Early game annoyances

[Tertius]

In preparation for 2.0, I started a fresh new 1.1 vanilla map, and I'd like to mention what I still find annoying and not fun while leveling through the first 3 technologies:

• manually clearing wood [I remember it was a chore, but not that it was SO tedious. How about a chainsaw with a 3-4 tile radius?]
• manual placing for every single item on a blueprint. [suggestion: walking over the blueprint or hovering the mouse over blue blueprint places items, if in inventory]
• manually placing items over a blueprint ignores rotation settings from the blueprint. Required to use the pipette tool for every single item or rotate the item manually until it matches the blueprint.
• clearing nests to secure the area (if done proactively to avoid attacks, most tedious, annoying, time wasting and non fun thing ever. I'm just not completely deactivating enemies because of the huge amount of tech that has no purpose without enemies)
• combat in general (I guess you're supposed to use different weapons to be efficient, but I'm not getting used to this. Aiming is terrible. Properly do placing items/throwing items/targeting/aiming/shooting during combat is impossible (thrown/targeted stuff gets everywhere, especially killing myself, but not hit the enemy. I'm incapable to use the combat options properly, for example properly getting items from the quickbar into my hand during combat). I end up using just the submachine gun in this early game stage, no matter how often I have to load a save because I died. Especially the ammo gets empty in the most crucial point, so I'm just using one type of ammo and carry loads of it. Ammo supply is by the way another reason why I totally don't like the PLD nerf in 2.0, although I'm not yet at modular armor, that's the next tech)
• car and tank difficult to drive (forward is not forward, if not driving north)
• car bumping into everything and taking damage and damaging the factory (how about guardrails and not taking damage if bumping into guardrails, like not taking damage with bumping into cliffs or shores?)
• putting a blueprint over assembling machines without recipe isn't applying the recipe from the blueprint [annoying if a mall blueprint is used and the recipes are unlocked over time]
• not being able to do anything while the game is paused. I would like to pause, then have all the time to inspect the statistics or whatever dialogs, or investigate the area in map view, as it is possible in map editor mode and ticks halted
• the more widescreen the monitor the less is visible, because zoom is adjusted to the horizontal resolution. Ultra widescreen zooms that much in that if you're running north or south, you'll running into the biter aggro and pull them without even seeing the biters and their nests, because they're still offscreen.
• being carried away by belts and having to have a belt immunity equipment to counter this. WTF? It's annoying to be carried away, and it's annoying to spend precious equipment grid space and grid power for nothing.

I understand these are no bugs but just how it is, but at least for me it's the least enjoyable stuff in Factorio. It would be nice if one or the other thing gets reconsidered in 2.0.

[DarkShadow44]

manually clearing wood [I remember it was a chore, but not that it was SO tedious. How about a chainsaw with a 3-4 tile radius?]

Should be okay with grenades, they are not too hard to get, and in the beginning you should have enough open space.

manual placing for every single item on a blueprint. [suggestion: walking over the blueprint or hovering the mouse over blue blueprint places items, if in inventory]

Don't really have a solution for this, I personally like the Nanobots mod.

manually placing items over a blueprint ignores rotation settings from the blueprint. Required to use the pipette tool for every single item or rotate the item manually until it matches the blueprint.

Agreed. Although sometimes you might want to place a belt in a different direction than it is placed, that might be annoying too...
In a similar vein, that you can build other buildings on different ghosts, although there is the There is My Ghost mod for that.

clearing nests to secure the area (if done proactively to avoid attacks, most tedious, annoying, time wasting and non fun thing ever. I'm just not completely deactivating enemies because of the huge amount of tech that has no purpose without enemies)

I kinda liked the differened "phases" you have. First by foot, then with car, then a tank, then with combat bots. Although I agree it can get tedious, maybe try the railworld preset to have enemies not expand?

