Hi, thanks. That is my ship. That was my very first moving platform ever. It made it to Vulcanus and was in service on that route at least till victory.
I had to make sure I included a picture of everything, without the wide variety of ships from the community it would have been so awful to come up with something that felt good. Thanks again!
I think it would make more physical sense for asteroid damage to scale with impact energy, but to substitute the mass term in the kinetic energy equation for a term proportional to the remaining hit points of the asteroid, i.e.
Impact damage = k * <remaining hitpoints> * v^2
This would be predictable, and it would give partial credit for damaging asteroids which hit the ship / platform.
Same. I'm kinda shocked that "the faster you go, the harder asteroids hit" is being removed as a mechanic. It just makes logical sense that slowing down means the asteroids don't hit as hard, and replacing that with an arbitrary "if you're stopped they barely scratch you but if you're moving even slightly they suddenly deal 20x damage" feels weird and 'gamey'.
when I was reading the section on asteroid changes, it felt uncharacteristically as if the devs kept making band-aid fixes for their change, despite having a 90% functional system before. they should definitely iterate on it to be based off impact energy & remaining HP
100% agree with this! I like the change of hitting the asteroid lowers the damage it does but don't like the fact that it is only moving vs non-moving damage. I think it should scale with speed, coming to a halt when stationary.
The thing is, it's not "how fast you go". it's "how fast the asteroids fly at you" and I have no idea how this thing is even calculated. They just spawn there at the edge of the view and start drifting towards. I asume it's some scaling of your speed but it's not even somewhat realistic and their speed already determines how much time you have to destroy them before they hit. So this one time, I'm on the devs' side. The "stopped platform buff" does feel weird tho.
I assumed this was how it worked the whole time. Astroid would break apart once all if its kinect energy had been used to break up your platform. Likewise shooting at it broke off bits of mass (Ie. Health).
Was surprised reading the blog that a partially damaged asteroid still did full damage.
Space travel in this game already makes no sense. The planets never move relative to each other. There's "drag" in space instead of infinite acelleration. Slowing down takes no energy. And switching directions? Yeah.
So at this point, its purely gameplay decisions. The "make more physical sense" train left the station a long time ago.
This is very much where I'm at too. I keep thinking about how they could have made it a little more realistic, but you would have to forsake a bunch of other mechanics. For example, the ability for your craft to "fall" down to the closest planet.
For a general audience, no. I want lots of things I think the average player would hate and that I would not recommend for them.
But Pyanodon's exists, and so does Py Hard Mode. The audience is small, but there's a certain subset of players who would gleefully enjoy something like that, and I'm sure they'd be thrilled if there were a mod for it.
Yeah, Factorio is a game where everything except enemies can be handled at your own pace, and you don't need perfect timing or ratios for everything. Having to make a flip (even if that's automatic) and needing enough fuel to brake or something bad happens is sort of antithetical to that.
You might enjoy the Space Exploration mod (note it will probably take about 4 vanilla playthroughs worth of time to get to the point where using spaceships makes sense)
I mean doing mass is actually a rough approximation of this because with 1/2 flips you are basically limited by acceleration which is a factor for thrust and mass.
There's a very dense asteroid field so it makes sense that the interplanetary medium also has lots of smaller particles that are displaced by the ship as it moves, causing drag.
That drag made more sense with it being based on width tho, as width scales how many asteroids you encounter. Mass should actually decrease this type of drag, as more mass means more inertia.
Change in velocity from a drag force is inversely proportional to mass, while drag force is proportional to the surface area. So the new change is wildly silly as far as physics is concerned.
But the reasons for changing it are 100% correct imho, it makes a lot of gameplay sense to incentivize small ships in some way while not incentivizing narrow ships.
If it's going to be based on mass it should really be called inertia. (Also, the post mentioned they call it "weight" internally and that makes my eye twitch)
Am I reading that correctly that by starting to move platform, ever so slightly, you get 20x asteroid damage, no matter the speed? That sounds even more weird than most of other DLC shenanigans.
Yeah, it was really nice on my first few platforms to be able to turn off the thrusters to slow down the damage when things went wrong. I think new players may find this frustrating, as it's likely to turn a journey into a binary succeed/fail and get rid of those "barely limped home" experiences
Slowing down still help: asteroids are generated more slowly and they take longer to reach your ship. But yeah, if your defenses are already toast, you're basically dead now.
Eh, what it really means is if you press the button to have your platform go somewhere, it gets dangerous. You shouldn't ever reasonably be accelerating by single digit meters per second without being ready to defend the platform anyways. It's not like the game gives you free-move in space. You have to select a destination and commit to it or turn back. If you're committed to going somewhere, the game assumes you're committed to defending yourself.
