Friday Facts #375 - Quality

[Edriel]

I don't know why but reading about this "quality thing" makes me feel a bit uneasy, it seems to make things just more complicated on "purpose".

I'll try to explain as best as I can:

I know that this is quite straightforward to understand and consequently play but adding a core feature of the expansion that relies on a "per chance" formula, it feels like you're moving away from what the "essence" of Factorio is.
This is because in vanilla if you plan something you know exactely what you're getting every single time, but with quality you're like "well.. we'll see".

Yes I know that it's affecting just the mid/lategame while in the endgame it's just an additional step (low quality -> recycle -> repeat until legendary quality) but it seems like it makes things longer to reach "just because" other than making it longer because you need more assemblers, outposts, smelters etc like in vanilla Factorio.
I hope this makes sense.

Ok it's optional to use quality modules (much like productivity and speed ones) but we all know that the real endgame is running a megabase.

Maybe I'm just too "afraid" of this big change and when I'll play the expansion it will be ok anyway but reading it on "paper" makes me feel a bit concerned.

Speaking of concerns, these are some I have about some entities not getting different bonuses other than health when they're of higher quality:

• BELTS
  The obvious thing to ask here is "why not increasing the transport speed?"
  Is it because they might mess up with planning and correct production ratios? If so why not giving the legendary belts a 100% bonus instead of 150%?
  Is it because if you place different quality of the same type of belts near each other makes the whole thing mesmerizing (visually "disturbing")?

• PIPES
  Why not increase the pipe throughput the higher the quality is?
  Is it because it might be buggy if you plug in different quality pipes on the same line and/or is it because it's hard/long to code?

• RAILS
  Why not increase the acceleration/deceleration/max speed of trains while on higher quality rails?
  Same as for the pipes, will it make buggy/hard/long to code?

• CHESTS
  Why not increasing the inventory by one slot for each quality type?

• LAMPS
  What about increasing the brightness and/or the lighting radius of the lamp?

These are just suggestions and concerns I have.
Factorio is a great game, the dev team is great and so is the community so even if I'm a bit "worried" about the expansion and the new things it will bring us, I know the final product is gonna be great anyway.

Thanks for the hard work!

[Oscar]

Much has been said in this forum, here just my 2 cents.

First I do like the idea of having quality as an advanced feature in the game. Implementation-wise I do think it can be much improved. At the same time I do reckon that it is hard to really know how this system will play out without full knowledge on all other additions to the exapansion.

That said, just based on my current understanding of the system and underlying rationale from the developer, what I dislike the most regarding the quality feature is the amount of grind it introduces. To be specific, unlocking new recipes and production methods, and continue advancing to the next tier of industrialization is the soul of factorio; it is what makes factorio fun for most of its fervent player base. Complexity of the game should come from new production methods and discovery of new materials, just like in the real-world, and should not overly rely on a system that feels like a grind fest.

my suggestion for the developer is this, why not seamlessly combine the quality feature with what space travel and extraterrestrial colonisation would bring? New materials from outerspace and other planets could lead to new ingredients that once further processed with existing product will improve its quality. This way the whole quality thing will feel more natural and it is another way to lure players to explore space and control the overall pace of the game: seamless integration of the base game with a space game!

Drawback of this is of course that more thoughts are required to game balance, but I believe it will ultimately result in a more flushed out and fun addition regarding quality.

Hope more of you agree with this!

[Raze1991]

Two cups of hot tea for this gentleman!

Overall, I love this! But I also hate the names! I expect you will make them moddable though, right? I'd name them something like Crude/Low (and you only realize the quality wasn't even good before you unlock quality modules and see it), Normal/Nominal, High/Great, Exceptional/Superior and Pristine/Perfect.

Uncommon/Rare/Epic/Legendary titles are not how Factorio feels.

... I don't like the randomness of getting higher quality. I like how tier 1 machines make tier 2 machines. Making things defined 2 -> 1 gets exponential costly just fine as it is. If this has to be implemented, then 2 normal - > 1 uncommon, 2 uncommon - > 1 rare, and so forth feels better to me.

This sounds interesting, but it requires balance edits from the developers, for example, 10 Rare ones being changed to 1 Epic one and/or 100 Epic ones being changed to 1 Legendary.

The exchange can be made using an Assembling machine recipe and simply be an additional option to an already existing idea with complete randomness in order to bring a little stability to the game.

[Edriel]

Much has been said in this forum, here just my 2 cents.

First I do like the idea of having quality as an advanced feature in the game. Implementation-wise I do think it can be much improved. At the same time I do reckon that it is hard to really know how this system will play out without full knowledge on all other additions to the exapansion.

