Friday Facts #200 - Plans for 0.16

[TheVeteraNoob]

Fluid squashing?

[cohem]

The terrain in this image looks good

It, a kind of, feels "right".

I was thinking of something like planetary terrain with cold polar lands and hot equatorial lands (forests and deserts). This have to limit a map vertically, though.

And thanks for your FFFs - always interesting to read.

[TheTom]

Any ideas on when 0.16 is going to go experimental? This year as target?

That is still the last release before 1.0?

Looking forward to the changes to trains

[BHakluyt]

Is an artillery train really needed? Why not unlock the vehicles equipment grids as part of vanilla and add some more goodies for the grids. It seems way easier than making a new train...

[waduk]

Am i the only one that miss the point of having an Artillery Train ?
I mean, if they behave just like regular train (scheduled based) then what's the point ?

You can't use it as an offensive weapon effectively since it bound to the rail (you can't free roam with it), also if we can't detect an enemy approach/activity, then we can't use it as defensive weapon effectively either.
Note the "effectively" word that i use. I'm aware you can loop it, cross your finger and hoping that the train arlilery catch enemy in action.
But i prefer if i can tell the train on-demand basis, not random chances.

A bit more with defensive :
Even if we hooked the schedule to circuit, it still very limited in terms of how are we gonna detect enemy activity.

Perhaps you can hook up to repair pack item count, then the artillery train is activated based on that.
But it's rather late isn't ? Repair pack is already being used which means the damage is already being done.
And assuming many player defend the outpost like i do (surrounding outpost with turret), by the time it reach the outpost, the biters already being wiped out already.

[FasterJump]

Every week I hoped for a FFF where the devs would say:
"We figured out that endgame gameplay on default settings is not satisfying. Players spend their time only to make up for the ore patches depletion, instead of actually improving their resource-generation setups. So we decided to implement dirty mining in a future update."

This is an exemple from Angels Infinite Ores where the center of ore patchs have a yield.

Angels Infinite Ores 0.1.8

Related suggestion

Sadly this card appears to be pushed to "probably never" along with the space station. Time to move along, there is nothing to see here.

[Koub]

Every week I hoped for a FFF where the devs would say:
"We figured out that endgame gameplay on default settings is not satisfying. Players spend their time only to make up for the ore patches depletion, instead of actually improving their resource-generation setups. So we decided to implement dirty mining in a future update."

Dirty mining. (Way to get more resources from mining posts at a cost of additional industry, logistics requirements and investment)
We decided to not do this, the mining productivity research seems to be solving the problem.

Source

[ske]

Improving the terrain generation is wonderful! That plate-tectonic map looks really interesting.

One thing very much related to the generation is to actually make the terrain matter. Currently there is just water, land and ore patches laying around. I'd like to have the terrain and resources correlated. For example, Stone is mostly found in desert, Coal where big trees grow. Biters like iron and dislike copper (or vice versa) and Biters live where the grass is, not in deserts.

This would mean that the player gets big open (desert) spaces without much Biter interference but many ore patches are heavily defended. You'd need much fewer Biter bases to achieve the same gameplay effect. Currently, with default settings, there are biter bases everywhere and you constantly have to fight in order to get anywhere. With my imagined settings you could place your base in the desert and lay much of the rail through safe terrain. But you still have to fight in order to free up some big ore patches. The worms on these patches could be bigger and stronger than they are today making for some interesting fights where you actually need to deploy the weapon arsenal instead of just lasering everything. There could even be some worms so big and strong that you have to leave them alone till late in the game. These super strong worms would protect really big ore patches and you have to build your rail around that in order to get to smaller ore patches that are less protected.

Another thing I'd find interesting is that you cannot build every building on every terrain. E.g. on swamp you cannot place assembly machines (because they are too heavy) but you can walk on it and put down belts. There is the effect that blueprints won't work everywhere anymore. This can be seen as annoying but it could also be seen as something that makes the game more interesting because you cannot just copy-paste the whole factory after landfilling everything. Instead you have to adapt your structure to work around obstacles. The current landfill could still be enabled via a mod for those who need it.