combat in general (I guess you're supposed to use different weapons to be efficient, but I'm not getting used to this. Aiming is terrible. Properly do placing items/throwing items/targeting/aiming/shooting during combat is impossible (thrown/targeted stuff gets everywhere, especially killing myself, but not hit the enemy. I'm incapable to use the combat options properly, for example properly getting items from the quickbar into my hand during combat). I end up using just the submachine gun in this early game stage, no matter how often I have to load a save because I died. Especially the ammo gets empty in the most crucial point, so I'm just using one type of ammo and carry loads of it. Ammo supply is by the way another reason why I totally don't like the PLD nerf in 2.0, although I'm not yet at modular armor, that's the next tech)

Partially a agree, I would like if you can throw stuff outside your max radius, just throw it in the right direction... Aiming should be simple though, since it is auto aim?

car and tank difficult to drive (forward is not forward, if not driving north)

Not sure what you mean, W always moves the tank forward?

car bumping into everything and taking damage and damaging the factory (how about guardrails and not taking damage if bumping into guardrails, like not taking damage with bumping into cliffs or shores?)

That's why I never drive in my factory.

putting a blueprint over assembling machines without recipe isn't applying the recipe from the blueprint [annoying if a mall blueprint is used and the recipes are unlocked over time

That does work though?

not being able to do anything while the game is paused. I would like to pause, then have all the time to inspect the statistics or whatever dialogs, or investigate the area in map view, as it is possible in map editor mode and ticks halted

Might be useful, I never used it myself. I guess the intention is that you can only pause for other people, not to get a time advantage in game?

the more widescreen the monitor the less is visible, because zoom is adjusted to the horizontal resolution. Ultra widescreen zooms that much in that if you're running north or south, you'll running into the biter aggro and pull them without even seeing the biters and their nests, because they're still offscreen.

Can't say anything about that due to having only normal 4k monitors.

[mmmPI]

[*]manually clearing wood [I remember it was a chore, but not that it was SO tedious. How about a chainsaw with a 3-4 tile radius?]

I think the answer will be : you have options to preview map and pick a desert, or remove trees in settings, or just look for a place without trees before building if you don't want to change from default settings. Yes cleaning trees is annoying, i use grenades when i can't pick my seed.

[*]manual placing for every single item on a blueprint. [suggestion: walking over the blueprint or hovering the mouse over blue blueprint places items, if in inventory]

I think this is somewhat self-inflicted. Yes it's annoying, but you don't HAVE to use blueprints before construction robots are availables. Or you can make them minimalistic before you get the beelined robots to try and mitigate. I think it's part of the game design trick that makes factorio addictive, in a way it has a role in the sunk cost fallacy or something. This and trees, both are the kind of thing that may gives the feeling of progression when seeing the means to do task change over the course of the game after some effort were invested. You may be a player that is not very attracted to those , but it may be a part of the game experience for other player willing to "beat a challenge", like some little steps that makes you feel you climbed something.

I have used nanobots as a form of pre-robots, and i don't mind starting with personnal robots in a janky armor as a way to quickstart my games though. But i think it suits better mods, as it aims at tailoring a playthrough toward personnal preferences.

[*]manually placing items over a blueprint ignores rotation settings from the blueprint. Required to use the pipette tool for every single item or rotate the item manually until it matches the blueprint.

Part of the reasons i try to avoid manually placing things over blueprint, is a real pain.

[*]clearing nests to secure the area (if done proactively to avoid attacks, most tedious, annoying, time wasting and non fun thing ever. I'm just not completely deactivating enemies because of the huge amount of tech that has no purpose without enemies)

yes it's much more fun to pollute a lot and let them come =) I only do this because i hate seeing all the attack notifications. I like to put radars to reveal the map beforehand so i can plan chokepoints to defend and appreciate the strategic aspect of choosing which ressources patches to add or not, how "greedy" can be the expand. But if the combat is "too easy" and sound like " do that circular motion shooting rocket for the next 4 hours" and then "build wall". It's annoying. I found going to expand with different tech/weapons and by incremental steps helps mitigate the feeling of tedious, instead it feels like testing new weapons all the time to me.

