Friday Facts #189 - Specifying the 1.0

[PetrGasparik]

"The overall plan is to mainly polish and finish" - don't forget also czech!
(just kidding good luck in polishing and finishing )

[beiju]

I like the science pack changes. However, I think most players have left level 1 assembling machines behind long before they get to production science. Now that the assembler is part of a higher-cost science pack (and one that gives two packs per recipe!), I think requiring level 2 assemblers would maintain balance while also having the player automate a more useful item.

[VimiZap]

How about adding modules to for example the oil refinery and roboports? Like, you place a 1x1 or 1x2 construction next to the specific building, which ofc. will connect neatly , and then the building uses less power, is more efficient, gives a boost to production and so on? So basically like the modules you put inside them, but it is like an addon which is visible from the outside. I think it would not only make the factories look cooler, but also make the gameplay a bit different and interesting. The bonuses given could be anything (for example a bonus to a specific item type like weapons or an extra production slot), but the idea is adding on to existing buildings and machines. That would be really cool and interesting

[porcupine]

So one thing I would like to know after reading this is, are the features you cut for 1.0 gone forever or can we hope to see them in mayne a DLC later on? Reason I am asking is because you previously mentioned the possibility to add the space station idea through a DLC.

I agree with this. The one thing I want to see more than anything else, is Factorio team announcing DLC/expansions/what have you. Let's be realistic, Factorio is a > $20 game, value has absolutely been delivered, whether you've extracted your $20 of enjoyment or not, you'd be hard pressed to look at the game, and say it wasn't incredibly reasonably priced.

Eventually, new cash needs to be injected to keep a project running, and most people are conscious of that. I'd like to see the team announce where their future is going (even if it's another title or what have you), and start grabbing the cash they need to make sure they stick together, and keep pumping out content like this. I'd even be ok if it wasn't Factorio to be honest (though I'd rather it was), I just think the team as it stands is something "stand-out", and they need to keep producing the kind of content they're doing now, as long as possible!

Like most others, I'd also like to see expansion/DLC content trickle back to people who haven't necessarily bought into it (IE: in terms of patches, bug fixes to the core game, etc.), so everybody wins out.

Did anybody here play Total Annihilation in its hay-day? Back when they released a new unit weekly? That's what kept the game alive (despite the fact it got crushed by Starcraft in terms of popularity, the fact it was actively supported in some smaller manner, *ages* after it had been finished.

[smurphy1]

I'm curious to the reasoning behind changing the underground belt length. It's not like having different lengths for the different tiers is a new idea, there have been mods that do that for quite a while I believe, so what prompted the change now?

[Marconos]

Assembly 1 in purple? That seems wrong type of ingredient for advanced research, pumpjack makes a lot more sense there to me.

Blue print mode needs to have a way to do a fixed mode or random map. There are many people that would want to start at that state for new worlds and it seems like a good options for those that want to start there.

Glad you guys are coming close to fininshing 1.0. You may feel like there are more bugs than normal, but take heart, there are more features, more players and more functionality that is working than ever before. Keep it up!!!

[factoriouzr]

I understand that you eventually need to release 1.0 and Factorio is a great game.

However there were a lot of things mentioned that didn't come to fruition.

Examples are:
1) vehicle equipment grids with equipment
2) improved GUI (a reskin is nice but it doesn't address the fundamental issues with the GUI) such as dragging and dropping items, tabs
3) improved train management like what many mods try to do but can't do properly because it's not built into the game. It would also be nice to be able to label trains with say "iron loading" and "iron unloading", then group iron loading and pax and supply stops into a station at each outpost and give the same labels to the stops. Then just tell the train to go to station "iron 1" and it will find a stop with the same label in that the train has and it will go there.
4) larger GUI
5) better biter AI and more interesting biters
6) what about the RTS direction of having a command center where you can deploy and manage armies from?
7) etc.

What about all the other really good suggestions that are polishes to the existing functionality, such as combining player request and trash slots?

I feel the game is really good and I don't regret buying two copies. You guys are great developers. I still want more factorio, so I suggest either an expansion to add more content to the game (the space part as previously explained in Friday facts doesn't interest me as it's just like starting a new game) but I would like many of the requests made by players to be implemented (most make sense in the current factorio) and I would love new content. You can also release a Factorio 2.0 but it would have to have all the features of Factorio 1.0 plus more content.

Whatever you decide to do, please polish up all the existing functionality, primarily the train management, General GUI overhaul and better control of inserting and removing bots from roboports.

