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Modules in general were a bad idea and if the goal is less UPS the answer is more advanced machines with faster craft speeds. Productivity just breaks the game entirely unless you specifically restrict it to places where it doesn't. It's a super boring mechanic because there is an explicit correct answer and there is next to no benefit to not spamming modules everywhere.
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Dec 12, 2022 20:06
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power crystals posted:Modules in general were a bad idea and if the goal is less UPS the answer is more advanced machines with faster craft speeds. Productivity just breaks the game entirely unless you specifically restrict it to places where it doesn't. It's a super boring mechanic because there is an explicit correct answer and there is next to no benefit to not spamming modules everywhere. The cool thing is that it's completely up to the player and you can just play without them!
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Dec 12, 2022 21:05
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Efficiency modules are also game-breaking but for a different reason: it makes pollution virtually non-existent if you care about going green! I am one with nature: I burn and refine the blood of empires next to a lovely forest
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Dec 13, 2022 00:06
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I am a big fan of schall scaling mods as a way to deal with ups issues. Just make a series of bigger machines that each do 4x the previous size (cost, physical footprint, input/output etc) and you can have way fewer of them in total. I barely ever get that far, but I think they're great anyway.
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Dec 13, 2022 02:13
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gently caress it, maybe I will just use 300 asemblers per science pack.
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Dec 13, 2022 02:51
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The Locator posted:The cool thing is that it's completely up to the player and you can just play without them! The player doesn't really have any choice. It might look silly making a blue belt full of green circuits with a handful of machines surrounded by dozens of beacons, but the alternative is limited by raw system performance.
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Dec 13, 2022 03:45
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I mean, they do. For a normal playthrough, even a playthrough where you're going for some space science, you don't need beacons at all to maintain 60ups even on a pretty weak machine, the game is fabulously optimized. Only once you start getting around 500SPM or higher do you need any, probably closer to 1k spm on most machines.
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Dec 13, 2022 08:09
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nrook posted:It’s not that unpopular. One of the big mods (Space Exploration, iirc?) reworks beacons for basically this reason: the author finds them ugly and boring. Yes, it's that one. Any building can only be affected by up to 1 beacon. It does add +9 modules though.
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Dec 13, 2022 17:30
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Taffer posted:I mean, they do. For a normal playthrough, even a playthrough where you're going for some space science, you don't need beacons at all to maintain 60ups even on a pretty weak machine, the game is fabulously optimized. Only once you start getting around 500SPM or higher do you need any, probably closer to 1k spm on most machines. This. I've done 1k spm in vanilla without beacons in my early days of the game and my UPS barely dipped at all. Maybe into the 50's in some views.
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Dec 13, 2022 20:18
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There's also Factorio Extended (Plus) for 2 extra tiers of machines and belts. I can appreciate people disliking beacons for aesthetics but they do serve a very good purpose for stupid large bases (5K+) and 12 beacon setups have their own belt routing challenges to work within the confines. This is 21.6K/min (8 blue belts) vanilla Production science....can you imagine this with no beacons? for example, it would need about 420 belts of iron plate w/o beacons but about 220 with beacons.  FPS/UPS is low because of infinizoom mod. (I just can't see the whole dang thing with stock zoom levels) it runs just fine on my old laptop at regular zoom levels.
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Dec 13, 2022 21:49
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SpaceX reworking beacons such that you can only hit one machine with one beacon, but they individually hold a lot more modules, is one of the stylistic choices I can unreservedly get behind. Of course, nixing Productivity and there being no pollution on a space platform just shifts "productivity internal, speed in beacons" to "just wanna go fast!" so it really is just a style and aesthetic change which doesn't add meaningful choice.
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Dec 13, 2022 22:04
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It's pretty hard to define "normal" factorio. Like, beating the game not only doesn't require beacons but it'll be done long before you ever get to the point where you'd really use them. My mostly vanilla (Honk and some QoL mods) runs look quaint compared to the monstrosities that get posted in here, but I'm sure to someone my just-getting-started megabase from my last game looks insane.
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Dec 13, 2022 22:21
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Majere posted:This is 21.6K/min (8 blue belts) vanilla Production science....can you imagine this with no beacons? for example, it would need about 420 belts of iron plate w/o beacons but about 220 with beacons. You can't put productivity modules in beacons, so adding beacons doesn't improve the ratio of input to output belts. It'd just be, you know, absolutely enormous without beacons.
