Friday Facts #222 - Christmas avalanche

[dgw]

With this suggestion i risk my life because everyone will hate me: Just remove barrels from the game - Since the entry of the fluid waggon there is no need for them (the main problem in earlier versions were the missing ability to transports fluids over long distances)

You're risking your life because barrels are still an A+ solution for throughput over short distances using bots instead of pipes in setups like dense nuclear reactors. They are not useless in vanilla.

[rldml]

With this suggestion i risk my life because everyone will hate me: Just remove barrels from the game - Since the entry of the fluid waggon there is no need for them (the main problem in earlier versions were the missing ability to transports fluids over long distances)

You're risking your life because barrels are still an A+ solution for throughput over short distances using bots instead of pipes in setups like dense nuclear reactors. They are not useless in vanilla.

You will hate me much more: If your nuclear power plant-design only works with barrels, your design is crap . And you deleted the most important part of my suggestion: this will be good content for a mod.

And on the top: Even the splitable fluid waggon isn't useless in vanilla, so that is no argument...

[dgw]

You will hate me much more: If your nuclear power plant-design only works with barrels, your design is crap .

The design I'm talking about isn't mine, so insult it all you like. It works great anyway. /thread-derailment

[rldml]

You will hate me much more: If your nuclear power plant-design only works with barrels, your design is crap .

The design I'm talking about isn't mine, so insult it all you like. It works great anyway. /thread-derailment

qed

[brunzenstein]

I dearly miss the 3 individual tanks in the fluid waggon - to say the least.
There is no sound argument to scrap a working, effective and elegant opportunity - only lame explanations for taking away a nice feature for no good technical reason .
my 2 cents

[stretch611]

I just wanted to add another voice to the opinion already expressed by others: if you want to reduce the fluid wagon capacity, which I'm not too opposed to, it kinda makes sense for the reasons you specified, you should definitely nerf barrels. Otherwise it would be ridiculous: four times more capacity with barrels which logically should be highly inefficient way to store and transport liquids compared to tanks. My suggestion would be 100 liquid per barrel, and barrels only stacking to 5.

I feel the same. Nobody would use fluid waggons just because they look nice. Give them an advantage against the "barrels in a standard waggon".

With this suggestion i risk my life because everyone will hate me: Just remove barrels from the game - Since the entry of the fluid waggon there is no need for them (the main problem in earlier versions were the missing ability to transports fluids over long distances), now they are typical content for a mod.

And a second little suggestion: I can accept, that you remove features of the game because of reason. I believe that a lot of people wouldn't have problems with that, when you add a mod with the removed content. So everyone who wants the feature can still uses them with the help of a mod...

Have nice holidays

I use barrels for a reason in vanilla game... I use them to jump start coal liquefaction.

When I create an outpost in vanilla, I prefer to create fuel for my trains locally if possible. Oil is generally not as common as Coal, and I can use coal liquefaction and convert/process the results to rocket fuel. It is much easier to just bring two barrels of heavy oil with me to jump start the process than it is to actually bring a fluid train.

In real life, both fluid wagons and barrels exist. Tank cars (fluid wagons) are used pretty much every time quantities of liquids are involved. Even milk can be put into tank cars. Tank cars are more efficient. Their is a huge amount of space wasted to air when trying to stack cylindrical barrels in a boxcar compared to filling a tank with liquid. Barrels are essentially used when the quantity of liquid does not justify a tank car.

I agree that fluid wagons should stay in the vanilla game, but so should barrels. Both have their uses. I personally do not see the need to nerf the capacity of fluid wagons, but I will be accepting of it, if needed. However, I do think that barrel capacity or barrel stack size be changed appropriately to make fluid wagons more efficient. As heavy as train cars are, the product they ship is the big factor in weight as well. (I expect even heavily armored train cars in factorio to have more mass in the shipped product than the mass of the train wagon.) It boggles the mind to have more liquid be shipped in barrels, as well as be lighter, then possible with a more efficient fluid wagon.