Also please prioritize adding support for modders to be able to do more things. If a feature might not make it into the game, please add the api calls necessary so that at least modders can add the feature.

[zanven]

arty train big yes so people aren't forced to wall in their train lines to outposts on death worlds like i have too .

when you do the arty trains can you please consider making it a platform which is a wagon where people can mount their weapon systems of choice, so if they can mix and match the weapon systems of choice onto the trains (flame turrets get ammo from connected wagons). and the train locomotive imho isn't tanky enough / good enough at just driving through the AI so maybe a reinforced loco which is tankier can drive over ai better but has a much slower acceleration is the size of two loco's so more ideal for long trips.

One thing that would be really nice is enemy AI looked at and ways to interact with them before 1.0 possibly or if not then in 1.1, because even on deathworld the ai just doesn't feel challenging if you keep ahead of the curve with the upgrades which is a fun challenge to force you to advance your factory asap.

for me the AI if i were to relate it to starcraft they feel like zerglings/roaches with hydra's, and im sitting back wondering where the MUTA's are and when an ultralisk is gonna give me a bad time. Definitely love the improvements over the last year to making the AI better at expanding and harassing but it would be cool if instead of exactly the same thing for x infinity with a linear curve for fighting enemies that their were the rare and occasional "hero bases" that have some kinda super hard challenge and may force you to just avoid a area and actually make you respect and fear the biters. (i.e when you attack a hero base its aggro range to call for help is much much further forcing you to clear around it first and its units are stronger than your typical biter / spiter and they have a much bigger agro range).

You guys have done a great job i just feel the enemy AI is not deep enough in detail and complexity to feel "finished" even though its much better than a year ago it just feels more polished of the feature set it has had since forever. But with enemy AI i don't think that can really be touched till the trains have a way to traverse without forcing the tracks to be walled off to protect them.

[Tolrin]

The overall feeling was, that we might have gone little bit too far with all the science pack extensions, so I wanted to make it slightly less expensive. So we changed it that the science pack 3 (the blue one) requires mining drill instead of assembling machine now.

I'm currently playing on the deathworld pre-set and I believe you overlooked something here, because mining drills cost 70 iron and 25 copper per, whereas assembling machines only cost 35 iron and 15 copper per. Instead of making it slightly less expensive you have doubled the costs with this change, making blue science extraordinarily expensive.

[Balinor]

While I know you guys are looking forward to 1.0 and want to lock things down please do consider modular armour/weapons for the tank and/or the long talked about rts option.

Without the ability to send out robots to do the fighting for you, I think you are missing out a huge chunk of what a game focused on automation should be.

[Aardwolf]

The campaign is kinda cliffhangerish, will 1.0 be shipped with it like this, or will a continuation involving building a rocket be added?

[SHADOW13]

when reviewing trello cards, can you ask a question "is it possible with modding and will work well?"
if yes, then I would suggest to skip it or lower its priority significantly
if yes but might require small changes to support it with modding, then maybe worth to leave it and possibly implement post 1.0
if not possible with modding then question is how important/critical it is? then remove if not so much

I will miss the development and new features ... I hope there will be some new features post 1.0 release eventually, always love to see games being developed for longer (like Paradox style)

[Aurilika]

3) improved train management like what many mods try to do but can't do properly because it's not built into the game. It would also be nice to be able to label trains with say "iron loading" and "iron unloading", then group iron loading and pax and supply stops into a station at each outpost and give the same labels to the stops. Then just tell the train to go to station "iron 1" and it will find a stop with the same label in that the train has and it will go there.

I'm having a little trouble fully understanding your statement, but I believe what are asking for is already in the game. You can name multiple stations the same name and the train will pick one at random (it may be closest, not sure). You can also use the circuit logic to make any that don't have enough resources waiting to be picked up be unavailable as a stop. I you can just have a train go to iron loading until full and iron unloading until empty and it will do everything on its own. I had forgotten this was a feature until you mentioned it. Makes it a lot easier to set up routes with many similar stops.

[Artman40]

I think there should be a middle ground between having to automate things that you really need and having to automate things that normally have to be produced in relatively small quantities.

One solution is to make a major research overhaul in form of being able to make a specialized science pack production lab (maybe after a research) where you need default ingredients to make a science pack but where you could add more optional ingredients. Those would allow to produce more science packs per raw material. The more different products used to produce science pack, the more you'll save on raw materials.

