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Factorio - Klonan
The previous FFF seems to have caused quite a reaction. We had many discussions in
the office regarding this topic, so this week some of us prepared some detailed
responses.
Then I decided to make the writing more dramatic by making it look as if we plan to
remove bots from the game. My intention was to create an emotional roller-coaster
in order to make the FFF a more interesting read. Combined with the context of the
recent nerfs, some people got very angry very fast. "Remove bots from the game" was
nothing more than a thought experiment, not a proposition. Unfortunately that
didn't work out as intended.
This has taught me some valuable lessons in writing, including that I should not
play with people's emotions, at least not the way I did.
The reactions were very strong, from long analytical posts, to heated but deep
discussions, to personal attacks towards me. Not to mention the 46 forum pages that
make that FFF the one with the most forum replies by far. It's clear that there's a
strong emotional attachment to bots that plays an important role.
But I would like to add that it's our jobs as game developers to make sure that the
most optimal way of play is also the most fun way of play (ref1, ref2). What is
most fun is of course an subjective and extremely complex topic that dives deep
into game design, human psychology and player motivation.
The reasoning behind the why we wanted to do some minor nerfs to bots, was actually
to promote player choice. Many players argued that choice matters and we should
leave bots alone. If choice matters, then the player should be able to chose
between belts and bots. Is this much of a choice if you just look at the numbers
and want to play optimally? Bots are easier to use, offer more throughput, they are
inherently balanced, are way more flexible, easy to expand, and use less UPS. So by
looking at the facts, bots are superior in every way, and they are the only choice
if you want to play optimally.
The reason people will ever chose belts is because they want to go for the fun
option (in their opinion) not the optimal option. The idea was to level this a bit
so players who want to play optimally can choose to play using belts without
feeling like they made the wrong choice. Buffing belts is not something easy to do
any more since we have always done it over the years (fixing belt corners
decompressing the belt, making the distance between items smaller, etc), so we were
looking at bot nerfs.
There will probably be no nerfs coming to bots since it's hard to nerf something
players are so attached to. Seeing your factory produce much less won't be seen
well no matter how good the reasoning behind the change is. It could also be argued
that the reason why bots are fun is because they are overpowered and they offer a
massive progression to your factory, maybe what some people see as game-breaking is
simply game-changing.
In Baldur's gate, you start at level 1 and you are very weak. Almost every monster
is a challenge and a threat to kill you. But as you gain experience and level up,
you get stronger and if you are a wizard, you also get stronger spells. At level
12, you get one of my favourite spells called Death spell. It instantly sucks the
life out of all low/middle level monsters within a certain radius. When acquired,
it gives you feeling of being very powerful, as instead of having to fiddle with
the enemies one by one, you just end the battle instantly. It is one of the things
you look forward when you start the game and gives you great feeling of
improvement.
This is very similar to how bots work. Once you get them, they give you the same 2
similar things. First is the power, as they just provide stronger logistics. The
second is that they free you from having to fiddle with every little logistic
detail and let you think more in the bigger scale. The big difference between Bots
and the Death spell is, that in Baldur's gate, Death spell only works on the
low/middle level monsters, so as you progress through the game, there will be less
and less enemies who are affected by it. It is still useful to clean out the weaker
part of the enemy group, so you don't waste time with the small things, and you can
concentrate on the stronger ones. The game would certainly be very bad, if the
Death spell would be ultimate way to kill anyone anytime, as at the point of
getting it, all the other spells and things would be borderline useless.
You probably understand where am I getting to. Yes, we kind of managed, to make
long distance transport to be more suited for trains, but other than that, bots are
the one solution for everything. With bots, there is no reason to think about other
types of transport (Cable cars or automated vehicles for example), because why
would anyone use it when you have bots? It is kind of fun getting to the bots
setup, and moving to the bot-only factory, but once it is achieved, the continued
play feels very dull for me, because I know that this is it: There are very few
improvements I can do to the system, and extending the factory is just about
plopping more assembler/requester/provider cells without any thought. Also, with
bots in the game, making extensions to Factorio feels useless. For example, the
extension where you would expand to other planets, start there over, and once you
achieve the rocket there, you would combine the production of the two planets
somehow. But if starting on another planet just means playing with robots from the
start, which means plopping a few cells of what you need and making a few mines, I
don't see the point.
The question is, how to approach this problem? As Twinsen said, making belts
stronger would not only be a compromise in some way and it would also reduce the
amount of moving things, which is the proper metric in my eyes. When you see a huge
factory, it is cool, because there are 16 blue iron belts being filled, not because
the output is X per minute.
With worker robot speed research, it approaches the maximum around 19.5k per
minute.
With this in mind, we can safely say, that robots are at least 2 times stronger
then express belts, but in real factories, it is much more as belts need lot of
other parts and are rarely used as ideally as robots would be, so my private guess
would be that robots are currently around 5+ times stronger compared to belts.
The visual solution for the stack belt we intended would be items stacked on top of
each other, which would be really hard to do as many of the item icons would have
to be rethought. Keeping in mind that we have hundreds of item icons, this could be
really dangerous, hard and time consuming to do. It's worth mentioning that with a
stacked belt it would likely be less visually clear if your belt is fully stacked
and compressed.
The coding solution of the stack belt including all of the item stacking in
splitters, miners and side-loading might not be that easy either.
I think there is a bunch of issues that belt throughput increase would address,
like:
The "production numbers" reward for time spent when setting up robots is clearly
bigger than for time spent building belts.
Belts can't really keep up with heavily boosted setups by beacons.
The last belt technology is relatively early in the game, so when you just look at
the tech tree, you immediately know that robots are supposed to be the next step.
The highest producing base possible to build at 60UPS is strictly robot based.
I had a look at various megabases, and I was actually quite surprised how far you
can get with belts if you really try to be efficient. Of course not all of the UPS
is tied to just belts, in fact the usual entity update consumes a greater portion
now, but increasing the belt throughput 3 times seems like it would at least make
belts competitive. However this is pure guesswork from seeing some big bases and
reading their update times, and having some feel from using belts myself. If you
are interested, you can send me your belt megabases that push the game to the
limit, possibly with modded 3 times faster belts and inserters.
Belt buff
We decided that we won't make stronger version of belts for now, but we could still
improve the usability of belts. I tried to make some interesting setups with belts
and sushi setups, but I feel, that the belt filtering with filter inserters is very
clunky when it is supposed to be reliable and have large throughput.
This is why we decided to add a few options to splitter configuration. These might
be perceived overpowered by some, but we believe, that these mainly solve problems
in the later part of the game when belts compete with bots, and when the player
needs more control over the belt logistics.
The splitter additions will come with the next 0.16 release.
The conclusion
The conclusion is, that I strongly believe that bots should have a debuff. They
should still be a big and powerful advancement when they are researched, but they
should work more like the death spell. It should solve the little stuff that isn't
that powerful (in Factorio, it is equal to smaller production). I even believe that
robot-only Factory should be possible and not useless, I just don't believe, that
they should be 5+ times stronger than anything else.
Players would still be able to build robot only factory, belt only factory or
combination of those, but the strongest strategy would be to combine all types of
transport, each for the part where they are the strongest. My suggestion would be
to either completely remove the Worker robot cargo size research, or more likely,
to multiply the charging time several times. For factory transport, both would have
the same effect, but the latter wouldn't hurt personal transportation that much, as
robots would transport all the missing items to player before they would need to be
recharged, and then they would recharge when the player is already supplied and
doing something else.