Some game features are abstracted a bit too much

[just_dont]

None of these things can be easily changed, so it's more like the list of things to consider and lean towards later in the development (or not). Changing any of them is most probably quite a big (re)balancing task. Also, all of them goes with my personal "vision" of the game being a game about making grand complex designs out of simple things. Sort of "Incredible Machines meets a sandbox survival game (meets TTD meets... okay, I'll stop now)". This may or may not correspond to devs' own vision.

1. Pollution.

It doesn't work all too well at the moment. There is simple reason for it: a player could very easily check if pollution affects anything or not, and adjust accordingly and almost instantly. At the moment, nothing presses the player to go "I still must run all these pollution-producing buildings, because...". Currently, there's no "because", aside from "I'm not caring about those biters any more". Which usually happens with the laser tower research, i.e. not too far ahead, especially if you aim for that tech. Playing maps for a time record could provide an incentive, but I feel like it'll be far too weak, or even worse -- it could turn out that playing "safe but slow" is really the fastest way to victory in biters-heavy maps.
In the end, I think like this entire system should be reworked or changed completely to something else. I can imagine two possible types of such systems:
a) "The more you spent (build/mine/etc), the more resources you have to diverge for defense". Current pollution strives to be such a system, but it fails because it's easily avoidable and abusable. An ideal system should work no matter what player do, and of course it shouldn't allow him to do instant "optimizations" for the sake of avoiding the system entirely.
b) Race against time. No matter what you do, there will be attacks and biters will evolve, so you'll have to be prepared. Relatively simple to implement (compared to option a), but could be detrimental to, say, playing for a time record (if the system already punishes you enough for being too slow, there may be already no time to lose), and the sandbox-y playstyle (it's not really a sandbox if you have to hurry to hit some invisible but mandatory goals set before you).

2. Construction.

For a game where building lots of small things automatically takes a considerable part of gameplay, the player himself can build WAY too much small things non-automatically, at a mere click of a button. This cheapens early gameplay quite a bit (an early assembly line wouldn't even get you any profit compared to if you just build things by hand), and is generally detrimental to the whole "make things build things" design idea. Not to mention it's the main reason why the player can easily avoid early pollution penalties (see #1).
Ideally, manual production should only be suitable for early-game stage and/or to build rare items in very small quantities (like guns). A rather simple way to do it is to disallow "AFK" construction and make it so the player must spend his active time to build things (i.e. much like mining ores by hand), probably even through a special placed entity (i.e. "workplace"). This already will provide a rather strong incentive to make assembly lines, but more measures can be implemented as well (read #4 on that).

However, nerfing the manual construction shouldn't come without lots of tech tree rebalancing, as currently some things could be quite frustrating to get to without manual intervention.

3. Building.

It's not terribly fun to have a magical dimension hole to an arbitrary-sized warehouse building inside your pocket. The ability to get trains, diesels, steam engines, oil refineries out of your pocket makes quite a sizeable contribution to the "player can do WAY too much just by hand" problem. Any sort of large-scale construction shouldn't go though player's pocket at all.
A "Settlers-like" approach is probably the way to go here: instead of making a building inside your pocket, you make a construction site in the world, then you bring resources to it, then you spend some time building (or order that to your construction bot), and a building appears. When you dismantle it -- you'll spend some time (a way more time that you currently do), and you'll get resources back. But not the building itself.

Some buildings should be constructed and dismantled pretty easily depending on balancing needs (i.e. assembly machines), others -- not so much (labs, refineries, etc). And trains should be built in train depots, not in the pocket. And cars -- in garages. And so on.

Obviously, this one can't be done without extending some of game's aspects first (i.e. a garage just for building a single type of a car is a huge overkill; on the other hand constructing several dozens of assembly machines could become tedious).

