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PaperclipPerfector
6d ago
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I definitely appreciate your thoughts and maybe it comes of different approaches to the game. One of the neat things about Factorio is you will see two people approach the same task in vastly different ways, just based on what they intuitively came up with. So, let me elaborate my thoughts on some of your points.
I definitely don't agree that space platform is basically free; it sucks up steel like blue circuits suck up copper. Not necessarily in terms of the literal amounts, but in terms of how you go from "I have enough for everything" to "holy shit I have nowhere near enough" as soon as you start producing them. And of course it will take a shit ton of resources to get all that space platform up to orbit. Ice platforms are basically free, but both they (and space platform) are S L O W to produce even with speed modules in the machines. And given that I needed thousands of both, that's a big bottleneck. I estimated that it would take me anywhere from 20h to 40h to finish, and I expected (based on how Aquilo had gone thus far) that up to half of that would be waiting for ice platform to get made (and for concrete to arrive from Nauvis).
I also am not a city block guy (I'm a main bus guy), but I have seen some city block designs in my day and I would not say I saw even one Fulgora island which could fit one. Maybe the islands are theoretically that big if you add up all the square footage, but the thing is that Factorio builds tend to be very rectangular and islands on Fulgora just aren't. You can't exactly put a square shaped city block on an island that is L shaped, after all. Add to that the fact that you're going to need a lot of accumulators for your power needs (I literally half filled one of my biggest islands with them and it still wasn't enough to last between storms) and the islands get cramped fast.
The issue with belts on Gleba isn't how far you can carry things before spoiling (green belts kick bots' asses in that regard anyway), it's the logistics of distribution at the factory. Take for example bioflux. You need three things (jelly, mash and nutrients) at different rates. So you side load a belt with jelly and mash, have a second belt for nutrients, and run them down the side of the row of machines, with filtered splitters switching which belt carries what as you go. The basic setup you might have for coal based smelting. Except sooner or later (it's sooner), spoilage will be on one of the belts. And now your splitters all jam. And then on the output side, you are going to have the splitter which siphons spoilage off the belt jam up sooner or later (again, it's gonna be sooner) and cause the output to jam. Both of these things cause cascading spoilage all the way down the belt until finally everything spoils, it all starts to go through the spoilage filters, and things flow again (for a while). Belts are just plain really hard on Gleba. By contrast, bots never jam. If something spoils in a requester chest, they take it away. If something spoils in the machine, it gets put into an active provider chest and they take it away. Everything flows smoothly at all times, unlike with belts.
Fair enough on stack inserters. I didn't ever make them because I never needed more throughout than a green belt provides, but you're right that they are very powerful. Also I suppose the biolabs (or whatever the research building is called, I can't remember which is the production building and which is the research one) are arguably a Gleba building. And they are very good as well.
As far as enemies go, I don't think I could have any less military and live. Medium stompers (let alone big which I haven't seen) are no joke, and they generally make up half of any attack group (13% spawn chance is a lie as far as I can tell). That takes a fair amount of combined arms fire from Tesla turrets and rocket turrets (with lasers to do damage to the squishier enemies). Even with that my turrets take decent damage from every attack. But really the issue to me is that they just don't feel very different from biters. Spores are just pollution with a different color, so they feel very much like the enemies you're already used to.
I genuinely have no idea how you can do Aquilo with that little space. Like I said it took me literally thousands of tiles to give me space for:
As I evaluated how much space I needed to produce 60 SPM, I figured I needed at least another chunk that size, not to mention the bridges out to fluorine and lithium brine patches. And not to mention rocket silos either! All of which needed to have concrete so it could support heat pipes, but that at least was being produced on Nauvis and I just needed to wait for the ship to bring batches of it (which is a slow trip). Actually building the base on Aquilo isn't that hard once you get the hang of how to leave space for heating pipes to touch everything, but getting the area to build on is torturous. You're just sitting around waiting for resources to build up so that you can actually play the game. If I had kept going I probably would've let the game run overnight just so I didn't have to wait that long for the platform+concrete I needed.
As far as quality goes I agree that it would need some thought put into it. But on the other hand, that's kinda not my problem as a player. They're the game devs, it's on them to figure out how to make it fun and not me. All I know is that quality in its current iteration is kind of a pain to deal with for the reasons I stated. Maybe my suggestion would work and maybe not, but they needed to do something different.
