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[Sirus]

I don't understand why there are portable fusion reactors for your power armour but no fusion power for your base. How does that make any sense?

I guess they wanted base power to have some sort of sacrifice.  Either you have steam that pollutes like hell, or you have solar that's clean but you need a billon of them and they take up all of the space everywhere.  Fusion would have neither of those problems.

I can think of one very simple (and !FUN!) way to give fusion a drawback: make it a risk to your entire complex. Fusion should be quite safe and efficient normally, but if the alien hordes break through and wreck your fusion generator it should go critical in a very big way. I'm talking a couple square miles of destroyed buildings and infrastructure. Sure, that particular attack wave will probably perish as a result, but chances are you'll lose most of your factory unless you positioned your fusion generator far away from your bases.

[Parsely]

I don't understand why there are portable fusion reactors for your power armour but no fusion power for your base. How does that make any sense?

I guess they wanted base power to have some sort of sacrifice.  Either you have steam that pollutes like hell, or you have solar that's clean but you need a billon of them and they take up all of the space everywhere.  Fusion would have neither of those problems.

I can think of one very simple (and !FUN!) way to give fusion a drawback: make it a risk to your entire complex. Fusion should be quite safe and efficient normally, but if the alien hordes break through and wreck your fusion generator it should go critical in a very big way. I'm talking a couple square miles of destroyed buildings and infrastructure. Sure, that particular attack wave will probably perish as a result, but chances are you'll lose most of your factory unless you positioned your fusion generator far away from your bases.

I like it. There's a similar mechanic in Supreme Commander, whereby any structures that just passively generate resources such as power generators or mass fabricators are volatile, and therefore explode when damaged. So you get this big benefit of efficient and safe resource generation, but as a consequence it's much harder to protect than any other type of building because you are encouraged to build them in clusters, so when one blows up all of them do.

[umiman]

I don't understand why there are portable fusion reactors for your power armour but no fusion power for your base. How does that make any sense?

I guess they wanted base power to have some sort of sacrifice.  Either you have steam that pollutes like hell, or you have solar that's clean but you need a billon of them and they take up all of the space everywhere.  Fusion would have neither of those problems.

I can think of one very simple (and !FUN!) way to give fusion a drawback: make it a risk to your entire complex. Fusion should be quite safe and efficient normally, but if the alien hordes break through and wreck your fusion generator it should go critical in a very big way. I'm talking a couple square miles of destroyed buildings and infrastructure. Sure, that particular attack wave will probably perish as a result, but chances are you'll lose most of your factory unless you positioned your fusion generator far away from your bases.

I like it. There's a similar mechanic in Supreme Commander, whereby any structures that just passively generate resources such as power generators or mass fabricators are volatile, and therefore explode when damaged. So you get this big benefit of efficient and safe resource generation, but as a consequence it's much harder to protect than any other type of building because you are encouraged to build them in clusters, so when one blows up all of them do.

It was always fun to watch someone build his super hyper efficient resource generation centre, taking him an hour and a half of turtling to do... only for you to come in with 20 strat bombers and blow the whole thing up after sniping a single corner.

[Parsely]

I do see one issue with the volatile fusion reactor suggestion. In Factorio, on maps that are big enough, there's no reason why you couldn't build your fusion reactor in an isolated area of the map surrounded by defenses with electric poles connecting it to your base. And since it's clean it wouldn't attract many enemies, so it wouldn't require even a railroad connection for maintenance probably, so now it presents no danger to your main base base. So there needs to be some kind of reason to keep it within your main base, I think.

It was always fun to watch someone build his super hyper efficient resource generation centre, taking him an hour and a half of turtling to do... only for you to come in with 20 strat bombers and blow the whole thing up after sniping a single corner.

Heh, yeah, that's not how you play SupCom.

[Sirus]

I do see one issue with the volatile fusion reactor suggestion. In Factorio, on maps that are big enough, there's no reason why you couldn't build your fusion reactor in an isolated area of the map surrounded by defenses with electric poles connecting it to your base. And since it's clean it wouldn't attract many enemies, so it wouldn't require even a railroad connection for maintenance probably, so now it presents no danger to your main base base. So there needs to be some kind of reason to keep it within your main base, I think.

It was always fun to watch someone build his super hyper efficient resource generation centre, taking him an hour and a half of turtling to do... only for you to come in with 20 strat bombers and blow the whole thing up after sniping a single corner.

Heh, yeah, that's not how you play SupCom.

Well, I can think of a couple reasons. For one thing, it could be handwaved that something about fusion power attracts/angers the aliens. Radiation, vibrations, magnetic fields, whatever. Perhaps the attacks are much more powerful as long as your fusion plant is up and running.

A second possible reason could be that the fusion generator provides power in a very large radius but cannot transfer power through anything but heavy-duty lines. Park it in the middle of your base and you no longer need to worry about throwing power poles down everywhere, which can open up room for further optimization of your industry. On the other hand, it also puts your base at greatest risk of explosions.

I'm sure someone more familiar with Factorio than I could come up with something else.

[PTTG??]

1: Fusion power doesn't explode. The containment vessel might pop, but that's barely an industrial accident.

2: If it did, the fact that it encourages you to build an external power annex is actually just cool.

