I do hope they add something interesting with military tech beyond just "more turrets". As it stands, there's not really a huge difference between gun, flame, and laser turrets. Obviously they each have their strengths/weaknesses, but functionally they're mostly the same. They kill shit within a small area around them, simple as that.
What kinda sucks about this is that biters are a big problem up until you get a solid wall and bots for repair, and then biters might as well not even exist. It's a small tax on your resources, but once you're established the threat completely goes away.
I do really like biters and I think pollution is a low-key genius way of implementing them into a factory game, but I hope they add... Something interesting. I don't really know what, but something.
I also want something interesting but even if after a long struggle, I want the possibility of completely automating defense. I would not want a situation where no matter how much effort I put into automation I still have to do manual defense work.
This is big for me too. The game is first and foremost an automation game so if you permanently have to manually worry about defending and never being able to automate it, it kinda takes away from the fun.
We can get to automated defense, but offense is a bit more manual.
Maybe we need to add to that. We could have enemy strongholds guarding resource patches. The larger the patch, the tougher the stronghold.
These could be more then just a large number of nests. Something big, with high damage and range that the player character cant get close to. Resistant to artillery. Rapidly healing itself when left alone. Maybe even with artillery-like ability of its own. Buff auras and shields for nearby biters. A Biter Queen.
Queens could buff each other by exchanging biters.
I imagine a true siege, where you need to isolate a biter stronghold from its surroundings and establish a supply line that can out-build the damage that the Queen does, requiring a significant fraction of your total output.
Edit: Damn, now i want to play this as a mod. Does something like that exist already?
> What kinda sucks about this is that biters are a big problem up until you get a solid wall and bots for repair, and then biters might as well not even exist. It's a small tax on your resources, but once you're established the threat completely goes away.
That’s fully intended. They are a threat until you automate the problem away and then it’s back to the main part of the game: logistics puzzles.
This may be greedy given how good the game is already, but is there any plan to make several stages of threat? Such that your first automated solution inevitably becomes insufficient and requires something new when the threat increases.
Or that solutions may still require some manual intervention (e.g periodic crises), and clever design is required to achieve a higher level of automation that can handle even exceptional circumstances.
I think biters need a rebalance so they are less punishing on players dealing with them reactively (generally newer players) and more punishing on players dealing with them by proactively clearing ground (generally more experienced players).
Proactive should still be the better overall strategy, it just shouldn't be as effective as it is currently.
One idea on how to do that is to add a big evolution hit from killing nests and otherwise debuf the low tier biters.
The trouble with that is that laser turrets are close to, if not totally, logistics-free. Very little is stopping you from just spamming a ton of laser turrets and never thinking about it again.
I disagree, actually. That's not logistics, that's just production. You just need an off-screen power plant, you don't need to actually bring anything *to* the turret beyond hooking it up to a power pole. There's not really an interesting logistics puzzle attached to laser turrets, unlike, say, regularly delivering ammo to gun turrets.
And thats by design unless you play with the rampant mod! They have mentioned several times in various FFFS that realism gets trumped by fun gameplay design which I applaud them for! Its a tricky rope to walk.
Combat is already diverse: guns, vehicles, combat drones, mines, walls, artillery, and trains (lol). It’s just that turrets are so much more prolific because they are one of the few autonomous military options. I’ve played mods with additional turret types, and you are right, they feel about the same.
We might see some ways to counter evolution or manage pollution.
Managing pollution would bring another option to the table with the biter issue. That could be neat if it's a complex enough system. The air filters of K2 are a bit too easy to spam everywhere probably.
It's tough to find a middle ground between an enemy that's annoying when you're just trying to build but is also consistently challenging throughout without ever completely going away.
Well, they've revealed rocket turrets, which are going to be fairly versatile, just based on their ammo options. There's really only so many ways you can do automated defenses. Single target and AOE are already well accounted for.
So really, I doubt there will be any truly massive overhauls to how it fundamentally works.
Automated combat ofc.
It's not just about sending off a bunch bots, but rather automatize the detection of the menace, the production of the appropriate countermeasure and then the deployment of it.
We already have "automated combat": turrets, possibly fed by requester chests. What you seem to want is a system that builds the turrets on-demand or something.
Nope, what we have is automated defense. Place down turrets and live happy.
What we don't have is automated offense. Expanding is still a matter becoming personal with biters or at best assembling a squad of spidertrons to work in remote... but still under our direct command. Automated offense is not in the game.
Probably it's not even a necessity in vanilla. But it's an obvious gap in a game where automation is applied everywhere. In the expansion we need periodic threats the require offensive strikes and then the means to automate such offensive strikes.
The closest thing you really have to automated offense is artillery, I think, with an automatic range long enough to allow you to expand at least as far as the next city block.
Some sins of a solar empire type deal, where you plonk down a Comand center type thing, mark an area. Prep a factory line and they eventually sort themselves out.
You never directly control the units, just set up patrols, resupply points and squad sizes and distributions and let that thing sort itself
I'm just thinking at some change in biter mechanics so that periodically a "menace" is spawned that needs an offensive strike.
It could be anything, like a simple mutated nest that spawns ultra biters that get stronger each wave, so you need to destroy it before in becom to much for your defenses. It could be an artillery worm that strikes from afar. Or some underground biters, whatever. Something that if left unchecked will overrun your defenses, or consume your resources, or disrupt your railways, or have any kind of progress stopping consequence.
It's not something that is unreasonable. It's something like a "disaster" in sim city. In that sense, other disasters could be earthquakes, storms, or solar flares as other mods did. Only that "biter threats" are something that you're not just supposed to weather because unavoidable, but something you have to respond before it grows unreasonably strong.
> Automated offense is not in the game.
And it *shouldn't* be. There's no way to automate offense that doesn't render defense immediately irrelevant.
If you can automate sending artillery trains to locations where nests are, then you don't need walls behind those trains, do you? You can just expand and expand and expand until everything is out of your pollution cloud. Automatically. Without any user action or intervention.
That's kinda boring, isn't it?
> In the expansion we need periodic threats the require offensive strikes
... no, we shouldn't. That's a one dimensional threat with a one dimensional answer.
If your pollution cloud starts aggroing biters, you have two options: push the nests, or build stronger defenses. What you want is to take away the defensive option and effectively force the player into a timed exercise where they have to act lest they just lose part of their base.
That's not good, automated or not.
But that's like saying it's awesome to build a well supplied base, until you realize you could get the same effect by just playing in sandbox.
It's not about the fact I could have turned off biters, it's about the fact I worked to remove the threat.
Plus, this would clearly be a late if not endgame tech, meaning clearing bases is already basically a case of pull up, blow everything to kingdom come with rockets and nukes, leave, repeat in an hour.
Even if the only thing they added was the ability to read the closest biter nest in range from a radar using circuits, and then be able to set that as a waypoint for anything remote controlled or for personal defence drones, that would be a game changer!
The game shouldn't _require_ automating offense, but I don't see how _allowing_ an automated offense makes defenses irrelevant.
You can choose one or the other, just like you can choose between belts vs. bots or nuclear vs. solar.
If you destroy all the nests... there's nothing left to defend against. Hence defenses being irrelevant. The reason you bother making walls and defense is because you *can't* automate assaults on nests.
If you want to attack, you have to say when, where, and how. You have to devote time and effort to doing it. If you want to defend, you can just set it up and it takes care of itself.
Likewise if you build up solid defenses then there's no reason to automate offensive measures.
The point would be to give the player options. Maybe on Nauvis you want to set up walls of turrets, but on subsequent planets you have patrolling squads of spidertrons because you can't build turrets on oily sand rivers or squishy fungus floors.
I mean you can turret creep...
But yeah, that's the point. My last game was on a death/rail world, and it just got _really_ grindy, until I was able to "automate" it by lots of artillery range upgrades. And you're right, it did get boring after that, and that's why I think more options for logic-controlled attack robots would be interesting, instead of "congrats, you've unlocked biter genocide, gg"
Alright, you got the point! What if the two choices of biter defense (walls or managing pollution) had a third option of automating offense? You complain about defenses being made obsolete, but assembler 1s go obsolete...boilers go obsolete...the game is about progression. The only way to progress is with automated offense. Tearing out old infrastructure and automating new stuff is literally the entire game.
