Friday Facts #257 - NPE/Campaign update

[abregado]

If we add shallow water to Freeplay (which is not as simple as it sounds), then some people might be sad that there is the occasional Biter nest where you cannot use turret creep...

The other reason is that then everyone will ask for aquatic biters *sigh* *grin* *evil laugh*

[rldml]

I have more interest in implementing Deep Water Sites, which cannot overbuild with landfill and you have to build (much more expensive) bridges instead. On the bridges should only railtracks and electricpoles be allowed to build, no assemblers or similar stuff

You have already two different water tiles, so this should be possible (at least as an option)

[rldml]

Now that the satellite is useless, I have a few ideas for its use:

Huh? Did i miss something? The satellite is still needed for white science, as far as i understand the FF257, it is just hidden in another technology now...

edit: But it will be fun, if there are more types of satellite you can send to space. One radar satellite with a huge discovery range as example. The more power a satellite has, tha faster it has to burn out to be replaces or it has be much more expensive...

[T-A-R]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-257

I think the shallow water looks a little bit weird in its current state....

..... With Rocket Control Units being necessary for atomic bombs, it might make sense to have some more control over the rocket. Maybe atomic artillery shells with higher blast radius as a late-game technology? This way you wouldn't need to target almost every single enemy spawner which can be tedious and annoying at times.

I couldn' t agree more on these two points.

The sand should be under the water not on top, In current state its more like you're blueprinting landfill. I like the grass/rocks debris. Nice water transition are hard (and maybe too) expensive for simplicity in (already not ultimate) in mapgenerating. Though the idea of a walkable, undefendable biome is interesting, as long as they can be filled.

Post launch playing clearing biters can become grinding due too lack of biter intelligence. Since that is not main focus of the game, some nuke artillery shells (larger blast radius) would be really welcome as a late game tech since the artillery train was ment to be awsomely overpowered.

Once you search for 200k+ patches it is a hard decision to use manual nukes (walk walk walk) of the artillery train (click click click). The only reasonable vanilla way to reduce your time investment is automate it via a good turret wall creep. By replacing process uniit for control modules nukes are made more expensive and thereby even less attractable. Ablilty to combine nukes with shells could make up the increased price. I think nuke shells will be fun way to use your uranium patches. I just love my artillery train.

The presented science changes seem reasonable because they spread tech better over a game duration. That might be a good choice for different styles of players.

Thanks for another great update!

[Gergely]

If we add shallow water to Freeplay (which is not as simple as it sounds), then some people might be sad that there is the occasional Biter nest where you cannot use turret creep...

Wait...

So turret creep is allowed now?

Also, you can landfill the shallow water tiles and place turrets on them so how would it hurt turret creep?

The other reason is that then everyone will ask for aquatic biters *sigh* *grin* *evil laugh*

That wouldn't be necessarily bad.

[ratchetfreak]

If we add shallow water to Freeplay (which is not as simple as it sounds), then some people might be sad that there is the occasional Biter nest where you cannot use turret creep...

Wait...

So turret creep is allowed now?

Also, you can landfill the shallow water tiles and place turrets on them so how would it hurt turret creep?

The other reason is that then everyone will ask for aquatic biters *sigh* *grin* *evil laugh*

That wouldn't be necessarily bad.

It's never been dissallowed, But the devs did create better alternatives to it, like nukes and artillery

[Gergely]

Wait...

So turret creep is allowed now?

It's never been dissallowed, But the devs did create better alternatives to it, like nukes and artillery

I thought they are planning to add a "deploy time" for the turrets to discourage this play style.

At least they mentioned this more than a year ago.

You are right, things have changed.

[pleegwat]

I have more interest in implementing Deep Water Sites, which cannot overbuild with landfill and you have to build (much more expensive) bridges instead. On the bridges should only railtracks and electricpoles be allowed to build, no assemblers or similar stuff

And belts. And probably rail signals? But no undergrounds, no splitters, and no curves.

[Oktokolo]

If we add shallow water to Freeplay (which is not as simple as it sounds), then some people might be sad that there is the occasional Biter nest where you cannot use turret creep...

