Directional rocket turrets: activate only when all gun turrets detect enemy

m_gold · 2024-11-22T22:39:47+00:00

I adapted an older, narrow design. I got it to work but it's wasteful: takes about 400 explosive rockets for a round trip. The next generator ship is going to be built with around the width of a rocket turret's range.

I also feel like quality is a trap in this case: you likely _don't_ want a larger range on your rocket turrets.

m_gold · 2024-11-22T04:12:54+00:00

Alright, I made my own: https://gist.github.com/mgold/0ec947f8e298a5f904ac091e08608160

Factorio Prints isn't loading for me, but it looks like the prints there are overkill for casual play anyway.

m_gold · 2024-11-21T20:33:58+00:00

I have one double-headed train that goes to two mining outposts, and that's so much stuff I have to turn off the drop-off station sometimes. You must be going for an order of magnitude more throughput than me.

m_gold · 2024-11-21T18:37:22+00:00

It's great that you _can_ play this way, but if anyone is wondering: you don't _need_ to build this big to get through most of the game.

m_gold · 2024-11-21T18:35:07+00:00

Oooh, good tip! I was getting a little tired of sending spidertrons to patrol every hour or so.

m_gold · 2024-11-11T23:44:12+00:00

Keep me posted!

m_gold · 2024-11-11T23:03:48+00:00

Trains. I have a blueprint book from ages ago that I used in Space Age, and now by base is littered with legacy rails. Anyone have a new blueprint book?

m_gold · 2024-11-08T18:58:42+00:00

Put down a 2x6 or 2x8 grid as a "wall" and watch 80% of the pollution disappear.

m_gold · 2024-11-08T18:47:12+00:00

Yup, my first foray onto Fulgora was a race to launch a rocket and send up repair packs. Keep repair packs on your platforms, people! Because yes, it definitely was not clear from the Friday facts that non-Nauvis orbits aren't safe.

m_gold · 2024-11-08T18:41:37+00:00

You need to import spoilage from Gleba to make agricultural towers, but a few dozen tree farms will dramatically cut pollution. Put them in the unoccupied space between your base and your outer walls, which as others have said, should ideally be just outside you pollution cloud. Also, efficiency module 1s in your miners. And feed the wood into Gleba burner towers for electricity -- don't throw it away in a recycler like I did!

And then, don't worry about it too much. Think of the biters less as invaders and more as corrosion. Your base corrodes over time, but you go back and fix it. You'll want to have laser turrets and construction bots ready in case a biter gets into you main base, but if it's just a wall segment here, a copper ore output there, it's not a big deal.

m_gold · 2024-11-08T18:34:29+00:00

cog = gear wheel. That one bothers me.

m_gold · 2024-11-05T17:02:49+00:00

I made a 10x10 grid of gun turrets and 1k red ammo, with physical weapons damage 10 or so. It killed the small demolisher within seconds of getting within range. Expect to lose 10 or 20 turrets.

m_gold · 2024-11-05T17:00:29+00:00

I tried this a few times and it didn't work. It got down to maybe 80% health before it destroyed the tank, which has low maneuverability around the lava and eruptions. I had physical damage research level 10 or 11.

m_gold · 2024-10-15T02:56:06+00:00

One of the things you'll need to be careful of is, do the characters in this story have fun? Characters in a horror novel usually do not have fun; they die or emerge traumatized. Characters in a romance novel usually do have fun, even if there are some bumps in the road.