That said, just based on my current understanding of the system and underlying rationale from the developer, what I dislike the most regarding the quality feature is the amount of grind it introduces. To be specific, unlocking new recipes and production methods, and continue advancing to the next tier of industrialization is the soul of factorio; it is what makes factorio fun for most of its fervent player base. Complexity of the game should come from new production methods and discovery of new materials, just like in the real-world, and should not overly rely on a system that feels like a grind fest.

my suggestion for the developer is this, why not seamlessly combine the quality feature with what space travel and extraterrestrial colonisation would bring? New materials from outerspace and other planets could lead to new ingredients that once further processed with existing product will improve its quality. This way the whole quality thing will feel more natural and it is another way to lure players to explore space and control the overall pace of the game: seamless integrating of the base game with a space game!

Drawback of this is of course that more thoughts are required to game balance, but I believe it will ultimately result in a more flushed out and fun addition regarding quality.

Hope more of you agree with this!

I'm glad there other people concerned about this.
Also your idea of not scraping the "quality feature" but integrating it with exploring/new resources/new processing methods other than relying on a "per chance" formula feels much more Factorio than the dev's one and that's why I like it.

[exterathor]

Building an epic factory using only epic components is epic

[Ghoulish]

Awesome FFF, can't wait for the expansion (and to learn other stuff being added!).

[webkilla]

gotta admit, the space stuff seemed nice enough - but this?

This seems like needless complication to the system.

[Roxor128]

Having had some more time to think about it, I'm thinking maybe this feature should be implemented backwards from its current form.

That is, instead of quality levels going up and granting bonuses from the vanilla base form, start there and go down, with lower tier machines being more likely to botch the job and produce junk instead of what they were supposed to make. Import a saved game from the base game into the expansion, and everything will be top-tier, as that's the way vanilla works now, never making a mistake.

The junk objects could have a handful of member variables specifying the raw materials they'll produce when recycled, with the exact amounts coming from the botched recipe, divided down to the level of single objects and stacking based on what they'll recycle to, so if something takes 2 iron plates and 3 copper plates to produce 2 outputs, the junk will be marked as 1 iron plate and 1.5 copper plates, with a botched assembly replacing one or more of the outputs from that crafting with junk. The recycler can just have several progress bars for fractional amounts, similar to productivity ones on mining drills, which result in an extra output when filled. Recycle two of these example pieces of junk with a perfect recycler, and you'd get one iron and one copper plate from the first one and one iron and two copper from the second (0.5 copper carried over between them).

[BattleFluffy]

I love this so much. Quality is the perfect expansion of the lategame.

[PaszaVonPomiot]

recycler yes, but without outputting higher quality components than inputted ones
extedned quality of modules yes
quality for individual components like iron plates sounds like an overkill and cheap way of adding complexity to the game
if it's optional and UPS friendly then ok

[EvanT]

I guess that most of the resentment comes from beeing burnt with RND in other games. Like getting 5 perfect bear hides or farming lots of rarely dropping items in far away regions to put them into a misbehaveing slot machine game mechanic.

This though is automatic. You just setup the machines and sorting and go do other stuff to come back an hour later to collect the pristine stuff.

[nuhll]

I dont like the symbols (the small on the inserters e.g.) What about a outline in colors like other games? Grey trash, white normal, epic lila you get it?

[DDRJake]

Interesting concept, terrible naming conventions and symbols.

I actually do not enjoy the late game of Factorio, where I'm largely just stamping down the same solved problems across the land to feed the machine, optimizing for quality seems like a much more enjoyable task, but fishing for Epic and Legendary equipment pulls one right out of the experience. Crude, Pristine, Immaculate and Refined are terms far more befitting a factory. It's funny for a game which is designed to be tuned to your tastes as opposed to what the mainstream consensus is would fall back on tired and trite terms for fantasy games and looter shooters.

[Hesiodich]

As long as there aren't any quality science packs it wont be intrusive, just a nice new challenge for designing a new kind of mall for end game separate from the science production, the more productivity more free stuff without ups hit and less entities now. I like this new mechanic an interesting new dilema for megabasing. The things I would wish for are space exploration beacons in vanilla and fluid optimizations on full pipes. can change the design of megabases.

Some other things ive though about are:
1) recycling nuclear fuel cells will it bring it back to live (despite of how cheap it is) could make the nuclear fuel reprocessing redundant
2) what about legendary nuclear fuel for trains? (given that quality liquids dont seem a thing)
3) legendary underground blue belts and pipes for bigger spaghetti builds able to go beneath train unloading stations for example
4) for train stations would legendary chests or storage tanks have more space, now that compressing full blue belt from 4 chests is a thing, it will help to last longer
5) quality wagons and locomotives can reduce the traffic inside a megabase allowing it to build bigger on a smaller space without a huge train network overload, im used to ruspartisan train network on city blocks now that production buildings can be smaller with greater productivity and speed solving throughput problems are more important with more train loading and unloading stations for more belts is able to take and return.
6) same with lights at least making the light radius 150% bigger
7) future things as we will get to know more things about the expansion

[Hesiodich]

8) Filter for any item with the quality greater than normal for example would be nice for hand feeding recycling setups in the mid game, for the extra production of a mall it can get tedious to filter out 5 classes per 20 possible inputs
9) how will the recycler behave on mods like py or seablock where some items have multiple crafting recipes, are those assigned automatically or can you choose them?

