Remaking how you get Higher Quality in Factorio

[EricGamer87]

This Post is made with the confirmed Changes to Asteroid Crushers and Foundry's not being able to use Quality Modules in 2.1 in mind.

TL;DR

Make Quality work without a Percentage chance and better ease people into Higher Levels of Quality.

What?

Instead of Quality being a Chance to Rank up a level with even smaller chances to skip levels, have Quality be a White Bar that fills up above the Green Bar when the machine is actively crafting something, similarly to how Productivity's Pink Bar fills up below the Green bar. The higher the percentage of quality in the Quality Modules the faster it fills up.

Unlike Productivity though once the White Bar fills up it is not instantly consumed, instead it is consumed once the Green Bar or the Pink Bar (If Productivity is active as well) fills up and creates the item. When this happens the Quality of the item goes up by 1. The same happens with Recyclers, once the White Bar is Filled up the next time the item is recycled, the Quality of the Parts you get back Go up by 1.

If the Recipe is changed or the item the Recycler is Recycling is changed the Bar will reset so you can't do any shenanigans with upgrading Quality.

Quality cannot Jump in Rank at all, it can only go into the next rank after it.

As well, Quality ranks instead can be introduced a bit later and more linearly than they are now, and make Quality not as fast early on. Uncommon Quality and Tier 1 Quality Modules can be introduced with Space Science Rather than Green Science and the Tier 1 Quality Modules only has 0.5% Quality Attached to it.

You get the Rare Quality and Tier 2 Quality Modules with Electromagnetic Science and researching Tier 1 Quality Modules. The Tier 2 Quality Modules has 1% Quality attached to it.

You get the Epic Quality and the Tier 3 Quality Modules with Electromagnetic, Agriculture Science and Tier 1 and 2 Quality Modules Researched. Keep Tier 3 Quality Modules having a 2.5% Quality attached.

Legendary Quality can stay where it is on the Tech Tree.

Why?

The main reason why I really want these changes is because I think the way Quality is Unlocked and higher quality machines and items are made in General right now is very flawed.

With Quality being a Percentage chance right now it can lead not only lead to bad habits forming like gambling away many resources or reloading a save to get a higher quality item or building you want, but it also means that a lot of getting higher Quality can be dependent on luck. You can get unlucky with the chances and use loads of resources to get only 1 Legendary even with Recyclers or you can get very lucky and spend very little to get multiple Legendary Items, even if the odds are low.
Something in Factorio that Encourages gambling and hoping to get lucky via burning resources or reloading saves is not that Fun.

While Something like Uranium processing does have a Chance to get you what you want, there is tech that completely removes the chance from the Equation and makes Uranium Power, Weapons, and Tech far more fun to get. Quality doesn't have an equivalent to Koverax Enrichment and the Recycler with Quality is still a Chance to upgrade, so while RNG is lesser with the Recycler is still a noticable factor in getting the stuff you want at a good pace.

I want these changes to make Quality far More probabilistic and not rely on luck to get higher quality items, especially earlier on when you don't have Recyclers yet.

I also wanted to change the progression on how you got Higher Quality Modules and Higher Quality as well as how Strong the Tier 1 and 2 Quality Modules were because I want people to be eased more into Quality, so they Don't have to worry about trying to get the Rare stuff earlier on with them only being able to get Uncommon stuff until they get Electromagnetic Science and therefor the Recycler.

Making the Other Quality Modules other than Tier 3 Weaker as well is an attempt by me to make the Tier 3 Quality Module feel more Important as the Tier 3 Module currently is only 0.5% Strong than the Tier 2 one, so people may not even bother with Tier 3 and just Rank Up Tier 2 in Quality instead.

Weakening the Tier 1 and 2 Modules also makes the Recycler still feel important with the Chance to upgrade being removed entirely. It also makes building Upcyclers far less clunky to build because you don't have to worry about Recyclers Making 5 Different Tiers of items, making it easier to build one.

I want Quality to not be a chance to make something While Keeping how expensive it should be to make high quality buildings and items, making the mechanic overall far more fun than it currently is.

Addendums Based on Feedback:

Quality Tier 1 and 2 will be the same in vanilla (1% and 2% Quality respectivly) But Tier 3 will be buffed to 4% To make up for the random chance up skipping tiers being removed.

[Hurkyl]

I think you're underestimating the value of qual% to an upcycling loop.

If you're using, say, common quality 2 modules to upcycle something you craft in assembler 3's, and common productivity 2 when you can't use quality... your loop has to input roughly 48 sets of common crafting materials to produce a rare output.

But if you're using common quality 3 modules? You only need to input roughly 36 sets of common crafting materials. You pay 25% less for every rare item!

If all the modules involved are rare? You need 25 sets with the qual2's and 19 sets with qual3's.

