Factorio Forums

Sorry for the long post. There are quite a few improvements I'd like to see in the game ideally. Feel free to disagree in replies, I love criticism and hearing other peoples' opinions!

Rails Improvements
2 types of train cars:
-Cargo car: Length of 2, same length as locomotive. Crafted with steel + 10 steel chests, holds 50k resources. Used for transport of materials.
-Turret car: Either length of 2 with 2 turrets or length of 1 with 1 turret. Crafted with steel + turret(s). Used for defense of convoys.

-Locomotive should require fuel of some sort... maybe oil or gas harvested from hidden resources?
-Refueling station for train, or just right click and place like the car
-Material loading/unloading stations. Perhaps use crates of some sort, or pick up chests themselves and place them on the train/on the ground.

Armored Vehicles
-Tank: Very slow (slightly faster than walking speed maybe?), built in turret, lots of health. Maybe use a magnetic accelerator cannon, load with iron sticks as ammo, requires coal or nuclear power to operate. Can run over aliens, spawners, and turrets.
-LAV (Light Armored Vehicle): Requires burnables to operate. Very, very fast like the car, but with more health. No built in weapons, so the only defense is what you have equipped. Can run over creepers, but not buildings. Maybe turn the car into this
-Aquatic vehicle: Fast in water, slow on land. Requires burnables to operate. Other than that, same stats as LAV.

Nuclear Power
-Find radioactive isotopes underground. Process them, and put them in the reactor. This would replace the coal-powered boilers in the late game, when coal is harder to find. Becomes a target for creepers, and when destroyed, has a large blast radius.
-Isotopes could be a hidden resource.
-Possibility of nuclear waste? Remove expired isotopes from the reactor. Place them in a chest for storage. Any living beings near the chest get damaged.

Other items for consideration
-Capacitor: I've noticed that at night, when my solar power system doesn't generate power and my turrets are firing, my entire facility flickers with each shot. It would be nice to have a capacitor to store excess energy that is generated when I'm not getting attacked, so that the lasers don't momentarily drain my power.
-Some kind of weapon to use against rocket turrets. Those things are impossible, man.
-Conveyor sorter/splitter: Using filter inserters to sort items on the conveyer can be unreliable and bulky. Having a 1x1 or even 3x3 item to sort input items would be incredible. It would also be nice to have a conveyor splitter, so that you can split off coal and mineral resources, for instance.

Let me know what you guys think!

Rocket turrets can be defeated with rockets and standard armour -> shoot 2-3 rockets and then run away to heal yourself.
I don't see any real reason why you should be technologically superior to the aliens.

Suggesting train cars, so the trains look like trains is a nice idea

Maybe also allowing combining a conveyor belt with the iron rod...
The product would be able to block off parts of the belt (one, other one, both) and optionally allow items from the blocked side to slide on the other one.
I believe that's the way how IRL conveyor belts manage their cargo position.
I am not a fan of the current way of side-management that is based on strange belt shapes.

That's a good point... My current method is stringing power everywhere and spamming them with laser turrets. It's very crude, but it works.

You mean like the paddles they have that flip the products left or right? That would be a cool idea, but it's not entirely what I was thinking of. You essentially have 3 lanes on the conveyor; With the device I'm suggesting you could filter certain items into the left, right, or center lanes. Items that aren't set for filtering would stay in the same lane. Of course, this might take away from the challenge of setting up your conveyors so that certain items stay in certain lanes...

Nuclear power. Yes... I want that. In fact, I like all of these ideas.

I think the train should be able to run over creepers as well. I mean, have you ever tried to stop a train?

Gephorian wrote: You mean like the paddles they have that flip the products left or right? That would be a cool idea, but it's not entirely what I was thinking of. You essentially have 3 lanes on the conveyor; With the device I'm suggesting you could filter certain items into the left, right, or center lanes. Items that aren't set for filtering would stay in the same lane. Of course, this might take away from the challenge of setting up your conveyors so that certain items stay in certain lanes...

I guess I do. But I think that idea got rejected with "strange belt contraptions are a feature"
Filtering would be indeed too powerful (and possible with a filter insterter and 3 pieces of belt.

one way to filter a lane could be to have 3 filter inserters on each side of a conveyor which place the items onto another conveyor which feeds back onto the first one, it kinda looks like an upside down trident.

Necroing.
Most of this is implemented. Only some points keep:

- Armored train. This is mentioned many times in other suggestions.
- Conveyor sorter/splitter: Dito. I think we need some kind of specialized building for this job, and also enable the player to fill/empty wagons fast.
- Nuclear power: Is more or less clear, that we will become some other types of power generation, see developer proposals and many suggestions about uranium.
- aquatic vehicle: I think, this is already modable. But obviously not needed yet, so this is questionable. I think the right direction goes more to ships, which are automatable.
- (rocket-turrets in 0.3 = worms in 0.11) Well, that should be a thread to the player, I'm sure.

So, as I can make a check at every point I move this to outdated.