[0.14.21] Automatic ceasefire and a few tips

[Tenemo]

I've played with friends a few times and I've grown tired of manually creating forces (easy part) and ceasing fire between each other (the worst part). With 5 people playing (assuming everyone is playing separately) it's 20 commands already to just cease fire between each force, the number getting much bigger with more people (it's n*(n-1), where n equals number of players, so it reaches tedious levels really fast). I've been googling for a bit and didn't find any simple and satisfying solution, so I decided to write a short lua script, which I believe some other people might find useful.

Features
- Automatic force creation, naming every force with player name in front and the suffix -Force, e.g. TenemoForce. If you want to change it, just change the string variable "suffix" at the beginning of the script to whatever.
- Automatic ceasefire between every single force, so no turrets will fire at any player e.g. you have force1, force2, force3, so it created ceasefires between force1 & force2, force1 & force3, force2 & force1, force2 & force3, force3 & force1 and force3 & force2.
- Assigns every player a random color.
- Notifies players of their respective force name.
- Works with any number of players.

How to use
Get everyone to join the server, open the console using ~, paste the script and press enter. If it's the first command used, do it for the second time, Factorio will block the first attempt. Works even with players offline, it's enough to join the server once.

Automatic ceasefire

/c
suffix = "Force";
for key in pairs(game.players) do
forcename = game.players[key].name .. suffix;
game.create_force(forcename);
game.players[game.players[key].name].force = game.forces[forcename];
game.players[game.players[key].name].color={g=math.random(0,255),b=math.random(0,255),r=math.random(0,255),a=1.0};
game.player.print("Added " .. game.players[key].name .. " to newly created " .. forcename .. " and assigned a random color");
game.players[game.players[key].name].print("Your force name is \"" .. game.players[game.players[key].name].force.name .."\"");
end
for key in pairs(game.players) do
for key2 in pairs(game.players) do
if key2 ~= key then
game.forces[game.players[game.players[key].name].force.name].set_cease_fire(game.players[game.players[key2].name].force.name, true);
end
end
game.player.print("Automatic ceasefire successful.");
end

Optional tips
I didn't include it above, but in my personal script I includ two more lines, they reset evolution factor to 0, so everyone gets a fair start (gathering multiple people takes a while) and sets destroy factor to 0. Destroy factor is the evolution percentage generated when destroying biter bases - in singleplayer it's reasonable, in multiplayer with many teams not really, because the first person to get a flamethrower can instakill everyone, even if by an accident, unleashing big biters upon gun turrets. Also it stacks between multiple players, which means the evolution progression is way faster. You could balance the lack of destroy factor by multiplying time factor, but I personally don't. How to use: use pastebin link or use it separately, with "/c " typed before.

evolution fix

game.evolution_factor = 0.0;
game.map_settings.enemy_evolution.destroy_factor = 0.0;

Another thing we do, to avoid custom multiplayer maps, is setting generation of enemy bases to very low frequency and very small size and water to high frequency and small size. Despite the size setting, you still get huge bases, but it actually becomes possible to travel between them on foot and spread out in the beginning of the game. Water is less important, but not having huge lakes helps a lot when traveling (as well as fixed tree hitboxes!). You still get actual lakes, but with less dead ends with water on one side and biters on the other.

Here's a pastebin link to the full script including evolution fixes and proper indentation.