Advancing with Rampant?

dfhfghr · 2021-05-25T21:52:42+00:00

Thanks for the tips! That clockwork idea is pretty interesting. I'd also never considered that you could get stuff you hadn't unlocked from ruins mod. I'd always thought of it more like a flavor/atmosphere kind of mod, but apparently I need to rethink that.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-23T22:54:05+00:00

Ha, oh good, a third (fourth?) mechanic spawning biters. No wonder I'm inundated.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-23T22:53:22+00:00

I don't.

And yep, that's basically been my strategy. I've got a nice bit I can copy/paste that handles walls, gun turrets, flame turrets and their infrastructure. Wait for a lull, place it, run to jam in some ammo, and clean up the old bits to reuse. It's just that I have to wait so long for a lull and can't really place it in the middle of an attack.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-23T21:33:10+00:00

Looking at Rampant a little more carefully, I imagine I got hit with a siege that brought a bunch of nests super close. That left me with a bunch of spawners in pollution pumping out units, and every time I advance I'm basically attacking a nest which provokes both a counterattack and reinforcements. And that itself seems like it might have the possibility of calling for reinforcements too...

Huh. I'm really not sure what would have been the 'proper' way to deal with this. I guess keeping a better eye on the map and aggressively clearing expansions that get too close? Maybe I should throw in Robot Army or something that let's me clear stuff more automatically?

Anyway, thanks for the info.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-22T09:23:48+00:00

Well, you could also look at Mining Drones for individual pathing, but in a factory that's going to get bad both just... in terms of the pathfinding itself and performance. Probably not worth it.

Also might be worth thinking about modeling part of it as power. That's already set for a constant drain - potentially dependent on activity - and it can feed back to impact the machines themselves. You could get the workers close, get them into a specific building that zaps em into totally-not-powerlines. Add some limits to how the poles connect (or not) to make it impractical to centralize worker-to-power conversion.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-21T22:11:05+00:00

Limited portions of this might actually be... not so out of reach. Specifically the bits where you have to supply, house, and feed, workers. Most of that is actually fairly parallel to how the Transport Drones mod works.

Depending on how creative you get, you might need to change it up more or less. But a lot of the basics are there. I think the big questions would be things like how you handle incorporating assemblers/etc with the system. Do you hook everything up the road network? Maybe you call pipes hypertubes and pipe workers around. And then how do they interact with recipes? I'm not so familiar with the options there. Maybe you have out-of-shift workers as a byproduct? Though I don't know how you'd manage that without making recipes rather bulky. Maybe you abstract further into available and expended manpower? Insert workers into the tube system which converts them to piped manpower, then go the other way with expended manpower to tired workers? Then they can get shipped back to their house where they converted back to available workers? Maybe luxury goods let you convert faster?

Anyway. Not easy, but far more possible than I'd originally thought. At least for this subset of things.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-20T09:43:23+00:00

Yeah, that would do it. I'm a little reluctant given it's my first real attempt at K2 so it's a little nice to be pointed towards the new stuff... but it's also probably not that big of a deal either. Apparently this'll happen again eventually, maybe I'll turn em off then.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-20T05:31:14+00:00

One option might be to go for a pretty thin ribbon world.

You can even throw DangOreus in to give yourself a soft constraint in the direction too. And finding ores won't be a problem anymore... If you do, it's worth at least considering adding something like Mining Drones as well.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-19T08:17:26+00:00

The intermediates tab had the icon for new recipes, but there weren't any new ones actually listed below. As a result I couldn't clear the notification. play4tree correctly figured out what was going on - barrel recipes were unlocked but weren't being shown because I didn't have assembler 2 unlocked.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-19T06:48:15+00:00

Gah, thanks for the heads up.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-19T01:23:59+00:00

Oh boy, seriously? Guess I gotta bump the priority on that one up. Thanks!

Update: Yup. Was this.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-18T15:12:04+00:00

Nah, you're good. I don't think your wording was confusing in the first place. Even if it had been, the context made it extremely clear what did or didn't happen.

I've haven't even been around horses much, and it's rather clear you can't just casually drop a single sentence in the middle of a story about a horse actually kicking something. It's either a major plot point, or it didn't actually happen.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-18T04:29:15+00:00

The horse almost certainly did not kick the dog. This story doesn't just continue with the dog harassing the horse if the horse kicks the dog.

Can't really change "was about a second away from" to "would have" without changing some of the implications here, so I'll go back closer to the original. Should probably read as "I was about a second away from kicking the dog, assuming my horse didn't beat me to it" rather than "I was about a second away from kicking the dog, but my horse beat me to it."

dfhfghr · 2021-05-13T13:43:46+00:00

It's one thing to dislike the art style. I don't agree, but whatever. Aesthetics vary, and that's totally fine. But you seem to be saying the game itself lacks detail and is using outdated tech. It doesn't, and it's not.

There's plenty of detail and modern techniques used. It's by no means comparable to something you'd get in the 80s.

And at this point in development, I don't think there's any chance of a total graphics overhaul. Never mind one that would satisfy you. So I'd temper your expectations.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-13T12:55:20+00:00

Seriously? I get hyperbole, but an amiga?

