Promethium science is too easy to cheese

[Khagan]

Another possible solution might be to limit promethium science pack crafting to pressure-less environments, such as space.

It's already limited to zero gravity, and hence to space.

[BraveCaperCat]

Another possible solution might be to limit promethium science pack crafting to pressure-less environments, such as space.

It's already limited to zero gravity, and hence to space.

That wasn't mentioned on the wiki. Maybe a different solution would be to only allow promethium science packs crafting in areas of high interstellar radiation. This still wouldn't do anything to the other biter egg cheese.

[mrvn]

Another possible solution might be to limit promethium science pack crafting to pressure-less environments, such as space.

It's already limited to zero gravity, and hence to space.

That wasn't mentioned on the wiki. Maybe a different solution would be to only allow promethium science packs crafting in areas of high interstellar radiation. This still wouldn't do anything to the other biter egg cheese.

What would be radiating out there? No. It's should require flat space-time. So far away from any gravity source.

[Khagan]

It's already limited to zero gravity, and hence to space.

That wasn't mentioned on the wiki.

Lots of things aren't on the wiki yet. The Factoriopædia is authoritative.

[BraveCaperCat]

Another possible solution might be to limit promethium science pack crafting to pressure-less environments, such as space.

It's already limited to zero gravity, and hence to space.

That wasn't mentioned on the wiki. Maybe a different solution would be to only allow promethium science packs crafting in areas of high interstellar radiation. This still wouldn't do anything to the other biter egg cheese.

What would be radiating out there? No. It's should require flat space-time. So far away from any gravity source.

Are you saying that the Factorio Galaxy is not full of stars?
Yes, interstellar space IS somewhat flat space-time, but cosmic rays are much more common in interstellar space, where the cosmic rays from multiple different stars can reach you - compared to interplanetary space, where only the star's cosmic rays can reach you. Interstellar radiation works just as much as flat space-time.

[RockPaperKatana]

If I were to balance it, I will:
Make biter eggs spoil in one hour instead of 30 minutes.
Make promethium spoil in 30 minutes, and when it spoils, it triggers an explosion just strong enough to destroy transport belts.

This ensures egg speedrun would become the main strat, but you still go greedy and design a system where you can hoard promethium chunks, and dump them when the timer is about to run out.

[mrvn]

Is transporting Promethium to the eggs really such a good strategy? For the first research you need about 1000 promethium or 125 belts worth and 400 biter eggs or 4 stacks. Since biter eggs only spoil once you remove them from the nest it's easy to store up 5 stacks of unspoiled eggs (one full rocket) and then you have 30 minutes to fly them to the edge.

Seems to me that carrying biter eggs out to the edge and beyond is still preferable. Or at least a hybrid approach. Fly eggs out, build science and then fill belts with excess promethium to process at Nauvis. That would go well with an interrupt that makes the ship return to Nauvis once the biter eggs are used up so you don't have to manually send it back.

[Khagan]

Yes, interstellar space IS somewhat flat space-time, but cosmic rays are much more common in interstellar space, where the cosmic rays from multiple different stars can reach you - compared to interplanetary space, where only the star's cosmic rays can reach you. Interstellar radiation works just as much as flat space-time.

You know, it might be a good idea if you actually read the article on cosmic rays that you linked to. Even inside the solar system most cosmic rays are from outside (e.g. from supernovae). The contributions from the sun are occasional ones from special events such as solar flares. (I have memories of doing a final-year undergrad physics experiment one point of which was to show that cosmic ray intensities did not depend on the direction of the sun. It was generally regarded as the dullest experiment in the course, since you sat around counting rays for hours, and nothing changed.)

[jaylawl]

I feel a bit hurt that apparently many people consider it cheesing/cheating how i made my promethium science. That is, i stored a bunch of promethium asteroid chunks on a belt buffer and crafted the promethium science over Nauvis orbit.

Now i can see that it is debatable whether this is the or an intended way to do this. The answer to that stands or falls with whether the game designers consider belt buffering on a space platform an intended strategy. And i do 100 % also feel like recycling non-spoilable items into biter eggs feeling like cheese. I think organic materials should not be regained when recycling stuff (except for those items that recycle into themselves).

Calling the belt buffering cheese feels rough though. I still spent an entire long, long evening designing my own platform capable of traveling 100k+ km towards the shattered planet (not to mention all the time i spent playing my Space Age run!), and even then my ship is only capable of doing so safely somewhere in the slow speed of 50-75 km/s while very slowly collecting the asteroid chunks. It takes a good hour for the platform to leave Nauvis and return with a full load (~5k chunks, which isn't much). And i constantly have to check on the platform in fear of something overwhelming it.

Even with that "cheese" i think it is still a remarkable achievement of any player to get this far - that should most certainly not be punished or de-valued. But i also agree with the people here saying that this ultimate challenge could be more... challenging.