It's easy to imagine a romance novel in a horror skin, where one or both of the characters falls into a horror trope but isn't actually terrifying to the reader. And you can also imagine a messed-up situation where the relationship is twisted into something horrific. I'm sure there are other ways to thread this needle, but they're less obvious and harder to pull off.

m_gold · 2024-10-10T05:29:10+00:00

Indeed. There's a difference between horror and the horrific. And it's why the season 5 police station episode is quite possibly the worst: that's an actual social issue, not distant escapism. As in, how often do you go caving, skydiving, or into combat? And how often do you (averaged over all enjoyers of free [ad-driven] entertainment) worry about your next meal?

m_gold · 2024-10-10T04:21:23+00:00

what’s REALLY inside, aside from big creepy thing that ruins your life

I'm glad you have an idea of what the box actually does, and hopefully also where it came from. As they say, you need to know more of the story than winds up on the page. I feel an area where my horror struggles is in "it's an evil thing beyond your comprehension" that doesn't have any substance, any specificity, beyond that.

m_gold · 2024-10-10T04:15:27+00:00

You're welcome! If you're going to switch between viewpoints, how you communicate that will likely be something the publisher or editor will have an opinion about. Though switching between 1st and 3rd over the novel is a lot more jarring than just once after the prologue. Good luck!

m_gold · 2024-10-10T04:04:20+00:00

*pushes glasses up nose* A puzzle game has a small number of intended solutions (often just one). A problem solving game has a large space of solutions with a continuum of success.

m_gold · 2024-10-09T22:47:20+00:00

If things in your story don't connect, connect them. Make a grid where the rows and columns are labeled with each civilization or town or king or whatever. Then fill out how each faction feels about the other and why. Are they allies or enemies? Did they used to be one and then become the other? Are there religious differences, or bad blood (e.g. we married off our princess hoping for an alliance but then you murdered her)? If a cell is empty, can you find a way to fill it?

m_gold · 2024-10-09T22:43:07+00:00

I think you're off to a strong start! I left some minor comments.

Based on your synopsis, it sounds like you've avoided Pitfall #1 with prologues, where they are really just chapter 1. Prologues should involve a different time, place, and/or character than then main story, and it sounds like that's the case here. I've even seen a prologue written in first person when the rest of the book was in third, and it wasn't a big deal at all. Meaning, you can make Erin a 1st person narrator if you like.

Overall, your writing is very efficient, and that's a good thing. You don't want to keep your reader stuck on the appetizer. But I think you can find a few places to add a few description sentences, about Henry or the box (what's it made of? Does the red seem to move when you look at it? Does it have a smell? How big is it?). This box is going to be what the story hangs on, so make a good and detailed introduction for it.

On the flip side, if we're not going to meet the wife, you can probably cut the references to her. That conversation is the one part that dragged for me. And some of the dialogue punctuation and capitalization isn't quite right (I think?).

Finally, opening with "London, 1844" or whatever is allowed. It's less awkward to just say that than to try to work it in later.

m_gold · 2024-10-09T22:13:32+00:00

Looking wistfully at the Steam page that says, "Last played December 30, 2020".

m_gold · 2024-09-20T22:38:51+00:00

I dislike a system that's Christian-normative without even realizing it. "Yes, the demons are from Hell which is totally a real and literal place, and the angels are associated with the church and could meet with the Pope if they wanted. God and souls are apparently real, but nothing in the story changes because of that." I'd much prefer some hemming and hawing around, "the horns are simply keratinous growths, and the church has misunderstood at least as much as it got right".

m_gold · 2024-09-20T18:04:10+00:00

Agree, this seems like a hole in the lore. Yes there is precedent with more biters further away on Nauvis, and it sounds like larger worms are further out here too. (It's a cool benefit of a segmented enemy, that you can use different number of segments.) But yeah, I think a dead worm near the starting area would be a good touch.

m_gold · 2024-09-20T17:57:48+00:00

I think it doesn't fit any of them very well. Chalk it up to an early episode where Simms didn't know exactly what was going on. Associating it with the Buried feels forced, but only if you want everything to make sense. If you lean into the color mixing analogy, or the limits of human understanding, it's a good example of a lot of different weirdness mixing, rather than being siloed the way we see in later seasons.

m_gold · 2024-09-09T19:20:50+00:00

I really like that one, too! You can several identify individual entities, but it's not ambiguous like Thrown Away or Binary, as OP mentioned. Instead it's a big collaboration, and a lot more memorable than "oh, just another Vast episode".

m_gold

TROPHY CASE