Sounds good in theory, but in we went from logical and realistic "the faster you collide with asteroid, the more damage it does", which was claimed to be opaque, to "the moment player clicked the button, asteroid looks and moves the same but suddenly does 20 times more damage with no prior indication" - which seems to be much more opaque to me and arguably a significant step backwards.
To be fair it kind of aligns with how Space Age is balanced in general via arbitrary restrictions, but that is probably off topic.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is the new drag formula adversely affects very heavy platforms drastically. Large Promethium haulers are gonna need crazy amount of thrusters and fuel production.
Yeah the huge ones that take multiple screen heights to see the whole ship are basically going to be unusable and will be forced to thruster stack to make the round trip time from Nauvis to S.S. Edge in a decent amount of time. But to do that in the 30min egg spoil time will require the ship to be significantly smaller than before.
I always found it to be more intuitive to collect the promethium first and only fetch the eggs once the buffer is filled up. At least, that's how all of my promethium ships are setup. They collect the chunks, return to Nauvis, fetch the eggs, fly back to collect the next batch of chunks while the science is being crafted, and then deliver the science on the next return to Nauvis. That way, i won't have to worry about the eggs spoiling, since they get processed as soon as they arrive on the ship.
Using mass or width to determine drag is such a cop out. I wish they instead use a computational fluid dynamics simulation to determine the effects of drag. That's just a bit more realistic. /s
I'm just psyched at the idea of width not being a punishing variable. If I want to have a chunk projecting out to the side, I can do that now! And I don't have to police the sides of my platform to make sure there's not one extra tile extending past the boundary somewhere.
I'm glad width won't be major factor in ship speed, so stupidly high ships won't be meta. Obviously doesn't matter for stationary platforms, but it was always annoying to have most of your ship off-screen or zoomed out.
Probably should have been done that way from the start... But I'm guessing it's a heavy lift to undo at this point. And it'd be disorienting for players to have it suddenly change, too.
If the primary variable is now mass, then I feel like the natural extension is for the space platform foundations to have quality tiers that reduce their individual weights. Might add some value for optimizing platforms
Might be a bit overwrought, but you could have the quality of the hub determine the quality of space platform you can use and act as a multiplicative factor. So normal hub would let you use any platform, but it would be x1.0, rare hub would let you only use rare and higher quality platform but give x0.8, and legendary hub would let you only use legendary quality platform but give x0.5. That's probably possible with a mod, but it's probably not readable enough for base game.
That also makes the LDS shuffle even more OP though, which already only narrowly avoided a nerf. Space platforms are only steel and copper, which are free and infinite using the LDS shuffle.
Maybe? But even though it reduces the cost of steel a lot, platform foundations are so steel-hungry that it'd probably require fewer Foundries to just quality-cycle underground pipes and furnace steel from those. Or ore-wash and furnace those up.
Ultimately, I think it would be better, if there's a need to change anything, to just have quality platform hubs/starter packs that have reduced weight. This could either be just reducing the weight of the hub itself (good for smaller platforms) or just a flat multiplier to the platform's weight as a whole. So a rare hub might weigh 0.8x that of the same platform built with a common hub.
Well actually you already get a benefit from quality: more production for the same machine, and since each machine needs platform, you're getting more out of your weight budget. It'll encourage using quality for ships when increasing production, instead of adding more machines.
It seems like they have this very narrow view that the only possible reward is going faster with the same exact thruster you first started moving ships with. Why not look into acceleration window as a design space? Feels like ships almost instantly get to >90% of max speed regardless of arrangement. With a higher speed ceiling and lower all around acceleration you might see people actually designing their gleba and vulcanis ships differently.
That could be further encouraged/enticed by making gleba much closer than vulcanis, which feels like it makes sense. Nauvis and gleba have similarly wet and bug infested worlds. Vulcanis definitely feels more distant. Anyways, let’s say vulcanis is 100k away and gleba 25k away with this more acceleration-limited model. It feels like it aligns better with the spoilage mechanics to be focused on a small and zoomy lower-capacity hauler for gleba and a bulky massive-capacity one for vulcanis.
You may find playing with my mod interesting. In fact, I fully encourage you to go and try out exactly what you are suggesting. It can be set up pretty easily by scaling the Inertia Coefficient in settings. And post about your findings too.
Yeah, bottom line. That if you add x amount of platform tiles, you add one more engine/thruster to compensate. But its not important as such where the thruster goes, or the amount of platforms..
me not think it opaque at all. rock move slow, rock gently bump into platform, just leave dent. rock move fast, rock SMASH through platform and cause huge damage!