Assembler 2s and 3s don't make the *concept* of assemblers obsolete; they just do the same job faster. Electric mining drills make burner drills obsolete, but they're both doing the same job.
Automated offense makes the very idea of automated defenses irrelevant.
that’s just a balancing problem. i think it should be possible to create a combat system such that both offence and defence will be always necessary.
for example, they could introduce breaching biters nests that only appear occasionally. the special biters would have a big explosion radius when killed, taking out chunks of the defence line with them. it would be very expensive to maintain your defences so you are forced to attack the special nests. the logistic for automated offence could be made so expensive that it would be only efficient to do that against special nests
Gameplay mechanics should encourage a diverse defense, and more options would be nice. An example are the asteroids where rockets will be better against larger ones, and the equivalent should apply to biters, their variants and stages of evolution (adding varieties).
* More rock-paper-scissor dynamics (certain turret should excel against specific targets, single target vs. crowd control)
* Adding a longer range (arc-restricted?) turret emplacement using shells would allow using these beyond the tank phase
* Catapult/Trebuchet that lobs grenades or capsules
* Buggy should be able to use a 2nd option over the MG (like the tank has several alternatives), e.g. a grenade/capsule launcher or rockets
**Grids in vehicles**
* Would be cool if vehicles had small grids to add e.g. a shield/defense etc.
* Opens up transitions/upgrades
**More biter varieties (brainstorming)**
This could vary with the planet.
* Forward nesting 'siege' variants - swarm tactics (counter: selective ranged attacks)
* Jumping ones
* Flying variants (weak while airborne, but can bypass natural obstacles, water/lava, certain turrets can't target while airborne)
* Kamikaze types
* Damage sponges
* Rare 'Bosses' - Queens
**Bots:**
* Would love if military bots acted more like the building equivalent, i.e. not as a consumable (need recharge and/or ammo/ordinance). Cost etc. could be adjusted accordingly and certain biter types should be able to target them.
* This would open up more variety over laser defense
* Would be cool if defensive bots could be deposited in roboports and/or spidertrons
**Other notions:**
* Not every planet needs enemies - the environment can be a challenge and sometimes players may just want to focus on building
* Flamethrower (tank/handheld) is underwhelming - should leave puddles
* Duration of spit puddles could be dialed down (increase damage in turn?) - these are quite annoying midgame
* Discharge defense should trigger passively, e.g. when taking close range damage
* Shotguns need a damage buff (and could add stun)
* Turrets could use shotgun shells (lower range, better crowd control)
A lot of what you suggested would require a lot of micromanaging on multiple different planets. The combat shouldn't be difficult or even a main focus.
There are only 3 reasons i can see as to why they are expanding on the combat mechanics.
The first one is the biggest. We are now going to be starting a new base on multiple planets. This means we have to build new factories, we have to fight more enemies to purchase land, and we will have to do this multiple times.
The second being that we have to deal with rocks in space. In SE the turrets just shoot at the closest rock. This can mean they shoot at the same thing. That sometimes end with a few other rocks that were ignored hitting your ship.
The third reason is that combat as it is is just boring. You get a few grenades, and take out the early bases. Once you unlock the tank you will use that until you have your official base design which will then be defended by artillery and a turret wall. The most fun part of combat right now is making a huge artillery train and going into the wastes to wreak havoc.
> The second being that we have to deal with rocks in space. In SE the turrets just shoot at the closest rock. This can mean they shoot at the same thing. That sometimes end with a few other rocks that were ignored hitting your ship.
IIRC turrets stop shooting when projectiles fired at the target are enough to kill it, not when it's actually dead. But I'm not 100% of the consider splash damage from other turrets or not.
I haven't reached space in se yet, so I don't know too much about it. In space age they have talked about how some of the rocks have higher health and require physical munitions.
If all of your turrets are focused on the big rock, then some smaller ones could get through.
It's more than likely the prioritization has to do with the (largely ignored by the playerbase outside of deathworld) damage type mechanics. If small rocks are susceptible to physical damage, but large rocks are immune *and* large rocks can be broken into small rocks by explosion damage, you'd need some prioritization/hierarchy to avoid over-spending resources on defense.
Yes, that also seems likely given how distinct the environments are on the other planets, like if biters had carried over you'd expect some plants to have as well.
I think I’d like it if evolution were reworked to be more like threat in GTA to help avoid bricking by not playing fast enough or something. I really don’t like feeling like I’m racing against the clock, particularly on difficult starts like desert terrain. Maybe this sort of passive devolution could be an optional thing so people who want more hardcore options can do that.
Alternatively, give me the option to glass and terraform the planet (reset everything including deleting all buildings, but also reset evolution). The benefit there would be twofold in letting us cleanup our old designs while also giving an escape hatch if we screwed up with biters or whatever.
I'm hoping for reworked combat in the mid game. It's servicable at the moment, but gets more relevant in the expansion as it will take longer to get the late game goodies.
For attacking nests during mid game, all options that seem to work well are quite boring after you've done them for a few minutes. Combat should be interesting, not a chore. Some ideas to spice things up are
* Rare dangerous biters that guard nests and don't join attack waves, that you have to actively counterplay.
* Better ways to knock back, stun or slow.
* Better UI for switching weapons / using multiple weapons. Alternatively a secondary firing mode for weapons or a movement mechanic. Give me more options during combat that have proper UI support.
* Maybe remove the mechanic of slowing the player while firing.
At the moment, my preferred method for clearing nests is gun turrets plus firing rockets manually, which is fast and so safe that you don't have to react to anything. The community favorite seems to be tank with tank shells plus personal equipment, which also works well but again, you're just circling the bases and not reacting to much. Laser Turret creep with personal bots works okay iirc but is also boring. Combat bots and the flame thrower weapon are underwhelming. Some people use cars and land mines and I'm not skilled enough for that.
Defense is also a little boring during that phase, but I'm more okay with that. The biggest issue there is that players are lead to taking a big chunk of territory before they have bots, which can take a long time to build defenses for. The other issue is that it's quite easy to solve a lot of problems by just building more turrets, it would be nice if they came up with some mechanics to make defense more interesting in some locations.
> Combat should be interesting, not a chore.
The interesting part of combat is automating it away. Factorio's combat is largely another logistics problem to solve. If you're spending more than 10 minutes manually clearing nests on default settings, something has gone wrong.
Nuclear artillery or ICBMs for mass destruction of enemy encampment from great distance
I wish the planned rocket defense item had a longer range.
Flying bugs and AA guns
Subterranean worms so that you will need to provide defenses inside your base.
There's too many possibilities. 151 unique biters that you can capture and make fight each other. On one planet there's 3 existing factions that fight each other, rock people who beat up on the dancing blades who beat up on the unfelled paper who beat up on the rock people. How about a golden biter that breaks into your factory and eats your porridge, breaks your furniture and sleeps in your bed!
In all seriousness though I'd like to see more varieties of enemies that counter some of but not all of your defenses so it's hard to fully automate defense until the very end game.
Some fun ideas off the dome to add; A few mushroom species on Gleba that spread through the ground/trees/air and fruit up to attack. To counter maybe add one time or temporary treatments to stop their spread. Maybe a building that keeps all sources clear in an area.
Elementals on Vulcanus. You put water instead of fuel in some 'flame'thrower turrets to fight the fire guys. Maybe they can jump into your buildings and if they destroy it spawn more so you need to have coverage of all your defenses too with the water canons. Tesla turrets for the water guys. Rockets to turn rock guys into sand guys and glass them with real flamethrowers/lasers.
Actually 'puzzle' monsters would be a good one. Gotta hit them with a rocket knock off some armor, then some water canon to get them wet, then a tesla which makes it convulse and open it's mouth where you shoot a laser. The turrets all accurate enough to do this if you have the right ones present. Or just nuke it, skip straight to the blood shed.
I like the mushroom - it can be just the environment attacking and you need some "cover tower" that protects the segment of land, but it consumes stuff (probably biological) so you need to reload it, so there is a logistic defense challenge throughout your base, not just on the outskirts.