Album that I reference below: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fOO5Lneer9W4UiT9pn9bKf2dvob_rKjN?usp=sharing
(1) On Vulcanus, a space platform foundation literally costs about 1 calcite without any modules.
20 steel + 20 wire = 400 molten iron + 17 molten copper = 1.1 calcite
The build in the album could make my whole post game fleet of 2 freighters and high speed delivery ship, a personal cruiser and 2 legendary asteroid farms every 6 hours. If you want more than that it is tileable up to 8 times with no changes, a minor belt tweak would let you go to 16.
The rocket costs are about .2 calcite and 15 coal per platform delivered to orbit with no productivity on anything. It is a fair bit of processing sure, but not that much. To keep up with the platform build you need 1 lds foundry, 2 em plant for each circuit type and 5 rocket fuel assemblers. Without modules. Or beacons.
(2) The ice platform build generates 0.5 platform per second and takes a bit less than 180 platforms to make, so it takes about 9 minutes to self replicate. After an hour of that you'll already be getting 64 platforms per second and probably have trouble building the platform factory fast enough.
(3) I generated a Fulgora and dropped some 100x100 squares of belts. I think that is what Nailus (a popular factorio streamer) uses but I could be wrong. My train network is 64x64 tiles because I think 100 is way too large. Big square patches aren't incredibly common, but they definitely aren't rare. Fulgora does really force you to use a lot of bots or trains though.
(4) Next is a demo of a Gleba main bus style base. Produces 180spm at 98% freshness and can trivially scale until your mash fills a green belt with stack inserters (about 3600 spm). Obviously needs some more production sections for rocket parts if you don't want to import them. No circuits needed just inserter filters.
I think more could've been done to distinguish them from biters, but there is a a lot of little differences that again aren't very well communicated. Only farms produce spores, and the pentapods give no fucks about anything else you place, so your base can largely co-mingle with them while you heavily defend your farms. Also traditional pollution is free so power and production can be dirty; bring out those steel furnaces and oil refineries. Their expansion parties are always wrigglers and will only move to wetlands so you can wall with very light defenses or landfill them away from your agri towers (a lot of wetlands are entirely surrounded by highlands which don't even need that much landfill to give you free fruit forever with no defenses). Stompers will get lost if they have to travel far enough to reach artillery (strafers too but that is very late game), so artillery outposts need suprisingly little defenses once established. The enemy types are much more varied than the biters/spitters which makes the new turret prioritization much more impactful.
(5) Re Aquilo: I dunno. I guess direct insertion and beacons? I used fission which is probably about the same size as heating towers per watt, but only made like 40MW. If you have a place for things to buffer you can also babysit your other 4 bases or do some victory ship design while you wait for platforms to accumulate.
Re Quality I was more trying to communicate that I think such a system would necessarily be too complex to teach the player in a satisfying way. I agree it is kinda jank, but it also leads to some interesting decisions/math about where in the production chain to upgrade quality, which recipes to use, where to trash materials to simplify logistics and how many machines need to be processing each quality tier. I guess it is a particularly bad fit for main bus style bases because of the explosion of distinct items. Might be why you are feeling it particularly acutely.
Thanks for the pics, I think that they have clarified a couple of things that helped me realize where the difference in our experience is coming from.
I didn't realize you could just have inserters grab off the end of a belt to put into a heating tower like your build is. I figured you would need to split off spoilage so as to not starve the machines along the belt, but forgot that machines which come first on the belt will get served first so you don't need to worry about "what if the heating tower consumes too much".
Your Aquilo build makes a lot of use of modules and beacons, whereas I never plan a build using such. I do the math on how many buildings are needed without any additions, and only then start using modules or beacons to tweak results. That explains the vast difference in how much space we would need for two equivalent science factories.
As far as your points about Vulcanus and Fulgora go, I'll be honest I have never seen a Fulgora island as large as some of those which you were pointing out. Furthermore I build ships on Nauvis, not Vulcanus (cause Vulcanus has asteroids), so I definitely still don't think of ship size as being free. But it's true that if you use Vulcanus for parts the cost calculus changes significantly.
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