If you claw your way to fusion, maybe you deserve to be able to stay there. Just make it require "superconductor filament" and lots of other stuff first, so it clearly demands you reach the top of the tech tree.

[TheDarkStar]

1) Set aside time to eat, sleep and go to work. Maybe set an alarm.

2) Press ALT. Makes it much easier to see whats going on.

3) Figure things you for yourself. My brother has a beautiful factory full of elegant, efficient designs mostly copied from katherineofsky, and is bored of the game.

1. I played 9 hours in my first 24 hours of owning the game. Send help.

2. Does that toggle the GUI thing that indicates what different things store/build?

3. Yeah, I've already redesigned my base three times or so.

[Sirus]

1: Fusion power doesn't explode. The containment vessel might pop, but that's barely an industrial accident.

2: If it did, the fact that it encourages you to build an external power annex is actually just cool.

If you claw your way to fusion, maybe you deserve to be able to stay there. Just make it require "superconductor filament" and lots of other stuff first, so it clearly demands you reach the top of the tech tree.

You don't research things by producing large quantities of multi-colored beakers. You can't run large-scale steam-power generators from a tiny pool. I doubt we'll ever have man-portable fusion generators. You can't carry around 9999 steam engines or power poles.

It's a game, dude. A fusion containment field breach is nearly always a Very Bad Thing in fiction.

In any case, the original ideas came from someone complaining that fusion power involved no sacrifice in this game, unlike every other power source. I merely offered ideas on how to counterbalance the extreme amount of energy a fusion power plant would (presumably) create.

[Empty]

If you haven't done so already hit left alt I think.
It'll show you what stuff is doing.

[Ozyton]

Experimental 0.16 is available

[Farce]

I think I might have mentioned before, but one of my favorite things in this game is just a messy, horrible, snarled, weirdly laid-out factory, with snaking around other stuff and all that.  Every video I've seen of Factorio on youtube and the like has these super well laid out, efficient, well-planned things, and I just get all sad.

Like, one time a guy had like five belts going just straight north, his 'bus' he called it, and he'd just send stuff to little production chains on the right and then just feed them back into the bus and it was just... perfect.  Anathema.

[Ozyton]

Whenever I play this game I end up making a bus as well. Last game I played I had a bus with I think 5 lanes of 4 belts each, and 4 lanes of fluid. It takes up a lot of room but I like it. I'm doing something similar for my new playthrough but I'm going to try to use trains more, especially considering they changed how ore patches generate. The 'starter' coal they gave me is not only pathetic, but it is sort of mingling with the iron patch which makes it kind've annoying to mine.

[umiman]

I think I might have mentioned before, but one of my favorite things in this game is just a messy, horrible, snarled, weirdly laid-out factory, with snaking around other stuff and all that.  Every video I've seen of Factorio on youtube and the like has these super well laid out, efficient, well-planned things, and I just get all sad.

Like, one time a guy had like five belts going just straight north, his 'bus' he called it, and he'd just send stuff to little production chains on the right and then just feed them back into the bus and it was just... perfect.  Anathema.

If a guy came to me with what looks like a jumbled up mess of a factory, I can see passion. I can see self discovery. I can see his mistakes, his corrections, and what he thought was more important. His entire factory will tell me a story of him. And that is beauty and that is art in industry. Compared to another guy who has a main 5 bus with a bunch of copypasted blueprints. Sure it's efficient. But wow I couldn't care less. It's like the people who buy LEGO and only know how to build the thing that's on the box.

So I prefer the messy factory. It's more real. It's more human and more personal.

-----------------

Amusingly, this is more of a personal anecdote, but out of all my friends, I'm probably the least efficient in the game. I just spaghetti everywhere and build as needed. I don't care about ratios or whatever. I just build and build.

We all tried to get all the achievements.

Only I (mostly) succeeded. All my other friends with their bus theories and all that never even managed to get the train in 90 minutes achievement.

I'd like to think it's because I enjoy the game more by doing my own thing. They just know how to copy paste others so it's not as fun. But who knows. Maybe I'm secretly a savant. Or incredibly dumb.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Criptfeind]

I dunno, I guess there's one thing if you're literally copy pasting set ups off the internet, but if you take a lot of time and set up a hyper effective set up and try to make it all efficient on your own, that also speaks of passion and creativity to me. To continue the Lego comparison, you've got the people who buy the boxes and follow the instructions (which is a fun time, but not super creative) people who make a higglety pigglety pile with the legos free building, which is, once again, fine and at least somewhat creative, although just because somethings trash doesn't make it special... And those who actually make something really really cool without instructions. And I think those are the people who are the most creative and passionate about lego.

[milo christiansen]

I generally build a bus, but then off to the sides are a mix of well organized factory modules and retrofitted belts snaking over, under, around, and through to fit in those last minute assemblers that I forgot to leave space for...

Anyway, I just got Steam, so it is time to go for all the achievements again. I'm going for Lazy Bastard+Logistics Embargo+Raining Bullets+Steam all the Way for my first .16 run. Just to make it extra fun, I'm trying for the minimum hand crafts rather than 111. IIRC back in .13 I did it with 101 crafts, but .15 changed some recipes so I'm at 104, and I still need oil and such (I think the new lowest possible is 106).

The flamethrower turrets certainly make Raining Bullets much, much easier to get.