Change huge asteroid explosive resistance to 100%

[konage]

So your point is people have railguns that oneshot huge asteroids, but they rely on the 50-250 damage the explosive rockets do to a 5k/10k health target. If this sentence doesn't make sense to you, either think for an hour before responding till it does, or you just have never made a prom ship.

My point is that if your change is pushed onto the game, there will be ships that start failing because their average output damage will be lowered.

And then those players will come and explain to you that you must be someone who never made a half decent prom ship, because to make a good prom ship you have to be at the very edge of failure, and they were, but now someone that had a bad ship design that was not at the edge of failure but actually failing consistently proposed a changed for its own ship.

That's mathematical, your argument is saying "uhhh nooo think of it one hour", that's ridiculous.

The average output damage on huge asteroids from explosives is meaningless unless they manage to kill the asteroids purely with explosive/laser damage. I think you haven't understood the difference between DPS and #hits to kill. DPS works well as an estimate of how good something is when the target requires a lot of hits. The one-shot ability of railguns and the 100000-shot requirement of explosives/lasers, make it so that damage by lasers/explosives is useless unless you meme with nukes or with way too many rockets/lasers and with a ship that goes super slow or something

[mmmPI]

unless you meme with nukes or with way too many rockets/lasers and with a ship that goes super slow or something

Thank you for recognizing that my argument is correct, that some ship design that are perfectly fine right now would break because you want your currently failing ship to work better.

I think you also recognized that popularity was in last resort important.

Didn't adress the other points.

And didn't published your mod.

[konage]

unless you meme with nukes or with way too many rockets/lasers and with a ship that goes super slow or something

Thank you for recognizing that my argument is correct, that some ship design that are perfectly fine right now would break because you want your currently failing ship to work better.

I think you also recognized that popularity was in last resort important.

Didn't adress the other points.

And didn't published your mod.

lol ok debatebro. Now go back to your debate club in school and keep machine gunning arguments. I'm going go try and block you if its possible on this forum

[mmmPI]

lol ok debatebro. Now go back to your debate club in school and keep machine gunning arguments. I'm going go try and block you if its possible on this forum

You can add me as a foe if you prefer ignoring contradiction, that will cause my messages to be invisble to you.

[computeraddict]

If your railguns are failing their targeting because of rocket splash, have you tried moving your rockets back a few tiles?

[konage]

If your railguns are failing their targeting because of rocket splash, have you tried moving your rockets back a few tiles?

no, but my guess is this would only marginally help but then it would probably take damage from other smaller asteroids instead.

Really though, I'm not looking for help how to "fix" my specific ship. If I was I wouldn't be posting in 'Ideas and Suggestions', I'd probably be asking people in a discord server or something... I wouldn't even ask anyone for help with that in the first place if that's all I was interested in cause I can figure it out on my own.

I wanted to bring attention to how the targeting algorithm has "issues" with regards to HP/closest target when it comes to one-shotting cases, such as railguns + huge asteroids. The very spirit of the algorithm was to make it a really good one and it works in most cases. This is one case where it ends up being subpar. Then I recommended an easy fix for it but I wasn't tied to it.
And now that I think about it, maybe another easy but 'hacky' fix that wouldn't need to change the resistance would be that specifically for railguns, they always assume huge asteroids to have 10k health regardless of their actual current health. This would also solve this issue.

[computeraddict]

I wanted to bring attention to how the targeting algorithm has "issues" with regards to HP/closest target when it comes to one-shotting cases, such as railguns + huge asteroids. The very spirit of the algorithm was to make it a really good one and it works in most cases. This is one case where it ends up being subpar. Then I recommended an easy fix for it but I wasn't tied to it.

You call it issues because you've built to the absolute limits of a system that has random inputs. If they changed the targeting algorithm you could build a new setup that only failed in the 0.0001% case and identify some targeting change that would "fix" that edge case.

And now that I think about it, maybe another easy but 'hacky' fix that wouldn't need to change the resistance would be that specifically for railguns, they always assume huge asteroids to have 10k health regardless of their actual current health. This would also solve this issue.