It obviously would be an option in the map gen settings like all the other stuff too. Also players could still use landfill, nukes, a tank, or shields to easily kill the bitters.

I thought they are planning to add a "deploy time" for the turrets to discourage this play style.

That would only change the speed of the method - not its feasibility. It would make ommitting the back line and starting right inside enemy bases futil though.

The basic turret creep method applyable by even the slowest player works as follows:
1. Build line of turrets outside aggression zone.
2. Build next line less far away from target but covered by existing line.
3. Remove line farthest away from target.
4. Continue with 2. until target has been destroyed.

This method will always work as long as you can build turrets near biter bases and repair them fast enough so that they don't get killed by the worms before they are in shooting range by a turret.
You don't even need any personal weapon when using this technique.


The devs could give the bitter faction a specialized, ranged attack method wich is superior against immobile targets but bad against anything, that moves. Such an attack method should obviously only be given to immobile bitter units, but it would really make bitter bases much harder early and mid-game (late-game nukes are used anyway - and they do and should just kill everything located in their blast range).

Examples of obvious specialized attacks meeting the criteria upgrading the only stationary defense building currently in the game for the bitter faction:

1. Worms could fire slow-flying and non-homing (why did they ever implemented this anyway? the player has the most advanced machinery on the planet and never gets homing missiles) projectiles wich inflict heavy damage on anything they hit (including own troops so it does not look too gamey). Small worms' projectiles would obviously inflict less damage than that of bigger worms (like it already is today). The change would be to make the projectiles non-homing and inflict more damage (there are mods doing both).

2. Worms could send out underground worms against player-built structures and one-shot them that way. The underground worm would take the place of the destroyed building and would look and act exacly like the next smaller version of the worm that fired it. Small worms would not be able to send worms (so small bases would not become any harder to kill early on). This would be easy to implement by spawning some effect on top of a structure in range and after some time spawn a smaller worm than the attacking one. I don't know of mods implementing this but it should be doable and i might build one myself.

Both methods could be combined. Maybe, worms could only send smaller worms each n minutes and would fire projectiles in between. They probably would also still fire projectiles against mobile targets even if they would be slow-flying and non-homing just in case they get lucky or the player decides to suddenly stop and admire the landscape a bit.

[rldml]

I have more interest in implementing Deep Water Sites, which cannot overbuild with landfill and you have to build (much more expensive) bridges instead. On the bridges should only railtracks and electricpoles be allowed to build, no assemblers or similar stuff

And belts. And probably rail signals? But no undergrounds, no splitters, and no curves.

You got it - only stuff you would expect to be on a typical bridge and and the bridge should of course look like a bridge

[TheRaph]

I have more interest in implementing Deep Water Sites, which cannot overbuild with landfill and you have to build (much more expensive) bridges instead. On the bridges should only railtracks and electricpoles be allowed to build, no assemblers or similar stuff

And belts. And probably rail signals? But no undergrounds, no splitters, and no curves.

You got it - only stuff you would expect to be on a typical bridge and and the bridge should of course look like a bridge

I think there should only be railway bridges. Exactly that. Bridge tiles made of concrete, steel and rail tracks.
Signals placed next to rail bridges should connect to to it.

This would give rail an other benefit, so that in this case it beats up any bot route and any belt.

For electricity, there should be an other way to deliver it over wide distances... Accumulators for instance.
Belts should not go over or under deep water.

[ske]

V453000, you are the person who turns a house into a home. You now have been given a game engine to actually make a game. However this game has some properties that diverge from what the core devs imagined it to be. Some of the axioms that form the base of the philosophy seem to be broken a bit. This has been sugar-coated quit a bit and it's not too easy to dig down. To me the free game seems mostly like a sandbox without clear direction and lacking in actual "game" inside the game. The discussion about shallow water, landfill and cliff explosives are symptoms of this. The bots and blueprints are another big topic you maybe haven't even touched yet. I hope that you find a productive way to handle this. I hope that you are able to make the campaign nice and enjoyable and you will be trusted and enabled to do just this. Some things have to change to accomplish this and it will probably be things that some hold dearly and you will not only get praise but stay true to your vision to make a great campaign!

