Vehicle manufacturing buildings (No vehicles in inventory)

[Rawrlo]

I think the player's ability to build vehicles over-simplifies what should be a more interesting part of the game. It's just too easy to run around with a stack of engines so that you can make a car/tank/train-engine at any time. I realize Factorio isn't about realism, but I think these changes would make vehicle manufacturing more rewarding and interesting.

I think there should be separate car, tank, and train manufacturing buildings. They should require lubricant input in addition to the metal, gears, engines, etc.

After being manufactured, cars and tanks could just roll out in front of the building or alternatively, into a parking lot with a number of spaces that once filled prevent more from being produced.

The train manufacturing buildings would have permanent tracks that you attach to your rail network. Within the train engine manufacturing building you specify a station for new engines to travel to.
Another factory would build cargo train cars. These would need to be picked up by an engine as they're manufactured. They can be given station names so you could have an engine just traveling between the cargo wagon factory and another station to pickup new cargo wagons. Although this requires automatic trains being able to back into a station and maybe some way to automatically detach cargo cars at another station. Maybe the player would just need to do this manually until more train management features are added.

I think this would make vehicles feel more significant. Now, when your car or tank is destroyed you need to run away and travel to a manufacturing facility or somewhere you've stashed a vehicle rather than just spawning a new one from your inventory.

And if a train needs to be modified or built, you now have to detach/attach and maneuver the cargo wagons and engines around on tracks to build your new train rather than just picking them up and placing them from inventory. If you have trains crash into each other, you now have to solve the problem with rails, you can't just pick them up.

Also, when a train is destroyed, I think the debris should obstruct the rails. You should have to clear the rails with a tank or a new kind of bulldozer/recovery train engine.

One last idea: with these changes, a train car for transporting cars and tanks would be a nice addition. You just drive your car or tank onto it and it's ready for transport. (or maybe some other loading method?)

I realize these are significant changes, but I think they would really improve the feel of vehicles.

[ssilk]

I added this to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=23008 Warehouse / Depot / Storage / Stock (and related)

[leoch]

I like the idea (not sure about exact factories, but I like the idea that trains shouldn't be buildable directly by the player and shouldn't be min-able.

In addition, I would love to see a way to load a car or tank onto a special train wagon for transport.

[Gertibrumm]

When I read this then I am thinking about an assembly road with a lot of robot arms reaching out to car chassis to weld on their components.

In factorio I imagine a "car lot" with inserters putting engine parts, plates and steel directly onto an animated car assembling process. Once fully buildt, I can simply hop into the car on go crush biters, the next car will be buildt once I drive away.

But this violates the current use of insertes as item transfer, not sure if inserters are intended as a construction tool too. If you think about it, thats what these arms should actually do, the assembler is just that car lot where all the products are formed. This would make the car item redundant, as it is assembled directly on the ground. That concludes in more room in your pockets for smaller items (Maybe a 100 kg of steel bars )

But then why not have production rails for trains and freighcars (trains really shouldn't ever land in your pockets when talking about realism) and military hangars for tanks
-> special rail for the trains
-> special car lot for the car and tank and the spider-thingy

[MeduSalem]

When I read this then I am thinking about an assembly road with a lot of robot arms reaching out to car chassis to weld on their components.

Funny thing is that Positech is going to do something like that:

http://www.positech.co.uk/productionline/index.html


I'm not advertising it, there's not even an alpha yet, but just saying that someone picked up the general idea for car manufacturing.

[AndreyKl]

I think the player's ability to build vehicles over-simplifies what should be a more interesting part of the game. It's just too easy to run around with a stack of engines so that you can make a car/tank/train-engine at any time. I realize Factorio isn't about realism, but I think these changes would make vehicle manufacturing more rewarding and interesting.

Some kind of vehicle depot/factory would be really nice to have. Making vehicles in inventory is indeed significantly oversimplified and not entirely automatable - you can craft trains in factories, you can/will be able to place trains as blueprints onto ground, but you can't make a factory that creates and places trains on demand.
On down side this means that wagons that lost their train will be much harder to recover and there will be a need to auto-attach wagons in some way and there will have to be a way to assign schedule automatically.

P.S. Sorry for resurrecting. But feels like really nice idea.

[n7m6e7]

I do like the idea of a train manufacturing building. Mostly for the fact that if you can tell it to make a certain train config (i e. <Engine< wagon wagon wagon >Engine>) as well as pre-made stop setups, then you could hook it up to the logistics network, and, say, tell it to auto-build more trains when you're current train network cant handle the amount of mining outposts you've set up.

[ikarikeiji]

I love this whole idea!

Doubt this will make it into vanilla, but even a mod to do this would be fantastic.