[*]combat in general (I guess you're supposed to use different weapons to be efficient, but I'm not getting used to this. Aiming is terrible. Properly do placing items/throwing items/targeting/aiming/shooting during combat is impossible (thrown/targeted stuff gets everywhere, especially killing myself, but not hit the enemy. I'm incapable to use the combat options properly, for example properly getting items from the quickbar into my hand during combat). I end up using just the submachine gun in this early game stage, no matter how often I have to load a save because I died. Especially the ammo gets empty in the most crucial point, so I'm just using one type of ammo and carry loads of it. Ammo supply is by the way another reason why I totally don't like the PLD nerf in 2.0, although I'm not yet at modular armor, that's the next tech)

if you research "physical weapon damage" as the most important tech, everytime you can all the way you can, and second option when the first is not available due to missing tech, the "physical weapon shooting speed", using only red ammo and submachine gun can go a long way. You can add defender capsules, spawn a few before combat, start to retreat when you hear the characteristic noise of them disappearing. If you only keep those in hand you don't need to swap hotkey or aim and they don't have friendly fire like grenades of explosives rockets. If you have them in hand the number of them remaning in your the current stack is shown next to the cursor supposedly the only place where you look, before you would run out of those robots before red ammos, or at least their time would run out, and it creates many pauses when you can monitor if you can go for the next base or if you have to resupply. You won't get behemoth this way, you'd uranium ammo, and it'd be annoying still, but you can go all the way to modular armor depending the pacing.

I know it may not help at all x) I can only share what i think is the strongest or easiest

[*]car and tank difficult to drive (forward is not forward, if not driving north)

Yes x)

[*]car bumping into everything and taking damage and damaging the factory (how about guardrails and not taking damage if bumping into guardrails, like not taking damage with bumping into cliffs or shores?)

I think this is self inflicted, the damage of the car is useful to get through trees or biters. It could be totally absent when bumping into your own stuff, but then people would just do that all the time and do not try to "drive" the car, I don't try to brake when i see water for example, i imagine it would be the same with guardrails.

[*]putting a blueprint over assembling machines without recipe isn't applying the recipe from the blueprint [annoying if a mall blueprint is used and the recipes are unlocked over time]

This should be fixed with the super force building https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-383

[*]not being able to do anything while the game is paused. I would like to pause, then have all the time to inspect the statistics or whatever dialogs, or investigate the area in map view, as it is possible in map editor mode and ticks halted

This i wanted a lot for long time, and gradually made my plastyle so that i could have all the time to do those things without pausing, by lowering pollution and SPM and making sure i have ways to see things coming, like buffer getting lower indicating a need for ressources outpost or buffer of ammo getting lower indicating a need for research upgrades.

Still difficult sometimes, and i would use such pause feature if it was in the game.

[*]being carried away by belts and having to have a belt immunity equipment to counter this. WTF? It's annoying to be carried away, and it's annoying to spend precious equipment grid space and grid power for nothing.
[/list]

But isn't it super fun to run in the same direction of the belt like you're surfing on it ? , and it helps you go back and forth your main bus faster if you want to. It's just a battery that is removed and replaced by the immunity equipment and a solar pannel. Okay okay it could be a toggle option after the research or even at game start depending on player preferences.

[Panzerknacker]

Sounds like this is not the game for you..

[vanatteveldt]

Sounds like this is not the game for you..

I disagree. I agree with their first points (clearing wood and placing blueprints), and the solution is to use one of the mods (or console commands) to gift yourself construction bots at start (power armor, power source, portable roboport and 20 conbots). This doesn't really change the balance of the early game except for the better armor, but removes a lot of the tedium.

[NineNine]

2.0 has already been written and is being released in a few weeks. I don't think that your gripe list will have any effect on it.

