#Rebalancing to enforce quality-aware factorybuilding as a playstyle

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vestal onyx
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  • keep quality progressively upward (i.e. I'm not imitating Inverted Quality's literally inverted quality-chain; can dispense with a lot of the tweaks that mod has to undertake)
  • but keep the "all buildings produce 'quality' outputs from the start of the game";
  • and lower the level/effect-multiplier of the lowest quality to a value below Normal, with reduced stats. (I'm calling it Slop, hurhurr, topical trollface)
  • finally, gate 'traditional quality outputs' behind research-progression instead of quality-module-insertion (a necessary limitation, not the original design goal.)
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This means you'll, from the very start of the game, have to deal with filtering/routing "trash" outputs (thus ensuring all of your factories are prepared for routing later "uncommon", etc outputs once they're unlocked by research):

  1. Slop, reduced stats, ~15% of initial output at the start of the game (renaming/texturing the "null" quality, normal in vanilla)
  2. Normal, same values as vanilla (but implemented as a new 'quality chain' entry)
  3. Uncommon and Rare, research-gated at their normal current location
  4. Epic and Legendary, ditto
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so. downsides of this approach which I haven't yet figured out any way around:

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First off, "quality modules" now feel much less effectual - I've spent the last 10 hours tuning the curve, but unfortunately, due to the ratios between the qualities being hardcoded from game boot, I have very little "dynamic range" of quality-effect (most of the quality-curve is 'spent' on that initial gargantuan step shoving ~85% of items up from Slop to Normal.) For instance, with my current tuning, where 85% of the curve is spent on implementing slop (i.e. producing 15% slop from game-start), as you can see in the screenshot, the difference between Uncommon produced with no modules (7.65%) and with 4x-legendary-quality-Quality-M3 (9.91%) is basically meaningless.

Got a couple ideas of how to deal with that, but I'll circle around if anyone replies.

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Second, although my original hope is to encourage, maybe even nearly require, "quality-aware factory layouts" ... this approach completely and utterly precludes "qualityless builds" - you would literally be unable to build a direct-insertion factory without bots, even at significantly increased cost or decreased productivity or whatever.

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Feedback I'd love as I noodle on whether I want to expend more time on this:

  • does it sound fun to anybody else? it's already how I'm building factories in my current playthrough, but only by discipline; I tend to be a "cheese" player, and like to be free to butt up against the limitations of the engine/progression as much as possible, so I want to actually implement it.
  • any modders spot any limitations I'm missing with the approach I'm taking of tweaking the quality-"chain"
  • anybody see a way around the two big limitations I'm currently addressing
pallid wren
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Also is this mainly balancing things? So the fundamental system is still the same? (I guess you're sort of stuck with it anyways but just trying to understand)

vestal onyx
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as for 'the issue with quality everwhere getting side-producty' yep, that's the entire complete point, haha.

pallid wren
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right, there's no on craft trigger anyways

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Do you have a simple way of stating your goals? Because any overhaul of the quality system is going to need a clear "why" or else the "how" is going to be irrelevant

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You say "focused on the quality mechanic" but it's still unclear what you exactly want to me.

vestal onyx
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So, to elaborate on my playstyle slash goal: I want "getting a legendary" to feel like more work, more effort, and more rewarding; but through the core mechanics of the game (building and managing complexity, and scaling well); and my playstyle reflects that. (Diverting "unexpectedly-high-quality-intermediates" everywhere, throughout the game, in pursuit of eventually combining them all and upgrading through the tiers to produce legendary items somewhere, centrally; while also ensuring continuous throughput in cases where the additional byproducts aren't being consumed at the same rate.)