[Hellatze]

Fluid squashing?

I notice dev want to make artillery train.

But I hope we can draw railway in the map first before that. (Using train robots)

[TheTom]

While you are at it - please add a shuttle mode for trains (that the player is in).

Click on Map, Train goes to the location or close.

It is impossible to manually drive a train through a heavy trafficed area - not only does a player train not reserve signals, it also means being super carefull not to hit anything (due to the fast computer trains).

With a shuttle mode one could board a train, say "go there" and then take it from there (which may be a plae from where more tracks are laid). Would make a train a LOOOOT more useful.

[Xiphoris]

But I hope we can draw railway in the map first before that. (Using train robots)

You can essentially do this using shift-click to draw train tracks. Or is that not what you mean?

If you hold shift when you click on the rail planner arrow, you'll enter a mode where you can place down ghost rail tracks. Unlike the regular rail planner, the maximum length of the rail line is unlimited. So you can enter map view, scroll over to an expansion base, zoom in, and click to place the end of the track. Ghost rails will be laid all the way to it.

From there, using vanilla Factorio, you can drive along the train track using a personal roboport to place rail using construction robots. Or if you have the Fully Automated Rail Layer (FARL mod, then you can instruct it to drive along the track placing rail, which it will do at full speed.

[kpreid]

I like the idea of terrain (at the biome scale) mattering more to gameplay. Here are some more things that could be done with it and thematic excuses for it:

• Extremely hot areas. Player is damaged unless they use relevant armor equipment or vehicles. Some machines cannot run fast or at all. Geothermal power can be obtained only here (fits in between boiler steam and solar; runs continuously and infinitely; cheaper than solar; requires some kind of complicated plumbing and an initial input of oil products to operate; slightly better power-per-land-area than solar but only if you design the plumbing well).
• Extremely cold areas. Player is damaged unless they use relevant armor equipment or vehicles. Some machines run worse (stiff lubricants!), some machines run better (cooling! heat engine T_C efficiency!).
• Ice over water. You can build on it just fine, but if you make too much heat (yes this would have to be a new gameplay mechanic, so this is probably a bad idea) you now have water instead (and whatever was on it is drowned).
• Fragile terrain (some sort of thin crust on top of ???). Vehicles cannot pass, and you can build belts and small/medium power poles but not machines, rails, or roboports (i.e. no advanced logistics can cross it). You can solidify/replace it at a similar cost to landfill. (There should probably be some advantage to not replacing it.)
• Terrain that gives a huge localized advantage to aliens holding it (effect like extra strong worms, but different in the details), such that players find it more expedient to wall up and build around than to conquer.
• Terrain on which some specific kind of life grows that you can farm for useful resources (NOT trees).

Several of these are things that you can use for some moderate advantage, but instead just ignore or flatten (at some cost) if you like. So it gives you the tradeoff of either placing things to take advantage (at a larger scale than working around ore/oil patches), or just going ahead with your bus and standard layouts and such.

[AlexTheNotsogreat]

...There are no especially large lakes to work your way around...

*Inserts Manglepork Railword reference*

[Jap2.0]

Also, on the worldgen topic, the vast majority of land seems to be the regular grassy area, followed by sand and then a very, very small amount of the pink area. I would like it if there was actually a significant amount of the pink area.

Anyway, I would love it if you could keep the Friday facts coming, but if you take a break it won't be the end of the world.

[bobucles]

The basic challenge with "more varied terrain" is that it usually means "more tile maps". There are only so many things that a dozen flavors of desert and grasslands can do. There's always the option to dive into the standard earthy climates of marshy junk, tropical junk and frozen junk, as we know very well what they are. But we have an alien world, and alien stuff is always more fun. So if you want to get into some more alien type climates it's time to look into your standard mix of megaman stages. Things like:

- Crystalline themes
- metallic themes
- volcanic themes
- electric themes
- toxic themes
- shiny themes
- floating island themes
- Crashed ship themes
- Meteorite themes
- rainbow fun happy land theme

These themes may even have some odd quirks to go with them. For example the metallic theme might have large chunks of pickaxe ore, very handy for an early game boost. Floating continent/isles would feature open cloud terrain and limited opportunities to landfill. Toxic themes might have sulfur deposits that bubble out of the ground. Stuff like that.

