Friday Facts #177 - Difficulty settings

[posila]

It also struck me as backwards that killing enemies and destroying their bases would make them stronger...

Those who died were weak individuals, survivors were stronger so they will have strong offsprings ... that is how natural selection works.

[Engimage]

With the new difficulty options introduced what I would like to see is making a big switch for the preset difficulties like Easy/Normal/Hard/Insane/Custom with only Custom letting you use all those sliders while other having hard preset values. This will make it more convinient for the majority of playerbase and will also allow implementing achievements requiring certain difficulties to complete.

[ske]

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[Mendel]

If and when you add complex recipes, please consider making some of them such that they produce not only the product you want but also a byproduct you need to get rid of (kind of like in bob´s mods).

Maybe get ore as a byproduct of making irong gear wheels and sticks?
Maybe get heavy oil as a byproduct of making plastic?

Oh... wait... I know... this must be a winner:

Any water based recipe yields raw fish as a byproduct. maybe then add a recipe where fish can be useful, add salt.

[Asterix]

It also struck me as backwards that killing enemies and destroying their bases would make them stronger...

Those who died were weak individuals, survivors were stronger so they will have strong offsprings ... that is how natural selection works.

That justifies pollution making enemies stronger, yes. Not so much bullets, is all I'm saying

[Rythe]

It also struck me as backwards that killing enemies and destroying their bases would make them stronger...

Those who died were weak individuals, survivors were stronger so they will have strong offsprings ... that is how natural selection works.

It struck me as backwards too, even if I understand what the game mechanic was trying to do there, because that's not how natural selection works.

Assuming the player isn't killed off at some point by the strongest biter around, what's actually happening is that the player is killing off everything in their way - both strong and weak. In that scenario, natural selection would favor the biters that avoid the player completely, because they're the only ones that survive. So the cowards and the geographically distant would be the winners there, not the 'strong'.

What's really going on is the game mechanics are saying, "Well, since you've gotten to the point where you're destroying biter colonies, let's quickly make it both harder and more tedious for you so you experience something vaguely like a challenge while doing it."

Also, yes, one of my pet peeves is the egregious misuse of evolutionary theory to try to explain every silly little thing in sci-fi.

[AssaultRaven]

I feel like 0.15 might be something like this:

New gameplay features: 1200 programmer hours
Troubleshooting those features: 2400 programmer hours
Performance: 1000 programmer hours
Misc. crash and hang bugs: 400 programmer hours
HD textures: 0 programmer hours

Speaker: 25 programmer minutes

You people: "Wtf, why you waste time on speaker "

[Rythe]

PS:

If you want to model biter advancement after evolution, this would be a much better way to do it:

Each biter spawner 'claims' a section of ground around it and tries to fill that area with the biters it spawns, but each spawner has an upper limit of how many biters it can have on the field at a time and sections of ground can only sustain so many biters. Once biter density approaches the cap on the local population, stronger biters begin to eat weaker ones (pretending that the weaker ones wouldn't go pack mentality and gang up on the strong for simplicity...) The spawners would continue to pop out semi-randomized biters, but eventually, only the biggest type of biter would be wandering around the colony, with smaller types prowling around the distant edges of the colony in population spillage zones where the weaker biters are hiding out for their lives.

Depending on the evo factor and if the biters have reached/surpassed their pop cap for an area, biter populations might split off to try and establish a colony somewhere else as a way to relieve population stress. If the group that splits off happens to disintegrate in front of a few turrets, all the better. Higher evo factor would also allow for denser biter colonies.

Pollution would speed up this process by biasing spawners toward producing bigger biters and making biters more aggressive (more prone to eat the weak in their number, along with trying to destroy pollution sources). Possibly slightly increase biter spawn rate too.

This would also give players some incentives to try and clear out very dense biter colonies, at least of the biters if not the spawners. Doing so would give them a lot more time before the next attack wave, and doing so would reduce the size of a population split heading toward their base.

Under this model, destroying a biter spawner shouldn't increase evo factor. It might also be interesting if spawners could level up (more often produce stronger biters, and produce fresh biters faster) depending on how long they've been around, evo factor cap, and how many other spawners surround it.

Either way, the mechanic where spawners rapidly spit out a continuous stream of biters when they're under attack needs to go.

[xng]

Thanks for mentioning time estimates! <3

[Mendel]

Anyone else eagerly waiting to get to see the non-placeholder graphics for nuclear power plants?