I prefer the idea I saw on this sub to add an engine efficiency infinite research. So you can use more and more engines with the same amount of fuel. Or get more and more thrust per unit fuel from a single engine.
Hm, I actually had some platform versus platform PvP in mind since Space Age, but well, it ended just as a prototype, and there is not much time to work on it. Maybe some day...
I love the space platform changes, optimizing based on tile count is so much more interesting than constraining myself to some arbitrary width, and encourages a compact and more "organic" look as opposed to always being some rectangle
Here's a space platform I've been working on since the update, certainly not perfect but a lot more interesting than a big old pencil I would have made otherwise
Does the mass of objects on the platform (inserters, belts, machines, etc.) play a role or is it just tiles? I feel like the former would be both more interesting and more realistic
Eh, either way a well designed ship is one with no unused tiles. I dont really see how much difference adding weight to machines would really make. I mean you dont have much choice in the kind of machines you use on your platform do you? Not like you can not not use inserters or crushers etc.
And if you introduce a significant difference in weight for 2 machines that can achieve the same goal it would just feel like limiting design space instead of being more interesting. (since there would be no reason at all to use the heavier one)
I would have liked if they took the chance and gave machines weight as well, so optimal designs aren't just about removing as many tiles as possible. Though maybe that would have incentivized quality too much which already is very good for spaceships specifically.
I would have liked if they took the chance and gave machines weight as well, so optimal designs aren't just about removing as many tiles as possible.
If you want to use as few tiles as possible it also means you wanna use as little machines as possible. So I doubt it would make much of a difference to the design of the ships if machines also had weight.
An well designed ship is, no matter if machines have weight too or not, is one that has no unused tile.
I dont think there would be much interesting optimization if machines all had slightly different weights because in the end you dont really have that much of a choice in regards to what machines you need to use on your platform.
That's the part where your logic fails. Obviously machines should have very different weights. Power stops mattering on space platform once you deliver nuclear reactors, so what's there to balance different machines? No reason not to always use EM plants and foundries.
If those weighted 10 times as much as assemblers and furnaces, suddenly there would be a balance question. Do I want to go more compact, or more wide but also more mass-efficient? How many guns do I really need for my route? Guns are heavy, overusing them slows you down. Do I use only those super-efficient but also super-heavy railguns, or should I use more gun & rocket turrets?
> The only ships that were significantly hurt in testing were those making excessive use of the thruster stacking exploit; the rest of the skinnier ships didn't suffer too harshly.
I don't know what's "too harshly" ... my planetary haulers using no stacking that had ~500km/s went down to ~300km/s which is essentially undoing the regular -> legendary upgrade
Same, I think "too harshly" is relative, once you consider they kind of don't want ships going too fast at all. I look at this update like them putting a cap on speed altogether, no matter what your ship looks like.
This update looks half-baked. The asteroid damage formula makes no sense now (20x damage as soon as you start your thrusters? Wtf?), being just stacking of arbitrary modifiers without any reasonable damage model. The ship change just broke lots of designs for no good reason, favouring ultrawide ships over ultratall ones. And ultrawide ships are trivial to make, just copy ship design side by side and it will work. It's not like moth-shaped ships were unreasonably slow before, why try to buff them?
I'm still waiting to see if they address the belt-weaving issue. I find it quite silly that even a legendary cargo bay can't fit as much Promethium density per tile as doing a complicated weave of 4 different underground belt. I don't remember the exact numbers but I think it was something like 600 Promethium could be fit by using combinations of horizontal and vertical undergrounds in a 4x4 area compared to the 50 you could fit in a legendary cargo bay of the same construction area. Even if you don't belt-weave, a single belt of 16 spaces at 8 asteroids per belt still hold over double that of a cargo bay (128 vs 50).
The problem is balance. Even a simple belt wiggle with zero undergrounds dramatically outperforms a legendary cargo bay because asteroids don't stack in item slots. Belts will literally always be superior to cargo bays for storing asteroid chunks. A 4x4 building that only holds 50 single items can't ever beat 16 tiles of belts that can each hold 8 items.
The problem is that
if promethium chunks are allowed to stack in cargo bays, then they can stack on belts which quadruples the capacity of belt buffers. I did the math once and found that you would need about 50 stack capacity for only legendary cargo bays to be better then belt weaving. Around 70 to 100 stack capacity is when normal cargo bays start becoming better than rudimentary belt weaving.
It's a cursed design problem. The developers had a forced idea they wanted to push onto players: Deal with biter egg spoilage.
Unfortunately for the developers, they also created and incredibly powerful sandbox that gives players many different ways to solve problems.