4. Player's Inventory.

Getting buildings out of player's pocket would be nice, but there's still a matter of player putting several train wagons worth of ore in a pocket, then running merrily across the landscape while singing songs and shooting biters.
Introducing a concept of "weight" to the items could put an end to such behavior, all while providing the same inventory space for "lighter" stuff, such as ammo and other small things. Encumbrance could simply slow the player's speed (severely), and it could be quite a deterrent to hauling things by yourself.

However, this would require a suitable alternative for transporting things during early game. A player could be provided with some sort of a (small) transport right from the start. However, the entire concept of vehicles' collision should be reworked before that (currently, driving a car through your factory is not the way to transport items, but a potential for a huge disaster ending in loss of your car and some parts of the factory).

[ssilk]

This is a very good analysis! It makes me happy to read it, cause it brings in some aspects, which I thought long about.

Some words about it:

#1:
the total control of pollution is needed for two reasons: 1) to find a way to live with them 2) to have a chance, when you are in a situation where you are surrounded and need some time.

I think you're right saying that there is no good game, because there is no "because". But your solutions don't take care of the above two cases. Especially suggestion a) is not useable like so.

My suggestion would be, to add a "progression-element", something which calculates the current progression depending on some counters and research level and owned resourced and some more (length of power network for example). There are already some suggestion about such a system, and the DyTech-mod has some elements included. The calculation needs to be transparent, it is just part of the game physics.

I think your suggestion b) has a much better usage and gives more possibilities than a).

#2 and #3:
I see this as one point. I think crafting (construction means a bit different things) and building is not too much difference.

Crafting is currently needed, cause you are sometimes in situations, where nothing else is possible. You need to be always able to "restart from zero". Or when you work far outside of your factory. And it speeds also some game things much up, so I'm not a fan of doing more by hand and the "workplace" concept is already introduced with the logistic area (but I think you mean much earlier). So I'm not so happy with that suggestion.

But I really, really like the suggestion for building like in "Settler". There is a graphical problem, how to show half built stuff. I mean there are many technical reasons why it is not done so, but I don't see why not. We need to find a way, how the crafting could be automated after placing, because it is a no go for me to wait, until it set up. Perhaps a construction drone?

#4:
What I think about yet is some king if "hand cart", which the player can pull to any place. Like a chest with wheels. But I don't think, that weight is really needed. The inventory is very unrealistic, right, yes, but also very practical and speeds things up.

[Drury]

I agree with ssilk mostly. The current way the pollution works allows you to keep it at bay if you can make the effort (i.e. not cutting down trees, building huge solar and battery farms instead of coal power plants), some people like to play this way.

I like the idea of progression-based evolution. I think it would work well with certain high-end technologies that would allow "peaceful" gameplays, i.e. mind control devices/"dog whistles" like in Titanfall (huge towers that repel alien wildlife), later devolvers that would devolve big biters back into small ones, to tiny harmless ants (very high up on the tech tree). The player would have to choose between researching these "peaceful" technologies or going full militaristic - perhaps with RTS elements as endgame alternative, where you'd have to pick between sparing the critters or annihilating them with tanks. Seeing as military technology is available right off the start, you could perhaps also make the decision around the beginning of the game, with some cheap lab pollution filter that would slow down the progression-based evolution or something of the sorts.

About crafting, I like the way it works currently - if you have only the basic resources in your inventory like plates and copper plates, it will take you forever to make stuff like solar panels. You simply have to manufacture those cables, circuit boards and solar panels in assemblies. At the same time I can produce basic stuff like electric poles myself whenever I need. I think they did a good enough job balancing this.

About building: One thing I like about building factories in Factorio is that you can build anything instantly, much like in TTD. You can instantly demolish something and build it somewhere else. It makes planning so much easier, you don't have to imagine everything in your head and you can improvise to make interesting layouts. You can instantly see if something works or if it does not. It spares you a lot of time not doing anything but waiting for stuff to build (in fact, building is what I do while I wait for stuff to research, I can't imagine what I'd do if I also had to wait for the stuff itself to build on top of that). And construction robots are already in, they build stuff exactly the way you described it. About cars and trains though, fair enough. I believe depots are already planned. This will also be a necessity with RTS elements, it's already been said that walking up to an enemy base and throwing out a bunch of tanks out of your pocket Pokémon-style would be kinda weird.

pls no inventory weight. pls. kills any game for me. pls.