[meganothing]

I don't see shallow water as anything of a benefit for freeplay. It combines the worst parts of both water and land - biters can walk across it like land, but we cannot build on it as with water. This could be a great way to help guide the player toward an objective in a campaign or tutorial, but I don't see this making freeplay any better.

Mmmh, Factorio is a game that needs limitations for the player to overcome (at least for that part of players who's goal isn't trying to build mega-factories that produce items double as fast as the last one). Building a factory on a map with no obstacles and unlimited space is trivial.

So, yes, any ground tile with limitations has potential. But I think landfill should not work on shallow water (changing the name to swamp would help explain this).

Landfill is a great idea, but it made water into something you have total control over if you have enough stone. In my games I often have to restrict my own use of landfill just so I can't use the easy boring solutions. The game needs an obstacle that is really constricting the player, if he wants such a scenario.

PS: Just thought about it, I could make stone rare, that would also make water into an obstacle again. Still, above idea is a more direct way.

[Oktokolo]

Building a factory on a map with no obstacles and unlimited space is trivial.

Depends on the goal. If you just want to produce something - then yes. If you want to optimize for size, throughput, tileability, rainbowbelt-use, burner-tech-use or whatever else properties you want your factory to exhibit.

So, yes, any ground tile with limitations has potential. But I think landfill should not work on shallow water (changing the name to swamp would help explain this).

I like the new shallow water tiles too. Because they could help with making warfare more tactical or even strategic while keeping the maps looking believable. Chokepoints would not have to always be made from cliffs or land dividing two oceans. We could have fords and swamps too Together with cliffs and oceans they can reduce the common turret wall to carefully placed outposts guarding natural choke points - wich would certainly be much less boring than what we got now.
Map gen still needs a lot of love to fully use even the potential of recently added cliffs and i am not sure we will ever get sense-making natural choke point generation from the devs as they don't prioritize making PvE combat more interesting. But if the tile is available to the modding community, it will surely use it.

Landfill is a great idea, [...]

It is a great idea. It already is limited by the fact that you can't reverse it. You can build a bridge - but then you have to defend it. Depending on your map gen settings that might be super easy to absurdly hard. That you can easily clean a continent to use it for your megafactory blueprint of choice is not a problem but a feature.
It would be pretty annoying to have all that hand-optimized blueprints that you spent weeks in creative mode to craft - just to not beeing able to place them in the real game because of space constraints. Cheap cliff explosives (raw explosives would have done it too) and landfill are a good thing. They give a feeling of control and make blueprints usefull.

[ske]

It is a great idea.

I think it's a bad idea but I can understand why you think it's great. It depends on how you want the game to be. We could argue about if something is good or bad but that wouldn't be productive. We can argue about how we want the game to be and I fear that also isn't productive. In some ways we have a different mindset and we have to acknowledge that. We want different things. I feel that kovarex is thinking similar to you. V453000 sees things differently. A different mindset and/or a different perspective. This is a complicated situation that requires finding an underlying common standpoint and then working things out from that. Arguing on the surface won't help much. We have to go deeper and see the invisible glue that makes a good story great.

[Oktokolo]

This is a complicated situation that requires finding an underlying common standpoint and then working things out from that. Arguing on the surface won't help much. We have to go deeper and see the invisible glue that makes a good story great.

As you do not seem to want to start with this, i try it:
I see Factorio as beeing mostly about building in a pretty sandbox (i ecept this opinion to be mainstream).
The complexity comes from optimizing for specific self-choosen goals (and using mods complicating the production chains). For the building aspect, landscape is pretty much irrelevant but i like eye candy and incorporate nice looking landscape features into my bases early and mid game if i easily can do so.