So let's incentivice going for the bigger challenge instead:

• add achievements for crafting x-amounts promethium science while on the space route to/from the shattered planet.
• make crafting promethium science on that space route superior to crafting it anywhere else (more productivity or something). You could even make it more productive the closer you get to the shattered planet.
• ... maybe you have some more ideas

[Illiander42]

Factorio is an open-ended puzzle game.

"How the devs intended" is not important. Seriously. Surprising the devs is a good thing, and they should stop "fixing" things like explosive reactive armour for spaceships. (Especially because that fix gave us dougnut ships in a really awkward way that's a PITA to use)

"Mechanics allow many options with competing tradeoffs such that people argue about which one is best" is important. So I'd say the fact that people are arguing over this shows it's balanced just fine.

(And belts aren't much denser than legendary cargo bays for things with a stack size of 1. And it's a neat moment of "wow" when you figure that out)

[CyberCider]

I feel a bit hurt that apparently many people consider it cheesing/cheating how i made my promethium science. That is, i stored a bunch of promethium asteroid chunks on a belt buffer and crafted the promethium science over Nauvis orbit.

Now i can see that it is debatable whether this is the or an intended way to do this. The answer to that stands or falls with whether the game designers consider belt buffering on a space platform an intended strategy. And i do 100 % also feel like recycling non-spoilable items into biter eggs feeling like cheese. I think organic materials should not be regained when recycling stuff (except for those items that recycle into themselves).

Calling the belt buffering cheese feels rough though. I still spent an entire long, long evening designing my own platform capable of traveling 100k+ km towards the shattered planet (not to mention all the time i spent playing my Space Age run!), and even then my ship is only capable of doing so safely somewhere in the slow speed of 50-75 km/s while very slowly collecting the asteroid chunks. It takes a good hour for the platform to leave Nauvis and return with a full load (~5k chunks, which isn't much). And i constantly have to check on the platform in fear of something overwhelming it.

Even with that "cheese" i think it is still a remarkable achievement of any player to get this far - that should most certainly not be punished or de-valued. But i also agree with the people here saying that this ultimate challenge could be more... challenging.

So let's incentivice going for the bigger challenge instead:

• add achievements for crafting x-amounts promethium science while on the space route to/from the shattered planet.
• make crafting promethium science on that space route superior to crafting it anywhere else (more productivity or something). You could even make it more productive the closer you get to the shattered planet.
• ... maybe you have some more ideas

Well, I can tell you now that since the creation of this thread, my mind has in fact been changed.
Believe it or not, this whole thing actually stemmed from a misunderstanding . My misunderstanding, of the fundamental mechanics of factorio space travel.

You see, this whole argument was constructed upon one assumption: That bigger platforms moved slower. Until recently, I had been completely convinced that the top speed of a space platform was dependant on its weight. Or rather, the ratio of thrusters to the platform’s surface area. But this is in fact not the case. The top speed is primarily determined by the ratio of thrusters to width, instead. So, in order to achieve maximum speed, all you need to do is completely cover your platform’s backside with thrusters… So long as that condition is met, the width and height of the platform will only have a minimal effect on its top speed.

It’s safe to say that this fact completely topples the core premise of my original post. A platform fast enough to deliver biter eggs into promethium space can actually be absolutely enormous, with no downsides. So the difference between a standard ship and a belt buffer ship isn’t a difference between “small” and “huge”, it’s actually more like “huge” and “huger”, which is not nearly as significant. I’ve even learned that an optimal method for producing the science is a “hybrid” approach: A platform that uses both in-flight crafting and belt buffering, together in sequence. Because a platform can in fact be both fast enough to deliver a significant payload of eggs, and massive enough to store promethium chunks.

So, I suppose that’s the end of that. If I decide that I’m bothered enough by the way the general space velocity mechanics work (as I now actually understand them), I’ll make a new thread about it. But I completely understand that it would be demanding for a change far too drastic to be implemented post-release. So maybe I won’t even bother.

I guess that’s it for this thread

[Khazul]

It’s safe to say that this fact completely topples the core premise of my original post. A platform fast enough to deliver biter eggs into promethium space can actually be absolutely enormous, with no downsides. So the difference between a standard ship and a belt buffer ship isn’t a difference between “small” and “huge”, it’s actually more like “huge” and “huger”, which is not nearly as significant. I’ve even learned that an optimal method for producing the science is a “hybrid” approach: A platform that uses both in-flight crafting and belt buffering, together in sequence. Because a platform can in fact be both fast enough to deliver a significant payload of eggs, and massive enough to store promethium chunks.

So, I suppose that’s the end of that. If I decide that I’m bothered enough by the way the general space velocity mechanics work (as I now actually understand them), I’ll make a new thread about it. But I completely understand that it would be demanding for a change far too drastic to be implemented post-release. So maybe I won’t even bother.