[just_dont]

1. I get your points. Progression-based evolution is a good idea, and it probably should come together with the "emergency response" system, so that the player won't simply faceroll biters (at least not for long) at any point of tech development. However, my biggest gripe with the current pollution is that there's quite a large gap between "a state of response" (i.e. biters attacking and evolving) and "a state of peace" (no one's attacking for whatever reason). The former requires you to spend QUITE a large amount of items to set up some proper defenses, while the latter allows you to entirely avoid all that. And because pollution info is freely available to the player -- it's very easy to balance around the "state of peace" up until the point you have enough tech to just faceroll all attackers.

Juggling around pollution system shouldn't be possible at all. Surely, the player should be able to set up some very "green" complexes, which would provide a pretty weak response (a single lowest-level biter once in a long while?), but there ALWAYS should be a response for any kind of pollution from nearby nests; and the only way to avoid attacks would be "clear all nests from the surrounding area" approach (and biters should try and colonize back in that case). This way, the aforementioned gap would be bridged.

I.e. if one would be rebalancing the exisiting system:
a) The pollution should spread MUCH more;
b) The nest should be able to launch "weak" attacks if there are low levels of pollution (at the moment, attacks from a single nest is too binary: just "attack" or "don't attack" with little difference, if any, in between);
c) The pollution should have much more "weight" (i.e. it should linger around much longer even after the polluting factor is removed).

On 2-3-4, I'd like to point out that I'm too very much against making factory management more tedious, and that's why I said in advance that all these suggestions are pretty grand and shouldn't come into the current version of the game. At the moment, implementing any of these will add lots of tediousness, and the net result of positive/negative effect would be pretty small (if even positive).
Until we have better GUIs, better item/unit management in general, and the game's features that are mostly finalized, these shouldn't be attempted.

[just_dont]

About crafting, I like the way it works currently - if you have only the basic resources in your inventory like plates and copper plates, it will take you forever to make stuff like solar panels. You simply have to manufacture those cables, circuit boards and solar panels in assemblies. At the same time I can produce basic stuff like electric poles myself whenever I need. I think they did a good enough job balancing this.

I want to specifically address this -- it DOES seem like we're playing different games
At the moment, unless you want dozens and/or hundreds of a certain "slow" item, it is very viable to just build it by hand. If at one moment you just say "oh, I need 50 more solar panels right now" -- then indeed, it'll take you pretty long to sit around and build them. However, if you recognize that you'd require some solar panels in advance, and built them in small quantities any time your queue is empty -- you'll end up with lots of panels; up until that time where you expand so much that it'll be prudent to set up a dedicated assembly line (and it'll be pretty late in game).

Even with items supposedly "balanced" against by-hand construction, like potions -- you can "cheapen" you way out pretty much just by setting up a single assembly machine for the last stage of construction (which takes a lot of time), then build gears/belts/inserters by hand and feed them into assembly machine. And it'll be pretty fast to get you through even 100 reds/100 greens techs with little wait time.

[kovarex]

Hello, you have some good points there, I'm glad that you are taking the game seriously enough to point these