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Dec 14, 2022 01:03
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Decided to inflict some pain on myself and start a Angel/Bob funthrough and do it blind because apparently I hate myself. Getting some nice spaghetti layouts 15 or so hours in. About every 5 minutes I say, what do I need to do next and then it's just a bunch of cursing as I see what I need to build, then what I need to build that, then what I need to build that, etc. Makes me long for the simpler times of K2
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Dec 21, 2022 05:16
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diremonk posted:Decided to inflict some pain on myself and start a Angel/Bob funthrough and do it blind because apparently I hate myself. Getting some nice spaghetti layouts 15 or so hours in. About every 5 minutes I say, what do I need to do next and then it's just a bunch of cursing as I see what I need to build, then what I need to build that, then what I need to build that, etc. Makes me long for the simpler times of K2 I assume from what I've heard of these mods that what you've created here is in support of one of the 5 components required to automate yellow conveyers.
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Dec 21, 2022 07:31
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Nah, I had those automated in the middle of that mess. Spent an hour today and finally automated yellow inserters, belts, undergrounds, splitters, and miniloaders. I'm kind of glad I didn't jump into also using Py with this runthrough. That might break my brain. I do have a question, is there a mod or something that gives an idea on when to upgrade the smelting lines? I'm currently using the blast furnace - induction furnace - casting machine and it works but is there a better way right now? My iron lines are getting eaten up by the yellow factories and I've rather rip it all out now than wait.
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Dec 21, 2022 23:41
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diremonk posted:Nah, I had those automated in the middle of that mess. Spent an hour today and finally automated yellow inserters, belts, undergrounds, splitters, and miniloaders. I'm kind of glad I didn't jump into also using Py with this runthrough. That might break my brain. Any new smelting/casting tech you unlock in Angelbob's will be a straight upgrade to previous techs, but at the cost of extra complexity. New ingredients, more machines, more steps, that sort of thing. Blast Furnaces and Induction Furnaces will stick around for quite a while, though. From where you are now, there's three general ways in which the metal production process upgrades in Angelbobs:
You have to unlock each method separately for each metal type, so you'll have to look at the tech tree to see what you have available at the moment. These techs aren't really hiding, they're all on the standard smelting/casting line, so it shouldn't be hard to find them.
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Dec 22, 2022 00:44
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diremonk posted:I do have a question, is there a mod or something that gives an idea on when to upgrade the smelting lines? I'm currently using the blast furnace - induction furnace - casting machine and it works but is there a better way right now? My iron lines are getting eaten up by the yellow factories and I've rather rip it all out now than wait. Are you using Factory Planner or Helmod? Either one will let you math out a whole production chain with a few clicks. It'll tell you electricity usage, raw material requirements, and so on, then you can compare different processes including ones you haven't unlocked yet.
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Dec 22, 2022 03:43
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Mr. Peepers posted:Are you using Factory Planner or Helmod? Either one will let you math out a whole production chain with a few clicks. It'll tell you electricity usage, raw material requirements, and so on, then you can compare different processes including ones you haven't unlocked yet. Helmod is a godsend for AngelBob, but also quite complex itself, and not great at the probabilistic processes like puffers/biters and the nuclear stuff. Or I've never figured out how to make it use those recipies correctly (Very likely).
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Dec 22, 2022 10:51
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Also don't upgrade your smelting just because you can. It's often better to keep using what you have until it's starting to cause throughout issues. You might unlock another option before you even need to upgrade and that time van be better spent on building new stuff. If it's causing issues now then by all means upgrade, just don't feel like you have to switch the moment you get some sleep need process
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Dec 22, 2022 14:06
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Christmas surprise! Industrial Revolution 3 is out!