You can't have both an "intended solution" and an open ended sandbox. Those are incompatible design goals, which is why many elements of space age feel disjointed in many ways. The problem of incompatible design goals isn't unique to belt weaving for asteroid storage. It shows up all across multiple space age mechanics.
Yeah idk how they solve this, short of making prom chunks explode if they stay on belts too long or something stupid lol.
I do agree with your last paragraph. So many changes recently feel like disjointed, "gamey" solutions to things the devs consider issues because it's not the "intended" method of doing things. A lot of them I agree with, but some of them I don't, limiting player agency in a sandbox feels counterintuitive to what Factorio is.
Boy, if they introduced spoilage to prom chunks, I'm not sure it would be well received, even on this sub. Though it shouldn’t matter too much, unless you specifically have chunk haulers
While the math around needing promethium stacking to 50 to beat belt weaving is interesting... I feel like maybe something is being missed here. A fix/rebalance to promethium chunk handling (or promethium science in general) doesn't need to beat belt weaving, it just needs to be good enough to make it unnecessary (at least for anyone not mega basing).
I feel like the issues here are largely inherent to what promethium asks you to do: grab eggs with a fixed spoilage time, take a flight towards the solar system ege shattered planet that eats up a significant amount of that time, then try to make science as quickly as possible before biters start popping out of the walls. If players could just make many, many platforms to scale up this might not be an issue but unfortunately your UPS will drop trying that out, thus the incentive is either to subvert The Intended Way™ by storing lots of promethium then getting the eggs back on Nauvis, or by storing the eggs in an unconventional way (read: overgrowth soil that gets recycled as needed).
Any fix will need to address that maaaaaaybe the inherent nature of promethium science is a bit fucked and just might necessitate a second pass. Honestly it kinda feels like a last minute addition (maybe this is confirmed already somewhere but I'm on mobile and not opening another tab just to check) and it wouldn't surprise me if that's the case. My first thought is that increasing the science you get per craft and/or decreasing the amount of promethium you need to craft or increasing the amount of eggs you need to use (explicitly in conjunction with one/both of the other options) could help, but this is just a hot take and could have lots of issues I'm not seeing.
Edit: changed solar system ege [sic] to shattered planet
I think prom hauling is not really the way they envisioned people doing prom science. As evidenced by it not stacking in the first place. Belt-weaving is just as unintended as a solution. So I doubt they want to improve hauling chunks.
I still don't like the idea that speed doesn't matter for asteroid damage. In reality speed is a bigger portion of damage than size. Energy of a colliding object scales linearly with mass (double the mass, double the energy), but if you double the speed the energy goes up by 4x. So removing speed entirely from the equation just feels wrong.
Nothing about this is realistic. Totally fine that that's not how we want the mechanics to work or the kind of design we'd like to encourage, but when planets are 15,000 km apart, realism is not even in play.
I realized the solution I actually want: "dim weight" (like shipping). Height+ width results in the drag factor. It encourages for smaller and more interesting ships, but doesn't punish/reward long in either direction or holes...
As it is, it's now impossible to build truly huge ships (see my screen shot with TN of force and 25 kms). That's a bummer.
Feels a bit odd that asteroid damage isn't based at least somewhat on speed, that makes sense to me, even if it makes the damage they deal unpredictable. Surely a basic equation of asteroid health against ship speed would be a good marriage?
But then again, I'm the sort to just want to kill all the rocks before they hit the ship and not pay attention to the nuance of the system, so I shouldn't notice much of a difference anyway, while those that do optimise every little detail will appreciate it.
All my ships reduced in speed by 30-50%. But booster stacking does still work, it seems. I stacked some in a new ship and it went faster; I switched off all the bottom level boosters and the ship still flew. Every working booster has ship behind it…
Or am I wrong and booster stacking is still supposed to work - I’m confused…
Booster stacking still has an impact, but no where near what it used to be. Previously width was 95% of your drag so adding nearly free boosters always increased speed. Now going by platform weight means your weight increases when you add the platforms for the additional boosters, whether your stacking them behind the ships or just adding them to the sides. In fact the sides are better since you don't have as many needless platforms just to get behind the ship, assuming you can add defenses for the sides with minimal platform adds.
Or am I wrong and booster stacking is still supposed to work - I’m confused…
It's still supposed to work. Stacking wasn't affected directly, it's only affected in so far as that it is no longer 'free' thrust vs drag. For the purposes of increasing speed it no longer matters if the thrusters are added to the back or the sides of the ship.
Give Rocket Silos an Orbital Defense mode. Set a defended platform (obviously, the one you're building), and it consumes one Rocket Part and 50 Explosives to intercept impact-course asteroids.