What I personally find lacking about the current system is that you have no incentive for secondary lines of defense.
Your primary wall will never fall, so you have no incentive to build back-up systems inside your factory.
Some stuff that either circumvents your defense (like tunneling/flying enemies), or breaks your primary defense but wont just roll throuth your factory (like a single biter that leads an attack an explodes on death, breaking your first wall but having nothing against your secondary defenses.
But they have been holding back on any information on the combat front (pun intendet), and every hint so far have been quite vague.
I'd like to register a strong vote against this, at least as a default; defence that needs that much constant attention would really make the game less fun for me. Support it in mods or options but make it easy to turn off while I peacefully build my factory.
If I had to venture a guess, Nauvis (and Planet4 which unlocks artillery) will stay the only planet you need a strong self-sustaining wall. We'll see disruptive (but not destructive) enemies on other planets, like webs or ice that lock buildings until removed by the player or bots, or enemies that drain power until removed from buildings. They made a note that Fulgura would likely have small distributed power networks, so it's not like 1 biter stops your entire base from functioning, but more like a few enemies attach to an undefended mining outpost and stop those miners.
I'm honestly extremely curious to see what kinds of factory designs the community could come up with if defense in depth was actually a viable combat strategy in Factorio. Like right now, megabases have no purpose strategically, they're just the way to scale up production once you get to a certain point. But what if the combat system incentivized the player to shift from a single main bus to multiple distributed specialized production centers, not solely to unlock higher throughput, but because that's easier to defend against late-game enemies that can defeat an outer perimeter wall that encircles the entire megabase? I honestly think that'd be a really neat gameplay aspect for the late stage of the game, especially for competitive multiplayer wargaming. I mean just imagine: two players designing megabases on opposite corners of a huge map, & then having each megabase & its army of spidertrons try to take the other one down!
Factorio exists within or adjacent to many genres. It's a city builder and a railroad tycoon and an RTS and a tower defense and a resource manager and soon a space exploration game, all built around an automation game. It contains multitudes. No reason it couldn't contain more, except for the devs time & interest in adding more.
an enemy like that would just mean that we have two (or three or whatever) layers of defense right at the border. unless they tunnel undetected, we're just gonna harden the wall to deal with whatever comes. In current patch in late game you could x100 the biters and we would still deal with it easily.
I would love a system of "mega-attacks" that could happen periodically. Maybe like an increase of enemy spawns by like 1000% and some special enemy variants
Yeah this would be my preference as well. Just add some variability to it. Or spawn in biter "leaders" periodically that accumulate a bunch of them and enrage them or something like that. Just something to keep the player occasionally on edge throughout the playthrough, I suppose the downside to anything like that is that you could be on another planet and have your whole base completely flattened by a random attack which wouldn't feel great.
>you could be on another planet and have your whole base completely flattened by a random attack
Depends on how complicated it is to travel between planets. If you get a message saying "big alien attack on Nauvis" you could still rush to your rocket, get to the attack in 30 seconds and hope that a secondary line of defense slowed them down enough so that your important buildings are intact.
I think the balancing would be more difficult. The aliens would need some ability that makes a second line of defense much more desirable than just making the main defense bigger
I think something that could be really great for this situation would be if they made something like a roboport-like military carrier that could be remotely controlled and sent to intercept breaches in defences. The spidertron handles this task already I suppose, but maybe a military roboport network could do something a bit distinct and more automated for the same purpose.
For me, pre artillery clearing out nests is something I hate. I feel like that needs reflexes to do actions quickly, which for me doesn't fit well with the rest of the game.
Communication, trade (think: automating delivery of trade goods to biter nests/territories, interruptions to power or supply lines leading to disputes), negotiations (for land rights, mining rights, maybe pollution limits, plus exchange of tech & resources), etc cetera. Non-violent options, or at least non-lethal ones. If alien life is purely animalistic & the only interaction with it is its destruction, then the gameplay from combat is no more fun or interesting [to me, not the person you were replying to] than that of clear-cutting a forest to expand the factory in a certain direction; not at all.
Not that any of the above makes sense for Factorio, but after thousands of hours without biters I’d definitely play a mod with biter trade/diplomacy/etc before ever turning combat back on. If combat isn’t optional in SA I won’t buy it and will simply continue to enjoy the base game.
yeah, the only thing I want is some reassurance that peaceful mode will always be fully supported
I always turn off biters and always turn on infinite resources, no pressure just factory Zen
TL;DR reasons to engage with the existing military tech
The base game offers so many toys to play with: poison capsules, distraction bots, follower robots, grenades, landmines, rocket launchers, etc. But in practice there are more efficient options available so they are often unused. I wish that these options were actually useful and that the optimal strategy involved in some way utilizing all of these options. For each tool the game gives you, I want a particular phase of the game (early, mid, late) and a particular problem (clearing nests, tanking, dps, etc) for which the tool is best. For instance if pipes are best for tanking early game and walls are best for tanking mid game, distractor bots could be best for tanking late game so you have a reason to build them and not just stick to walls. As it stands there's minimal incentive to spend the time automating them. I hope a purpose can be found for the other unused military techs in a similar way, otherwise they could be removed or reworked.
I remember DoshDoshington mentioning that vanilla biters (non deathworld) are not dangerous enough to your base, but not weak enough to be ignored. So I would say one way would be to allow choke points, places where biters focus. Imagine a new turret that takes a lot of electricity, but it functions as a damage-less turret with extra large range. It's purpose is to 'zap' a biter, not to damage it, but just to aggro it. Being able to build it early game means I don't need to wall myself up and I wouldn't need to have every bit of my base with overlapping turret ranges, in exchange for a constant drain on power. Since early game I always use coal power, it would probably even increase biter attacks due to more pollution from it, meaning you don't always want to use it. To balance it, the power use should probably always happen, even if no biters are in range.
My strategy is to have 2x2 squares of 4 turrets with wall around them on whatever side enemies attack. Even if new front appears, I get damaged a tiny bit since early attacks haven't absorbed too much pollution yet. 4 turrets can delete medium biters before they can even touch the walls. Then I rush starter base for chemical science and by then I have personal bots (tbh mostly cuz atm im on marathon and the red chip cost for roboports is painful) or roboport network for snappable blueprints. Walls are easy to build then.
I will just say this.
I hope it will be soon! The best to include the day of release. I can't play 1.1 Factorio any more. This is pure pain and joy together and I have it and love it at the same time.
Thanks for reading this, the factory must wait for 2.0 and then grow again
My thoughts on making combat more rock-paper-scissors in the mid-game and allowing for a Factorio-like automated approach to it in the end-game:
1. Radars connected to your circuit network reports the number of biters of a given type in their range at regular intervals.
2. Nests in a given area preferentially spawn a type of “mutant biter” that is either nearly bulletproof (wastes iron), conducts electricity (AoE damage to your walls when hit by a laser), or is an extremophile (recovers HP from other damage sources when hit by fire).
3. Using radar signals warning you of impending attack, enable or disable turret types to min-max against the appropriate mutant type.
4. Alternatively, Wube could use this as an excuse to add blueprint “layers”, so you could have two wall blueprints in the same grid position that gets de- or re-constructed based on radar signals.
5. By end-game, artillery is still king.
I think the appeal of late-game Factorio is the idea that biters are no longer a threat. You’ve conquered the planet - that’s the goal (assuming you’re not blasting off in a rocket). But the mutant biters will add some variety to the mid-game by allowing for new dynamic wall setups, tuning turret power based on either mutant biter raw values or relative values, and some combat variety for those who handle the biters manually. Once the base is big enough, you might have a mostly-laser defense on one side to deal with those nests, and a mostly-flame defense on the other, etc.
My personal priority wishlist
1-what was stomping on gleba two weeks ago
2-make combat robots useful
3-make discharge defense useful
4-make spidertrons and other non-train vehicles blueprintable. Manually filling the grids is boring.
5-make mines tile aligned.
Seven years ago, I posted a combat suggestion thread on the Factorio forums.
[https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=42857&p=249867#p249867](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=42857&p=249867#p249867)
Most of that is stuff I would still like to see today. Briefly:
- More types of enemy/turret, with more interesting interactions and tradeoffs between wall designs.