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Dec 25, 2022 17:28
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power crystals posted:Modules in general were a bad idea and if the goal is less UPS the answer is more advanced machines with faster craft speeds. Productivity just breaks the game entirely unless you specifically restrict it to places where it doesn't. It's a super boring mechanic because there is an explicit correct answer and there is next to no benefit to not spamming modules everywhere. What constitutes "breaking the game" in your mind? I'm genuinely curious. (e: oops that was an old post!) One of the main draws of productivity modules to me is that they ultimately mean I can spend less time plopping miner blueprints everywhere, which is something I'd consider a boring mechanic. I'd venture many (most?) Factorio players are mainly interested in doing cool builds and/or big numbers, and not so much with quote-unquote "game balance". There is a portion of the player base though who is really obsessed with that sort of thing; for example the Space Exploration author is definitely one of them (productivity modules banned entirely in space, absolutely cannot stand even the thought of people modding teleportation in, etc etc). Back in the day when Twinsen somewhat jokingly proposed to remove logistics bots from the game (another "balance" thing), someone wrote a long and thoughtful response about what motivates the different types of Factorio players, and I've always found it interesting. I'm playing K2SE right now and while it's a lot of content and fun most of the time, there's a lot of very annoying design decisions that I think goes against some of the main principles that makes Factorio so enjoyable to me. To me it's a creative game first and foremost; I'm not playing it to be challenged. I used to run peaceful mode most of my games, for example. The SE author however absolutely hates the idea of things being too little effort, and so they try to add friction to everything in really stupid ways that mainly turn out to be obnoxious - I'm talking things like robot attrition (which is active even on Nauvis), alien biomes making your walking speed complete rear end everywhere, meteors randomly destroying parts of your base, rockets randomly exploding, everything producing annoying byproducts you're explicitly encouraged to turn into landfill, etc etc. It gets really tedious, and DoshDoshington really nailed it when he said "in Space Exploration, fun is optional and very inefficient". TheFluff fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 00:12
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My main complaint about beacons is they tend to limit your options. If you have productivity modules and beacons, and you’re making something, you’re going to want to stuff the machine making the thing full of productivity modules, then put lots of beacons around it. In my experience, this leads to all my factory segments looking the same: line of machines, line of beacons on each side of it, use lots of splitters and underground belts to get the ingredients to the machine. There are exceptions, but generally the sorts of direct insertion or otherwise unconventional builds that made Factorio interesting to me were simply less practical than this, and let fewer beacons see the machines with the modules in them. As such, I found it became less rewarding to design new factory sections once I was using beacons everywhere.
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Dec 31, 2022 04:44
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Yeah I enjoyed K2 but have found most other mod packs to be too tedious. Industrial Revolution just has too many parts to make anything. Nullius has a billion liquids and gasses which can be a pain to deal with the waste, made more frustrating by a confusing flow mechanic (the upside is no biters). I like the main concept of SE but not all the frustrating anti-QoL crap the author demands. I'm pretty sure AngelBobs is going to be overly complicated (for my brain) as well. Oh well!
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Dec 31, 2022 04:45
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It's been a good while since I played last, and I had to think long and hard about how to make a smelting array. It's almost like being a newb again, which is great since I'll get to experience it all again.
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Dec 31, 2022 04:49
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TheFluff posted:What constitutes "breaking the game" in your mind? I'm genuinely curious. (e: oops that was an old post!) In the literal sense that if you allow productivity on anything you can wind up with infinite energy type reactions, at least with mods (there's probably one of these in the base game somewhere). Like if you can do 1x Item X -> 2x Item Y and vice versa, which isn't uncommon in larger mod sets, what happens when both recipes are 110% efficient? It's possible to fix this by just restricting what recipes can have productivity used on them of course, but it's still something you have to watch out for.
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Dec 31, 2022 05:03
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nrook posted:My main complaint about beacons is they tend to limit your options. If you have productivity modules and beacons, and you’re making something, you’re going to want to stuff the machine making the thing full of productivity modules, then put lots of beacons around it. In my experience, this leads to all my factory segments looking the same: line of machines, line of beacons on each side of it, use lots of splitters and underground belts to get the ingredients to the machine. I had a lot of fun designing a 2.7k SPM belt driven module base. Figuring out the belt routing became the interesting part. Fortunately if beacons aren’t your jam you can totally ignore them.
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Dec 31, 2022 05:34
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Surrounding assemblers with beacons is no less repetitive than surrounding massive arrays of assemblers with belts and inserters. It's just a different sort of repeating pattern.
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Dec 31, 2022 08:16
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Well, that was a nice surprise. The new version of Bobs changed a bunch of recipes and now I get to redo about half of my metal production lines to deal with the changes. On one hand its annoying as hell, but on the other more spaghetti to deal with. For those that care it looks like nickel and steel have been changed, didn't look too closely at the others.
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Jan 3, 2023 03:48
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New mod idea: recipes are randomised at the beginning of every play session using RNG that triggers on loading a save Someone would play it.
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Jan 3, 2023 04:33
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Breetai posted:New mod idea: recipes are randomised at the beginning of every play session using RNG that triggers on loading a save Finally, sushi-bus will have its chance to shine
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Jan 3, 2023 15:56
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Breetai posted:New mod idea: recipes are randomised at the beginning of every play session using RNG that triggers on loading a save https://mods.factorio.com/mod/zKenirasRandomRecipes I think this is per save but might be able to update it to per load?