I completely disagree with this statement: "The only ships that were significantly hurt in testing were those making excessive use of the thruster stacking exploit...". From some testing over the past week it seems like the only ships that did not get nerfed by 100km/s or more were ships so unoptimized for width that of course they got a buff. But anything over a 2:1 height to width ratio or excessive solars got hit hard. And that is even further exaggerated on early game ships that naturally are thin due to being smaller overall and couldn't have a full array of thrusters running at 100% due to smaller production capacity. As it stands the mass calculation is rather problematic because solars are almost unusable. A potential solve there is to scale the weight of the buildings themselves so you can fine tune the trade-offs. Please re-look at the low end numbers with less than full thrust and how mass gets calculated before these changes go stable.
To be honest, I loved my laser needle with stacked thrusters. The balancing fact was that for the longest time it wouldn't reach Aquilo, because needle ships seem to lose turret density at the tip of the ship.
It's a great change. Worst part of the old system was that how unintuitive it was. When I was building my first ships, I simply could not understand why ship with lower mass was slower with the same thrust. I went to forums to report a bug, and only there found that width actually matters, and weight is not important at all
They said that using quality isn't required to complete the game. Which, it obviously isn't. You can always scale horizontally, or wait longer. A 30-40% debuff to ship speed also doesn't change the game progression, most of the time. Ships have huge cargo capacity, it's nigh impossible to fully utilize it on time even for slower ships.
Obviously they balanced the game around quality. It's a major mechanic which most players will use, you can't avoid balancing around it. But it also gives a 2.5 prod boost tops, which isn't that much. One can always just build larger. Pretty much the only place where quality really matters is in space, where you can't just arbitrarily scale horizontally.
It really mattering in space, for a dlc where space is the major new feature, makes them calling it an "optional" feature seem a bit disingenuous yeah? Seems like they knew it would be a controversial feature and were trying to soften the blow by basically lying about its importance. I never touched it on my playthrough with my friends, but the two of them made sure I had quality parts for my ships. Frankly, had they not been doing that for me, I would have had a significantly lower opinion of space platform gameplay. Without quality parts, space can at best be described as a massive slog. So I guess it's optional if you want to make space, in a space based dlc, unfun.
I appreciate the rationale being provided after surreptitiously dropping the changes in a random hotfix. But at the same time it doesn't really make sense to use a poll that only a couple thousand reddit users responded to to justify the change to a game that is played by millions. It's especially jarring considering many of the other changes in 2.1 were extensively communicated and tested. It's possible to get used to the changes but they were done pretty abruptly
Reading the spaceship drag changes just made me think of the most recent Let's Game it Out Satisfactory video's title: "I made my absurdly tall factory also uncomfortably wide" and it made me chuckle
Not that this is helpful at this stage but I’m still really disappointed in the whole platform mechanic in general. I don’t know how it would have worked exactly but I really wish it had been something similar to the crashed ship at the start of the game…
I’m still really disappointed in the whole platform mechanic in general
I agree for other reasons. I enjoy creating ships that go as fast as possible, which is completely contrary to their vision. For me, maximizing speed is the only real challenge in space. I wish the mechanics worked in such a way that allowed for boundless optimization for any particular component, be it size, speed, damage, cargo, etc. I also have no idea how the mechanics for that would work. I do enjoy the 2.0 mechanics more, since thruster stacking allowed for ships that would be more limited by resource usage optimization and damage output. However, while I disagree with their vision, I think the direction they're taking in 2.1 will end up being more balanced and we'll end up with a better game. Mass-based limits are simply much more intuitive. I feel this way for most of the balance changes in 2.1.
That said, the only reason I play without mods these days is to complete an achievement, so in other words: hardly ever.
I'm in the same boat. The new changes leave me kind of lukewarm towards building platforms at all. It's like having legendary quality, legendary beacons and modules. Do you need one machine to output more then you can reasonably put on belts? No. But it's fun, now it's like being pushed back to common quality, quite literally, when my ships with legendary thrusters lose 40% speed.
The existence of asteroids already incentivizes narrower designs. There's a natural tradeoff between making a wider platform for more area and the cost of defenses to protect said area.
I don't know if I agree with that? A width ship of width x will be able to find more asteroids than are needed to fuel it, supply its ammo, and maybe even store some overflow materials to drop on planets that need them. As the fuel and ammo components are static for a static speed, this overflow only gets larger and larger the wider your ship is - safety and resource collections are advantages of wider ships. The existence of asteroids encourages wider ships, the desire for speed was the only thing encouraging narrow designs. It used to be a 2 variable problem, now it's a 1 variable problem, more width is just correct.