Or just give all turrets closest target priority for consistency

[konage]

I wanted to bring attention to how the targeting algorithm has "issues" with regards to HP/closest target when it comes to one-shotting cases, such as railguns + huge asteroids. The very spirit of the algorithm was to make it a really good one and it works in most cases. This is one case where it ends up being subpar. Then I recommended an easy fix for it but I wasn't tied to it.

You call it issues because you've built to the absolute limits of a system that has random inputs. If they changed the targeting algorithm you could build a new setup that only failed in the 0.0001% case and identify some targeting change that would "fix" that edge case.

And now that I think about it, maybe another easy but 'hacky' fix that wouldn't need to change the resistance would be that specifically for railguns, they always assume huge asteroids to have 10k health regardless of their actual current health. This would also solve this issue.

Or just give all turrets closest target priority for consistency

they already have closest target priority, as long as the turrets consider their damage "not wasted".

as for your first point, and? How does that prove it should/shouldn't change?
anyway ive already argued with the other guy. If you think nothing should change in the game, go ahead.

[computeraddict]

If you think nothing should change in the game, go ahead.

Or just give all turrets closest target priority for consistency

[quineotio]

If you think nothing should change in the game, go ahead.

I think this is the crux of the argument, and the difficult thing in public discourse to understand, and the point of conflict. There's no right or wrong answer - it's a difference in opinion. On one side there are people who think the game's systems should be worked within, and on the other (you) think the system should be changed.

I think both arguments are valid. Sometimes the best course is to change things. Other times it's best to change yourself to conform with the way things are.

I myself have argued for changes to the game, so I know where you're coming from. And I understand your frustration in dealing with people who argue in bad faith, and who refuse to acknowledge your position. Sometimes you just need to ignore these people, because they prove themselves to be unreasonable, and probably they are only responding to you for attention or some misplaced sense that they are "winning", whereas in reality it's not a conflict that should be won, but rather a discussion that should lead to a better understanding - of the game and each other.

On this particular issue I think it's something that can be worked around without making changes. On other issues I think the game would be best served by making changes. I wish we could raise the level of discourse, not just in these forums but in life generally.

So I feel your frustration. But don't let it get the better of you. Engaging with some people will only serve to drag you down to their level. Maybe if these people are ignored when they make bad posts they'll realize why no-one is bothering to engage with them and have some insight into how they treat other people.

[konage]

If you think nothing should change in the game, go ahead.

I think this is the crux of the argument, and the difficult thing in public discourse to understand, and the point of conflict. There's no right or wrong answer - it's a difference in opinion. On one side there are people who think the game's systems should be worked within, and on the other (you) think the system should be changed.

I think both arguments are valid. Sometimes the best course is to change things. Other times it's best to change yourself to conform with the way things are.

I myself have argued for changes to the game, so I know where you're coming from. And I understand your frustration in dealing with people who argue in bad faith, and who refuse to acknowledge your position. Sometimes you just need to ignore these people, because they prove themselves to be unreasonable, and probably they are only responding to you for attention or some misplaced sense that they are "winning", whereas in reality it's not a conflict that should be won, but rather a discussion that should lead to a better understanding - of the game and each other.

On this particular issue I think it's something that can be worked around without making changes. On other issues I think the game would be best served by making changes. I wish we could raise the level of discourse, not just in these forums but in life generally.

So I feel your frustration. But don't let it get the better of you. Engaging with some people will only serve to drag you down to their level. Maybe if these people are ignored when they make bad posts they'll realize why no-one is bothering to engage with them and have some insight into how they treat other people.

