Friday Facts #257 - NPE/Campaign update

[Gergely]

The campaign will definitely not have Landfill and Cliff explosives available to research as they just get rid of any obstacles we design.

Please unlock it when all the objectives have been cleared!

[H8UL]

A gameplay benefit with shallow water in freeplay: the player wouldn't be able to build defences there, but aliens could travel over it. So whereas cliffs and deep water provide natural defences, shallow water provides natural weak points.

In the water worlds I frequently play, I ban myself from landfill (I might use the expensive landfill mod in future). It would definitely be an interesting challenge to play a shallow water world!

[Ojelle]

Shallow water... now maybe you could do something about the fish!

(i.e. put automated fish-traps on the shallow water!)

Also, make it cheaper to dirt-over the shallow water

But this should be the solution in the map generator for putting the player on an island.... shallow water to the surrounding land so you at least have a way for the player to move out a decent distance rather than being stuck on an island.

Lets use wood to build shalow water! Fuck logic, but then you have a usefull use for wood, even possibly lategame when in need to get over an area and to lazy to go to base for landfill.

(and to the guy of the fish: you can 'mine' fish with a deconstruction planner)

[Chartas]

Wuhu new terrain type! I can already see my visions of a Dune 2000 scenario for Factorio not being a dream anymore. ^^

[Ojelle]

For the shallow water: work like age of empires and like someone proposed. x tiles wide around the coast is shallow (or part of the coast = some immediatly deep, some shallow) -> close boddies connect from time to time + extra challange to wall yourself in (untill you have landfill) at the start of the game.

[ScottyWired]

I also thought about being able to enter the escape pod just like you can do with the car, I just didn't bring it up to anyone who can make it happen yet. Maybe?

Fast Travel! Just like in RimWorld where you can use the somewhat expensive rocket-launched escape pods to travel across the planet instead of hiking. I'll leave the balancing of that to you though

[H8UL]

Can I suggest to call shallow water bogland or marsh? Then it makes more sense you can walk on it but not build on it.

An intuitive idea is to have two types of landfill:

• Basic Landfill: makes water into bogland
• Permeable Landfill: fills in all water and bogland

Basic Landfill would be cheaper than current landfill, while permeable landfill would be behind a later technology with a more expensive recipe.

Permeable landfill is logical, because in real life you need advanced materials to have landfill drain properly.

More importantly for gameplay, it solves the main problem with balancing landfill against interesting terrain: you need to be able to escape islands at any stage of the game but comprehensive terraforming should be a late game thing that doesn't negate interesting maps.

[Nemoricus]

I like the changes to the rocket science tree. Makes it more of a gradual build-up then a monolithic task, and since there's uses for everything in the tree, you're incentivized to start working on it early.

I hope that shallow water makes it into the freeplay modes. Like cliffs, it's another terrain effect for players to plan around.

[Jap2.0]

Did anyone else think of waterfill when they mentioned shallow water?

[Termak]

Can we please "ENTER" the escape pod and have the camera follow the rocket as it launches?

"Watching a rocket launch" versus actually "riding the rocket into space" makes all the difference and would give a much more satisfactory feeling of completing the primary objective!

Put a car or loco into rocket and hit enter to board it before launch

[Lonami]

*or* hand crafted very, very slowly from nothing. That way you cannot get stuck on an island with no way off.

Oh please no. Island maps with low resources, just enough to get out, are fun. See for example https://redd.it/8pp6cz.

[Tev]

Can I suggest to call shallow water bogland or marsh? Then it makes more sense you can walk on it but not build on it.

An intuitive idea is to have two types of landfill:

• Basic Landfill: makes water into bogland
• Permeable Landfill: fills in all water and bogland

Basic Landfill would be cheaper than current landfill, while permeable landfill would be behind a later technology with a more expensive recipe.

Permeable landfill is logical, because in real life you need advanced materials to have landfill drain properly.

More importantly for gameplay, it solves the main problem with balancing landfill against interesting terrain: you need to be able to escape islands at any stage of the game but comprehensive terraforming should be a late game thing that doesn't negate interesting maps.

