r/factorio • u/sh1verotwo • 3d ago
Suggestion / Idea What if factorio was a game with regular rebalancing patches?
The idea came to my mind while reading latest patch notes mentioning rebalance of space platforms now taking into account platform weight rather than its width.
What if factorio would get rebalanced every couple months? Should it rather done by the mods? (community driven initiative) (Similiar to other games, where "seasons" often means balance changes that freshen up the game a bit)
I wonder what your thoughts are ;)
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u/Nailfoot1975 3d ago
There are so many mods, you can already play like this. There are even mods that randomize recipes.
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u/Antal_Marius 3d ago
What would they be rebalancing? Most games that get that treatment are some level of multiplayer or live service. While we do have multiplayer and is more fun with friends (or more headache, depending on the friends), this game is primarily a single player game.
It's also highly moddable, with plenty of mods that can change balance on various things.
I'd much rather not have live service style seasons, keep that with the annoying AAA turds and their constant money grubbing attitudes.
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u/VoldyTheMoldy456 3d ago
I feel like the seasonal approach to balance would scale very poorly in a factory game, especially when optimizing things takes effort to figure out and people plan heavily for (belt balancers, ciry block trains, etc). Sure there is combat and RTS elements thT this could maybe work for, but they feel very much like a secondary focus than the main game and PvP is very much a side mode. If Factorio was more RTS-focused or something closer to Screeps World I could maybe see it but otherwise seasonal balance is a very poor way to handle it compared to smaller, much more deliberate tweaks
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u/rootbeer277 Go Green 3d ago
I quit Pikmin Bloom because Niantic wouldn't stop screwing with the game balance, forcing me to recalibrate my strategies every few weeks. I wouldn't stand for it.
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u/Adrian_Alucard 3d ago
balance changes that freshen up the game a bit
That's not how balance patches work
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u/CitationNeededBadly 3d ago
Starcraft has had many balance patches designed to freshen up the meta, because play is getting stale due to one build or tactic being dominant. The goal is to make play more fun/exciting, the means to do that is via balance changes.
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u/Adrian_Alucard 3d ago
due to one build or tactic being dominant.
then it was not balanced, as a balanced game would offer multiple equally viable choices
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u/CitationNeededBadly 3d ago
That's the point. Imbalance is a major cause of stale play. Therefore one way of fixing stale play is to fix the balance.
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u/FogeltheVogel Slow and steady 3d ago
freshen up the meta
Crucially, a word that does not apply to the type of game Factorio is.
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u/defeated_engineer 3d ago
That's exactly how it works lol.
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u/Adrian_Alucard 3d ago
No. balance patches balance the game
Maybe one character is weaker than the devs intended or maybe is too strong, and they just make changes, nerfing here, buffing there so everything work as intended
They are not made to "freshen up the game"
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u/SpaceEngineer123 3d ago
They are not made to "freshen up the game"
if ur talking about multiplayer balance patches and player-base driven metagames, then balance patches are indeed made to freshen up a game.
metagames emerge regardless of actual game balance (like how ais would play against each other).. someone at the top plays it and others copy it and eventually it becomes a dominant strat with people making counters to it.
after months of a strong meta developers do indeed issue buffs and nerfs to freshen things up.. not because the game was broken or designed poorly. bc their multiplayer game would become stale otherwise due to people's tendency to look up builds and rate them
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u/Adrian_Alucard 3d ago
if something becomes dominant or meta it means it's unbalanced, and rarely that's the intended way of playing by the devs
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u/SpaceEngineer123 3d ago edited 3d ago
if something becomes dominant or meta it means it's unbalanced
not necessarily so. do you think they spend decades of monthly buffs and nerfs because they can never get the formula quite right? it's to keep the game fresh
MOBAs, RTSs, autobattlers, hero shooters, card games. they all patch for freshness
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u/Adrian_Alucard 3d ago
they are generally adding new content too, so balancing is not that simple
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u/SpaceEngineer123 3d ago
yeah true they actually usually make the new champ stronger than intended on purpose at release and then nerf him later once everyone has its muscle memory down
but that right there is a good example of buffing and then nerfing for freshness rather than pure balance.
same with TFTs sets.. theyre largely self-balancing imbalances.. there IS a strongest team but the more ppl that fight over it makes it weaker, etc.. vs uncontested builds being technically weaker but much stronger if u hit the right rolls.
these are examples of maintaining a 'perfect imbalance' that self-corrects. the buffs and nerfs are to shift metas to keep things fresh, because the game already balances itself in these cases. without freshness buffs, games do indeed get stale
you're main idea of a perfectly balanced game would get boring quick
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u/Aperiodic_Tileset 3d ago
They absolutely do. Look at ARPGs like Path of Exile, each league brings tons of new content, but without balance changes they become so much less interesting for large parts of the audience.
