Micromanagment anyone?

[masneoquil]

Hello Guys

I don't post too often but do read a lot.
By reading all of this great ideas, I thought of something I would like to do in Factorio.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is already great, but maybe we could get some more advanced management.

I was thinking that all the entities like Assembling Machines, Chemical Plant, etc. (Not furnaces), could have and advanced management when you click on them. Something like Capitalism maybe?
You click, and you get a screen to configure different modules that do different thing with the input material, to get to the final product. Maybe a module to not output unwanted side products.
I know that I'm asking to much, but maybe like a long term DLC?.

Hope no one already suggest this. I look for it but didn't find it.

Keep the good work

Regards,

Matias

[Deadly-Bagel]

There are -no- useless biproducts in vanilla that you would ever want to delete. Oil processing is the only recipe one with multiple outputs that comes to mind and you will want to crack excess heavy and light oil into petroleum so essentially you're getting one output anyway. So I don't see any real use or gameplay benefit this feature would have.

As for the feature itself, I don't see the devs wanting to do this. Factorio may not look it but the amount of processing that goes into it is immense. Think about how many Assemblers you might have running in order to build a rocket. Just look at the Steel for Low Density Structure for the rocket, you need 10,000 steel each of which needs 5 iron so 50,000 iron. Granted, this is done in furnaces, not assemblers, but the requirements for Electronic Circuits are even higher. I think I've got some 500 Assemblers in my current game and that's not even close to being large scale. My point is if you make -any- possibility for tweaking the recipe, every single assembler needs to check for this and that costs performance. The devs have repeated themselves countless times on various things they can't add or change in assemblers and furnaces due to the impact it would have on performance.

You already have Modules to affect the power consumption and speed, and even give extra products per x crafts. Some mods (Bob's Mods for example) expand on this to give you some interesting choices but this is as far as it can really go, and I don't see any reason you'd want to do anything else. If you are using mods you can install Void Chest to delete extra physical items, and Bob's Mods (as well as many other mods) includes a Gas Vent to delete any gasses.

[masneoquil]

Yeah, perhaps I'm asking too much. I can see easily enough how much processing the game already have.
I'm using bob mods and angel mods, and I don't seem to have enough.

[Yoyobuae]

Maybe it could be done as a mod of some kind. The "insides" of the machine would be a purely aesthetic feature only. Once you exit that interface all of it would be removed (only stored in some internal data structure by the mod), and the modifications applied to the entity directly. That way there isn't any CPU performance penalty on the machine entity itself. Some memory is still used to keep the machine internal setup stored, though.

Probably would be a good idea to make extensive use of copy/paste, that way the same setup can be used for multiple machines, but only stored once.

[Deadly-Bagel]

But I would argue what the point is. As I said with mods you can void any output you don't want, only other modifications you might want are higher output per input (Productivity), lower power consumption (Efficiency) or faster throughput (Speed). The only thing you might get out of this is the ability to move input pipes as currently they are fixed, but to go to that level would be an insane level of complexity required to implement it when it would be much easier as a separate interface with a button to move each input/output.

Not to mention once you've got your machine the way you want it you then only have to copy it to all the other machines and you don't need to enter that screen again.

Besides, what is it you would be doing? You'd have an input and an output that you can move around and somewhere in between you have to design the processing of everything to make it efficient. You can replicate this gameplay in the base game with a modular base approach. Have a train bring raw materials to an outpost, have that outpost take those materials and spit out logistic stuff (such as belts and bots), or science, or whatever. You're basically programming giant assemblers, especially when using Bob's Mods.

Heck, you could actually program giant assemblers by installing Factorissimo. Plug in the input, walk inside, "program the insides", walk outside, you've got an "Assembler" that takes raw resources and spits out Basic Electronic Board or something.