1. Pollution.

It doesn't work all too well at the moment. There is simple reason for it: a player could very easily check if pollution affects anything or not, and adjust accordingly and almost instantly. At the moment, nothing presses the player to go "I still must run all these pollution-producing buildings, because...". Currently, there's no "because", aside from "I'm not caring about those biters any more". Which usually happens with the laser tower research, i.e. not too far ahead, especially if you aim for that tech. Playing maps for a time record could provide an incentive, but I feel like it'll be far too weak, or even worse -- it could turn out that playing "safe but slow" is really the fastest way to victory in biters-heavy maps.
In the end, I think like this entire system should be reworked or changed completely to something else. I can imagine two possible types of such systems:
a) "The more you spent (build/mine/etc), the more resources you have to diverge for defense". Current pollution strives to be such a system, but it fails because it's easily avoidable and abusable. An ideal system should work no matter what player do, and of course it shouldn't allow him to do instant "optimizations" for the sake of avoiding the system entirely.
b) Race against time. No matter what you do, there will be attacks and biters will evolve, so you'll have to be prepared. Relatively simple to implement (compared to option a), but could be detrimental to, say, playing for a time record (if the system already punishes you enough for being too slow, there may be already no time to lose), and the sandbox-y playstyle (it's not really a sandbox if you have to hurry to hit some invisible but mandatory goals set before you).

I totally agree with you. The strategy to close/slow down production to avoid biter attacks is too cheap to be applicable.
The a) seems to be too abstract, but b) might be viable, but in that case we definitely need to have configurable difficulty and enemy aggressivity in the configuration of the game when you are starting it. Most people like me would prefer it to have more challenging, where the strategy to produce less is just not enough at all. On the other hand, some people are totally content with low or none aggressivity of biters and want just play around with the machines and automation as you play with lego.
I also agree, that seeing the pollution on map is probably too powerful, maybe the pollution could be visible only on chunks that are "light"= "visible by radars or player", because now when I have discovered bigger surroundings by radars, I can see where exactly the pollution reached the enemy.

2. Construction.

For a game where building lots of small things automatically takes a considerable part of gameplay, the player himself can build WAY too much small things non-automatically, at a mere click of a button. This cheapens early gameplay quite a bit (an early assembly line wouldn't even get you any profit compared to if you just build things by hand), and is generally detrimental to the whole "make things build things" design idea. Not to mention it's the main reason why the player can easily avoid early pollution penalties (see #1).
Ideally, manual production should only be suitable for early-game stage and/or to build rare items in very small quantities (like guns). A rather simple way to do it is to disallow "AFK" construction and make it so the player must spend his active time to build things (i.e. much like mining ores by hand), probably even through a special placed entity (i.e. "workplace"). This already will provide a rather strong incentive to make assembly lines, but more measures can be implemented as well (read #4 on that).

However, nerfing the manual construction shouldn't come without lots of tech tree rebalancing, as currently some things could be quite frustrating to get to without manual intervention.

It is obvious that there is some balancing to be done, but we need to be really careful with that. The motivation to automation must be obvious, but having to build automation for every single little thing you need would be too annoying, mainly in the start.
I believe that the approach that we have now, that when you are just starting, you can build few inserters, transport belts, poles etc. in hand without big trouble, but once you start building in bigger scale, it becomes progressivly more and more viable to automate most of the stuff, so you don't have to wait for the crafting all the time is good.
Don't forget, that there are thing already that can't be done manually, like anything done from fluids and also the engine has to be done in assembling machine.
P.S. I believe that for example, it is bad now, that solar panels/accumulators are built too fast.

3. Building.
It's not terribly fun to have a magical dimension hole to an arbitrary-sized warehouse building inside your pocket. The ability to get trains, diesels, steam engines, oil refineries out of your pocket makes quite a sizeable contribution to the "player can do WAY too much just by hand" problem. Any sort of large-scale construction shouldn't go though player's pocket at all.
A "Settlers-like" approach is probably the way to go here: instead of making a building inside your pocket, you make a construction site in the world, then you bring resources to it, then you spend some time building (or order that to your construction bot), and a building appears. When you dismantle it -- you'll spend some time (a way more time that you currently do), and you'll get resources back. But not the building itself.

Some buildings should be constructed and dismantled pretty easily depending on balancing needs (i.e. assembly machines), others -- not so much (labs, refineries, etc). And trains should be built in train depots, not in the pocket. And cars -- in garages. And so on.

Obviously, this one can't be done without extending some of game's aspects first (i.e. a garage just for building a single type of a car is a huge overkill; on the other hand constructing several dozens of assembly machines could become tedious).