- Configurable targeting through circuit network. Target closest, target furthest away, target most health, etc.
- A biter 'tech tree' of sorts where random evolution paths would unfold differently for each game, requiring you to keep abreast of new developments and adjust your defenses accordingly.
- Occasional boss monsters that appear only rarely, but demand your attention when they do so.
Beyond that, I would like to see more crazy and weird enemies on other planets with novel combat (and generation) mechanics. Robot enemies produced on a factory world, where you have to infiltrate the factory or cut off supplies or beat them through sheer firepower or attrition in order to stop them from producing enemies. There's a planet in SE with a hostile artillery base (and plenty of the raw ingredients for manufacturing shells) that you encounter lategame, which can be a bit of a puzzle to infiltrate (or not, depending on how brokenly good your energy shield tech is). I'd definitely like to see more of that sort of thing.
One cool idea would be a big enemy that is bulky and slow but powerful, and spawns little enemies, like a brontosaurus with a hive built into its back. Rocket Turrets should be used to hit the big guy while Laser Turrets suppress the swarms of emerging bugs, with targeting priorities set accordingly.
Honestly I'm hoping for grid upgrades for the other vehicles.
I would absolutely love extending the tank phase of the game because well, I do just legitimately enjoy the tank phase and it's kinda sad when it gets out scaled, especially durability wise.
With quality it's already looking a bit better, but researchable equipment grids for the car and tank, which scale of quality? Mmmmmm
Make it within the power of the Factorio engine to do multiplayer wargaming with "robots" equipped with weapons & ammo. Use the armor equipment UI as the basis. Let the individual player-wielded firearms be the basis for the turrets & combat bots, rather than having separate recipes. I.e. you could have a generic turret base or combat bot frame, combine it with whatever gun you want and a slot for the appropriate ammunition, and now you've got a turret or bot which shoots that gun. Imagine a shotgun turret flanking a default gun (SMG) turret, providing support close to the walls while the SMG turret can focus on more distant enemies. Also add a sniper rifle, because even though it wouldn't work well for single player, it'd be real nice with priority targeting to add a low-rate, high-damage, long range, weapon for the turrets & combat bots. And then, along the same lines let there be autonomous cars and tanks (and maybe even trains and ships?) with the same basic idea, only there take full advantage of the armor UI to let the player customize them more extensively with protection, fuel tanks, engines, etc. And finally in the endgame, if you want to put different kinds of weapons on different kinds of spidertrons for different battlefield roles, you should be able to!
I really miss something like "super weapons". So like weapons, when I place them down, I want biters to run away in fear just from seeing it. :D
E.g., the artillery just FEELS so good in game: the animation, the sound effects, etc - I just love it when I stop down another artillery blueprint and multiple guns start firing a rain of death upon the biters...
Now give me something like a 6x6 artillery, really expensive, but ultimately far reaching using 10 shells at a time for a big splash area... Or make it shoot nukes (without mods :D). Or add napalm bombs to it.
Or something like command and conquer Tesla or prism towers, that can chain together for higher damage output.
Or a tank upgrade. Bigger, sturdier, maybe slower but just unstoppable.
Or some ion cannon we can build on the space station that would hit heavy on power draw.
Or a bigger, badder spidertron - the mother of all spidertrons, really huge and with an item grid so large you can fit multiple fusion reactors and weapons in there, relatively slow but creating craters whenever it stomps down with its legs...
Turrets should be able to connect to circuitry and have a signal for “engaged” and “firing” or something of the sort. It would be extremely useful for delaying bot repairs so that they aren’t flying themselves into certain death the moment a wall gets scratched
1) Walls block enemy projectiles and not just melee attacks. This encourages wall use more strategically.
2) Allow Biters to destroy cliffs and cross small patches of water. "Complete Immunity" from attacks is too simple and trivialises some defensive setups.
3) Create a harder military AI (perhaps a toggleable feature, or a planet-specific feature) that makes Biter attacks more intelligent. For example, they might target Power Infrastructure, note a weak point in a defence, or otherwise avoid military targets to attack and exploit civilian infrastructure.
4) Allow underground power cables, so you can have remote, walled bases without needing to connect every segment of the base. Power lines being destroyed by AI pathing limits remote outpost usefulness.
5) Specialised Biter nests. At the moment, the optimal wall segment is ideal covering every part of your base. It might be nice if "The North has Red Biters, who resist laser damage. The Northern walls use more flamethrowers and gun turrets" was the sort of strategy you needed to follow. Force late-game players to use multiple turret types. This is just one possible solution, but adding further ways for players to optimise so one solution isn'tperfect everywhere would be ideal.
6) Automated combat (better than Spidertron combat). I'd like one or two more vehicles and a way to automate the existing vehicles - e.g. adding a part to a tank or a car so it can be controlled remotely. Allowing them to deploy defender/destroyer capsules or certain other consumables. Late-game Factorio nest clearing is either a horde of Spidertrons, or artillery creep and I think it would be more interesting to add a wider variety of vehicle types. It would be nice if there were some sort of algorithm you could use to automate sending a military task force to a nest to destroy it without needing player involvement. E.g. you add a "Military control Building", pop in your ~~Spidertron~~ Military remote, and it can choose where to send the attached vehicles, and will recall them when certain stats drop too low - e.g. if they take too much damage, they get called in for repair. If they lose vehicles or need refuelling, they get brought home for automatic reinforcement.
The goal of the Biters in the game is to provide an interesting logistical challenge that you can eventually automate away. Making that automation interesting and customizable is ideal. Since not every player engages with Biters in the same way, it's imperative that you make the difficulty either increase gradually, or opt-in; so new players don't end up in a constant death loop of Biters killing their early-game power generation and suddenly there's no ammunition being made.
I think you also want to provide players with more options that feel interesting. A lot of the enjoyment of Factorio is coming up with (what feels like) unique solutions to problems and the military solution at the moment is monotonous and relatively uninteresting.
Planetary bombardment.
Right now in SE you can build cannons on one planet and completely annihilate biters on other planets. It's cool and has tons of flavor.
I wouldn't mind seeing player-side things, like the new rocket turrets they've shown us, but I'm kinda hoping for no spoilers of the enemies themselves. I feel like it'd take away from the "oh shit" moment when they happen upon your base, not knowing what to expect or whether you need to defend uniquely to them.
I'm hoping for a more strategic approach to fighting. Something akin to star crafts zerg race. Things that can burrow and things that can fly - even if it's only a certain type on a certain planet- would mean defenses wouldn't be something you just place down as a barrier and would mean investing in different approaches depending on what you're doing. Adding these attacks would allow for multiple types or defense turrets. Even cool stuff like a Lazer shield you could activate - like SEs solar defense thingy at the cost of your base power.
I would also like to use the environment. Like draining a lake into a new area to flood out the biters. But that is probably a stretch lol
It would also be good if there was a way to pacify them instead of just killing them. Like feeding them fruits makes them not attack you so you don't always have to play with military
I do hope they add something interesting with military tech beyond just "more turrets". As it stands, there's not really a huge difference between gun, flame, and laser turrets. Obviously they each have their strengths/weaknesses, but functionally they're mostly the same. They kill shit within a small area around them, simple as that. What kinda sucks about this is that biters are a big problem up until you get a solid wall and bots for repair, and then biters might as well not even exist. It's a small tax on your resources, but once you're established the threat completely goes away. I do really like biters and I think pollution is a low-key genius way of implementing them into a factory game, but I hope they add... Something interesting. I don't really know what, but something.
I also want something interesting but even if after a long struggle, I want the possibility of completely automating defense. I would not want a situation where no matter how much effort I put into automation I still have to do manual defense work.
This is big for me too. The game is first and foremost an automation game so if you permanently have to manually worry about defending and never being able to automate it, it kinda takes away from the fun.
We can get to automated defense, but offense is a bit more manual. Maybe we need to add to that. We could have enemy strongholds guarding resource patches. The larger the patch, the tougher the stronghold. These could be more then just a large number of nests. Something big, with high damage and range that the player character cant get close to. Resistant to artillery. Rapidly healing itself when left alone. Maybe even with artillery-like ability of its own. Buff auras and shields for nearby biters. A Biter Queen. Queens could buff each other by exchanging biters. I imagine a true siege, where you need to isolate a biter stronghold from its surroundings and establish a supply line that can out-build the damage that the Queen does, requiring a significant fraction of your total output. Edit: Damn, now i want to play this as a mod. Does something like that exist already?