In regards to changing from 3 separate tanks in a wagon to a single large tank in the wagon. If this is due to the interface issues only, perhaps I have an alternate solution... Allow for two different types of fluid wagons to be built. One that is permanently set to 3 separate tanks, and one that is set permanently to a single tank. Let people assemble the one they want to use in each particular situation.

[daydev]

With this suggestion i risk my life because everyone will hate me: Just remove barrels from the game - Since the entry of the fluid waggon there is no need for them (the main problem in earlier versions were the missing ability to transports fluids over long distances), now they are typical content for a mod.

I always thought barrels where kinda inelegant, and also somewhat annoying to deal with, so before there was vanilla fluid wagon, I used the Rail Tanker mod. So I wouldn't be opposed to removing the barrels entirely, but you can imagine what outrage it would cause if very minor by comparison change to the wagon tank separation caused such hue and cry.

[MaexxDesign]

Thank you for the fantastic work in the last 5 years !
Factorio is the best game of the current decade !

Merry christmas !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWBjl-jPcVM

[Lubricus]

What do you mean with that inserters will compress?
I think all this little things that we can optimize in the Factorio is great and makes the game interesting to play in the long run.
I think belts shouldn't be automatically be compressed but be something you after playing for while see and think - This is not optimal how can I make it better.
For the game it is best if there is several way to optimize that have different advantages and disadvantages and they should be "mechanical" and possible to figure out by looking at the belts and think (This is ideal maybe not possible to do). So I advocate that side-loading and splitters would compress the belts not inserters and underground belts to make it as interesting as possible to squeak out the most of the belt capacity.
On the balance between belts and bots why not make faster belts? It could be an extra tier as in bobs mods or a research to make them faster.
Then I think bots using requester chests that replaces belts should somehow be nerfed and bots for building and fetches stuff for the player should be buffed. So it gets easier to build stuff and at the same time you have to build more intricate belt thingies instead of bot based assembler arrays.
The optimization of the belts is clearly a buff for belts in megabases where it is the UPS that we are trying to optimize the factory against.

[Lemlin]

A cargo wagons currently takes less than a steel chest so if we apply roughly the same logic a possible rebalance would be:

Fluid wagon should be 20K fluid.
Each barrel=100 fluid and stack 5. (20k fluid)
Both wagons should have the same weight.

You would have the same amount of fluid stored in both wagons so the choice of barrels vs fluid wagon would be more of a choice of gameplay design than effiency/throughput.

[ttapada]

The nomination for Steam awards in that category and with those contestants... AMAZING! ( I think I did nominate either Factorio or Civ6 there... Ahahahaha).

Even not winning, thousands of people considering the game so absorbing even when it's only early access... Something you guys should be proud of! Congrats!

And keep it coming! I'm sure lots of us would actually buy dlc from you, unlike some other bigger franchises out there that seem to be unable to put out finished products on the shelves...

Congrats! You guys deserve it!

[sicklag]

.

[RobertTerwilliger]

Probably, buffer chest should also have checkbox "alliw to requesters" - thus player will be able to have many small requesters for individual assemblers around main buffer, granting proper resource delivrry and distribution.

[Meddleman]

It is worth noting that filling an entire Cargo Wagon with 40 sets of 10 barrels is balanced in the sense that you require much more steel to carry that fluid, than you do to carry it with a Fluid Wagon. That steel needs to be mined, smelted, smelted again, and then made into barrels and brought to-and-from filling/emptying stations. There are anscillary costs associated with all of that. Fluid Wagons have much fewer logistical costs to transport fluids.

And while it flies in the face of euclidean-space logic, the player can carry even more barrels than a train can, and with the right modular-armor inserts, can travel nearly as fast as a train. If the devs are to nerf anything because of releastic space constraints, then all the item stack sizes in the game must be looked at, because why does the ability to carry 2.000+ factories around in your pocket make any sense?