We are quite sure, that when realism contradicts gameplay, the gameplay has to win. It is important that the player spends most of the time doing fun activity. Waiting for something to be deconstructed, or constructing something for a long time is not fun. I was thinking why don't you have to wait when you process 64 wood to planks in minecraft. The answer is simple, it would be boring to just wait for it to be done and spend your time doing something more fun, like building a house.
The other argument I feel that is important, that you build something and you have the instant feedback that it works which is important.

That doesn't mean that I reject these points completely. I agree, that making trains in depots and cars/tanks (in the future) in garages. I also believe that some bigger/monumental buildings could be constructed in more complicated manner.

4. Player's Inventory.
Getting buildings out of player's pocket would be nice, but there's still a matter of player putting several train wagons worth of ore in a pocket, then running merrily across the landscape while singing songs and shooting biters.
Introducing a concept of "weight" to the items could put an end to such behavior, all while providing the same inventory space for "lighter" stuff, such as ammo and other small things. Encumbrance could simply slow the player's speed (severely), and it could be quite a deterrent to hauling things by yourself.

However, this would require a suitable alternative for transporting things during early game. A player could be provided with some sort of a (small) transport right from the start. However, the entire concept of vehicles' collision should be reworked before that (currently, driving a car through your factory is not the way to transport items, but a potential for a huge disaster ending in loss of your car and some parts of the factory).

This is another point where gameplay meets realism and as inventory management is so big fun for me it is quite clear. The true point of the game is the building and designing factories, the more time you spent with that and the less time you spent with some other potentially boring things (like running to get more inserters for example) the better.

Ofcourse, I agree, that this is important until it can hurt the balance or gameplay in some matter. For example, if the possibility transporting 10000 iron plates manually demotivates the player to build logistics, that is something that should be solved.
If the player can abuse the inventory by building lot of turrets manually in front of enemy base, it is similar problem.

[ssilk]

I could add much, but only want to say two things:
- with the Settler type of building I thought a bit and I still really like it, but some differently:

I think of an advanced roboport (needs to be researched) and inside this port-area the construction bots can craft like in The Settlers: they bring raw material as needed to a ghost building and craft it together (like the player can do), until the entity is ready. This would enable some neat stuff, when building outposts!! (cause currently it is a real problem to bring all those different types of items there)

I really would like that, cause that would give the game a real new drive in the later game.

- I mean - sorry If I'm wrong - that you (just_dont) haven't played a lot with different kinds of map settings. Try with very poor or very rich settings, near and far distance of patches... It is a completely different game! Factorio should work with nearly all types of maps (my opinion!) in the end and this means a lot of fine tuning, as Kovarex said.

[just_dont]

A developer answered my post! *instant panic*

On a serious note, though:
1. Indeed, having difficulties as a balancing factor in "challenge vs. relaxation" gameplay (and in freeplay in general) would be nice and much better than the current boolean "peaceful mode" flag. And natives' response should be adjusted accordingly.

About a) and b) systems. Actually, current pollution is already an "a)" system, it's just one less level of abstraction from my description (instead of "produce more, get punished more" it goes with "have more polluters (which allow you to produce more), get punished more"). So it probably could be just upgraded and/or combined with a "b)" approach to provide better and more "smooth" challenge, especially if combined with difficulty settings.

2. Yup, I think a simple rebalance of existing numbers can do lots to improve this point, even without any deep changes (and solar panels should require some chemistry-related materials, not just steel and circuits). I.e. things like belts and inserters should be produces a bit slower to give an incentive to early simple assemblies, at the moment it's not a problem at all to manually build a few hundreds of basic belt units, same with inserters.

3-4. Well, of course gameplay trumps everything else. Some unrealistic things (i.e. belts) allow for better and cleaner gameplay, and I have absolutely no problem with them. I'm viewing these points strictly from the gameplay angle -- there should be enough incentive everywhere not to do things by hand (except some biters' shooting, which is fun), and at the moment some areas are lacking that incentive. Cars are pretty useless currently, for example -- not enough benefit for the cost, plus the fact that you car can be instantly destroyed by pretty much anything more severe than a stern gaze.