I hear ya, the problem is aside from mmmPi's argument (aside from at least what I perceived as bad faith argumentation, cause i still think he has never made a half-decent prom ship based on some of his responses) about not changing the resistance specifically (rather than the targeting algorithm itself) because of meme nuke explosive/laser ships (which to me even if the resistance suggestion went through, I still think its worth over the meme ships, so I think its not a strong enough argument, but it IS an argument in favor of not changing that, so that makes sense), I haven't really heard any objective reasons about why changing this is bad? It just feels like people think its somehow cheating or things shouldn't change if they don't affect the game a lot? The first, I'd agree if I was asking for something like 'make railgun shots be 5 tiles wide so they hit more targets', but I'm talking about a behaviour that feels awful when you actually see it as well as all the other arguments I've previously made. Its just that most people haven't seen it. You watch your railguns and the asteroid slowly closing in and they keep ignoring it, shooting at further away ones. As for the latter, why should all changes be super-impactful? One of my bug reports was a super niche case which probably hadnt happened to anyone yet (I went and did testing to find out that issue was there, it didnt actually occur in my normal playtime), which had to do with spoiling items in stack inserters when inserting in a rocket silo, yet they fixed it.

[mmmPI]

I haven't really heard any objective reasons about why changing this is bad? It just feels like people think its somehow cheating or things shouldn't change if they don't affect the game a lot?

I advised you to publish your mod so more people could test it, and explained that objectively changing the targetting algo to suit your ship may break other people's ship that are designed for the current one and are at the very limit, but still work, and would start to fail because of the change you propose to accomodate the rare but consistent occurences of your ship failing.

It's not only about popularity, i thought it was clear, but also the possibility to test at larger scale to better anticipate the likely negative consequences that will occur.


In some langages there's a saying "you are undressing one person to dress another one".

[quineotio]

bad faith argumentation

The thing that is so frustrating is that initially you think the person you're talking to is just misunderstanding your point, so you go to great effort trying to articulate your argument. And it's only after a while you realize they aren't even trying to understand - they're just looking for some way to nitpick your position and prove that you're wrong.

On one hand it can be clarifying to your own position - it forces you to think through your own arguments. But on other other hand it feels like a waste of time, because the whole point of communicating is to... communicate, and form a mutual understanding. I don't know if people who argue for the sake of arguing understand what they're doing, but they're destroying the town square. You only need to get burned a few times before you give up on even trying, and then the marketplace of ideas becomes more and more dominated by people who only criticize and mock. The further you go down that road the harder it is to get back.

[konage]

bad faith argumentation

The thing that is so frustrating is that initially you think the person you're talking to is just misunderstanding your point, so you go to great effort trying to articulate your argument. And it's only after a while you realize they aren't even trying to understand - they're just looking for some way to nitpick your position and prove that you're wrong.

On one hand it can be clarifying to your own position - it forces you to think through your own arguments. But on other other hand it feels like a waste of time, because the whole point of communicating is to... communicate, and form a mutual understanding. I don't know if people who argue for the sake of arguing understand what they're doing, but they're destroying the town square. You only need to get burned a few times before you give up on even trying, and then the marketplace of ideas becomes more and more dominated by people who only criticize and mock. The further you go down that road the harder it is to get back.

true, also it doesn't help that it seems talking to the developers directly seems to have achieved more in my experience than using the forums which they say we should use

[mmmPI]

Debate bro here, it may be useful to highlight a few points from the rules for the forum and the ideas and suggestions that seem to have been overlooked from this thread ( similar to your local debate club rules ) :

Before posting you should know also the following things:

This board primary goal is to create ideas/suggestions that eventually end in an implementation.
But the second goal of this board is to discuss and become friends. In other words: TO HAVE FUN!
So don't write for the devs, write for the forum members.

What will this suggestion bring for the game-play? What is game-play-value?
That means, there is always a consideration: How much more complexity will a suggestion bring in vs. how much more game-play?
In simpler words: Added game-play vs. added complexity.

Don't tell the HOW. A suggestion is most times not implemented in the way it is described here. They take the suggestion as inspiration. So don't explain how much items should be used for research and how many tiles an entity should be. It has not much relevance, cause you cannot know, when that suggestion might be implement. That is part of balancing! Much, much later. This is about IDEAS.