Of course when there are more obstacles, players may require options to overcome those obstacles. Some of the resources or obstacles might even dramatically change how games play out. That's all part of the fun, isn't it?

[NotABiter]

Some innocuous wildlife other than the biters would also help make things feel a bit better as well

The devs tried putting such things in. The biters kept eating them all.

Regarding map gen, please make when setting resource frequency to very low that it spawns even less patches and further from each other for awesome railworld games. Currently vanilla mapgen spawns too much resource patches, it looks bad and is annoying

Just to illustrate the point...

So I'm playing with "railworld" type settings (map string at end of this post), and I find a good-sized iron deposit outside of my starting area. Time to set up some larger (than my current base) iron production - iron smelting, steel smelting, gears production, along with some train stops to export iron plates, steel plates, and gears, to accept iron ore, a PAX station, a supply station, and a stacker. No problem, right? Wrong. If I build to the north I'm on top of uranium and coal, to the west I'll end up on top of coal, to the south and I'm on top of uranium and oil and coal. To the east - well that's where the iron deposit is (and then my main NS line -- and that's where it is because I had to carefully place it to avoid major deposits - still cut a stone deposit in half). I end up squeezing something in between all of the deposits, but it's quite cramped -- I end up having to "build small", or at least smaller than I would have liked. Why am I tripping over deposits like this on "railworld" settings? WHY??? I'm *belting* iron plates made at that iron deposit to my copper smelting + green circuits "outpost" (colocated with a major copper deposit) not only because they were so close to each other but because the copper outpost was also so lacking in space that I didn't have room to give it an iron plates import station (or a supply station, so I'm also belting fuel up from the iron outpost's supply station). Later when I made a separate gears outpost I ended up landfilling a bunch of lake just to have enough room to build it.

I've got lots of radars looking for a good place to build - just some nice big open place somewhere, anywhere. I'm not even looking for enough space to build a whole factory in one place, just one good sized outpost. There are none that I can see. I've got a stack of nukes ready to help me expand my controlled territory yet again, but I don't really have much hope of finding such a place.

How hard can it be to add "Super Low" and "Ultra Low" resource frequencies to the game? Do the devs really not see the value in that? Or is there some other catch? They tried it... and their computers blew up? What? I don't get it.

If resources could be at least twice as far apart as they are now on "Very Low" resource frequencies, then there'd at least be room to build. I'd think a proper "railworld" would have them even farther apart than that though - probably 8 times or more farther apart. (Players with RSO experience could give more informed opinions on what range of spacing provides a good experience.)

One possibly contributing factor: Maybe the game isn't taking resource size into account when implementing resource frequency -- larger resources having the same on-center distance results in less space between resources. (My current game is large/rich resources, expensive recipes, expensive science -- I wanted a reason to actually build big in Factorio, and now that I have such a reason... the game isn't cooperating. I could just landfill an ocean, but that kind of feels wrong, just like building on top of resources does, and neither changes the fact that "railworld" settings are not really railworld settings.)

This can warp landforms in a way that looks a bit like the result of plate tectonics.

The terrain in this image looks good

To me it looks more like a lava lamp than any sort of realistic terrain.

I mean, if they behave just like regular train (scheduled based) then what's the point ?

I believe the point is:
* look cool (be all "steampunky")
* provide a way to keep back biter bases (defense) that isn't overpowered
While it can shoot at individual enemies, I believe it's intended purpose is really enemy bases - to have some way to automatically kill bases that pop up near your walls so you don't have constant attacks that then need manual intervention. There's no "crossing of fingers" necessary when used for that purpose - the enemy bases will still be there the next time the train comes 'round (and you can use the 0.15.x map view feature to then watch them get destroyed).