[just_dont]

- I mean - sorry If I'm wrong - that you (just_dont) haven't played a lot with different kinds of map settings. Try with very poor or very rich settings, near and far distance of patches... It is a completely different game! Factorio should work with nearly all types of maps (my opinion!) in the end and this means a lot of fine tuning, as Kovarex said.

I did. And it's not very different at the moment: you can have "great" or "boring and/or appaling" start conditions, but beoynd those map settings doesn't matter much.
- Starting area settings on "small"? You're up to a slow start before you can get to Military 2, make enough steel (all by small-scale non-automated processes) and piercing ammo to clean up some closest nests, then you can just play normally.
- Water settings? Either a disaster (when you appear on an insland) or a boon (naturally fortified position). Only the "water only in the starting area" setting makes for a little bit more interesting play, where you have to move oil around in barrels.
- Mineral settings? These actually provide two states: "good" when you can tech up using starting and/or available resources (if biters are low), or "impossible" if you don't have enough starting resources and you also set biters to "high" (exploration is not an option then). Also, if biters are low, and there's not enough resources in the starting area, you're up for some boring hauling trips across the planet. But that doesn't change much in the grand scale of things, you'll get to trains eventually.
- Biters? Two states: "go and explore" (normal/regular and below) and "sit in your starting area and don't go anywhere until at least you get enough piercing ammo" (everything higher). Seriously though, it's only two states -- because when you set frequency to "high" and more, nests will prevent you from exploring without good offense options. If frequency is "normal" and below -- you can go around the planet without having to shoot things.

[ssilk]

Well, it feels like we are playing two different games. I cannot say what's different. But it is.

For example the car: this is currently one of the most useful things in the game... And you say it's useless??

@Kovarex: we need to find out, what it is. It feels like that this is very important! I mean it would be a cool idea to have the ability to upload a replay to some server...

[just_dont]

For example the car: this is currently one of the most useful things in the game... And you say it's useless??

Well, I can't imagine how you would use it. Out of my several tries, all ended in pure frustration when I just had to ditch the car to get through some forest, or I had to ditch the car because there are biters around (and running over even small biters is totally not good for car's health.

When I need to get somewhere, I just take a walk. When I need to get to some already "colonized" point, I use the train (I always build a second set of tracks specifically for travel purposes). Even the extra cost of rails is totally worth it.

[Drury]

You don't have to kill them carmageddon-style, you know, technical-style is much more effective. In that regard car is invaluable, I can't imagine killing off large biter nests any other way.

[LoSboccacc]

Actually tech up fight is another black/white depthless affair

Until you have enough exoskeleton you drop tons of distractor and spam base running in circles. Then you get fast enough to congaline aliens and decimate them with impunity and the combat shotgun. In both cases there is zero depth and strategy involved.

[just_dont]

Actually tech up fight is another black/white depthless affair

Until you have enough exoskeleton you drop tons of distractor and spam base running in circles. Then you get fast enough to congaline aliens and decimate them with impunity and the combat shotgun. In both cases there is zero depth and strategy involved.

Yup, that pretty much fits my experience as well. Or if you can afford to be patient a little bit -- there's also the turret creep. Get power lines, place laser turrets, smoke up biters. Boring, but extremely practical.

[Zequez]

3. Building.

It's not terribly fun to have a magical dimension hole to an arbitrary-sized warehouse building inside your pocket. The ability to get trains, diesels, steam engines, oil refineries out of your pocket makes quite a sizeable contribution to the "player can do WAY too much just by hand" problem. Any sort of large-scale construction shouldn't go though player's pocket at all.
A "Settlers-like" approach is probably the way to go here: instead of making a building inside your pocket, you make a construction site in the world, then you bring resources to it, then you spend some time building (or order that to your construction bot), and a building appears. When you dismantle it -- you'll spend some time (a way more time that you currently do), and you'll get resources back. But not the building itself.