Won't changing the factor from width to mass simply change optimal design from tall and skinny to short and wide, to maximize the number of truster for the same area?
Correct. Despite saying they didn't want to switch punishment from one to the other, that is precisely what they did. You'd think they would have noticed that their tradeoff of "harder to defend" isn't actually remotely true in practice.
hey factorio team, i dont know if you read these. and you guys probably dont like me from my past, but if possible can we un-tie the planet effects to be tied to the surface and make it a biome instead? that way modders can possibly make say, aquillo's freezing mechanic on nauvis via a biome instead of making the entire planet (surface) "freezing"?
Mass change is an improvement, but I think the scaling should be sharper, seeing calcs/designs showing that approaching the max speed, for a pretty small core mass, can require wings of thrusters 10x the width of the original ship seems off.
So many of the changes they are implementing make me wonder "what problem are they trying to fix?"
The platform width one makes sense, but the asteroid one seems like HUGE step backwards. Game mechanics should be intuitive where possible. The faster you go, the more damage the asteroids should do. Removing that and adding a bunch of weird math hacks is...not intuitive at all.
I respect CodeGreen but I feel this is overcooked. You said you wanted to "expand the design space, not switch what gets punished". But now you are just punished for weight instead of width.
This ultimately encourages ship hole behavior (like blowing up tiles with landmines) just to reduce weight. I ask you: is a pencil ship or one with holes everywhere the more realistic solution?
Everyone applaudes this change but in a few months when people optimized the fun out of this iteration everyone will start to dislike it just as they did with the previous iteration. And this iteration will produce much more unholy abominations than the pencil ships from before.
I still think having weight as a factor is important - it suggests to use nuclear/fusion for example because they are more fuel efficient per tile. But I also feel like it enforces compact building even more - something new players might struggle with and be unproportionally punished for. And we already had the compact aspect in one dimension - designing a ship that's 8 or 12 tiles wide was quite a challenge.
But I also think width is a really good factor for space platforms. It gives a clear thrust per engine ratio and has proven to be a solid concept.
I would propose to use both and create an "optimal" shape. In my opinion this is a rectangle with 1x width and 2x length (like 16 tiles wide and 32 tiles long). This would be an optimal speed shape. If you add more weight while keeping width (stick ships) you would get punished for it but also if you create a square or long line ship you would be slower (which is advantageous as wide ships are usually used as harvesters and thus want width for asteroid spawns but don't require speed).
IMO, The width system does not give sufficient reward for building compact ships, also the optimal engine layout(the asymmetric / or \ with one non engine tile of width for pipes) is too heavily rewarded. To be clear, the optimal engine layout has NOT changed, it retains the most optimal tile to thrust ratio, however, the punishment for off meta ships(ships with creative thruster designs) has been drastically reduced and it no longer feels like a severe punishment to have none engine width tiles on our ships. The absolute top of the meta will always be small design space, this is the result of optimizing a system for a singe parameter, top speed. But the build space that is "good enough" is much healthier with the new mass based system that punishes non optimal thruster design less and encourages compact designs which are very much in the spirit of space platforms as they were envisioned.
(I'm not going to comment on how thruster stacking has been impacted, that's a separate matter)
So the new system punishes empty tiles/wasted space MORE and creative engine layouts and ship shapes with non thruster width LESS. Seems like a big win for a broader design space from my testing so far. This is all opinion of course, not saying your comment is not correct.
Thanks for responding. I would first separate the thruster layout discussion from the width/weight. I wouldn't mind more creative freedom in thruster layouts but that's on the thruster entity design, not the space platform. It should always be optimal to have the space filled completely with engines (plus 1 or 2 tiles for pipes).
The new approach doesn't favor compact builds, it favors long ships with little height (rulers instead of pencils). Since weight is so important it also favors removing unnecessary space platforms that would look nice but aren't used (holes). Design is of course personal preference but wide ships just look ridiculous and if you optimize the tiles out of it they look even more ridiculous.
I've been building incredibly compact ships: https://factoriobin.com/post/4mxejp I like compact ships. Everyone does. I never proposed to get rid of compactness as a metric, I just don't think it should be the only one.
My ships slowed down very drastically while a platform flipped on its side is now incredibly fast. Maybe you love that you have a new design challenge but ultimately CodeGreen changed the mechanic to work from one way to the other. Nothing changed but everything looks horrible now (to me). That's what I'm criticizing.
I don't think the current version favors long ships that much.
There's still a clear trade-off: longer ships can go faster, but they also need more defense, which means more production and, ultimately, more weight.
