Friday Facts #166 - Combat Revisit

[Klonan]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-166

[Mooncat]

Combat!

[Andrzejef]

Only one question - what do you mean by nerf "turret creeping"? Nerfing turrets at all, or making some super-hyper-logarythmic factor that decreases their efficiency depending on the number of turrets in some area?

Also I think I don't really know what "turret creeping" is in general

[kinnom]

Maybe make certain turrets or even types of ammo more effective against certain types of biters.

[HammerPiano]

Well, I voted for the "5 more minutes award" because I do need five more minutes (times 100) to finish my factory

[Mooncat]

Only one question - what do you mean by nerf "turret creeping"? Nerfing turrets at all, or making some super-hyper-logarythmic factor that decreases their efficiency depending on the number of turrets in some area?

Also I think I don't really know what "turret creeping" is in general

"turret creeping" = you don't bring guns and ammo, instead, you only bring laser turrets to destroy alien spawners.

According to FFF #160, this should be what they mean by nerfing it:

Limit turret creep as it is way too powerful now (especially with personal roboport) with a turret activation time

Nominated for the Steam reward. 5 more minutes are not enough. We need 5 more months.

BTW, Klonan, have you tried my Creative Mode? Although it doesn't focus on combat as much as your internal mod, it may be helpful for you on some perspectives.

[_aD]

No mention of offensive or defensive capsules at all? :-\ They really need to be considered, as they're a crucial element of real combat. Biters can't do much when they're so slow you can walk away slowly, all while they're being poisoned and lasered to death.

[Matthias_Wlkp]

Good FFF!

It's nice that you mentioned rockets - I find it weird that it has shorter range than Tank cannon... It could be the ultimate weapon against nests, if the range was buffed and damage was proportional to cost.

You are definitely getting a nomination from me!

[onebit]

Make the biters less of an irritant, but still a threat

In my opinion the game was better with victory poles. I've started using Robot Army because the rate of biter re-expansion is too much. Other's use Ion Cannon for this purpose. It's pointless to prune biters manually because they'll be back so soon.

There seems to be no way to establish a biter free zone. They will always re-encroach into pollution range. So unless you want to prune them every 30-60 mins you must build a turret wall. Building laser walls is expensive, power consuming, and tedious.

One idea I had was an anti-victory pole. Basically a thumper from Dune. Instead of making the expansion chance 0% it would make it 100%. Then you could lure biters into kill zones outside your base.

Some kind of artillery with a range of several screens (radar visual range?) would also be cool. I would gladly feed this thing shells.

I know with 0.15 I could play without biters. But at some level I like them. The initial clearing is a fun challenge. The constant re-encroachment is more of a chore.

[DeathMers]

Well, I voted for the "5 more minutes award" because I do need five more minutes (times 100) to finish my factory

there is no thing like finished factory

[Rhamphoryncus]

Some ideas:

• Shifting wind direction, so you mostly get attacks from one direction for a while and players can focus there
• Biter events. Rare attacks in an unusual way, be it a larger swarm, some sort of tunneler, etc
• Boss biters. Lording over a cluster of rich resources, the boss doesn't spread or respawn but you can't build close without killing it. Needs a good AI to resist cheesing.

Aside from those it feels like forests are too effective at reducing pollution. When tree density was increased in 0.13 was the pollution absorption reduced to compensate?

[stootachtig]

Biters are a nuisance because:
A) Once you've figured out the routine of attack, that's it.
B) Going out and killing detracts from basebuilding (sometimes its good, but atm its a meh experience after having it done more than 10 times because it is repetitive)
C) there's no variety in enemies

You have a grand set of weapons, but there's a clear winner because it doesn't matter what you use. You NEED the most damage, nothing else matters.
Rocket launchers could be useful, if there was a type of spawn or biter which was highly resistant to normal or fire damage. Then you would WANT these weapons. You could tie this in to the deposits in the ground for instance.

Spawns which are far away from base and are close to iron, could get an extra iron layer on top of them, making them more resistant to normal damage.
Spawns near oil are maybe highly flammable, but they produce waaaay more aggressive biters.

Expanding upon this can A) spice up combat, B) force different weapon use and C) break routine during biter hunting (I wonder what kind of base I'll meet now..)


Also, I love your game, damn it is good.

[Axios]

I play factorio since 2 weeks only so I cannot express an opinion about the actual combat, but please, mantain weapons variety.

