[0.11.22] Turret range/armor upgrades (proof of concept)

[ThaPear]

As per this thread, i present:
Turret Range/Armor upgrades

This mod adds 5 researches for range, 5 researches for health and 3 upgrades for armor giving the gun turret 17-22 range, 200-450 health and 0/0%, 0/10%, 1/20%, 2/30% physical and impact resistance.
It's probably not balanced correctly, as it's mostly a proof of concept.


The code should allow you to alter any stat of any entity using upgradestats.lua.
It generates the appropriate researches, entities and control.lua makes sure it's processed.
It only executes code when the game starts or when a research is finished, so it does little to affect performance.

Features:
- Arbitrary stat upgrades for arbitrary entities.
- Virtually no performance impact.
- Easy changes

Current issues:
- Only supports a single entity type.
- Locale definitions are a pain.
- All researches show all the time, they are not hidden until possible. (upgrade="true" doesn't work.)

Downloads:

TurretUpgrades_0.0.3.zip

(5.71 KiB) Downloaded 3535 times

Old versions

TurretUpgrades_0.0.2.zip

(5.71 KiB) Downloaded 206 times

TurretUpgrades_0.0.1.zip

(5.27 KiB) Downloaded 189 times

[orzelek]

Small question - what problems did you have with upgrade = true?
It seems to work for me without problems in fort mod.

[Peter34]

Should I expect this to work in MP?

Also, why are you first talking about Armor upgrades and then talking about giving Extra Hit Points? The reasonable thing to assume is that the effect of an Armor upgrade will be to give the Gun Turrets an increasing Physical Resist. Perhaps in addition to a HP boost, but certainly just giving a HP boost with no Armor upgrade is illogical.

[ThaPear]

Small question - what problems did you have with upgrade = true?
It seems to work for me without problems in fort mod.

I'm not sure why, but the following does not work. They still all show up

Code: Select all

{
	type = "technology",
	name = "gun-turret-health2",
	icon = "__base__/graphics/technology/gun-turret-damage.png",
	prerequisites = {"gun-turret-health1"},
	unit =
	{
		count = 150,
		ingredients =
		{
			{"science-pack-1", 1}
		},
		time = 30
	},
	upgrade = "true",
	order = "e-p-a-a"
}

Should I expect this to work in MP?

Also, why are you first talking about Armor upgrades and then talking about giving Extra Hit Points? The reasonable thing to assume is that the effect of an Armor upgrade will be to give the Gun Turrets an increasing Physical Resist. Perhaps in addition to a HP boost, but certainly just giving a HP boost with no Armor upgrade is illogical.

It should work in MP, I haven't tested it extensively in MP though.
On the point of the name armor, you're absolutely correct. I've uploaded a new version where there's health upgrades and armor upgrades separately.

[Peter34]

You've giving these resistances, based on researched tiers?

0 (default): 0/0%
1: 5/5%
2: 10/10%
3: 15/15%
4: 20/20%
5: 25/25%

That's beyond wildly overpowered. It's clincially insane. Physical Resist of 25 means that Medium Biters cannot do anything to the Gun Turrets at all. And in fact this effect occurs long before tier 5, since Medium Biters do much less than 25 damage per hit. There's no readily availablye (out-of-game) information about what kind of damage Biters/Spitters do, but I wouldn't be surprised if your tier 5 Gun Turrets are completely impervious to even Large Biters!

I was actually going to post here and caution you about potentially doing +1 Physical Resist per tier to a maximum of 5 Physical Resist for the 5th tier, since that alone would be wildly overpowered, but you've gone and done something 5 times more overpowered than what I imagined.

Unless I've misunderstood something...

Try taking a look at my proposal, from a few months ago, which if you scroll down a bit has some much more reasonable suggestions for what magnitude of armour boost to give to Gun Turrets: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 99&start=0

[orzelek]

Big biter has 30 damage if I recall correctly so 25/25% is big biter proof. You can find more mean biters in mods to break the turret.. maybe. Best heavy turret in fort mod is now 6/50% and I think it might be also a bit to good. It's meant for worse biters then big ones tho.

[ThaPear]

A lot of sense

You're absolutely right. I don't know what I was thinking. (Well obviously, I wasn't)
I've altered it to your proposal in the other thread.

[Peter34]

A lot of sense

You're absolutely right. I don't know what I was thinking. (Well obviously, I wasn't)
I've altered it to your proposal in the other thread.

Thanks a lot.

My friends in our weekly Tuesday MP game were keen to try your mod, when I told them about it, until I convinced them it was OP. Thans for changing the stats to something more reasonable!

