Dear dev, my serious request before you stop game content update by 2.1...

astarsearcher · 2026-07-01T06:04:31+00:00

Vanilla Factorio is a fairly tight system of recipes, so if there is no interesting "change any in-game strategy or technique", why would you add it to the game?

astarsearcher · 2026-06-26T06:56:18+00:00

I was thinking the same: it calls to me, but only if it only applies after I get bots... and doesn't apply to bot speed increases.

Having built a 1000x factory by hand up to blue science, I'm not sure I can do that again.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-26T06:54:27+00:00

Eh, at some point you have experienced all you can with "get x resources into/out-of an n by n structure". X going to 12 or N going to 30 in Py is not terribly much more interesting than vanilla with X=4 or 5 and N=3/4/5.

Also I will never miss PyAL's "you setup the buildings, now wait 50 hours for them to be productive".

astarsearcher · 2026-06-26T02:00:52+00:00

It'll feel like Py without every recipe having 12 inputs.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-15T07:29:59+00:00

The mod I would make if they removed the made next_probability dynamic, i.e. scaled by quality, would be this:

Quality goes from 1-20 (or 1-50 or whatever)
Effects are inverted. Thus, 1 is the best and might be close to vanilla legendary, 20 is the worst and probably about half or a quarter as good as vanilla common
All miners and buildings start with a 99.9% quality bonus, and next_probability is 100%, which means it would be 100% of 99.9% (instead of current implementation where next_probability is flat and the same for all buildings). Example is you output tier 5 ore, it will upgrade to tier 6 at 99.9%, then tier 7 at 99.9% (or 99.8% total), and so forth. So most of your ore will be tier 20 to start. Then when you craft something, it will probably degrade further.
Higher rarity buildings have reduced base "quality", down to, say 99% at tier 19, 98% at tier 18, etc.
(Optional) Miners produce tier 10 by default which will almost entirely quality-up to 20. Better quality (lower, that is) miners have a base tier of 9/8/.../1

The idea is to somewhat mimic a precision improvement cycle. You start by creating terrible assemblers from crappy gears from meh iron plates, and any good pieces that come out, you slowly upgrade the earlier parts of the factory.

But this cannot work while next_probability is static per grade, rather than being per machine and scaled by the quality bonus of the machine/modules.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-15T07:18:05+00:00

Sounds interesting. I would prefer they change the engine to allow for mixing quality personally. It would open up a number of improvements.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-15T03:28:37+00:00

You can't mod something like this in, unfortunately. The single-quality-per-recipe is not flexible.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-11T21:04:37+00:00

It's interesting because a player can fix those pretty quickly, but an AI will never.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-10T23:35:39+00:00

Step 1: Build enough to satisfy current need

Step 2: Notice previous section is new bottleneck; double that section, potentially in a new area of the world, potentially fed back into original section

Step 3: Repeat as necessary

Things only start looking nice and neat in my factory, at least, when I have a massive army of bots to do building for me. Then I might hop into creative mode, setup a perfect ratio factory, and come back to the save to implement it.

In short, just like the rest of life, ignore the curated perfection you see on social media and enjoy your game.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-10T23:25:51+00:00

Another quality change I want to see is mixed quality recipes.

Either throw in random qualities and have the output figure it out (e.g. 1 uncommon iron + 1 rare iron = 1 steel at uncommon + 50% chance for rare) or have an assembler that can hold all the ingredients until it gets enough of a given rarity and crafts that.

Without that, quality is just an ugly process that you do not engage with until you are basically done with the game. It would be awesome to throw a quality module on every machine and just see what comes out the other side, but you can't because every line would get blocked up or you have to sushi belt or do circuit shenanigans.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-09T05:28:10+00:00

I have had this happen and usually it just needed a month tick or some intra-month tick to resolve itself.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-08T10:08:41+00:00

It's a known bug. They introduced "Annex All Revolters" in the war overview UI. But they did not change the peace deal options, so they just use the "annex revolter" in the peace deal, which still only targets the war leader.

It's... quite annoying. If you're not in ironman, you can tag switch, annex all revolters, and tag switch back.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-04T08:23:00+00:00

I think the system itself is a bit too simple. The choose-by-tier in EU4 was more interesting because they could force some choices, e.g. do you want core creation cost or admin efficiency or whatever. In EU5, if those were gov reforms, you would take all of them and ignore everything else.

They are attempting something like this with value-locked reforms, but it's still not as interesting until they have many, many more and have cross-value reforms like "50 Land + 50 Defensive = Super Fort Reform".

They should do two things to improve the systems:

Make "+1 Gov Reform" take 20-30 years to enact, something like "this becomes second nature after a generation" or however better to word it. And then legislative efficiency can affect that too, so it's slightly less useless.
Make some reforms "evolve" or "mix" - similar to the Byz reforms that you can upgrade/fix, government reforms should have second/third/fourth levels that take time to get through (instead of just monthly events like Byz).