I guess that’s it for this thread

My promethium collector has a top speed of well over 300Km/s (cant remember exactly, might be 340 or so). It is a largish ship too (26k or so foundations I think).
It has alot of circuits on it to control its speed - including in response to what is in front of it. If the railguns that are set to only shoot huge asteroids start firing, it takes note and slows down. The more they fire, more it slows so it can maintain a speed it can get away with. If it suffer any damage because it was pushing a little too hard, it slow right down to minimum thrust for 30 seconds to allow for self repair before it continues. Typically it ends up doing between 125 to 175 on the shattered planet route, but it collects quite fast so doesnt need to spend much time out there. It only collects around 12.5k on its belts as it was a retro-fit not a purpose built belted design. Its speed control means it can and does do 300Km/s back though the inner planets and speeds in the mid 200s out to system edge.
Once back at Nauvis, it can process that 12.5k promethium in around 2 minutes before it is off and back out again. The egg are pulled from spawners on demand managed by a load of circuits to do so so they are always fresh. The onboard promethium science has a load of circuit to make sure no biter eggs ever get trapped. (Occasionally one does, despite there being no shortfall in science to account for it - dup? bug?).

That is your 'cheese'. Not a quick hack, but alot of time spent on circuits and a fast ship because before I knew better, I wanted to de-risk the eggs. Now it doesnt matter as I know it carry 1000s of eggs, collect the promethium and process them quick enough in your assumed 'intended' way.

My next ship will do the same, just be 100% legendary so faster and hopefully much smaller but more belt storage too (it can store vast number of eggs too). My fastest ship can manage just over 500km/s all the way out to Aquilo but lack my speed control system to go beyond that. So that's my baseline. Something that can manage say 200km/s+ while collecting promethium would be interesting, but not sure if possible. That is the challenge for me - not collecting promethium nor making science out of it or even the eggs and that isnt really a challenge either, but doing it with a ship that is as destructive as possible and therefore as fast as possible out there is the interesting bit. I need to run some test on asteroid collection rates to see if it can make 2000 railgun round a minute and 8000+ rockets a minute and likely 12000+ gatling ammo a minute. My current vessel is only around 1/4 of that and when it gets unlucky dense cluster of asteroid spawns, then it may suffer some minor damage that it can immediately recover from automatically and continue after some time to fix it. But IU nbot8ice that it is only because of its restricted firing setup to limit ammo use to roughly what it can produce so it never runs out. If in doubt - more guns and more ammo

I know, you have seen the light so this is kind of rubbing it in (apologies), but that doesnt strike me as exactly 'cheesy'. It wasnt a lame quick hack and nor is that true of many other people ship designs that use belt storage. Cheesy is using someone else blueprint for an entire structure and not solving the problems yourself nor making choices yourself.

As someone else pointed you, people can spawn creative chest in and do science that way. It wont be permitted on my server, but otherwise it has zero impact upon me so I don't care what they do in their own games. And that TBH is part of what I really like about this game. Multiple ways of achieving your personal aims in a play though, and complete freedom to play a challenge game at one extreme to a designers/semi-creative game at another. So long as each enjoys it, that in the end is what matters.

[BraveCaperCat]

Well, I can tell you now that since the creation of this thread, my mind has in fact been changed.
Believe it or not, this whole thing actually stemmed from a misunderstanding . My misunderstanding, of the fundamental mechanics of factorio space travel.

You see, this whole argument was constructed upon one assumption: That bigger platforms moved slower. Until recently, I had been completely convinced that the top speed of a space platform was dependant on its weight. Or rather, the ratio of thrusters to the platform’s surface area. But this is in fact not the case. The top speed is primarily determined by the ratio of thrusters to width, instead. So, in order to achieve maximum speed, all you need to do is completely cover your platform’s backside with thrusters… So long as that condition is met, the width and height of the platform will only have a minimal effect on its top speed.

If Factorio had realistic space travel, speed should depend only on acceleration, which in turn should be determined by force and mass. However, this is not the case (see Air resistance... in space? for more info) as the this is the actual equation used:

Code: Select all

space_platform_acceleration_expression = "(thrust / (1 + weight / 10000000) - ((1500 * speed * speed + 1500 * abs(speed)) * (width * 0.5) + 10000) * sign(speed)) / weight / 60"

Which should be simply "thrust / weight" to implement newton's laws of motion. Instead, a drag effect is introduced (along with a bunch of unit conversions and other constants) slowing down space platforms and giving them a "top speed". I myself have tried using newton's laws of motion here before and it didn't turn out that well...

My space platform was destroyed by asteroids.

Destroyed-icon.png (935 Bytes) Viewed 851 times

...Which may be the reasoning behind the equation.