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If you want a legendary power-armor, basically, you should have spent 100 hours routing belts more-difficultly-than-you-currently-have-to, storing/sorting/combining all the quality outputs from everywhere in all of your factories as a side-effect of science production, to do so. :P

pallid wren
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Isn't that how the current system is but less intense? I haven't played space age much.

vestal onyx
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not particularly - you can, at any point, sidestep the entire system by just ..... building a part of your factory without quality-modules.

pallid wren
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Sure, but you were talking about legendary

vestal onyx
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there's basically two problems that are slightly related, one is more solved (by other mods/playstyle-restrictions) than the other:

pallid wren
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You need to be clear about your goal for others to understand

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So I guess the first part is legendary things being more rewarding, the second is that quality should not be side-steppable

vestal onyx
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  1. the ability to get legendaries by rerolling at the end of the chain (recyclers)
  2. the low value of the "noisy" quality-outputs throughout all the earlier stages of the chain, relative to the annoyance of managing them
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first is more solved by other people (some mods remove aspects of the recycler's functions, or how it interacts with quality, or just impose higher costs to make it net-negative, etc); latter is a bit more what I'm trying to address here.

pallid wren
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The second one feels well-defined at least, but I don't know if "rewarding" can be given meaning that's not highly player dependent

pallid wren
vestal onyx
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so, the above-described technical approach has a side-effect of enforcing quality-handling, yes; but that's actually not preciesly my end-goal - again, I want to tweak the effort/reward, but ideally, non-quality-handling factories would still be possible, just less "obviously superior in every way" than they are right now. (and, potentially, something you unlock later in progression, additionally, to further encourage a quality-focused playstyle.)

pallid wren
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So in short you want quality to be relevant in early game?

vestal onyx
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Mmmmm, almost the opposite - it's, as you pointed out, very subjective; but to a particular player mindset, it's currently more valuable early-game

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er, "it", I should be clearer here - "it" being "quality-as-a-byproduct-of-a-factory-with-a-different-purpose", not just quality existing at all.

pallid wren
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So you want quality to be less relevant early game? engithink

vestal onyx
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QAABOAFWADP :P

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shocked at how poorly I'm explaining this D:

pallid wren
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It's okay, I think you have a lot of thoughts in your head and a lot of words here, and you just need to exchange the two XD

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To begin, it's really just like, what are you trying to solve in a very precise sense, like one or two sentences

vestal onyx
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again, focusing on end-goals, and presupposing that yes there's different player-types and only somebody who enjoys <some thing we're currently talking about> would bother installing this mod -

  1. late-game, continuously handling quality-byproducts throughout other-purpose factories (basically, lol, science-production-chain, in Factorio) should be rewarding enough that that's the default go-to (well, early-game, too, but the change here is making sure it's viable/desired/valuable late-game)
  2. the player should be encouraged to not hit a "quality-mess" wall midgame when they unlock quality as a whole - i.e. preventing/strongly-discouraging them from "ignoring" byproducts in their builds, early-game, when actual quality products aren't unlocked yet
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I suspect 1. alone can actually be achieved by tweaking some productivity values, but 2. is actually the interesting one that leads to my approach here - introducing "slop"

pallid wren
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That's more than 1-2 sentences 😉

vestal onyx
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(having a "not nice, desirable, quality in the literal sense of the word" byproduct starting from the very beginning enforces/encourages a certain type of design (belts, diverters, buffers/storage); then when quality unlocks, the player isn't miserable, having to tear down all their old builds)

vestal onyx
pallid wren
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ah mb

vestal onyx
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does that track better? :P

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er, actually, tweaking that

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(s/as their general build/of the way you're encouraged to play)

pallid wren
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Ah so in other words "a quality system where factories inherently produce legendary items through science production, and where players are encouraged to build these sort of factories from the getgo"

vestal onyx
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which is what I was describing earlier - just removing the recycler-loop cheese (which other mods do) as an option gets you a lot of the way there, for the actual late-game goal ... but it requires a certain amount of discipline early-game, and then the step-up jump in difficulty when you decide "Yah I want some legendary stuff" is, well ...... tear down literally your entire world, every factory, rebuild them all in a quality-aware way, to collect enough quality-byproducts. All I want is to tweak that (in a game-design sense, not a technical one) to keep the player "on-track" towards quality-byproducts from moment one.