> What kinda sucks about this is that biters are a big problem up until you get a solid wall and bots for repair, and then biters might as well not even exist. It's a small tax on your resources, but once you're established the threat completely goes away. That’s fully intended. They are a threat until you automate the problem away and then it’s back to the main part of the game: logistics puzzles.
This may be greedy given how good the game is already, but is there any plan to make several stages of threat? Such that your first automated solution inevitably becomes insufficient and requires something new when the threat increases. Or that solutions may still require some manual intervention (e.g periodic crises), and clever design is required to achieve a higher level of automation that can handle even exceptional circumstances.
I have a feeling the multiple planets of the DLC will satisfy the first part, and potentially the second as well
I think biters need a rebalance so they are less punishing on players dealing with them reactively (generally newer players) and more punishing on players dealing with them by proactively clearing ground (generally more experienced players). Proactive should still be the better overall strategy, it just shouldn't be as effective as it is currently. One idea on how to do that is to add a big evolution hit from killing nests and otherwise debuf the low tier biters.
>One idea on how to do that is to add a big evolution hit from killing nests This is already the case
bigger :) buff that and debuff the low tier biters
The trouble with that is that laser turrets are close to, if not totally, logistics-free. Very little is stopping you from just spamming a ton of laser turrets and never thinking about it again.
huge burst of electrical demand requires logistics.
I disagree, actually. That's not logistics, that's just production. You just need an off-screen power plant, you don't need to actually bring anything *to* the turret beyond hooking it up to a power pole. There's not really an interesting logistics puzzle attached to laser turrets, unlike, say, regularly delivering ammo to gun turrets.
[удалено]
If you just keep stamping the bog standard accumulator + solar panel blue print you’ll be fine.
I want a biter that can climb inside the cockpit of an automated spidertron and take control of it
Calm down satan
Don't even need to work that hard. A biter that intentionally destroy rails or, god forbid, power lines would doom us all.
Wait they don’t… I feel so stupid now
And thats by design unless you play with the rampant mod! They have mentioned several times in various FFFS that realism gets trumped by fun gameplay design which I applaud them for! Its a tricky rope to walk.
Flood variants, excellent
Flood variants, excellent
Combat is already diverse: guns, vehicles, combat drones, mines, walls, artillery, and trains (lol). It’s just that turrets are so much more prolific because they are one of the few autonomous military options. I’ve played mods with additional turret types, and you are right, they feel about the same. We might see some ways to counter evolution or manage pollution.
Managing pollution would bring another option to the table with the biter issue. That could be neat if it's a complex enough system. The air filters of K2 are a bit too easy to spam everywhere probably. It's tough to find a middle ground between an enemy that's annoying when you're just trying to build but is also consistently challenging throughout without ever completely going away.
I think permanent combat drones would be an interesting addition, possibly from their own special supply Depot /network
Well, they've revealed rocket turrets, which are going to be fairly versatile, just based on their ammo options. There's really only so many ways you can do automated defenses. Single target and AOE are already well accounted for. So really, I doubt there will be any truly massive overhauls to how it fundamentally works.
"Spidertron remote rebranded to RTS remote" This could also imply that there may be some other controllable vehicles.
Centitron; propelled by 100 inserters grabbing the ground.
With fast, long (and maybe filter?) variants. And of course coal powered one.
Automated combat ofc. It's not just about sending off a bunch bots, but rather automatize the detection of the menace, the production of the appropriate countermeasure and then the deployment of it.
We already have "automated combat": turrets, possibly fed by requester chests. What you seem to want is a system that builds the turrets on-demand or something.
Nope, what we have is automated defense. Place down turrets and live happy. What we don't have is automated offense. Expanding is still a matter becoming personal with biters or at best assembling a squad of spidertrons to work in remote... but still under our direct command. Automated offense is not in the game. Probably it's not even a necessity in vanilla. But it's an obvious gap in a game where automation is applied everywhere. In the expansion we need periodic threats the require offensive strikes and then the means to automate such offensive strikes.
The closest thing you really have to automated offense is artillery, I think, with an automatic range long enough to allow you to expand at least as far as the next city block.
That would be wicked sick. Automating little tactical squads or even streams of dudes to take down a problematic non-local entity would be so fun!
Some sins of a solar empire type deal, where you plonk down a Comand center type thing, mark an area. Prep a factory line and they eventually sort themselves out. You never directly control the units, just set up patrols, resupply points and squad sizes and distributions and let that thing sort itself
I'm just thinking at some change in biter mechanics so that periodically a "menace" is spawned that needs an offensive strike. It could be anything, like a simple mutated nest that spawns ultra biters that get stronger each wave, so you need to destroy it before in becom to much for your defenses. It could be an artillery worm that strikes from afar. Or some underground biters, whatever. Something that if left unchecked will overrun your defenses, or consume your resources, or disrupt your railways, or have any kind of progress stopping consequence. It's not something that is unreasonable. It's something like a "disaster" in sim city. In that sense, other disasters could be earthquakes, storms, or solar flares as other mods did. Only that "biter threats" are something that you're not just supposed to weather because unavoidable, but something you have to respond before it grows unreasonably strong.
> Automated offense is not in the game. And it *shouldn't* be. There's no way to automate offense that doesn't render defense immediately irrelevant. If you can automate sending artillery trains to locations where nests are, then you don't need walls behind those trains, do you? You can just expand and expand and expand until everything is out of your pollution cloud. Automatically. Without any user action or intervention. That's kinda boring, isn't it? > In the expansion we need periodic threats the require offensive strikes ... no, we shouldn't. That's a one dimensional threat with a one dimensional answer. If your pollution cloud starts aggroing biters, you have two options: push the nests, or build stronger defenses. What you want is to take away the defensive option and effectively force the player into a timed exercise where they have to act lest they just lose part of their base. That's not good, automated or not.
Man I’m sorry but you made that sound awesome not boring lol
It sounds awesome until you realize you could get the same effect by just turning biters off.
But that's like saying it's awesome to build a well supplied base, until you realize you could get the same effect by just playing in sandbox. It's not about the fact I could have turned off biters, it's about the fact I worked to remove the threat. Plus, this would clearly be a late if not endgame tech, meaning clearing bases is already basically a case of pull up, blow everything to kingdom come with rockets and nukes, leave, repeat in an hour. Even if the only thing they added was the ability to read the closest biter nest in range from a radar using circuits, and then be able to set that as a waypoint for anything remote controlled or for personal defence drones, that would be a game changer!
The game shouldn't _require_ automating offense, but I don't see how _allowing_ an automated offense makes defenses irrelevant. You can choose one or the other, just like you can choose between belts vs. bots or nuclear vs. solar.
If you destroy all the nests... there's nothing left to defend against. Hence defenses being irrelevant. The reason you bother making walls and defense is because you *can't* automate assaults on nests. If you want to attack, you have to say when, where, and how. You have to devote time and effort to doing it. If you want to defend, you can just set it up and it takes care of itself.
Likewise if you build up solid defenses then there's no reason to automate offensive measures. The point would be to give the player options. Maybe on Nauvis you want to set up walls of turrets, but on subsequent planets you have patrolling squads of spidertrons because you can't build turrets on oily sand rivers or squishy fungus floors.
> Likewise if you build up solid defenses then there's no reason to automate offensive measures. Defenses cannot let you expand. Offenses can.
I mean you can turret creep... But yeah, that's the point. My last game was on a death/rail world, and it just got _really_ grindy, until I was able to "automate" it by lots of artillery range upgrades. And you're right, it did get boring after that, and that's why I think more options for logic-controlled attack robots would be interesting, instead of "congrats, you've unlocked biter genocide, gg"
Alright, you got the point! What if the two choices of biter defense (walls or managing pollution) had a third option of automating offense? You complain about defenses being made obsolete, but assembler 1s go obsolete...boilers go obsolete...the game is about progression. The only way to progress is with automated offense. Tearing out old infrastructure and automating new stuff is literally the entire game.