Some buildings should be constructed and dismantled pretty easily depending on balancing needs (i.e. assembly machines), others -- not so much (labs, refineries, etc). And trains should be built in train depots, not in the pocket. And cars -- in garages. And so on.

Obviously, this one can't be done without extending some of game's aspects first (i.e. a garage just for building a single type of a car is a huge overkill; on the other hand constructing several dozens of assembly machines could become tedious).

4. Player's Inventory.

Getting buildings out of player's pocket would be nice, but there's still a matter of player putting several train wagons worth of ore in a pocket, then running merrily across the landscape while singing songs and shooting biters.
Introducing a concept of "weight" to the items could put an end to such behavior, all while providing the same inventory space for "lighter" stuff, such as ammo and other small things. Encumbrance could simply slow the player's speed (severely), and it could be quite a deterrent to hauling things by yourself.

However, this would require a suitable alternative for transporting things during early game. A player could be provided with some sort of a (small) transport right from the start. However, the entire concept of vehicles' collision should be reworked before that (currently, driving a car through your factory is not the way to transport items, but a potential for a huge disaster ending in loss of your car and some parts of the factory).

You got me thinking with that. And this is what I think: change the lore.

- Add deposit building. Everything in your inventory is actually on the deposit building, and some fancy robots deploy it back and forth wherever you tell them.
- Add remote factory buildings. When you create an item you actually send the queue to the remote factory building, and the robots carry the materials there, and then to the deposit.
- The robots shouldn't even be visible, you could even explain it as teleportation technology and get rid of the robots thing.

Both buildings could be just a part of an initial "settler building".

The settler building could even be the place where humans live, so if you want to build something manually the population of you settlement would actually be doing the job. Although to do it this way you would have to add food mechanics or something like that for it to be realistic. Which would be nice, because having to keep your settlement alive would be a nice challenging addition. I'm sure someone already suggested about population, so I'm not going to bore you any longer.

This way you add realism, and you keep almost the same gameplay, win-win.

[ssilk]

You got me thinking with that. And this is what I think: change the lore.

- Add deposit building. Everything in your inventory is actually on the deposit building, and some fancy robots deploy it back and forth wherever you tell them.
- Add remote factory buildings. When you create an item you actually send the queue to the remote factory building, and the robots carry the materials there, and then to the deposit.
- The robots shouldn't even be visible, you could even explain it as teleportation technology and get rid of the robots thing.

Remembers me to this: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=6&t=886

What I don't understand: why do you want to remove the bots?
And removing crafting from the player doesn't work like so.

Both buildings could be just a part of an initial "settler building".

Hm, that changes too much for me.

The settler building could even be the place where humans live, so if you want to build something manually the population of you settlement would actually be doing the job. Although to do it this way you would have to add food mechanics or something like that for it to be realistic. Which would be nice, because having to keep your settlement alive would be a nice challenging addition. I'm sure someone already suggested about population, so I'm not going to bore you any longer.

Indeed

[samitefan1]

This concept reminds me of the gameplay style of the 90's game Lego Rock Raiders. I like this idea.

Anybody else ever play that game? (Apologies in advance for the off-topicness of this comment).

[bobucles]

Pollution

I think some of the issues with biters comes from the "dynamic difficulty" of pollution. In the first third of the game you can cut your pollution in half with solar, and cut it again by 50% or more with efficiency modules. That kills the difficulty.

Some of the difficulty aspects shouldn't be dynamic. For example there might always be nests with large biters, but they're initially very rare. Literally a single high level biter will KILL players below laser or armor piercing tech. Put less armor on large biters and more armor on large nests, so players can defend at a low tier but lack the punch for an assault.