There is also the combat aspect as a resource sink and to give us something else to do than only building stuff. Having to conquer new resources (space, ore, oil) instead of just taking them also feels somehow like achieving something.
But the bitters also are rather boring after you cleaned your first perimeter. The problem is that all biters are acting the same, all bases are the same and they feel absurdly gamey with their high spawn rates - almost like playing a tower defense game - wich Factorio is not and should not be (i also avoid using laser turrets because they feel too cheaty).
I would expect the mainstream to not want to have more combat and warfare complexity. But i would love it. A lot of Youtubers also tend to play Factorio more like a tower defense (not keeping a clean perimeter, not beeing carefull about pollution cloud coverage, building huge multilayered turret walls just letting bitter waves come). So maybe, seeing it more as a tower defense game is mainstream too.
I like tower defense games in general - but i want more traditional RTS-like warfare in Factorio.

I also feel like research could be a nice additional aspect - but currently it is just a resource sink without any real game play aspect after mid-game. Not sure whether that can be fixed though.

[ske]

It seems that factorio tries to be everything at once but fails on most ends to reach top level in that category. Maybe with one exception: "Teaching automation."

It really is interesting to experiment with all the possibilities it gives you. At least once. And it gives a lot of possibilities. After having it played through a dozen times and having all the blueprints ready it starts to lose its appeal and kind of falls apart. Could that even be intentional?

The biters - like a lot of other things - feel like some gapfilling addition that turned out to be permanent. Introducing major changes at this point even seems out of the question. The mastery of this game is the game engine building. That turned out really really well. It does do a lot of stuff very well and is pretty optimized.

[Oktokolo]

It seems that factorio tries to be everything at once but fails on most ends to reach top level in that category. Maybe with one exception: "Teaching automation."

It does the base builder part better than any other base builder on the market - including the RTS and City-Builder genres. It is as good in that aspect as possible without having a voxel engine (and surprisingly still does it better than all that games that do have a voxel engine).

After having it played through a dozen times and having all the blueprints ready it starts to lose its appeal and kind of falls apart. Could that even be intentional?

You mean like "we make a really good game but nerf ii somehow so that you can only have fun with it for a dozen playthroughs"? Bo, i don't think so. You probably have mastered the game. Try some overhaul mod to refresh your experience and have some new things to learn.
Or try competetive multiplayer - if that is your thing - because that is completely different than singleplayer Factorio.

[Aeternus]

If we add shallow water to Freeplay (which is not as simple as it sounds), then some people might be sad that there is the occasional Biter nest where you cannot use turret creep...

The other reason is that then everyone will ask for aquatic biters *sigh* *grin* *evil laugh*

Why? That biter nest can't exist on the shallows either if no buildings are allowed there. Only minor issue would be getting power into range of the biters, which you need a little landfill and some bigpoles for. Then just drop 20+ turrets using a blueprint onto the edge of said biter base and let your bot drop em faster then the biters can harm em. Hasn't failed me... yet. And if not there's always artillery.

Could you build Rail over these shallows by the way?

[meganothing]

Depends on the goal. If you just want to produce something - then yes. If you want to optimize for size, throughput, tileability, rainbowbelt-use, burner-tech-use or whatever else properties you want your factory to exhibit.

Ah yes, don't know how I could forget.

...

It is a great idea. It already is limited by the fact that you can't reverse it. You can build a bridge - but then you have to defend it. Depending on your map gen settings that might be super easy to absurdly hard. That you can easily clean a continent to use it for your megafactory blueprint of choice is not a problem but a feature.
It would be pretty annoying to have all that hand-optimized blueprints that you spent weeks in creative mode to craft - just to not beeing able to place them in the real game because of space constraints. Cheap cliff explosives (raw explosives would have done it too) and landfill are a good thing. They give a feeling of control and make blueprints usefull.

I think this case will only happen to experienced players who will know to select swamp off in map generation if they want complete control. And swamp generation could be defauit off to make sure it is a conscious decision to use swamp.

Swamp generation should generally fill the land with bigger areas like it already does with other land types. Yes, there are occasional mini-water tiles on maps already and with procedural generation this might not be completely avoidable, but if neccessary a final generation-pass could removes these mini-tiles. Such a cleaning pass should be done anyway as such mini-water tiles are more of a nuisance than a feature.because of their near-invisibility.