There could even be some worms so big and strong that you have to leave them alone till late in the game. These super strong worms would protect really big ore patches and you have to build your rail around that in order to get to smaller ore patches that are less protected.

Yes, please. (There are many good ideas on making terrain matter in this thread, though implementing them all would seem far too much for a game so late in development. But "super worms" is something which should be fairly easy to add - just a recoloring and some new stats and done. Maybe have them highly resistant to all damage types except nukes!)

[Frightning]

Some innocuous wildlife other than the biters would also help make things feel a bit better as well

The devs tried putting such things in. The biters kept eating them all.

Regarding map gen, please make when setting resource frequency to very low that it spawns even less patches and further from each other for awesome railworld games. Currently vanilla mapgen spawns too much resource patches, it looks bad and is annoying

Just to illustrate the point...

So I'm playing with "railworld" type settings (map string at end of this post), and I find a good-sized iron deposit outside of my starting area. Time to set up some larger (than my current base) iron production - iron smelting, steel smelting, gears production, along with some train stops to export iron plates, steel plates, and gears, to accept iron ore, a PAX station, a supply station, and a stacker. No problem, right? Wrong. If I build to the north I'm on top of uranium and coal, to the west I'll end up on top of coal, to the south and I'm on top of uranium and oil and coal. To the east - well that's where the iron deposit is (and then my main NS line -- and that's where it is because I had to carefully place it to avoid major deposits - still cut a stone deposit in half). I end up squeezing something in between all of the deposits, but it's quite cramped -- I end up having to "build small", or at least smaller than I would have liked. Why am I tripping over deposits like this on "railworld" settings? WHY??? I'm *belting* iron plates made at that iron deposit to my copper smelting + green circuits "outpost" (colocated with a major copper deposit) not only because they were so close to each other but because the copper outpost was also so lacking in space that I didn't have room to give it an iron plates import station (or a supply station, so I'm also belting fuel up from the iron outpost's supply station). Later when I made a separate gears outpost I ended up landfilling a bunch of lake just to have enough room to build it.

I've got lots of radars looking for a good place to build - just some nice big open place somewhere, anywhere. I'm not even looking for enough space to build a whole factory in one place, just one good sized outpost. There are none that I can see. I've got a stack of nukes ready to help me expand my controlled territory yet again, but I don't really have much hope of finding such a place.

How hard can it be to add "Super Low" and "Ultra Low" resource frequencies to the game? Do the devs really not see the value in that? Or is there some other catch? They tried it... and their computers blew up? What? I don't get it.

If resources could be at least twice as far apart as they are now on "Very Low" resource frequencies, then there'd at least be room to build. I'd think a proper "railworld" would have them even farther apart than that though - probably 8 times or more farther apart. (Players with RSO experience could give more informed opinions on what range of spacing provides a good experience.)

One possibly contributing factor: Maybe the game isn't taking resource size into account when implementing resource frequency -- larger resources having the same on-center distance results in less space between resources. (My current game is large/rich resources, expensive recipes, expensive science -- I wanted a reason to actually build big in Factorio, and now that I have such a reason... the game isn't cooperating. I could just landfill an ocean, but that kind of feels wrong, just like building on top of resources does, and neither changes the fact that "railworld" settings are not really railworld settings.)

This can warp landforms in a way that looks a bit like the result of plate tectonics.

The terrain in this image looks good

To me it looks more like a lava lamp than any sort of realistic terrain.

I mean, if they behave just like regular train (scheduled based) then what's the point ?

I believe the point is:
* look cool (be all "steampunky")
* provide a way to keep back biter bases (defense) that isn't overpowered
While it can shoot at individual enemies, I believe it's intended purpose is really enemy bases - to have some way to automatically kill bases that pop up near your walls so you don't have constant attacks that then need manual intervention. There's no "crossing of fingers" necessary when used for that purpose - the enemy bases will still be there the next time the train comes 'round (and you can use the 0.15.x map view feature to then watch them get destroyed).