So while longer ships have the advantage of higher speed, they also come with a cost. It's not a straightforward upgrade.
Previously, the trade-off was that more length meant less speed and more asteroids, making longer ships worse in both aspects.
I think the current version is easier for new players to understand because the trade-off is more intuitive: more weight requires more thrust.
The previous version really felt like an arbitrary choice, whereas the current one has a more logical cause-and-effect relationship.
There is no tradeoff. The long ships are trivial to scale, because if you have a ship that can fly, stacking it side-by-side will also fly, faster. Any formula where the drag scales sub-linearly with width just means that the meta is to blueprint-copy your ships to ultrawide sizes, since the incoming asteroids scale linearly with width.
Conversely, the vertical design doesn't scale trivially, since all turrets must be at the front, while all thrusters are at the back (thruster stacking doesn't change it too much). This means that building your ship twice as long actually means designing it for that length, not just copy-pasting.
Fist off, love your ships! You have an eye for compacting.
Second, I see your designs got hit really hard with the change so I get we're coming from separate places here.
To give my perspective, this is one of my current hauler designs, so much wider and less optimal
I have many other wide designs as well. Many got faster with the update. I have narrow ships too but always preferred wide.
I like now how I'm incentivized to build compact vs it not mattering nearly as much with the old system.
Take a narrow ship for instance, if you went and doubled the height with empty tiles, the affect to speed would be negligible. If you doubled the height with the new system, the impact to speed would be much greater. If you added a single tile that increased the total width of the ship in the old system, entire ship slows down appreciably, in the new system the tile will just add weight.
In the end, the new system favors shaving off empty tiles far more then the old, and building beyond thruster width on either side doesn't tank your speed so I find it more intuitive and less punishing for building less then optimal thruster layouts. That's my 2 cents for why I like the changes.
Thanks for the nice words on my ships. Yours is pretty funky too!
While I personally enjoy width as a puzzle mechanic I'm fully on board that width alone was not a great mechanic. Sometimes you want or need to build a line out to a side and it feels wrong to get punished for it. Fully agree.
But I also don't think weight alone is a great modifier. We don't see the effect yet because everyone is in their honeymoon and CodeGreen was smart enough to showcase a huge varity of designs, but the ultimate meta will be super wide ships with maximum thrusters and as little height as you can get away with. Also I'm expecting to see a lot more hole-y designs with holes on every free tile. I think there's about 68 tiles on your ship that don't have entities on them - you could blow them up with landmines to save weight. I think that's cheesy but the community will optimize the fun out of it pretty soon.
Before I continue I wanted to talk about space ships shapes. Of course they can't be generalized but common designs include a square, a rectangle either slim (rocket shape) or wide (kind of like your ship) and the ultra thin strip as a pencil or a ruler. I think the ultra thin designs are not great and would prefer a rectangle over a cube too. My goal would be to make a rectangle (both tall and wide ones) viable. Yes, this punishes weird and creative designs but you have to draw the line somewhere and everyone who designs a ship purely on looks should realize that they could design a more optimal ship without the creativity changes.
That's why I proposed the combination of weight and width into a combined metric. It would eliminate the pencil and ruler shapes for being too extreme in width or weight. It would favor the rocket rectangle as it is slimmer than the square/wide rectangle but that can be counteracted with more thrusters as the ships are wider. This would modify the 2.0 meta where both tall and wide were viable. Tall ships were fast transport ships and wide ships were great asteroid catchers for resource farming.
Now in 2.1 the wide ship dominates the meta. It's best for speed and asteroid collection. There is no more variety, the opposite happened: we got much more restricted in design creativity.
And keep in mind that 2.1 favors compact building for platforms but that isn't a new thing. Rocket launches and material costs already limited platforms pretty well. We already had the incentive to build compact ships. It only really helps for a better transition from solar to nuclear to fusion for better space efficience. But IMO the changes heavily limit creativity, ship design options (compared to 2.0), force even weirder builds than thruster stacking in landmine holes and do the exact opposite of what they wanted to do.
I respect CodeGreen but I feel this is overcooked. You said you wanted to "expand the design space, not switch what gets punished". But now you are just punished for weight instead of width.
I think this fails to see the forest for the trees. The old system was punishing specific ways of building compared to others. There are still design trade offs, but they are actively engaged with gameplay as opposed to an arbitrarily defined rule of "wider is worse."
This ultimately encourages ship hole behavior (like blowing up tiles with landmines) just to reduce weight. I ask you: is a pencil ship or one with holes everywhere the more realistic solution?
I reject the premise tbh. A bigger-but-with-holes ship makes a tradeoff of requiring more defense to gain only a little extra speed.