Each optional ingredient could be assigned a tier to indicate which science pack it can be used to increase productivity of. For an example, Tier 1 ingredients would be copper plate, iron stick, copper cable, wood, stone brick and perhaps an iron axe. In specialized science pack production building, you'd still need a copper plate and 2 gear wheels to produce a science pack 1. However, you could add any tier science pack 1 ingredients to the mix. The more different ones you add, the more science packs are produced. Different items would have science pack production productivity value according to the raw materials needed to craft the product.

That means that a good builder who can automate complex product chains will be rewarded while a more inexperienced player could still get their research done.

Hard to describe though. Have to go to suggestions forum for that.

[ohmusama]

I think there should be a middle ground between having to automate things that you really need and having to automate things that normally have to be produced in relatively small quantities.

One solution is to make a research overhaul in form of being able to make a specialized science pack production lab (maybe after a research) where you need default ingredients to make a science pack but where you could add more optional ingredients to produce more science packs per raw material. The more different products used to produce science pack, the more you'll save on raw materials.

Each optional ingredient could be assigned a tier to indicate which science pack it can be used to increase productivity of. For an example, in that kind of a building, you'd still need a copper plate and 2 gear wheels to produce a science pack 1. However, you could add tier science pack 1 ingredients to the mix. Tier 1 ingredients would be copper plate, iron stick, copper cable, wood, stone brick and perhaps an iron axe. Different items would have science pack production productivity value according to the raw materials needed to craft the product.

That means that a good builder who can automate complex product chains will be rewarded while a more inexperienced player could still get their research done.

Hard to describe though. Have to go to suggestions forum for that.

This is a clever idea

[lukaiw]

artylery train ? oh god plis let it be what i think it is

(lost planet 2 train)

[factoriouzr]

While I know you guys are looking forward to 1.0 and want to lock things down please do consider modular armour/weapons for the tank and/or the long talked about rts option.

Without the ability to send out robots to do the fighting for you, I think you are missing out a huge chunk of what a game focused on automation should be.

+100

The biters need some love. Please improve them.

[factoriouzr]

What about other promised features such as being able to see everything in the logistics network. The only way to see this now, is still with the ancient GUI when you hover over a logistics item and it's cut off and becomes useless very quickly after getting robots because the items run off the screen and jump positions too fast. This would be a great integration into the production GUI with an ability to search for specific items.

[factoriouzr]

3) improved train management like what many mods try to do but can't do properly because it's not built into the game. It would also be nice to be able to label trains with say "iron loading" and "iron unloading", then group iron loading and pax and supply stops into a station at each outpost and give the same labels to the stops. Then just tell the train to go to station "iron 1" and it will find a stop with the same label in that the train has and it will go there.

I'm having a little trouble fully understanding your statement, but I believe what are asking for is already in the game. I'm pretty sure you can name multiple stations the same name, and the train will go to the closest unoccupied one. You can also use the circuit logic to make any that don't have enough resources waiting to be picked up be unavailable as a stop. I think you can just have a train go to iron loading until full and iron unloading until empty and it will do everything on its own. I still have the stops in manually but I thought I remembered reading that there was support for having stations named the same that are considered the same.

Sorry for the confusion I was trying to summarize a previous suggestion I made (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=38496). This feature is not in the game now and running cables for distant outposts is a chore and would make this more difficult. Basically what this boils down to is that train management in this game is too basic. Some reasons why it kind of sucks right now:
1) no way to blueprint trains and trains stops (with train filters, setup, cargo wagon filters, train stop names). This results in every outpost setup requiring tedious stop renaming, new trains requiring setup of filters etc
2) the train GUI is tiny for nor reason when setting stops, picking stops etc
3) no copy paste of train schedules easily, no way to copy settings from one stop to another for a train (such as the wait conditions)
4) no train names in trains GUI (where it shows the live feed of where the train is)
5) No way to manage lines
6) no way to have a train go to each and every stop with the same name (I don't want it to always go to the closest, I want it to go to ALL). Ie. Have an iron train, and have it go to all stops named "iron"
7) Once you have even just a few trains, you end up with so many stops that it's a pain to scroll through them and manage them. My suggestion (above) along with blueprinting train stops would solve this issue.

[CaptainHook]

What about other promised features such as being able to see everything in the logistics network. The only way to see this now, is still with the ancient GUI when you hover over a logistics item and it's cut off and becomes useless very quickly after getting robots because the items run off the screen and jump positions too fast. This would be a great integration into the production GUI with an ability to search for specific items.

Try pressing L button in game. And be amazed.