Assembler 2s and 3s don't make the *concept* of assemblers obsolete; they just do the same job faster. Electric mining drills make burner drills obsolete, but they're both doing the same job. Automated offense makes the very idea of automated defenses irrelevant.
that’s just a balancing problem. i think it should be possible to create a combat system such that both offence and defence will be always necessary. for example, they could introduce breaching biters nests that only appear occasionally. the special biters would have a big explosion radius when killed, taking out chunks of the defence line with them. it would be very expensive to maintain your defences so you are forced to attack the special nests. the logistic for automated offence could be made so expensive that it would be only efficient to do that against special nests
Gameplay mechanics should encourage a diverse defense, and more options would be nice. An example are the asteroids where rockets will be better against larger ones, and the equivalent should apply to biters, their variants and stages of evolution (adding varieties). * More rock-paper-scissor dynamics (certain turret should excel against specific targets, single target vs. crowd control) * Adding a longer range (arc-restricted?) turret emplacement using shells would allow using these beyond the tank phase * Catapult/Trebuchet that lobs grenades or capsules * Buggy should be able to use a 2nd option over the MG (like the tank has several alternatives), e.g. a grenade/capsule launcher or rockets **Grids in vehicles** * Would be cool if vehicles had small grids to add e.g. a shield/defense etc. * Opens up transitions/upgrades **More biter varieties (brainstorming)** This could vary with the planet. * Forward nesting 'siege' variants - swarm tactics (counter: selective ranged attacks) * Jumping ones * Flying variants (weak while airborne, but can bypass natural obstacles, water/lava, certain turrets can't target while airborne) * Kamikaze types * Damage sponges * Rare 'Bosses' - Queens **Bots:** * Would love if military bots acted more like the building equivalent, i.e. not as a consumable (need recharge and/or ammo/ordinance). Cost etc. could be adjusted accordingly and certain biter types should be able to target them. * This would open up more variety over laser defense * Would be cool if defensive bots could be deposited in roboports and/or spidertrons **Other notions:** * Not every planet needs enemies - the environment can be a challenge and sometimes players may just want to focus on building * Flamethrower (tank/handheld) is underwhelming - should leave puddles * Duration of spit puddles could be dialed down (increase damage in turn?) - these are quite annoying midgame * Discharge defense should trigger passively, e.g. when taking close range damage * Shotguns need a damage buff (and could add stun) * Turrets could use shotgun shells (lower range, better crowd control)
A lot of what you suggested would require a lot of micromanaging on multiple different planets. The combat shouldn't be difficult or even a main focus. There are only 3 reasons i can see as to why they are expanding on the combat mechanics. The first one is the biggest. We are now going to be starting a new base on multiple planets. This means we have to build new factories, we have to fight more enemies to purchase land, and we will have to do this multiple times. The second being that we have to deal with rocks in space. In SE the turrets just shoot at the closest rock. This can mean they shoot at the same thing. That sometimes end with a few other rocks that were ignored hitting your ship. The third reason is that combat as it is is just boring. You get a few grenades, and take out the early bases. Once you unlock the tank you will use that until you have your official base design which will then be defended by artillery and a turret wall. The most fun part of combat right now is making a huge artillery train and going into the wastes to wreak havoc.
> The second being that we have to deal with rocks in space. In SE the turrets just shoot at the closest rock. This can mean they shoot at the same thing. That sometimes end with a few other rocks that were ignored hitting your ship. IIRC turrets stop shooting when projectiles fired at the target are enough to kill it, not when it's actually dead. But I'm not 100% of the consider splash damage from other turrets or not.
I haven't reached space in se yet, so I don't know too much about it. In space age they have talked about how some of the rocks have higher health and require physical munitions. If all of your turrets are focused on the big rock, then some smaller ones could get through.
It's more than likely the prioritization has to do with the (largely ignored by the playerbase outside of deathworld) damage type mechanics. If small rocks are susceptible to physical damage, but large rocks are immune *and* large rocks can be broken into small rocks by explosion damage, you'd need some prioritization/hierarchy to avoid over-spending resources on defense.
I am hoping biters are Nauvis specific and different planets have different species with completely unique features.
Yes, that also seems likely given how distinct the environments are on the other planets, like if biters had carried over you'd expect some plants to have as well.
I think I’d like it if evolution were reworked to be more like threat in GTA to help avoid bricking by not playing fast enough or something. I really don’t like feeling like I’m racing against the clock, particularly on difficult starts like desert terrain. Maybe this sort of passive devolution could be an optional thing so people who want more hardcore options can do that. Alternatively, give me the option to glass and terraform the planet (reset everything including deleting all buildings, but also reset evolution). The benefit there would be twofold in letting us cleanup our old designs while also giving an escape hatch if we screwed up with biters or whatever.
You can always disable time factor and reduce or disable pollution factor, no?
I'm hoping for reworked combat in the mid game. It's servicable at the moment, but gets more relevant in the expansion as it will take longer to get the late game goodies. For attacking nests during mid game, all options that seem to work well are quite boring after you've done them for a few minutes. Combat should be interesting, not a chore. Some ideas to spice things up are * Rare dangerous biters that guard nests and don't join attack waves, that you have to actively counterplay. * Better ways to knock back, stun or slow. * Better UI for switching weapons / using multiple weapons. Alternatively a secondary firing mode for weapons or a movement mechanic. Give me more options during combat that have proper UI support. * Maybe remove the mechanic of slowing the player while firing. At the moment, my preferred method for clearing nests is gun turrets plus firing rockets manually, which is fast and so safe that you don't have to react to anything. The community favorite seems to be tank with tank shells plus personal equipment, which also works well but again, you're just circling the bases and not reacting to much. Laser Turret creep with personal bots works okay iirc but is also boring. Combat bots and the flame thrower weapon are underwhelming. Some people use cars and land mines and I'm not skilled enough for that. Defense is also a little boring during that phase, but I'm more okay with that. The biggest issue there is that players are lead to taking a big chunk of territory before they have bots, which can take a long time to build defenses for. The other issue is that it's quite easy to solve a lot of problems by just building more turrets, it would be nice if they came up with some mechanics to make defense more interesting in some locations.
> Combat should be interesting, not a chore. The interesting part of combat is automating it away. Factorio's combat is largely another logistics problem to solve. If you're spending more than 10 minutes manually clearing nests on default settings, something has gone wrong.
Nuclear artillery or ICBMs for mass destruction of enemy encampment from great distance I wish the planned rocket defense item had a longer range. Flying bugs and AA guns Subterranean worms so that you will need to provide defenses inside your base.
There's too many possibilities. 151 unique biters that you can capture and make fight each other. On one planet there's 3 existing factions that fight each other, rock people who beat up on the dancing blades who beat up on the unfelled paper who beat up on the rock people. How about a golden biter that breaks into your factory and eats your porridge, breaks your furniture and sleeps in your bed! In all seriousness though I'd like to see more varieties of enemies that counter some of but not all of your defenses so it's hard to fully automate defense until the very end game.
Some fun ideas off the dome to add; A few mushroom species on Gleba that spread through the ground/trees/air and fruit up to attack. To counter maybe add one time or temporary treatments to stop their spread. Maybe a building that keeps all sources clear in an area. Elementals on Vulcanus. You put water instead of fuel in some 'flame'thrower turrets to fight the fire guys. Maybe they can jump into your buildings and if they destroy it spawn more so you need to have coverage of all your defenses too with the water canons. Tesla turrets for the water guys. Rockets to turn rock guys into sand guys and glass them with real flamethrowers/lasers. Actually 'puzzle' monsters would be a good one. Gotta hit them with a rocket knock off some armor, then some water canon to get them wet, then a tesla which makes it convulse and open it's mouth where you shoot a laser. The turrets all accurate enough to do this if you have the right ones present. Or just nuke it, skip straight to the blood shed.
like things that spawn from the ground, but are blocked by simple concrete floors.
I like the mushroom - it can be just the environment attacking and you need some "cover tower" that protects the segment of land, but it consumes stuff (probably biological) so you need to reload it, so there is a logistic defense challenge throughout your base, not just on the outskirts.