I would propose to use both and create an "optimal" shape. In my opinion this is a rectangle with 1x width and 2x length (like 16 tiles wide and 32 tiles long). This would be an optimal speed shape. If you add more weight while keeping width (stick ships) you would get punished for it but also if you create a square or long line ship you would be slower (which is advantageous as wide ships are usually used as harvesters and thus want width for asteroid spawns but don't require speed).
But why? What is the point here? Why is better that a 16x16 ship is SLOWER than a 16x32 ship with the same amount of thrust? Why is that good? We would be once again restricting players in ship designs only on the premise of arbitrarily deciding the 'shape is wrong' for no good reason. I seriously don't see any advantage to this.
We're arbitrarily restricting players right now. Wide ships with little height are insanely more efficient than any other design. More thrusters = better right now. With sufficient width fuel and ammo production both become quite irrelevant to the total weight (also ammo dropoff from other platforms now).
What I proposed was that "pencil" shapes (16x32) are the most efficient at equal thruster numbers but wider ships can build more thrusters to compensate and reach similar speeds. Previously we also had different designs in use case: fast transport ships were long and thin, heavy asteroid collection ships (space casino, calcite farmer etc) were wide and slow to catch asteroids.
Now all ships are wide. Congratulations, the meta is MUCH, MUCH more restrictive now. The exact opposite of what we all want.
And no, ships with holes don't need more defense?? Now every time you have an empty space platform on your ship you'd be better off placing a landmine and blowing a hole in that single tile. No defense is lost as the outer shape doesn't change.
We're arbitrarily restricting players right now. Wide ships with little height are insanely more efficient than any other design. More thrusters = better right now. With sufficient width fuel and ammo production both become quite irrelevant to the total weight (also ammo dropoff from other platforms now).
You are wrong. A wider ship requires more defenses because it is facing more asteroids. Similarly, you need to weigh the pros and cons of more thrusters versus more production and therefor more power usage.
What I proposed was that "pencil" shapes (16x32) are the most efficient at equal thruster numbers but wider ships can build more thrusters to compensate and reach similar speeds. Previously we also had different designs in use case: fast transport ships were long and thin, heavy asteroid collection ships (space casino, calcite farmer etc) were wide and slow to catch asteroids.
Your proposal slows down ships that aren't specifically the shape you describe for no particular reason. Wide and tall ships are still both a possibility, the only difference is that one particular shape (or I guess in your case, anything BUT that shape) isn't hamstrung for no real reason.
Now all ships are wide. Congratulations, the meta is MUCH, MUCH more restrictive now. The exact opposite of what we all want.
Not all ships are now wide and the meta is not more restrictive, it just isn't highly weighted in the direction of one particular shape. You're just saying false things. There is always going to be an optimal shape or size for a specific use, players optimizing the fun out of everything and all that, but the difference is that different shapes of ships aren't going to be seriously hamstrung based on an arbitrary factor unrelated to gameplay.
And no, ships with holes don't need more defense?? Now every time you have an empty space platform on your ship you'd be better off placing a landmine and blowing a hole in that single tile. No defense is lost as the outer shape doesn't change.
A ship that uses less tiles uses less area which means it is naturally going to come into contact with less asteroids. In other words: Less defense is necessary. This means that any ship that has unused tiles is by definition slower than a ship that does the same thing in less tiles.
Are there going to be some hyperoptimizers that blow a few holes in an otherwise completely minmaxed ship? Probably? Is that still infinitely better than the old system? Absolutely.
Thruster stacking is relatively hard to do, the forbidden zone is long. You need to have sufficient platform production and launch capacity to stack thrusters even once in any reasonable time, and it doesn't favour small ships at all. Blowing up holes is trivial, and works for any ship.
People don't use them YET. Weight wasn't important and holes were hard to make. Now weight is important and holes are easy to do with wired landmines. Expect to see hole ships in a few weeks
I know I will see them, just like I see stacked thrusters posted often, but still most people don't use them and balancing around exploits makes little sense in my opinion. A player who blows holes in their ship or stacks thrusters does so knowing they are circumventing the intended mechanics.
What if the speed reduction scaled slightly less-than-linearly with the mass (like something like mass0.9 )? That way it still rewarded compact designs, but by scaling ships up you could get really fast ships by building big and compact.
I was finally getting good at building pencil ships in my experimental 2.1 run. I probably won’t have much of a rebuild because they are fairly light already, but will definitely be redoing my build plans
712
u/mjconver Still looking for that spoon 5d ago
I got a big smile when I saw this.
No more boring pencils, we can make things that work and look cool.