[Peter34]

Your mod has three problems:

One is that it seems to no longer be compatible with an on-going game, that is a game that was started before the mod was added in. When I try to put down a Gun Turret, i that situation, I get an error message and the game quits on me.

Secondly, there's no mouse-over information on the T Tech/Research screen. Other Inventions give specific information when you mouse over them, even before they've been invented, e.g. one might show "+20% Damage" or "+1 Logistics Drone Cargo Capacity", but your mod lacks that. Means you have to actually research the invention first and then you have to notice the difference when you mouse over a Gun Turret. I imagine that if you try to look more thoroughly at existing in-game-tech-writeups, you might find out how to get that mouse-over info shown.

Thirdly, your mod is poorly documented. This is particularly problematic in a coop MP situation, where one player suggests that a new mod be included into an ongoing or new game, and the other players then request specific information about what the mod does, so that they can evaluate whether or not the mod is balanced, overpowered or ridiculously irrelevant. if such information is not readily accessible, the other players are unlikely to consent to adding the mod. To start with, you could update your original post to indicate the number of tiers of each research that can be done, and the effect of each tier. Currently your OP still reflects the original 5/5%-per-tier Resists

[Peter34]

Thanks for updating the info in your post, but I still get game-ending crashes when I try to use the mod in an on-going game, one that was started before I added the mod.

[Peter34]

Thanks for updating the info in your post, but I still get game-ending crashes when I try to use the mod in an on-going game, one that was started before I added the mod.

Testing a bit more, there seems to be no crash problem with this mod itself. Rather the conflict was with the Test mod. When I disabled that, the game stopped crashing on me.

There are still usability/interface problems, but the mod appears to be basically functional.

[Peter34]

I'm getting a weird error now.

I started a new game, a few days ago, intending to use both this mod and some other new mods, along with some old mods I like.

Then after having played a few hours, I disabled the Turret mod and some other mods, to join the weekly MP game I'm in.

Now, today, I wanted to resume the SP game, so I re-enabled the Turret mod and some others, but when I tried to load my SP save game, I got a popup window this this error message:

Migrated content
Removed entitites
gun-turret-range2-health1-armor2 16

And this causes, in-game, the 16 Gun Turrets I've built to disappear. Even though I was using the same 0.3 version of the mod 2 days ago, as I am using now.

Those 16 guns were all placed around my "Citadel", my run-to-in-emergencies safe house, rather than around my factory perimeter, but it's still very disturbing to me that this bug might crop up again, later in the game, when I've painstakenly set up many dozens of Gun Turrets around my factory perimeter, causing the loss of both lots of material (Gun Turrets are expensive, when you build dozens of them) and all that effort (especially seeing as alpha 11 Gun Turrets aren't compatible with Blueprints).

So I'd like to know what's up. Why did I get this error?

I tried several times by disabling other mods, and ended up disabling all other mods, so that only the Base game "mod" and the Gun Turret mod are disabled, but I still got the error popup and lost all 16 Gun Turrets.

I know this mod is only "proof of concept", but I really like the idea of it, and I'd like to be able to play with it without having to worry about resource-harmful bugs (both now and also after alpha 12 comes out).

[Peter34]

I've now playtested this mod, in an actual game (not to finish, but I did play for perhaps 8 or 10 hours total), and I can say for sure that the armour bonuses I suggested certainly aren't overpowered, but in fact may be a bit underpowered. They don't seem to help Gun Turrets much, although I'll still maintain that the original bonuses of 5 Resist per level were absurd.


My suggestion would be to combine the 3 armour bonus techs and the 5 HP bonus techs into a single research ladder of three techs:

Robust Turrets 1: Gives Gun Turrets +150 HP and +1/15% to Physical Resist and Explosive Resist. Costs 50 Red Potions.
Robust Turrets 2: Gives Gun Turrets +150 HP and +1/15% to Physical/Explosive Resist. Costs 100 Red+Green Potions.
Robust Turrets 3: Gives Gun Turrets +150 HP and +2/0% to Physical/Explosive Resist. Costs 200 Red+Green+Blue Potions.

Thus the total bonus is +450 HP (not 500 HP) and +4/+30% (up from +2/30%), and the HP bonus is gotten faster.

Likewise I'd suggest combining the 5 Range techs, each giving +1 range, into three three, each giving +2 range, first costing Red, 2nd costing Red+Green, 3rd costing Red+Green+Blue, for a total bonus of +6 to range instead of +5.

And of course the reason I'm posting here is that I'm hoping that either the OP will update his mod to alpha 12, and turn it into a real mod (it needs quite a bit of interface polish) rather than a mere proof-of-concept, or else that someone else will "adopt" his proof-of-concept and turn it into a real mod, continuously maintained.

[Peter34]

Will this mod get updated to alpha 12?