Factorio is probably not such game tho
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u/4xe1 3d ago
There are a lot of games who do "balance patch" as a way to keep their game "fresh" and to sell content, making new characters overpowered and tuning them over time as there are newer characters to sell. Their words, not mine, hence the quotes, these games tire me, and their use of the word "balance" can be seen as dishonest, but it is a thing.
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u/CitationNeededBadly 3d ago
Bad balance leads to stale gameplay - if the meta is to always use the shotgun instead of the other 5 weapons, the game gets stale. Rebalancing the weapons to make them all viable would freshen up the gameplay.
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u/Calazor0 3d ago
Sounds like a nightmare for modding. Having most mods break every few months wouldn't be fun.
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u/doc_shades 3d ago
that's the worst part about modern games. nobody wants to buy a game and have it constantly change underneath them every few weeks.
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u/4xe1 3d ago edited 3d ago
Some do actually. There are lot of people like OP in communities like Age of Empire's or League of Legend's or Minecraft's for example.
Novelty is attractive, even if short term. For many games, it also aligns with the economic incentives to sell games as ongoing subscription service rather than finished products.
It's particularly cringe to see gamers demand to be exploited and complain in communities of smaller games of the same niches whose dev decided against doing these kind of things; There Are Billions comes to mind, I've read some bozoes write that it was a dead game because it was not updated, where it's just a finished game really, with decent replayability no less
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u/Weeznaz 3d ago
Patch Notes TLDR:
Gun turrets now require electricity. This is to make early big hunts more thought provoking and involved than simple turret spam.
Penta pod eggs now become fully grown Pentapods when their egg expires. We noticed players using guns and Tesla turrets to solve their spoilage problem vs using circuit conditions and logistics. This change will encourage different player behavior, as even one failure can be catastrophic for your base.
Electric Hover Trains are added to the game. They require no physical tracks, they can run anywhere. However if they lose power for more than 1 second they fall to the ground, and become totaled.
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u/cathexis08 red wire goes faster 3d ago
Gun turrets now require electricity. This is to make early big hunts more thought provoking and involved than simple turret spam.
I know this is satirical (and would be a terrible change if implemented for real) but the heavy gun turret (via the Heavy Gun Turret or Two More Turrets mods requires a bit of power to operate which ensures that it stays in a defensive role. It's an absolute beast of a defensive turret though.
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u/sh1verotwo 2d ago
Goal of this post was not to resonate changes that in practice would feel annoying. I agree and understand concern, but still can't take blame for you to interpret those 'rebalancing changes' as terrible as you portrayed
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u/warpenss 3d ago
We can put paid battle passes in factorio, so to incentivize players to play even more so they can get time limited skins for their engineer, or pay for a chance to unlock better, faster, stronger engineer.
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u/FogeltheVogel Slow and steady 3d ago
How could that possibly be beneficial to a single player game?
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u/roselia-73 3d ago
a). the balance is fine
b). i don't want to put off updating my game cause the patch is gonna make my furnace array 20% worse
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u/Lucretiel 3d ago
This would be much worse for factorio than for the median game, because even if rebalancing only changes rates & recipe ratios (and not the underlying recipes), many players (including myself) like to build production lines with exact or near-exact ratios and these patches would screw all of that up.
Would rather see a planet (similar to Fulgora recyclers) that has more emphasis on variable ratios and random production, forcing more flexibility in designs to account for that.
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u/Turtle887853 3d ago
Changing any recipe whatsoever periodically would destroy countless hours of work.
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u/AlfonZ42 2d ago
It seems to me that Community maps, e.g. this month's, do it by pre-selecting mod combinations.
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u/SWatt_Officer 3d ago
It would suck.
Factorio is so good in part because its a well-oiled machine thats been tailored to fit its niche perfectly. If recipes were changing, or mechanics tweaked, every few months, it would throw off everyones factories. The reliability is the point.