[Jaclyn]

As much as my original reaction was to vehemently recoil from the idea of a bunch of RNG added to the game, I think there's a way to make this interesting and tune it so that it fits more in line with how Factorio plays. I feel like instead of or in addition to recyclers, we should have a building whose sole purpose is to take in objects and some unspecified material for a chance to improve the quality. You could even have the material be quality modules and have the chance be contingent on the tier of module fed to the machine, like 15%, 20%, and 25% chance of bumping the item up one quality level. You can balance this and stop it being a kovarex enrichment loop of guaranteed epics by simply giving the machines like a flat 20% chance of destroying the item that can maybe be brought down to 10% with a full array of tier 3 quality modules. The premise of quality modules is interesting, but the current proposed implementation just feels haphazard and unrefined.

[Abarel]

It is also an incentive to avoid manual crafting, as i guess you can't actually place the white modules on the players.

The things you need in big quantities could gain little to no (average) quality from handcrafting, but small amounts of complex products would gain (significative) quality from manual assembly over automated systems, at a cost of time and maybe some ingredients lost. Of course, it would make sense to require the use of high quality components only. For example, I would manually assemble the Rocket Silo, or the Nuclear Reactors.

[GrandMasterB]

I have now slept one night. Slept badly. The planned feature kept me awake all night.

I would like to say here that Factorio is my favorite game and I have great respect for the work and ideas that have led to this game.

Things I love about Factorio:

• In each stage of development you have a different challenges. First automated production of the basic materials, Mall, Research, Chemistry, Robots, Nuclear power, space travel. Each of these problems is solved in a different way

• I can observe the transport of each object. I have to transport the raw materials. Nothing lands in a virtual pool and is beamed back into the game at another point from this pool.

• Each object that can be placed on the map has its own appearance and corresponding properties. I identify everything I see without clicking on it or displaying extra icons.

• Everything can be calculated and optimized to become a huge just-in-time factory.

• The controller components enable almost complete control of the factory (Hysteresis, PI controller, switches).

• The unique development of atomic energy.

What I love in mods are the following things:

• Mods that generate byproducts, making circular processes necessary.

• Mods that distinguish high-voltage networks from low-voltage networks. Mods that take into account power line losses and conversion losses.

• Mods that make the game more realistic. Like the more realitik nuclear power plants mod.

• New towers with a new look, like the ones from Space Exploration and Krastorio.

• Mods that add new enemies to the game. If these are visually and in the game mechanics clearly different from the valilla enemies (Armoured Biters).

Mods I do not like:

• Mods that simply add more levels to an existing item and only extend the game.

• Mods that add item and use icons that are already present in the game and only change properties.

• Mods that force you to just do more of the same.

I had hoped that the expansion would add more content like the mods I like. With better optics, because graphic designers were hired. That these extensions balanced and with possibly new mechanics for individual technical problems. Like the nuclear power. A special challenge for a special technology.

Instead, the opposite seems to have been implemented. More different properties without visual difference or technical explanation. Towers have a greater range because they have an icon? But do not have a longer barrel. Radar stations scan a larger area, but why? No larger dish or laser scanning or drones. Just because they now have two blue dots. Machines are more efficient or faster because they now have an icon on their chest? It's as if the machine puffs itself up and says: "Mhhh ... I am a legendary machine!"

I'm sorry I'm really unhappy! This feature pushes Factorio into the uniformity of all other games and removes almost everything special about Factorio!

Note 1: Yes the names are not good
Note 2: Yes it's optional and it's still not a good concept to consider quality.

[thedoh]

Looks like very few people like this idea. The consensus on steam is no one likes this idea.

When anything new is introduced (in a game or anywhere in live) it is really the people who disagree with or dislike the new thing who speak out most. The people who see the FFF and go "Oh, okay that's interesting I guess" or "Wow that's sweet! I can't wait" aren't likely to come onto the forums and say so.

This isn't to say that the people who DO express their discontent with the new thing should be ignored, or shouldn't share their (respectfully shared) sentiment, but it is to say that the most vocal will be people who dislike the new.

[Zaflis]

...
if used everywhere it indeed just becomes a tedium. but this design i think will cause:
- we will not use quality for science packs. instead productivity, just like before.
so the mass production bus will stay. (just upgraded over time)
- we will built a first mall in normal quality which initially serves everything, and longterm just belts etc.
- we will built a second mall in high quality. that one no longer siphons off the science bus.
meaning we also need to built a secondary high quality ingredient section purely for the second mall.
the effect is, i think, that we will most likely put the raw ores on the bus too so that
a small but high quality built picks them for the second mall....

I'm thinking that a furnace that can only take 2 modules is not enough to justify using quality modules, so only (Quality 0) plates stay on bus (no need for ore). You can get quality plates back from the scrapper so you can improve the ingredients in the cycle. (Which i might do with logistics bots)