You finished your first post? If it is good, maybe nobody will say anything. If not, the forum will discuss it. Or the other way around... don't care about it! Keep positive thinking! The forum is quite fair and a controversy discussion is a good sign, that you "might found something interesting".

It appear objective to me that a post titled "Change huge asteroid explosive resistance to 100% " is "not" a good post regarding the fact that it mentions a "how" that remove gameplay value ( the 'meme' ship) instead of refering to the "why", it is how i understand why the discussion sparked a 'controversy', which is a 'good sign' i guess, but you should "keep positive" nonetheless, i guess none of you will become my friend and that's ok, but you seem to get along much better than earlier in agreeing that of you both disagree with me

[ldmccartney]

true, also it doesn't help that it seems talking to the developers directly seems to have achieved more in my experience than using the forums which they say we should use

You likely are gone and will never come back to this. I read this whole exchange and I really feel for you. Great suggestion, well documented, I think your idea makes a ton of sense. I hope you aren't discouraged by the way this went.

[Tertius]

If my ship was getting destroyed all the time and couldn't even survive one roundtrip, I'd agree with you. This specific one had done dozens of runs and survived. It had killed a total of >7 million huge asteroids before one, out of luck, managed to do catastrophic damage. Most likely, if your prom ship ever takes damage, but it only happens rarely, its probably for the same reason.

I see the same: dozen of hours and 20 round trips without any damage, then suddenly one hit with my much smaller prom ship as well, but I was never able to see the reason.
When I switched to the platform one second after the alert, there was no asteroid any more, so it wasn't a huge asteroid. Not a single asteroid nearby, so the defenses aren't overwhelmed in general. The platform reported damage, so it was asteroid damage and not splash/aoe damage from a too near exploding explosive rocket. There was never an autosave near enough to reproduce. No ammo shortage alert or visualization.

I can only guess it was a big asteroid. The platform reported exactly 4000 damage multiple times, a multiple of big asteroid hitpoints.

It became more often (so it was required to take action) after I slightly increased the speed with better quality thrusters.

It stopped happening after I randomized the filters in the rocket turrets, so one rocket turret targets big carbonic first then the others, the one next to it big oxide first then the others, and so on. This way it's avoided all turrets will target the same asteroid, then half of them need to retarget after the asteroid is gone. Instead all turrets have different targets so they will all hit.
I did the same filter mix for every other turret type as well, including railgun, although this ship didn't have an issue with huge asteroids. Unfortunately this kind of filter mix will not improve railgun targeting much because of the small target angle - it's only useful for big overlapping target areas.

From your description my platform damage might have the same reason: damaged near asteroids are neglected in favor of undamaged more far away ones.

So in my opinion, changing asteroid resistance isn't the solution. This isn't a solution, it's a workaround. I assume a better solution is changed targeting: prioritize near asteroids, ignore hitpoints/damage ratio. However I don't know the side effects of this, this needs thorough testing work.

[konage]

true, also it doesn't help that it seems talking to the developers directly seems to have achieved more in my experience than using the forums which they say we should use

You likely are gone and will never come back to this. I read this whole exchange and I really feel for you. Great suggestion, well documented, I think your idea makes a ton of sense. I hope you aren't discouraged by the way this went.

Hey, thanks. I was discouraged from using the forums. But in any case, I made a mod that at least "fixes" the issue of prioritizing lower health asteroids. It does it by directly affecting railguns targeting algorithm, it doesn't affect resistances.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/railgun-t ... mprovement

If the devs also added the ability to blacklist in the targeting priority list (then again that wouldn't technically be a "priority list" anymore), then the railguns would function as I would desire - targeting nearest huge asteroid

[konage]

If my ship was getting destroyed all the time and couldn't even survive one roundtrip, I'd agree with you. This specific one had done dozens of runs and survived. It had killed a total of >7 million huge asteroids before one, out of luck, managed to do catastrophic damage. Most likely, if your prom ship ever takes damage, but it only happens rarely, its probably for the same reason.