[Cabanur]

I wonder if there's any way to favor enemy bases spawning near resource patches. I like playing with really low frequency of patches and now that enemies can also be low frequency even in the late game, I feel like making very few enemy bases but always close to resource patches to make sure expanding your mining operations is a challange, even if minimum distance between enemy bases is really high.

[Saltana]

It also struck me as backwards that killing enemies and destroying their bases would make them stronger...

Those who died were weak individuals, survivors were stronger so they will have strong offsprings ... that is how natural selection works.

In the case of factorio there are no alien survivors when the player destroys a base, and if there were they'd be the weedy aliens that run away, not behemoths. In short that's not how natural selection works; it's selection for traits which make the individual more likely to survive and produce viable offspring (in this case avoiding the player).


The aliens in factorio display a form of stress response to pollution and nest destruction. I can't think of any analogous real world examples but producing more numerous and larger offspring to combat a threat does seem like something an alien hive could do. The real question is why "evolution factor" can't slowly decrease over time

Edit: Just noticed the other responses pointing out 1st paragraph. It's a friendly dog-pile, we swear!

[mattj256]

Considering the amount of settings that exist now, it might be useful to be able to have presets, so you can pick one that is close to what you want, and don;t have to change much. It is then also useful if you could save your settings as a new preset.

Yes I agree. Many games have options like: easy, medium, hard, custom. If you start on medium and make any changes to the advanced settings it automatically changes from "medium" to "custom".

[aober93]

I think the advanced options could use at least a default button. That is if you play with the many sliders long enough.

An easy, normal, hard "preset" button would also be great. If only its purpose is to show players if lowering or raising a setting is making the game harder or easier.

[Avezo]

I absolutely dislike that difficulty thing. For a reason I barely played with complicated mods... Why not leave that 'neccesary short session' thing to mods aswell? Playing on an even field with people both better and worse than me made me feel happy in this game, now you are pretty much segregating us all into 'betters'and 'worsers'...

Just leave vanilla a single difficulty, harder or easier, be it SINGULAR!!!

[Zeblote]

I absolutely dislike that difficulty thing. For a reason I barely played with complicated mods... Why not leave that 'neccesary short session' thing to mods aswell? Playing on an even field with people both better and worse than me made me feel happy in this game, now you are pretty much segregating us all into 'betters'and 'worsers'...

Just leave vanilla a single difficulty, harder or easier, be it SINGULAR!!!

What? Why?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with people wanting a more fast paced game... or a more challenging one... this isn't competitive. Everyone plays the way he has the most fun.

[Avezo]

I absolutely dislike that difficulty thing. For a reason I barely played with complicated mods... Why not leave that 'neccesary short session' thing to mods aswell? Playing on an even field with people both better and worse than me made me feel happy in this game, now you are pretty much segregating us all into 'betters'and 'worsers'...

Just leave vanilla a single difficulty, harder or easier, be it SINGULAR!!!

What? Why?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with people wanting a more fast paced game... or a more challenging one... this isn't competitive. Everyone plays the way he has the most fun.

All you said is true and right. Through mods. Not through BASELINE game. When they start fragmenting baseline game, shitstorm is about to happen, and they know it very well as they refused to implement quite some mods into vanilla.

[Neemys]

I absolutely dislike that difficulty thing. For a reason I barely played with complicated mods... Why not leave that 'neccesary short session' thing to mods aswell? Playing on an even field with people both better and worse than me made me feel happy in this game, now you are pretty much segregating us all into 'betters'and 'worsers'...

Just leave vanilla a single difficulty, harder or easier, be it SINGULAR!!!

What? Why?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with people wanting a more fast paced game... or a more challenging one... this isn't competitive. Everyone plays the way he has the most fun.

All you said is true and right. Through mods. Not through BASELINE game. When they start fragmenting baseline game, shitstorm is about to happen, and they know it very well as they refused to implement quite some mods into vanilla.

Care to develop what could happen if they "fragment baseline game" ? Because I see this as the good thing. Providing players (customers) with more option to play the game as they see fit would be beneficial for sales ? More choice will bring more people. It's not like the game have a matchmaking that could suffer from a multiplication of game options. Leaving that to mod could be a problem, what happen if the mod author don't update ? Player need to wait for someone else to update ?

It will even benefit for the modding community, I think that all choices made during world creation will be available to mod (like actual world creation choice are, devs really care about modding here), so mod will be able to modify a bit of their gameplay to suit player more as they will know better what the player want.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Thanks for posting a time estimation, Factorio Team! I'm not even slightly unhappy that it'll take longer, rather I'm happy that you're talking to us about it! Take the time you need, and keep us in the loop!

[DaemosDaen]

All I can say about this is "about time"