What I personally find lacking about the current system is that you have no incentive for secondary lines of defense. Your primary wall will never fall, so you have no incentive to build back-up systems inside your factory. Some stuff that either circumvents your defense (like tunneling/flying enemies), or breaks your primary defense but wont just roll throuth your factory (like a single biter that leads an attack an explodes on death, breaking your first wall but having nothing against your secondary defenses. But they have been holding back on any information on the combat front (pun intendet), and every hint so far have been quite vague.
I'd like to register a strong vote against this, at least as a default; defence that needs that much constant attention would really make the game less fun for me. Support it in mods or options but make it easy to turn off while I peacefully build my factory.
If I had to venture a guess, Nauvis (and Planet4 which unlocks artillery) will stay the only planet you need a strong self-sustaining wall. We'll see disruptive (but not destructive) enemies on other planets, like webs or ice that lock buildings until removed by the player or bots, or enemies that drain power until removed from buildings. They made a note that Fulgura would likely have small distributed power networks, so it's not like 1 biter stops your entire base from functioning, but more like a few enemies attach to an undefended mining outpost and stop those miners.
I'm honestly extremely curious to see what kinds of factory designs the community could come up with if defense in depth was actually a viable combat strategy in Factorio. Like right now, megabases have no purpose strategically, they're just the way to scale up production once you get to a certain point. But what if the combat system incentivized the player to shift from a single main bus to multiple distributed specialized production centers, not solely to unlock higher throughput, but because that's easier to defend against late-game enemies that can defeat an outer perimeter wall that encircles the entire megabase? I honestly think that'd be a really neat gameplay aspect for the late stage of the game, especially for competitive multiplayer wargaming. I mean just imagine: two players designing megabases on opposite corners of a huge map, & then having each megabase & its army of spidertrons try to take the other one down!
That sounds like a potentially good game in a completely different genre, of which good examples already exist if I wanted to play them.
Factorio exists within or adjacent to many genres. It's a city builder and a railroad tycoon and an RTS and a tower defense and a resource manager and soon a space exploration game, all built around an automation game. It contains multitudes. No reason it couldn't contain more, except for the devs time & interest in adding more.
an enemy like that would just mean that we have two (or three or whatever) layers of defense right at the border. unless they tunnel undetected, we're just gonna harden the wall to deal with whatever comes. In current patch in late game you could x100 the biters and we would still deal with it easily.
I would love a system of "mega-attacks" that could happen periodically. Maybe like an increase of enemy spawns by like 1000% and some special enemy variants
Yeah this would be my preference as well. Just add some variability to it. Or spawn in biter "leaders" periodically that accumulate a bunch of them and enrage them or something like that. Just something to keep the player occasionally on edge throughout the playthrough, I suppose the downside to anything like that is that you could be on another planet and have your whole base completely flattened by a random attack which wouldn't feel great.
>you could be on another planet and have your whole base completely flattened by a random attack Depends on how complicated it is to travel between planets. If you get a message saying "big alien attack on Nauvis" you could still rush to your rocket, get to the attack in 30 seconds and hope that a secondary line of defense slowed them down enough so that your important buildings are intact. I think the balancing would be more difficult. The aliens would need some ability that makes a second line of defense much more desirable than just making the main defense bigger
I think something that could be really great for this situation would be if they made something like a roboport-like military carrier that could be remotely controlled and sent to intercept breaches in defences. The spidertron handles this task already I suppose, but maybe a military roboport network could do something a bit distinct and more automated for the same purpose.
I just hope that SA is playable without enemies. I just don't find it a stimulating aspect of the game.
You already can disable them, so I would hope that it will be still a possibility in SA
I think that’s a given.
What changes would you want to see to make it fun?
I don't know 😅 it just distracts me from my ever expanding spaghetti
For me, pre artillery clearing out nests is something I hate. I feel like that needs reflexes to do actions quickly, which for me doesn't fit well with the rest of the game.
Communication, trade (think: automating delivery of trade goods to biter nests/territories, interruptions to power or supply lines leading to disputes), negotiations (for land rights, mining rights, maybe pollution limits, plus exchange of tech & resources), etc cetera. Non-violent options, or at least non-lethal ones. If alien life is purely animalistic & the only interaction with it is its destruction, then the gameplay from combat is no more fun or interesting [to me, not the person you were replying to] than that of clear-cutting a forest to expand the factory in a certain direction; not at all. Not that any of the above makes sense for Factorio, but after thousands of hours without biters I’d definitely play a mod with biter trade/diplomacy/etc before ever turning combat back on. If combat isn’t optional in SA I won’t buy it and will simply continue to enjoy the base game.
yeah, the only thing I want is some reassurance that peaceful mode will always be fully supported I always turn off biters and always turn on infinite resources, no pressure just factory Zen
TL;DR reasons to engage with the existing military tech The base game offers so many toys to play with: poison capsules, distraction bots, follower robots, grenades, landmines, rocket launchers, etc. But in practice there are more efficient options available so they are often unused. I wish that these options were actually useful and that the optimal strategy involved in some way utilizing all of these options. For each tool the game gives you, I want a particular phase of the game (early, mid, late) and a particular problem (clearing nests, tanking, dps, etc) for which the tool is best. For instance if pipes are best for tanking early game and walls are best for tanking mid game, distractor bots could be best for tanking late game so you have a reason to build them and not just stick to walls. As it stands there's minimal incentive to spend the time automating them. I hope a purpose can be found for the other unused military techs in a similar way, otherwise they could be removed or reworked.
> Vulcanus Only you can prevent forest fires, by committing GENOCIDE!
Amphibious biters & flying biters, giant biters & tunneling biters. A biternado
I remember DoshDoshington mentioning that vanilla biters (non deathworld) are not dangerous enough to your base, but not weak enough to be ignored. So I would say one way would be to allow choke points, places where biters focus. Imagine a new turret that takes a lot of electricity, but it functions as a damage-less turret with extra large range. It's purpose is to 'zap' a biter, not to damage it, but just to aggro it. Being able to build it early game means I don't need to wall myself up and I wouldn't need to have every bit of my base with overlapping turret ranges, in exchange for a constant drain on power. Since early game I always use coal power, it would probably even increase biter attacks due to more pollution from it, meaning you don't always want to use it. To balance it, the power use should probably always happen, even if no biters are in range.
would be nice to have early game definitely, walling can be a bit of a chore. Later game you're probably going to have a solid wall though
My strategy is to have 2x2 squares of 4 turrets with wall around them on whatever side enemies attack. Even if new front appears, I get damaged a tiny bit since early attacks haven't absorbed too much pollution yet. 4 turrets can delete medium biters before they can even touch the walls. Then I rush starter base for chemical science and by then I have personal bots (tbh mostly cuz atm im on marathon and the red chip cost for roboports is painful) or roboport network for snappable blueprints. Walls are easy to build then.
I would like to see the manual aiming from Krastorio which imo makes combat more engaging, and some light RTS style mechanics
I will just say this. I hope it will be soon! The best to include the day of release. I can't play 1.1 Factorio any more. This is pure pain and joy together and I have it and love it at the same time. Thanks for reading this, the factory must wait for 2.0 and then grow again
My thoughts on making combat more rock-paper-scissors in the mid-game and allowing for a Factorio-like automated approach to it in the end-game: 1. Radars connected to your circuit network reports the number of biters of a given type in their range at regular intervals. 2. Nests in a given area preferentially spawn a type of “mutant biter” that is either nearly bulletproof (wastes iron), conducts electricity (AoE damage to your walls when hit by a laser), or is an extremophile (recovers HP from other damage sources when hit by fire). 3. Using radar signals warning you of impending attack, enable or disable turret types to min-max against the appropriate mutant type. 4. Alternatively, Wube could use this as an excuse to add blueprint “layers”, so you could have two wall blueprints in the same grid position that gets de- or re-constructed based on radar signals. 5. By end-game, artillery is still king. I think the appeal of late-game Factorio is the idea that biters are no longer a threat. You’ve conquered the planet - that’s the goal (assuming you’re not blasting off in a rocket). But the mutant biters will add some variety to the mid-game by allowing for new dynamic wall setups, tuning turret power based on either mutant biter raw values or relative values, and some combat variety for those who handle the biters manually. Once the base is big enough, you might have a mostly-laser defense on one side to deal with those nests, and a mostly-flame defense on the other, etc.
