a recycling mod it could cause a balance problem: convert 2 EMC to a gear wheel, recycle the gear wheel back to 2 iron plates, convert 2 iron plates to 10 EMC, pocket 8 EMC profit and cycle the other 2 EMC into repeating the process
Suggestion: Reprice gears to be 10 EMC and reprice everything derived from gears accordingly. (Actually it's more complicated than that, see next issue.)

Issue: Rounding errors mean profits can be made. E.g., buy 3 copper wires for 6 EMC (2 EMC each), an iron plate for 5 EMC, for a total cost of 11 EMC. Use them to produce a green circuit and sell it for 13 EMC. At least, I'm guessing these are rounding errors. E.g., if a copper plate is 5 EMC then copper wire should be 2.5 EMC, 2.5*3 + 5 = 12.5 so green circuits should be 12.5 EMC, but somehow copper wire got rounded down to 2 and green circuits up to 13. (Though I guess rather than 12.5 it was 12.5*1.1=13.75 due to the 10% overhead you add, and that got rounded down to 13. But that just points out that the 10% overhead is itself contributing to the ability to make profit, so by trying to make it "not 100% efficient" you actually created a loophole whereby it is more than 100% efficient by running it in the other direction - sell complex and buy simple rather than sell simple and buy complex.) Note that this was not the only case I found of this. E.g., IIRC copper wire + green circuit -> red wire also turns a profit of 2 EMC.
Suggestion: This one is complicated.
1. Rework the prices so there is no rounding error. Make plates be 6 EMC, copper wires 3 EMC, and adjust other prices accordingly.
2. If you really want to apply a 10% inefficiency (with no loopholes), you would need have buy and sell prices be different. E.g,. allow iron plates to be sold for 5 EMC and bought for 5.5 EMC. To combat rounding you would need to either allow for fractional EMC, or use larger values so rounding error is always less than the 10% difference you're trying to create (i.e., so rounding error never creates a loophole).
3. Even if the prices were all "correct", i.e. even with a perfect 10% inefficiency added, productivity modules could still be used to turn a profit. (4 level 3 productivity modules provide a 40% boost, which will overpower a 10% EMC conversion inefficiency.) You'd have to disallow productivity modules, nerf them to keep them below 10%, or adjust your prices using the assumption that such modules are always in play (i.e., increase the spread between buy and sell prices to 40% or 50% instead of just 10%). (Of course that last option is not enough if the player is using bob's mods with MK5 god modules in MK6 assembly machines for a +300% productivity boost.)

Issue: The mod allows you to create items for which you don't even have the tech researched yet.
Suggestion: Don't include items until their tech is researched.

Issue: When converting items to EMC, the usability is significantly hurt by all of the recipe choices looking identical. (This issue only gets worse as you do more research into EMC.)
Suggestion: Use custom icons (probably derived from the Factorio originals) for this. E.g., make the icon be the same as the normal one (such as the iron plates icon when converting iron plates to EMC), and just add an arrow and yellow disk to indicate the recipe converts iron plates to EMC. It would just be the same change to all of the icons, so it could probably be done mostly programmatically. Or at least provide some kind of "map" (even if it's just a picture in the first post of this thread) that shows where stuff is hiding. (It doesn't help that the item order in the EMC->item tab is completely different than the item order in the item->EMC tab. Just making those be the same would help quite a bit.)
EDIT: Alternatively, make a different machine. Use the existing condenser to convert EMC to items, and use this new machine to convert items to EMC. The new machine (just like furnaces) would not require a recipe be set at all - it just automatically converts whatever is stuffed into it into EMC.

Issue: Perhaps related to the above, the item order seems really random in the EMC->item tab. E.g., I would expect speed modules to be listed together, first level 1, then 2 then 3 (just as the game does it for the normal crafting tab), or perhaps all level 1 modules and then all level 2 and all level 3 with a consistent ordering between module types. Instead speed modules are scattered all over the place (as are other items that would seem like they should be organized together).
Suggestion: From what little I've looked into modding, I do believe the mod can control the ordering so it could be fixed.

Issue: Loading an assembly machine with EMC doesn't work right if the recipe takes multiple stacks of EMC and the player control-clicks on an empty slot in their inventory. E.g., if the recipe calls for 50K+50K+10K of EMC, when the player does this it will load all 110K of EMC into the assembly machine's first input slot, and none into the 2nd and third slots, and the assembly machine doesn't work. (You have to manually move the first 50K to he first slot, the 2nd to the 2nd slot, and then drop 10K+ onto the third slot to make it work.) If you make it so the player character can't carry EMC in their inventory, then this becomes a non-issue.
Suggestion: Don't let the PC carry EMC. Or you could of course increase the stack size to 200K (or whatever) so all recipes only need one stack. You may be making the game do something the dev team didn't anticipate, so this might be a game engine bug or it might be a "mods aren't supposed to do that" (multiple inputs for same ingredient type) situation.

science

I did have some fun when I tried to figure what why science was taking so long and I noticed one of the EMC techs (one of the earlier ones - I think the first one that lets you do items->EMC) was consuming 30 red science packs per lab per cycle. It meant bringing a lot more red science online so my research didn't stay stuck "forever", and even then I could only get a fraction of my labs running. Later I had 5 condensers each on red and green science and belt throughput became the bottleneck, and once I could turn EMC into blue belt the science belts got upgraded... and IIRC it still wasn't getting packs to the end of the belt. Having mods "mix it up" a bit like that is nice, though in this case I don't think there was any really good solution because if there is anything worse than trying to put the science on belts it would be putting condensers right next to each science lab to produce science locally and then trying to put EMC on a belt. OK, maybe it could be made even worse by having logistics bots carry the EMC to the condensers. Though, now that I'm thinking about it, using a 4 belt system for science instead of a two belt system would help - I've never used 4 belts (per row of labs) for science before.