Tweak them, add other weapons, but leave the combat an important part of the game.

I used the rocket launcer in the New Hope campaign and I feel that it was not too powerful compared to grenades and capsules...

[mdqp]

Would it be weird if I said the best way to make combat worthwhile is to make nests much, MUCH harder to kill, but make them not respawn, while keeping the "attack waves" more or less on the current difficulty level? I think the main problem with combat is that it has become more and more trivial, with the artifacts going the way of the dodo, now the only reason to clear a nest is because it's incredibly close to some resource, or because it's on the way to/from a resource, that's it.

The combat is not skill based, and the plans to confront the enemy are dull (usually you just run circles around them or turret creep, that's the entirety of your plan). Maybe if it was possible to send small flying scouts to spy the nests, and if the nests had more of a structure to them (using something similar to your walls, for example), then there would be a need to strategize, and perhaps use different weapons (explosives might do extra damage to structures). The truth is that zerg enemies aren't fun: clearing them temporarily will always feel like a chore, and having the biters respawn so quickly makes them annoying, not challenging, and this I believe applies to the combat on the micro and macro level. Since the map is infinitely large, I feel there is no need to make it impossible to "tame" the wilderness a bit, you'll have to venture outside eventually, and meet new nests.

But then again, I don't care about the aliens in Factorio at all, they really are just a nuisance to the core gameplay. Maybe if every now and then there was a "mega-wave" and its size depended on the number of nests you killed, it would be more of a logistic challenge (get everything ready for a large scale attack). Maybe if the aliens actually were more aggressive, and destroyed anything they found (but this should only be possible if permanent nest destruction is possible), so that hunting down nests becomes more of a necessity when you start getting attacked, as they might damage electricity lines and rails.

Honestly, anything would make the combat better for me, I think.

[onebit]

What is the purpose of biters? I believe they are entropy. If not dealt with, your base should return to the stable condition which is nothingness.

The question is how much player time and resources should it take to deal with this entropy? I believe the resources it takes is OK, but the player time is too much.

There should be automated ways to deal with biters. You'd trade more resources for player time.

[aober93]

Yea aliens take too much time to raid them. I would prefer to spend more resources and to have more diverse factory than to spend my time killing them.

The good thing about them, is that they require you to build defenses and weapons, which enriches gameplay alot. Just killing them manually is alittle boring. Its not the end of the world, just put balance in that direction if you can.

[roman566]

I have an idea to stop turret creep in the late game. What would be required is a special building for bitters and a new mechanism. Standard nests would turn into that building, reducing the amount of spawned bitters. The disadvantage would be that said building would damage all player owned buildings in a certain area around it. It can be explained as bitters generating some sort of vibrations that damages non-organic buildings. The damage does not have to be super high, 10 points per second would be more than enough. It won't outright kill a turret, but it will slaughter all power delivery buildings. Using repair drones wouldn't be impossible, but the costs involved would be prohibitively high.

To make it even more 'fun', the area affected by buildings could stack like personal roboports. If two buildings share effect area, it gets increased. If another enters the are thanks to that, it gets increased again for all buildings in it. Obviously, in case of very high bitter amounts, it would result in the entire map quickly being denied to player. To prevent that, buildings made on concrete tiles would be unaffected. Obviously, the concrete tiles shouldn't give immunity when very close to said buildings to keep turret creep from occurring.

The advantage of this solution is that turret creep wouldn't disappear. Enemies would simply evolve to combat it, forcing the player to adapt their strategy as well.

[Koub]

Combat revamp is good news indeed \o/

Steam award nominations

Steam has recently announced their Steam award nominations , and there are several categories you can nominate any game for. For example the "Just 5 more minutes" is for the games that keep you playing long long into the night. We think it is a really great idea, allowing the steam community to nominate titles in this way, so be sure to vote for your favorite games.

I created a topic in "Off Topic" board so that everyone can share his nominees : viewtopic.php?f=27&t=37739

[Mehve]

Yeah, for me clearing nests has become a total grind. Turret creep, circle-and-sear, consumable spam... the only challenge at this point is not falling asleep. If I wanted that, I'd be playing an MMORPG.

I DO think having to account for hostile natives is a great part of gameplay, but the current implementation is short on opportunity for strategy and automation, and long on grind.

[IronCartographer]

One suggestion for combat tech balancing- Flamethrower damage could be renamed as a "Chemical Weapons" damage upgrade, and apply to poison capsules as well.