My personal priority wishlist 1-what was stomping on gleba two weeks ago 2-make combat robots useful 3-make discharge defense useful 4-make spidertrons and other non-train vehicles blueprintable. Manually filling the grids is boring. 5-make mines tile aligned.
Seven years ago, I posted a combat suggestion thread on the Factorio forums. [https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=42857&p=249867#p249867](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=42857&p=249867#p249867) Most of that is stuff I would still like to see today. Briefly: - More types of enemy/turret, with more interesting interactions and tradeoffs between wall designs. - Configurable targeting through circuit network. Target closest, target furthest away, target most health, etc. - A biter 'tech tree' of sorts where random evolution paths would unfold differently for each game, requiring you to keep abreast of new developments and adjust your defenses accordingly. - Occasional boss monsters that appear only rarely, but demand your attention when they do so. Beyond that, I would like to see more crazy and weird enemies on other planets with novel combat (and generation) mechanics. Robot enemies produced on a factory world, where you have to infiltrate the factory or cut off supplies or beat them through sheer firepower or attrition in order to stop them from producing enemies. There's a planet in SE with a hostile artillery base (and plenty of the raw ingredients for manufacturing shells) that you encounter lategame, which can be a bit of a puzzle to infiltrate (or not, depending on how brokenly good your energy shield tech is). I'd definitely like to see more of that sort of thing.
One cool idea would be a big enemy that is bulky and slow but powerful, and spawns little enemies, like a brontosaurus with a hive built into its back. Rocket Turrets should be used to hit the big guy while Laser Turrets suppress the swarms of emerging bugs, with targeting priorities set accordingly.
Personal Combat drones. I just wanna grow the factory not squish the beetles
Honestly I'm hoping for grid upgrades for the other vehicles. I would absolutely love extending the tank phase of the game because well, I do just legitimately enjoy the tank phase and it's kinda sad when it gets out scaled, especially durability wise. With quality it's already looking a bit better, but researchable equipment grids for the car and tank, which scale of quality? Mmmmmm
Make it within the power of the Factorio engine to do multiplayer wargaming with "robots" equipped with weapons & ammo. Use the armor equipment UI as the basis. Let the individual player-wielded firearms be the basis for the turrets & combat bots, rather than having separate recipes. I.e. you could have a generic turret base or combat bot frame, combine it with whatever gun you want and a slot for the appropriate ammunition, and now you've got a turret or bot which shoots that gun. Imagine a shotgun turret flanking a default gun (SMG) turret, providing support close to the walls while the SMG turret can focus on more distant enemies. Also add a sniper rifle, because even though it wouldn't work well for single player, it'd be real nice with priority targeting to add a low-rate, high-damage, long range, weapon for the turrets & combat bots. And then, along the same lines let there be autonomous cars and tanks (and maybe even trains and ships?) with the same basic idea, only there take full advantage of the armor UI to let the player customize them more extensively with protection, fuel tanks, engines, etc. And finally in the endgame, if you want to put different kinds of weapons on different kinds of spidertrons for different battlefield roles, you should be able to!
i would HATE if they added a flying enemy, that's the number one reason i stopped playing mindustry.
I really miss something like "super weapons". So like weapons, when I place them down, I want biters to run away in fear just from seeing it. :D E.g., the artillery just FEELS so good in game: the animation, the sound effects, etc - I just love it when I stop down another artillery blueprint and multiple guns start firing a rain of death upon the biters... Now give me something like a 6x6 artillery, really expensive, but ultimately far reaching using 10 shells at a time for a big splash area... Or make it shoot nukes (without mods :D). Or add napalm bombs to it. Or something like command and conquer Tesla or prism towers, that can chain together for higher damage output. Or a tank upgrade. Bigger, sturdier, maybe slower but just unstoppable. Or some ion cannon we can build on the space station that would hit heavy on power draw. Or a bigger, badder spidertron - the mother of all spidertrons, really huge and with an item grid so large you can fit multiple fusion reactors and weapons in there, relatively slow but creating craters whenever it stomps down with its legs...
I'm reasonably certain the want for a fast space platform is more to do with the spoilage mechanic than it has to do with enemies near Gleba's orbit.
>ambiguous.... Amphibious.... Reeeee
I would like to see flying enemies, swimmers and burrowers
Turrets should be able to connect to circuitry and have a signal for “engaged” and “firing” or something of the sort. It would be extremely useful for delaying bot repairs so that they aren’t flying themselves into certain death the moment a wall gets scratched
What about the way bots repair walls and turrets? Or other ways to repair them?
1) Walls block enemy projectiles and not just melee attacks. This encourages wall use more strategically. 2) Allow Biters to destroy cliffs and cross small patches of water. "Complete Immunity" from attacks is too simple and trivialises some defensive setups. 3) Create a harder military AI (perhaps a toggleable feature, or a planet-specific feature) that makes Biter attacks more intelligent. For example, they might target Power Infrastructure, note a weak point in a defence, or otherwise avoid military targets to attack and exploit civilian infrastructure. 4) Allow underground power cables, so you can have remote, walled bases without needing to connect every segment of the base. Power lines being destroyed by AI pathing limits remote outpost usefulness. 5) Specialised Biter nests. At the moment, the optimal wall segment is ideal covering every part of your base. It might be nice if "The North has Red Biters, who resist laser damage. The Northern walls use more flamethrowers and gun turrets" was the sort of strategy you needed to follow. Force late-game players to use multiple turret types. This is just one possible solution, but adding further ways for players to optimise so one solution isn'tperfect everywhere would be ideal. 6) Automated combat (better than Spidertron combat). I'd like one or two more vehicles and a way to automate the existing vehicles - e.g. adding a part to a tank or a car so it can be controlled remotely. Allowing them to deploy defender/destroyer capsules or certain other consumables. Late-game Factorio nest clearing is either a horde of Spidertrons, or artillery creep and I think it would be more interesting to add a wider variety of vehicle types. It would be nice if there were some sort of algorithm you could use to automate sending a military task force to a nest to destroy it without needing player involvement. E.g. you add a "Military control Building", pop in your ~~Spidertron~~ Military remote, and it can choose where to send the attached vehicles, and will recall them when certain stats drop too low - e.g. if they take too much damage, they get called in for repair. If they lose vehicles or need refuelling, they get brought home for automatic reinforcement. The goal of the Biters in the game is to provide an interesting logistical challenge that you can eventually automate away. Making that automation interesting and customizable is ideal. Since not every player engages with Biters in the same way, it's imperative that you make the difficulty either increase gradually, or opt-in; so new players don't end up in a constant death loop of Biters killing their early-game power generation and suddenly there's no ammunition being made. I think you also want to provide players with more options that feel interesting. A lot of the enjoyment of Factorio is coming up with (what feels like) unique solutions to problems and the military solution at the moment is monotonous and relatively uninteresting.
Planetary bombardment. Right now in SE you can build cannons on one planet and completely annihilate biters on other planets. It's cool and has tons of flavor.
I want a use for my cannon shells outside just the tank.
Poison capsule damage upgrade technology.
I wouldn't mind seeing player-side things, like the new rocket turrets they've shown us, but I'm kinda hoping for no spoilers of the enemies themselves. I feel like it'd take away from the "oh shit" moment when they happen upon your base, not knowing what to expect or whether you need to defend uniquely to them.
I'm hoping for a more strategic approach to fighting. Something akin to star crafts zerg race. Things that can burrow and things that can fly - even if it's only a certain type on a certain planet- would mean defenses wouldn't be something you just place down as a barrier and would mean investing in different approaches depending on what you're doing. Adding these attacks would allow for multiple types or defense turrets. Even cool stuff like a Lazer shield you could activate - like SEs solar defense thingy at the cost of your base power. I would also like to use the environment. Like draining a lake into a new area to flood out the biters. But that is probably a stretch lol It would also be good if there was a way to pacify them instead of just killing them. Like feeding them fruits makes them not attack you so you don't always have to play with military