There could even be some worms so big and strong that you have to leave them alone till late in the game. These super strong worms would protect really big ore patches and you have to build your rail around that in order to get to smaller ore patches that are less protected.

Yes, please. (There are many good ideas on making terrain matter in this thread, though implementing them all would seem far too much for a game so late in development. But "super worms" is something which should be fairly easy to add - just a recoloring and some new stats and done. Maybe have them highly resistant to all damage types except nukes!)

If you're finding that there are too many resource deposits, make sure frequency is set to very low together with size very big. That should give much more room to work with and much bigger and richer resource deposits (especially if you go w/ very high richness too).

[NotABiter]

If you're finding that there are too many resource deposits, make sure frequency is set to very low together with size very big. That should give much more room to work with

*sigh*

As indicated in my post (and in the post I linked, and as you can verify by loading the map string from the linked post into Factorio 0.15.9), I already *AM* using "Very low" frequency for iron, copper, stone and coal (and "Low" for uranium and crude - i.e. exactly the same frequency settings as Factorio's "Rail world" setting). That's the whole point - "Very low" is as low as the map creation screen supports, and it's not *NEARLY* low enough.

In other words (pixels), with iron and coal both set to "Very low", this still happens:

pic

packed.jpg (199.67 KiB) Viewed 9740 times

Does that coal look like "Very low" frequency to you? (The uranium isn't really "Low" frequency either - the amount of territory claimed at this point is only around 10x the shown screen shot, and there's already 9 different uranium deposits in that area - that's not counting a bunch more I can already see in non-controlled radar-scanned areas.)

There's just four tiles between the steel smelting (west end of outpost) and the northern coal deposit, just two tiles between the southern rail and the southern coal deposit (note that the 2-4-0 iron ore unload station only has 1 of the 4 wagons wired up at this point), and not exactly a lot of space between steel smelting and the western coal deposit. (This picture is from before I added PAX and supply stations, which I eventually add between the stacker and the existing stations as that's the only place there is room.)

All of those smelters can run at 100% just from the local iron deposit, so this outpost has zero room for growth (unless you like having some smelters here, some there, some somewhere else, fitting into any nook and cranny you can find and all connected together with a giant patchwork of belt - and that's not so much an outpost at that point but some kind of sprawling base that will likely be very annoyingly in the way when you try to get at the other nearby resources). I would have liked to have started with twice as many iron smelters and would also have liked to have room to expand even beyond that, but no joy.

[Hellatze]

But I hope we can draw railway in the map first before that. (Using train robots)

You can essentially do this using shift-click to draw train tracks. Or is that not what you mean?

If you hold shift when you click on the rail planner arrow, you'll enter a mode where you can place down ghost rail tracks. Unlike the regular rail planner, the maximum length of the rail line is unlimited. So you can enter map view, scroll over to an expansion base, zoom in, and click to place the end of the track. Ghost rails will be laid all the way to it.

From there, using vanilla Factorio, you can drive along the train track using a personal roboport to place rail using construction robots. Or if you have the Fully Automated Rail Layer (FARL mod, then you can instruct it to drive along the track placing rail, which it will do at full speed.

you mean we can draw train tracks using map ?

then who gonna place it ?

i hope train will do it by adding roboport on it.

[Loewchen]

As indicated in my post (and in the post I linked, and as you can verify by loading the map string from the linked post into Factorio 0.15.9), I already *AM* using "Very low" frequency for iron, copper, stone and coal (and "Low" for uranium and crude - i.e. exactly the same frequency settings as Factorio's "Rail world" setting). That's the whole point - "Very low" is as low as the map creation screen supports, and it's not *NEARLY* low enough.

The way resource spawning works, the parameters Frequency and Size each influence both, the actual frequency and the actual size. So when you set the Frequency of an ore to very low but its size to very high the result is a somewhat high frequency, if you use low frequency and small size then the ore does not spawn at all.