[

[meganothing]

I think all this little things that we can optimize in the Factorio is great and makes the game interesting to play in the long run.
I think belts shouldn't be automatically be compressed but be something you after playing for while see and think - This is not optimal how can I make it better.
For the game it is best if there is several way to optimize that have different advantages and disadvantages and they should be "mechanical" and possible to figure out by looking at the belts and think (This is ideal maybe not possible to do).

Excactly. If everything were optimal automatically how could you have fun optimizing? Factorio is about optimizing.

The same applies to wagons and fluids. Less compartments, less capacity, means more trains to shuffle and manage for the same fluid throughput.

And that also means barrels have to stay. If you think of factorio as a heap of optimization puzzles, barrels are one unique puzzle in this heap. Because here you have to organize the return of the empty barrels and make sure that empty barrels don't fill up your pipeline. None of this is rocket science or difficult in any way for experienced players but I have fond memories of constructing different ways to handle barrels in many of my playthroughs.

[Alice3173]

With this suggestion i risk my life because everyone will hate me: Just remove barrels from the game - Since the entry of the fluid waggon there is no need for them (the main problem in earlier versions were the missing ability to transports fluids over long distances), now they are typical content for a mod.

And what about anyone who doesn't make use of trains to begin with? Suddenly they're now forced to use trains whether they want to or not.

[rldml]

With this suggestion i risk my life because everyone will hate me: Just remove barrels from the game - Since the entry of the fluid waggon there is no need for them (the main problem in earlier versions were the missing ability to transports fluids over long distances), now they are typical content for a mod.

And what about anyone who doesn't make use of trains to begin with? Suddenly they're now forced to use trains whether they want to or not.

Don't use trains if you don't want to - you can use pipes, pumps, storage tanks and circuit logics instead of trains to transport fluids.

Of course it would be a pain in the ass. But same goes to transport great amounts of other ressources with belts...

Greetings, Ronny

[mozair]

I'd be so sad if in the end inserters end up compressing a belt by default

at least make it require undergrounds, or splitters, or sideloading... something

having it be slightly more complicated to compress would be a forcing factor towards less boring smelter columns and probably create some variety about how people build those (right now it is already too streamlined and there is a clear optimal way to do it)


in other words what I'm saying it, if you "fix" the belt compression, i'd love for it to require a tiny bit of complexity to achieve it

[mozair]

What do you mean with that inserters will compress?
I think all this little things that we can optimize in the Factorio is great and makes the game interesting to play in the long run.
I think belts shouldn't be automatically be compressed but be something you after playing for while see and think - This is not optimal how can I make it better.
For the game it is best if there is several way to optimize that have different advantages and disadvantages and they should be "mechanical" and possible to figure out by looking at the belts and think (This is ideal maybe not possible to do). So I advocate that side-loading and splitters would compress the belts not inserters and underground belts to make it as interesting as possible to squeak out the most of the belt capacity.
On the balance between belts and bots why not make faster belts? It could be an extra tier as in bobs mods or a research to make them faster.
Then I think bots using requester chests that replaces belts should somehow be nerfed and bots for building and fetches stuff for the player should be buffed. So it gets easier to build stuff and at the same time you have to build more intricate belt thingies instead of bot based assembler arrays.
The optimization of the belts is clearly a buff for belts in megabases where it is the UPS that we are trying to optimize the factory against.

yes! ^ that is perfect : )

[Gully]

If it will be the same type of compression as before 0.16 it will not block.
Nice map. What mod is it?

Good to hear

It is the dangOreus-Mod. Ore is everywhere, mixed Iron/Copper/Stone/Coal. And you can not build anything on ore - you have to dig for extra space. I'm trying with Marathon Deathworld settings, but maybe it is too difficult. No walls or turrets outside your base, no turretcreeping, tons of stone- and coal-excess. I'm writing a story about it in a german gamer forum here: https://www.civforum.de/showthread.php? ... re-is-lava!