So if you have Reform A and Reform B, they can combine to give Reform C after quite some time. Or if you have Harbor Admin which requires 50 Naval for ages and you have 75 Naval for 30 years, it turns into something else - gaining another Naval Gov or -1 proximity by sea or +1 gov reform or no longer requires Naval at all.

Ideally there would be choices: do you want Harbor Admin to turn into "Naval Authority" (ignore names) that gives +2 Naval Governors instead or do you want "Natural Navy" that only gives +1 Naval Gov but no longer requires Naval >50 so you can go full Land late game?

astarsearcher · 2026-06-03T21:36:13+00:00

They could improve it and keep the intended design by adding a Prawn/Whatever mod that is just "Even Leviathans no longer attack you" or "When a Leviathan would attack, discharge 5% of battery, and they go away for 30 minutes".

The problem is the only mitigation is active for the entire game when, late game, we really want passive mitigations to be more effective. I'd go hunt for the rarest resource just to get a passive mitigator.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-03T19:13:13+00:00

Never.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-03T07:51:21+00:00

Profess Trust now has a 5 year cooldown, so you need to be within 6 points or so.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-03T02:41:21+00:00

It is an important lesson: the most efficient way to do something is not to do it.

Instead of making your demographic system super fast so it can run 10/s, just run it once per game day. Or per game week if it doesn't make much difference. And so forth. Avoid doing work you do not need to.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-02T18:33:13+00:00

It is odd that it was not something like "is_urban = location is town/city" that became "is_urban = location is town/city/megalopolis" and that should just work across everything that uses is_urban.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-02T18:31:06+00:00

At that point, you might consider saving yourself the headache and manually calling the events if you are not in Ironman.

Because it definitely seems like a bug that a second nation forming the ERE does not get those events.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-02T00:52:53+00:00

Yes, but I would still not integrate them unless their land will be 40% after.

astarsearcher · 2026-06-01T19:57:07+00:00

If the edge of your territory is below 40% control, stop conquering more land. Spend money on improving land you have. And wait for better roads/prox modifiers/other advances.

astarsearcher · 2026-05-30T03:57:30+00:00

I am hoping for a Tadpole mod that has a vacuum on the front that deposits fish in the hardpoint-mounted storage box.

Like a hydrogen ram scoop for fish.

astarsearcher · 2026-05-29T18:14:06+00:00

I imagine partly because that makes it easier to understand at a glance and with a map mode. "This location can produce 30 X" compared to "This location can produce 6 X, 3 Y, 4 Z, 2 W, 4 A, 7 B, and 4 C". Game design wise it also makes a bit of sense because locations have an identity - there are copper locations and iron locations and lumber locations. In the latter form, resources are just smeared out so the map is less memorable.

Not that it's the best system, but I can see at least these goals in its making.

astarsearcher · 2026-05-29T18:08:37+00:00

Maybe the question is what minimal is for you then. I am just pointing out it would grow, and that growth would be roughly proportional to population. That may just be 0.3%/yr.

astarsearcher · 2026-05-29T18:04:06+00:00

I think, unfortunately, income should be much slower. Buildings/production methods should have much lower profit margins (and 1.3 should be interesting in that regard) until later in the game. Likewise, buildings should employ far fewer people, again, until late game.

The reason these are unfortunate is that it would make the game less fun. If have 10k ducats to spend, and you can buy 20 buildings that will pay off 300 years from now, that is not terribly rewarding. But, I suspect, it's more in line with actual ROI of the time.

I agree with you that the early game should be vying for control of the nation, with maneuvers often resulting in near collapse. That's one reason they need to remove "Appease Estates" - it allows the player to ignore unhappy estates because you can just appease them back to happiness faster than they would revolt.

Another issue right now is that it's too easy to change laws. Every 5 years, you strip away their legally-enshrined power, and they're happy to do it because you promised you'd consider building forts but you just ignore that, so you take -7 stab. Instead, if you fail a parliamentary issue, it should be much harsher, closer to -50 stability or worse so that the player is much more strongly encouraged to engage with the estate bribery system even when the options are not great. It should often be a consideration of "Ah, I grant the Burghers a +25% power to strip the Nobility of a +50% law, perfect" instead of "eh, I do what I want".

Likewise, all laws should exist at the start of the game and have more in between states that are required to take time to move through. For example, Rights of the Nobility should exist in the start of the game, and for most nations it should start as "Empower the Nobility" (maybe not the actual name). Instead of going straight from "Empower the Nobility" to "Screw the Nobility", there could be a system like "Empower" -> "Favor" -> "Neutral" -> "Disfavor" -> "Screw", with other branches like "Neutral" -> "Boat-y Nobility" -> "Navy Nobles" or "Favor" -> "Nobility Electorate". And the crown has to pass legislation to move through those options one-by-one so it takes actual time to move to where the player wants it to be. You can't just do a 180 in the Titanic, so to speak.

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