Perhaps pollution is something that should be more inherently dangerous? For example a player might stop healing or suffer personal damage in a high pollution zone. They would need a supply of respirator helmets to stay healthy. Small biters might suffer damage in heavy pollution that ends up killing them even if the player is otherwise defenseless. Small nests might shrivel up and die, making room for medium and large nests to take over. Pollution zones could hurt solar efficiency and gunk up the base in a way that construction bots would have to clean up.

Ultimately I think pollution should be something the player hates but NEEDS in some way. Right now pollution only causes BAD things to happen, so if you minimize pollution, bad things stop happening. Give pollution some good things as well. For example, maybe only high level biters and evolved nests generate artifacts? Maybe powerful nests dig up new resource deposits while being aggressive? Maybe biters drop some goop that processes into oil? A player who doesn't generate enough pollution might find their base easy to defend, but won't gain any of the late game rewards.

Defenses

Gun turrets are currently WAY too resource intensive and laser turrets don't consume resources at all. Basic ammo is so inefficient that simply supplying the guns with ammo creates enough pollution to boost biter aggression to consume that very ammo. Guns definitely need love, perhaps being given a logistic slot to request ammo, or being upgraded to use shotgun ammo instead. Shotgun ammo is 5 times as efficient on resources, making it far more useful as a regular weapon. Some of the physical weapons could be upgraded with support effects like knockback or stun. The former can push biters around, sowing chaos and exposing them to more turret fire. The latter can paralyze the most lethal enemies, preventing them from dealing damage. This would make consumable weapons potent force multipliers, making good use of their limited resources.

Artillery would be a really great consumable weapon type. Craft the shells, launch them long distance, and destroy biters at the source. Obviously this would anger the nest, and if it makes a lingering pollution cloud (war is dirty) it would anger nearby nests as well.

The planet has nothing it can throw against a wall of laser turrets. Not sure what can be done about this. Increasing the laser turret footprint might help, because 1x1 towers stack up impenetrable firepower. Spitters could have less direct damage and more AoE HP drain, which keeps their overall damage high but reduces direct destruction. Laser turrets might have more idle energy drain (5-10%), making them less viable to spam. Obviously long range and infinite ammo is really good and there's no real place for lesser weapons in its wake. Consumable weapons simply have to be VERY good to compete.

Perhaps late game biters might tunnel around defenses and attack directly inside the base? That would give concrete slabs an important defensive use. Combat drones would also be a strong addition to the logistic system as a method of internal defense.

For example the car: this is currently one of the most useful things in the game... And you say it's useless??

There is some issue with an empty car being defenseless. On crueler difficulties it's pretty easy to lose your car unless it's abandoned way behind. The SMG turret is also pitiful next to the combat shotgun and does not fight well into blue science (it also needs to automatically fire when parked). A player who turtles up on low pollution before exploding in the laser age isn't going to get much use out of a car because most of that expansion HAS to be done on foot. Cars are still useful for wandering your perimeter (AFTER blowing out the forest), but an expert player is probably focused more on building and exploiting than enjoying the scenery.

Vehicle modules would help a lot for keeping cars on the front line. Module turrets are always nice, and an ability to auto fire the tank cannon would be nice. Ultimately I think a player needs a personal aircraft/chopper to explore the land and not worry about yet another tree or river blocking their way. Who wouldn't want to be a low flying Apache with miniguns and rocket pods?

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Not that really hard to solve, but probably hard to code.

1. pollution fix: i have no idea how

2. construction? Well this one is fun idea to do, you just need some construction in progress sprite and one progress bar like if you shoot down rock slowly. You just rightclick with construction hammer something like repairing but when you're finished "under construction" sprite will change to building you want.

3. steampunk bots! Like burner inserters low tech burner bots walk around like logistic bots but on ground like biters and can construct and carry things. They could use depot station as base with range and could carry things and build buildings and eat coal.

4. i guess cheap early steampunk bots that walk around you or stay withing depot could carry things.

To limit their functionality they won't be able to work as logistics robot but only as construction ones so you won't need to skip them. Also they need fuel so there's that aaaand with fuel comes pollution.