I see the same: dozen of hours and 20 round trips without any damage, then suddenly one hit with my much smaller prom ship as well, but I was never able to see the reason.
When I switched to the platform one second after the alert, there was no asteroid any more, so it wasn't a huge asteroid. Not a single asteroid nearby, so the defenses aren't overwhelmed in general. The platform reported damage, so it was asteroid damage and not splash/aoe damage from a too near exploding explosive rocket. There was never an autosave near enough to reproduce. No ammo shortage alert or visualization.

I can only guess it was a big asteroid. The platform reported exactly 4000 damage multiple times, a multiple of big asteroid hitpoints.

It became more often (so it was required to take action) after I slightly increased the speed with better quality thrusters.

It stopped happening after I randomized the filters in the rocket turrets, so one rocket turret targets big carbonic first then the others, the one next to it big oxide first then the others, and so on. This way it's avoided all turrets will target the same asteroid, then half of them need to retarget after the asteroid is gone. Instead all turrets have different targets so they will all hit.
I did the same filter mix for every other turret type as well, including railgun, although this ship didn't have an issue with huge asteroids. Unfortunately this kind of filter mix will not improve railgun targeting much because of the small target angle - it's only useful for big overlapping target areas.

From your description my platform damage might have the same reason: damaged near asteroids are neglected in favor of undamaged more far away ones.

So in my opinion, changing asteroid resistance isn't the solution. This isn't a solution, it's a workaround. I assume a better solution is changed targeting: prioritize near asteroids, ignore hitpoints/damage ratio. However I don't know the side effects of this, this needs thorough testing work.

One thing that definitely affects asteroid RNG, and why sometimes you load a savefile and then you don't see the same thing happening is whether you switched what surface you are looking at. This makes it very difficult to replicate these things if your ship got hit inside of a normal game where you may change surface view multiple times since the last savefile. In the editor where you are likely running the game at x64 speed or whatever, you can verify these more easily, especially if you saved it while the surface view was on the ship itself and in editor mode

As for the reason your ship took damage the common reasons are:

1) Huge asteroid that doesnt get killed - this will destroy the ship almost guaranteed
2) Huge asteroid that gets killed late, then the big asteroids get destroyed by explosive rockets close to the ship, so the splash damage destroys a few buildings

Also one other solution for the railgun problem, if you wanna stay unmodded, but still want a relatively optimal ship, is to place some q1 quality railguns BEHIND your q4/q5 railguns. They will only shoot if an asteroid gets too close. They will kill some of your stuff, but its better than the huge asteroid hitting you. yes, its very cursed

[mmmPI]

I see the same: dozen of hours and 20 round trips without any damage, then suddenly one hit with my much smaller prom ship as well, but I was never able to see the reason.
When I switched to the platform one second after the alert, there was no asteroid any more, so it wasn't a huge asteroid. Not a single asteroid nearby, so the defenses aren't overwhelmed in general. The platform reported damage, so it was asteroid damage and not splash/aoe damage from a too near exploding explosive rocket. There was never an autosave near enough to reproduce. No ammo shortage alert or visualization.

There is a mod for this , it pauses the game as soon as a platform takes damage, so you can investigate : https://mods.factorio.com/mod/freeze-frame

So in my opinion, changing asteroid resistance isn't the solution. This isn't a solution, it's a workaround. I assume a better solution is changed targeting: prioritize near asteroids, ignore hitpoints/damage ratio. However I don't know the side effects of this, this needs thorough testing work.

I agree the whole reasonning is about turret priority, the change of resistance supposedly would be an indirect way to achieve it.

Also one other solution for the railgun problem, if you wanna stay unmodded, but still want a relatively optimal ship, is to place some q1 quality railguns BEHIND your q4/q5 railguns. They will only shoot if an asteroid gets too close. They will kill some of your stuff, but its better than the huge asteroid hitting you. yes, its very cursed

It's hard to believe this is necessary in an optimal ship. It sound like a fail-safe for a situation that doesn't occur if you have enough railguns in the first place. If the defense fails occasionnaly it isn't optimal to me, it is insuffucient.