The reason people use quality qual2's after unlocking qual3's is not because the bonus is negligible. It's because they are are cheaper and are available in large quantities sooner: you can start using rare qual2's before you can expect to have comparable number of uncommon qual3's so they're better to use while bootstrapping. It takes time and resources to get large numbers of rare qual3's

[h.q.droid]

I think the suggestion tackles the right problem: the logistics challenge posted by the random chance isn't fun when applied to everything universally. There are a few flaws though:

- Without the 10% random bump, modules need a universal buff to keep the current rates. Maybe around 2% for tier 1 and 4% for tier 3.
- It will vastly slow down newly-built quality production lines. Without the randomness, you can't scale horizontally for more rolls and must wait for a long time to get your first batch, which is often the only batch you need when bootstrapping.
- It completely removes the randomness-based logistics challenge, which is actually fun when restricted to a few selected recipes.

Right now, the Koravex-enrichment equivalent of quality is 300% productivity LDS casting, ore washing, and to some extent asteroid cycling. They resemble deterministic recipes by requiring almost zero byproduct handling.

[EricGamer87]

I think the suggestion tackles the right problem: the logistics challenge posted by the random chance isn't fun when applied to everything universally. There are a few flaws though:

- Without the 10% random bump, modules need a universal buff to keep the current rates. Maybe around 2% for tier 1 and 4% for tier 3.
- It will vastly slow down newly-built quality production lines. Without the randomness, you can't scale horizontally for more rolls and must wait for a long time to get your first batch, which is often the only batch you need when bootstrapping.
- It completely removes the randomness-based logistics challenge, which is actually fun when restricted to a few selected recipes.

Right now, the Koravex-enrichment equivalent of quality is 300% productivity LDS casting, ore washing, and to some extent asteroid cycling. They resemble deterministic recipes by requiring almost zero byproduct handling.

While yes you can use stuff like Casting LDS And Asteroid Crushers right now the Devs have confirmed that they are going to be removing those ways of getting higher quality stuff in the next Major Update for Factorio, so I made this suggestion with that change in mind.

I do like buffing the tier 2 and 3 modules though, keeping them lower was my attempt to try and discourage people from going SUPER Into Quality early on but with the changes to Quality itself I think that was a bit overkill. I do wanna keep Tier 1 at 0.5% So you wont use it that much early on, since you need the recycler in order to get it tier 2 and 3 getting buffed would be good.

As for Slowing down newly-built production lines, the answer to me for that is simple: Build More. You can just build more to make it go faster, and with the randomness-based logistics being removed it would be way easier to set up something more scalable for quality.

Removing the Randomness logistics was more because its either annoying to do with belts or can be really laggy with Bots because they take up a Large amount of UPS In the game, which is why Megabases try to avoid using Bots most of the time.

[Hurkyl]

I don't really think harshly nerfing pre-recycler quality use is justifed. The motivation is to try and discourage people from playing badly, but:

• I doubt it will actually do much to discourage people from playing badly, it will just make them more frustrated
• You are penalizing all the people who aren't playing badly

As for Slowing down newly-built production lines, the answer to me for that is simple: Build More.

You missed the point of that objection: your suggest change prevents "build more" from doing literally anything to reduce the latency between setting up the quality production line and getting your first products. You have to wait for the white bar to fill, and building more assemblers doesn't do anything to change how long that takes.

You can just build more to make it go faster, and with the randomness-based logistics being removed it would be way easier to set up something more scalable for quality.

I don't understand this.

I can understand the suggested change from probabilistic to deterministic helping people whose situation is something approaching "I want to make one quality item of this type and my world revolves around getting this result", for the sole reason that you eliminate the long tail of the Poisson distribution. I don't understand any other benefit to the player you think your change would achieve and why.

(I guess I'm ignoring "I want to prevent people who want to save scum from doing that" since I'm not even sure that's a worthwhile goal, and severely doubt it's worth harming any other gameplay to achieve that aim)

[EricGamer87]

I don't really think harshly nerfing pre-recycler quality use is justifed. The motivation is to try and discourage people from playing badly, but:

• I doubt it will actually do much to discourage people from playing badly, it will just make them more frustrated
• You are penalizing all the people who aren't playing badly

As for Slowing down newly-built production lines, the answer to me for that is simple: Build More.

You missed the point of that objection: your suggest change prevents "build more" from doing literally anything to reduce the latency between setting up the quality production line and getting your first products. You have to wait for the white bar to fill, and building more assemblers doesn't do anything to change how long that takes.

You can just build more to make it go faster, and with the randomness-based logistics being removed it would be way easier to set up something more scalable for quality.

I don't understand this.

I can understand the suggested change from probabilistic to deterministic helping people whose situation is something approaching "I want to make one quality item of this type and my world revolves around getting this result", for the sole reason that you eliminate the long tail of the Poisson distribution. I don't understand any other benefit to the player you think your change would achieve and why.

(I guess I'm ignoring "I want to prevent people who want to save scum from doing that" since I'm not even sure that's a worthwhile goal, and severely doubt it's worth harming any other gameplay to achieve that aim)

Building More can make the assemblers start filling up their bars faster. The more assemblers you have, the faster the highest tier assembler can get to work and the more it can work. Building More would definitely help make the bar go up faster.

The Tier one Nerf was so that people wouldn't use Quality early on, more as a thing you know exists now but isn't that practical. I Think I did kinda go to hard on that so I think the Tier 1 Nerf should be changed.