Also, if you'd like to make some actual game suggestions, there's a section of the forum called "Ideas and Suggestions" (viewforum.php?f=6).

Most of your list of gripes are due to how you choose to play the game, by the way, as others have already pointed out.

In preparation for 2.0, I started a fresh new 1.1 vanilla map, and I'd like to mention what I still find annoying and not fun while leveling through the first 3 technologies:

• manually clearing wood [I remember it was a chore, but not that it was SO tedious. How about a chainsaw with a 3-4 tile radius?]
• manual placing for every single item on a blueprint. [suggestion: walking over the blueprint or hovering the mouse over blue blueprint places items, if in inventory]
  ....
  I understand these are no bugs but just how it is, but at least for me it's the least enjoyable stuff in Factorio. It would be nice if one or the other thing gets reconsidered in 2.0.

[Tertius]

I know the topic of this thread is a bit late to be relevant for the 2.0 update, however it didn't came up for me until now. So it's either now or never. It's all totally subjective, totally my own perspective, and some things can be changed with mods. May be other players have additional things they consider as annoyance. What are yours? I cannot believe you don't see any annoyances. No game is perfect. I posted here and not as suggestion, because these kind of threads are usually not very constructive but just list problems and hardly any suggestions for improvement.

An annoyance is not really bad, it's just something that takes a little bit of fun out of some parts of an otherwise excellent game.

[astroshak]

The tank and car are not that hard to drive. Tank is somewhat easier as it has a lower top speed; but that is balanced by it having worse brakes than the space shuttle at the end of the movie Armageddon.

[Koub]

The majority of your (@OP) points really appear when restarting new maps. I remember realising most of your annoyances gradually as the maps succeeded to maps.
Also, to be fair, I have been playing since 0.9, and a couple annoyances came after (the construction robotics used to be green science back then and it was soooooooo convenient to be able to rely on bots and blueprints for the blue science resource scaling). The only single change I regret is the construction bots having been pushed back into blue science. I really miss earlier construction robotics (and really loved the way Deadlock took care of the subject in IR3, with steam powered clockwork bots).

As for the driving, my own perception is : as long as I don't have to be precise in what trajectory I'm trying to follow, it's OK-ish. As soon as I have to slalom to avoid stuff, it's a nightmare. I also wish there was a cardinal direction snapping feature when I have to build a long segment of [pick any from belts, pipes, rails, power lines] manually : doing it from the car would feel less painful than on foot.

[Nidan]

• car and tank difficult to drive (forward is not forward, if not driving north)

Controls being relative to the vehicles orientation feels pretty natural to me, with two related reasons coming to mind: 2D top down racing games and playing with RC cars irl both use this control scheme.
What trips me up is driving the tank backwards, since pressing right and back results in driving a clockwise circle to the tanks left, rather than an anticlockwise circle to the right like with the car. (Looks like factorio handles turning tanks by slowly driving the threads in opposite directions, on top of any other concurrent movement. I could probably handle controlling each thread individually but that doesn't map nicely to WASD.)

[CheeseMcBurger]

> combat in general

I have the same opinion. Everything besides the automatic rifle is just boring or uncomfortable to use. After six years of Factorio I used combat robots for the very first time three days ago and I think I will never go back. These things are so much fun and make clearing out nests super easy. Have you tried them?

[CheeseMcBurger]

> What trips me up is driving the tank backwards

Man, I hate this! I understand why the tank does it and also have an idea why the devs implemented it that way. But dayum does it suck!

[Tertius]

I forgot these annoyances:

• open GUI screens autoclose if you open another one, so if you just want to inspect something in another machine but intend to mainly stay in some GUI, it's constantly opening the same GUIs.
• re-opened GUI screens forget their previous display, and always open in the screen center so you need to move any window out of the center again and click again to restore the display state [this in combination with the above drives me crazy!]