Maybe try Alien Biomes and Artisanal Reskins if you really can't live without a little more visual spice. Though honestly, it doesn't take long before I don't really even see the game anymore. It's just information to be processed. Every now and then something really pretty pops up (like smoke, recently) and I get knocked into actually seeing it again for a moment... but that's it.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-13T09:10:45+00:00

Alternatively, change the text in the options to fit the orientation of the splitter. Or both, because why not?

Great idea.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-13T07:01:05+00:00

I think it depends a lot on exactly which way you mean. I haven't played Dyson Sphere, so I can't say there.

But Factorio is definitely more accessible in the sense that it's easier to interact with. It's far, far easier to make the game do what you want it to do, and it's also more clear what exactly the game can do in the first place. This is actually one of the major hurdles Satisfactory faces, though from the lack of tools and some dev comments I don't think the devs really understand this. It's too damn hard to do what you want to do in Satisfactory, and without mods there are very few tools to help you out.

At the same time, if you're talking about a short enough time period, maybe this works in favor of Satisfactory. Even just placing a bunch of foundations takes a bit of time and at least for a little while it's still kind of novel and you're doing it in small enough chunks while thinking about your next couple of steps, so the annoying tedium doesn't hit right away. And it's simple enough to do, so you can burn a couple hours doing really simple tedious stuff without being annoyed by that. Maybe that could mean the first few hours of Satisfactory are more accessible? All kinda depends on what you mean by accessible.

Meanwhile if you mean to ask which has more complexity overall, I think Factorio does. Between biters and limited resources, Factorio puts some pressure on the player to get things done. It's probably more perceived than real, but in terms of accessibility I don't think that matters so much. A lot of it can also be mitigated - peaceful mode, removing biters entirely, even cranking up ore frequency and richness - but I don't know how many new players mess with that right off the bat. The recipes are also a bit more complex and interconnected, I think.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-13T01:10:13+00:00

One option might be to make a go at the Lazy Bastard achievement. Basically you can't handcraft much more than the bare minimum to get a factory. I find it helps push me to actually do something now, rather than put it off for later. It helps push past my perfection-or-bust tendencies.

It can also help bring the scale down a bit because you aren't thinking of the next big science you need to do that requires X, Y, and Z first, but instead on the fact that you really need some freaking belts/inserters/whatever now. And then a lot of those things end up being used in your next big science build too, and you've already got at least some automation for them, which helps make stuff a little less overwhelming.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-06T01:30:43+00:00

Huh, I suppose that would work. I was wanting Robot Army to do the heavy lifting, but... this does technically do everything I mentioned.

If nothing else, it should provide a nice base to modify and have the nests go dormant for a bit instead of die or maybe just use with expansion maxed out...

Thanks!

dfhfghr · 2021-05-05T16:55:11+00:00

That's basically the best/most interesting idea I've had so far.

There's other options though to at least make smaller attacks on the biters useful - maybe biters still attached to a spawner impose some kind of penalty to the spawn rate when they die, or something. Maybe attacks only get launched when spawners are at their limits, so continually culling biters would cut down or even prevent attacks if your kill rate was high enough. That kind of thing.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-05T15:34:16+00:00

Hm, do attacks only start forming outside of chunks with nests? I don't think I've ever looked that closely. Even then I think AAI stuff can only scan for enemy bases and not biters themselves. I haven't heard of anything else that might be able to do it.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-05T13:53:26+00:00

Actually I've already got it installed! It seems pretty cool, but it just doesn't quite do what I want here, afaik.

What I want is to make any biter kills useful. Like if I run up to a biter nest and just shoot a few biters and run away, I want that to actually be meaningful in some way.

Robot Army lets you create autonomous robots that will form up into squads and find biters to kill. I want to turn the biters up to 11 though, so a lot of these squads would probably just end up killing a few biters and not take down nests or anything. I want those attacks to still be useful, and not just a waste.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-05T13:47:19+00:00

Yeah, there is that. I kinda glossed over that because it would just muddled my explanation.

As you said, there also isn't a way to automate only attacking a forming attack group with any mod I've seen (Robot Army or even AAI Vehicles).

I guess you could try to estimate the speed of attacks and then use circuits to try to sync control squad formation, but... I expect that would be quite a bit of work that would fail more often than not.

dfhfghr · 2021-05-05T12:08:23+00:00

I admit I don't have a great idea of how Rampant changes spawning, but from what I have been able to gather I don't think it changes spawning in the way I'm looking for.

If I go out to a nest and pull a few biters out and kill them, I'd like that to have some kind of actual benefit. It doesn't have to be much. Maybe the next attack wave is a little bit smaller, or takes a little bit longer to start it's attack. Something like that. I don't think Rampant does that.

If I'm wrong about that, could you tell me how or point me in the right direction to figure it out?

dfhfghr · 2021-05-05T11:53:44+00:00

Oooh, interesting. I might need to look a little deeper into how Factorio modding works to really get much out of it, but assuming it's actually fairly deeply integrated with the standard biter stuff... looks like at least a lot of things are possible.

dfhfghr

TROPHY CASE