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Jan 3, 2023 17:13
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I've been enjoying SE a lot. Some might say I'm horribly addicted. So far, it feels like exactly how I want Factorio to be. The engineer arrives in a spaceship and wins with one; it feels like space is a natural extension for the game. I haven't traveled far from Nauvis yet though. Just into orbit and not much else. I like that stone gets a lot more use. Things feel a bit more balanced. I think playing with a friend helps a lot. Bot attrition is a bit silly, but also not that bad so far. It's definitely taking forever to do anything though. Shadow0 fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Jan 3, 2023 |
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Jan 3, 2023 23:14
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there's definitely an increasing cost to scale, and it bogs things down a bit. feeling that again with
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Jan 3, 2023 23:24
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The reddit monthly map is bob/angel's so I guess I'm gonna try it. I bounced off the petrochem stuff the last time I treid it, but that was a couple of years ago. I'm hoping since I started using Advanced Fluid Handling it will help to streamline the absolute clusterfuck of pipes that I remember. Not sure if I should go straight to rails and get LTN pumping or spend more time in my starter area and set up an early bus. I'll probably want cliff explosives, too, so I can use my chunk aligned rails. Just not really comfortable with finding the sweet spot of small enough that I don't get overwhelmed, but big enough that I'm not painting myself in to a corner.
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Jan 4, 2023 01:25
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MerrMan posted:The reddit monthly map is bob/angel's so I guess I'm gonna try it. I bounced off the petrochem stuff the last time I treid it, but that was a couple of years ago. I'm hoping since I started using Advanced Fluid Handling it will help to streamline the absolute clusterfuck of pipes that I remember. You can try doing both - start out building in your starter area, and put train stops at the end of your buses so any excess production goes into the rail network. If something doesn't fit well in your bus-based starter area for one reason or another, build it off to the side and supply it by rail instead. Sooner or later, your starting area's resources will run out anyway, and then you'll need to have enough of a rail network to ship in stuff from more distant ore patches. I've done something similar and it's a pretty natural progression. 80 hours in and my starting area is still home to a lot of my small-scale production. Most of my heavy-duty smelting and crafting is done at dedicated production areas supplied by rail, but the original buses are still an extremely convenient place to just toss together production for something I don't need in large amounts yet.
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Jan 4, 2023 08:05
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Have some seablock screenshots because I'm a masochist playing it on marathon with expert recipes. Note: This is a fraction of the total infrastructure pieces needed. The buildings are mostly accurate though.  The goal here was to be able to run 2 sorters with 100% uptime. Ignore the electrolyzers up top as that's part of the old t1 system  Running the fast dirtwater electrolysis recipe on the new electrolyzer block. But of course power was also needed which meant a whole boatload of algae  But hey at least I now have a power capacity of 139 MW  Current entire base uses ~60MW so the system is heavily in the net positive as self-contained unit.
Rynoto fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 23:07
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So I got a mod request. I was thinking of doing a deathworld/rampant modded game, but not *too* modded. However, I don't like the idea of having to rush flamethrowers and use them exclusively. My solution would be to have Gun and Laser turrets have a tiny AOE on impact-- with Rampant the bugs are coming in the thousands, and any weapon that kills one-at-a-time just isn't going to do it. I also don't like relying super hard on grenades but I think I just have to deal with that one. I imagine with gun turrets it's a 'bullet spread'/'recoil' functionality, as chainguns hose down the enemy indiscriminately (though code-wise, just a rapid AOE). Lasers could perhaps leave tiny-tiny flame trails as they fire. The AOEs would be just enough to catch clumps of Medium biters that are shoulder-to-shoulder, but when firing on Big biters they're generally too far apart from each other. Friendly fire is a plus! I don't know if we have a modder still reading the thread (I've been absent for quite a while now) but if these things are possible I would be immensely appreciative. I would not like a giant combat-overhaul mod for this run, just enough of a tweak so that guns/lasers can play competitively with the flame turret. Evilreaver fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Jan 14, 2023 |
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Jan 14, 2023 21:05
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Use landmines. They're extremely underrated.
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Jan 14, 2023 22:38
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KillHour posted:Use landmines. They're extremely underrated. Yes. Landmines rule. Use bots for self perpetuating minefields, just ensure that the mine stockpile is far enough back that the attack is dead before the bots arrive or they'll dive right in and get eaten up.
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Jan 14, 2023 23:03
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