This is great idea! Maybe the expensive-permanent-landfill won't feel so cheaty. Also, you can add interesting tileset to it, as it is 'reinforced landfill' (or whatever will Albert like)

[Lonami]

Or just have it so that you can create shallow water from regular water by mining it for a while.

Mining water to create less-deep water? That sounds weird! It would be interesting to be able to dig wells, though. They already exist in game, placing landfill on top of offshore pumps.

[MicFac]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-257

I think the shallow water looks a little bit weird in its current state.

I am really looking forward to the new tech and recipe changes.
With Rocket Control Units being necessary for atomic bombs, it might make sense to have some more control over the rocket. Maybe atomic artillery shells with higher blast radius as a late-game technology? This way you wouldn't need to target almost every single enemy spawner which can be tedious and annoying at times.

[Ghoulish]

I like the proposed changes, seem to offer much better progression.

"This results in:

You no longer win the game by launching a satellite, there is a new "Rocket escape pod" that you launch in a rocket to finish the game. Currently the escape pod has no other use. "

It's never sat well with me that there was a winning condition to Factorio. I appreciate there needs to be a goal, don't get me wrong here, but to say you've won the game after you launch a rocket in the same way as you might after killing the final boss in an FPS just doesn't sit well with me. For me once the first rocket & satellite is launched, that point is really the start of Factorio. You now have a big resource drain to deal with along with an ever increasing cost to continued science research, and dealing with and managing the logistical aspect of keeping all this going (and even increasing the launch rate or research rates) Is what Factorio is about, at least for me.

I wonder if people might play the game, launch a rocket and then think 'nice game I've won' and not play the game further? I'm not sure how this could be addressed, but to have a winning condition isn't quite right, as that's where it all really begins.

[thriem]

My main point is that it would feel like a massive obvious oversight to not have a terrain feature that is in the game and prominent in the campaign NOT exist in the free play. As if the game was not completely finished or polished.

I also would like to see shallow water in free play (if it doesn't cause issues), but I think you're exaggerating a bit. Most games have some special features or terrain inside their campaign that don't appear in randomly generated free-play maps. For example Age of Empires 2 features bridges in the campaign that don't exist in randomly generated maps. Many other games like Command & Conquer or StarCraft II feature several campaign specific buildings and units that don't appear if free play.

Well, there is a difference between RTS and Sandbox games - a sandbox is about shaping your world, RTS - Campaign tells you lore. Beside I'd like to have narrow waters at freeplay too, I doubt that it will have any use at random generated maps - since they will most certainly do not work well, because of the randomness... except we get some sort of rivers or other streams, so that you have actual vanilla way of crossing.

[Mylon]

Ooo, if you're reworking rocket fuel, could you make the recipe more complex and done in a chemical plant? I always thought it was weird that the recipe for rocket fuel was so simple. Solid fuel of course makes a good base, but I can't think of an oxidizer it should be mixed with among vanilla items.

[bman212121]

I'm curious if you have updated counts for the number of science packs required to beat the game. It seems like with all of this extra research getting the "there is no spoon" achievement is going to be almost impossible for some people. My friend and I did in post .15 and it took the two of us a couple of tries and we managed to pull it off in 7 1/2 hours. Having access to build the low density structures early should help that end game push by being able to start building those earlier, but it sounds like the overall resource requirements have gone up a decent amount again.

[coderpatsy]

Ooo, if you're reworking rocket fuel, could you make the recipe ... done in a chemical plant?

Making rocket fuel in an assembler makes some sense from a gameplay balance perspective, because you need it in equal amounts as low density structure and rocket control units (satellite excluded). Chemical plants only have 3 module slots vs assembler 3's 4, so rocket fuel would fall behind there.

[Koub]

I love what's announced on the science + endgame part, and also for the NPE. I'm planning to try it when this comes out.
Regarding the shallow water, the idea's nice, but if it's in the tutorial/campaign/NPE, it should totally make it to the sandbox/freeplay game.