The Green Dilemma

[MomoM8]

For a long time I played idle to get items and never checked back enough, I'd be like 10 hours in and barely have automated anything cause I played idle. Its really boring and once i started playing a bud and we kept rolling that ball of progression pollution got big and i have had actual fun with this so far. It was railword though so the biters not expanding made it feel a little boring, ended up turning that back on. SO yea why go green? I say to challenge yourself not to give up or stop playing from the extreme boredom

[qoonpooka]

At endgame, when you've got nuclear going and are liberally dispensing beacons and prodmods, yea, speed/productivity is the way to go. But the green thumb has a place midgame. When you're juuust getting oil, are cranking out your first laser turrets and don't really have the fuel yet to keep on powering through constant attacks. Keeping both pollution low and power requirements down with mk1 efficiency modules can be very effective, and they're pretty cheap. Especially if you've got some forests around you it can cause pollution-generated biter attacks to drop to 0.

Pardon the mild necro, but this has been a subject of my own inquiry for a number of reasons the past few months. I've been exploring the effects of various modules on the whole production chain using truncated LCA (Life Cycle Assessment, in this case a cradle-to-gate fashion), mostly because I have never understood the hate-on a lot of people have for eff mods.

My intuition was that the Prod+Spd default assumption that seems to have become a universal maxim would only hold for the higher tiers of product - where the free bonus product would avoid a tremendous amount of embodied pollution. In turn, eff mods would be incredibly valuable in low-tier products, where their pollution and energy reductions would reverberate up through the whole product chain. The maths say this is partially true anyway (3xEff3 + Prod3 becomes the superior build virtually immediately, starting with gears, even assuming solar-powered 3xEff1 mining drills.)

But the mid-game case that Aeternus describes is definitely still value. There is also the evolution factor to consider. I got into focusing on pollution-per-unit-product because I'm contemplating my first marathon + deathworld. I play with basically all resources set to rare and small so there's a lot of nest clearing that has to be done, and especially with the evolution factor cranked up, it seems entirely reasonable to expect that even if I rush turret damage it will be very possible to induce large biters well before I'm able to resource the defenses necessary.

I would like to see pollution play more of a role in the gameplay generally, however. Rather than buff pollution, though, I'd love to see defenses rebalanced. If ammunition cost more (5 Iron, 1 Copper, 1 Coal for a basic mag, for example), if laser turrets were changed from your basic electric fence spam to something more niche (say, a long recharge period in between massively powerful shots: same DPS, much higher TTK - this is your answer to the big bugs, but you still need a screening defense in front of them), and if the biters got a flyer that - instead of getting bigger, got faster/smarter - then I think you'd see people respect the consequences of pollution much more.

Personally, though, I study energy policy, and so focusing on minimizing pollution just suits my personality anyway and I was super hype for Solar + Accumulators the moment I started playing.

[HurkWurk]

until they can solve the performance issues with huge bases, green simply isnt practical, since ultra fast and dense factories are required for the highest throughput per framerate.

If you want to build different factories why you do not abandon requirement for megabase throughput? At least I think that factorio-optimal megabase is not entertaining way to play at all and prefer realistic-like railworlds with structured production plants instead of maximum throughput. Green world with limited production and active pollution handling would probably also be interesting option. For example by increasing pollution based biter evolution so that player could actually fail if he did not take pollution into account. Maybe it would be interesting idea for larger mod.

I disagree that there are severe issues with megabases. I do not know any games able to handle as large and complex systems ad Factorio. Problem is that because factories are practically free in related to game resources and also easy and fast to build with bots players achieve computing limits in any case. It is hard to believe that if maximum number of entities was ten or hundred times larger gaming would be significantly more entertaining for anyone. It would be just copying of more modules until UPS would drop too low and those who see maximum throughput as only meaningful objective would whine that there are "issues" preventing to build "real megabases".

sorry for the late reply to this, but i just saw it.

mega base isnt always about throughput. the issue is once you are the size of a mega base, then performance suffers. going green at lower SPM still takes considerable area. it actually takes a lot more room than a typical mega base. this is due to the lower output per factory, which means more factories to perform the same level of output. even if you only want one third the total output, you will likely still need more than two thirds the total factory size.

now, green as a mode, as you mentioned, might work... sorta like a limited wave defense version where you are limited on space so green to stop pollution spread works well for you. im all for new game modes and ideas that give the game longer legs.

im not sure what you consider "issues" with a mega base... personally once the FPS is jumpy, or consistently below ~40, i notice it and its no longer fun, because the gameplay is no longer fluid. ive played 20fps maps.... they werent fun. interesting yes, but not fun.

my goal with a "large" game with huge numbers of entities is about game modes. as you mentioned earlier, a green game mode could be really interesting.
i would love to have a train world where having large, spaced out bases of "normal" size, each producing one or two resources, then shipping all of that to some central complex where things are assembled and then sent back out again to fuel those spread out bases.

i compare it to minecraft... me and friends run a server. each of us runs off in a different direction, we build different things, and inter-connect everything with a train network to get around for travel and be able to see each others works.

imagine the next level of the game... one where you literally have different "zones" to the game... maybe even with different mods applying. so in one area, bob's mods are all active, people are building mark 5 machines, etc.. but in an ocean zone, seablock is active, but that player can use the stuff made in bobs area of the map, and imported, etc. and yet a third area, is the mines mod, where you are under ground, mining away, trying to prevent cave-ins, etc, but having vastly larger supplies of ingredients than other areas, so in that sense, you can play several different games at once. but interact between them.

[Rjskeet]

[*]I've noticed a lot of people saying green isn't that good because speed and productivity are better for smaller and denser mega bases, this statement is true but eff mods are not ment for that kind of factory, they are ment for factories that don't have massive main buses( think benthams towns series) and games like deathworlds where your factory always has to defend itself. Especially in a deathworld is green the best way to go(not always applicable), or you just end up making so much pollution that the amount of bases hit just overwhelm your defense