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This page contains some broader plans, goals, and priorities. Hopefully this will help structure the broad direction everything moves towards. Nothing here is concrete, and is always subject to change. Treat this more as vaguely up to date personal notes.

• | Difficulty |
• | Complexity |
• | Encounters |
• | Exploration |

See our | Design Docmentation | for in-depth info on the decision making and how/why specifically to implement each goal and their features. These are also work-in-progress so you may not find the info you're looking for yet.

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Difficulty

The overall difficulty of the game needs to be increased before we can give the players more tools to scale and grow. Current systems are somewhat static and limited due to fast implementations using factorio's existing tools. Expand our enemies tools, before we expand the players.

Boss Moves

We can use certain events to track the current state of the boss. Based on the current state of the overall fight, we can create some predefined scripts to create any number of gameplay changes.

• Spawn smokes/explosions
  • Animated to look like traditional boss attacks
  • Reusable by bosses or players
  • Triggered on specific actions
• Spawn enemies or hives
  • Trigger specific enemies
  • Spawn hives nearby
• Spawn internal events
  • Hordes
  • Waves
  • Other bosses

Boss Stages

We can track a bosses HP and replace it's entity with an entirely new one. With this we can create any number of cool changes...

• Entity Replacement
  • Hp
  • Ammo Types
  • Speed
  • Look
  • Animations
• New Moves
  • Everything from above
• Trigger initial attacks or effects as stage changes
• Any number of stages are possible

Threat

Expanding the threat system is a good way to initiate new interactions and scale the overall difficulty. Currently this system only modifies tick based horde/wave rates. Eventually this system should be broader, altering boss types or moves or damage.

• Boss moves
• Boss stage limits
• Wave alterations
• ...?

Complexity

With difficulty increased, we can look to expand the current player progression and build complexity. This is a little bit more limited by the factorio's deterministic implementations, but we can attempt to work around that.

Gear Sets

We can greatly expand the types of gear and the benefits of such gear by using a gear set system. This would help to improve the amount of theory crafting possible in each build.

• Deeper specializations
• High stat additions
• New mechanics, new requirements
• Better farming goals
• Thematically links items

To make gear sets possible however, we will need to add new types of items that can be stacked onto the player. Currently we have:

• Weapon
• Armor
• Equipment
• Artifact(not really)

This leads to the next feature...

Rings

Rings are "weapons", new items that take up a weapon slots.

• Strong stats
• Gear set compatible
• Hard to craft
• Upgradable(like easter-eggs)

You could potentially equip up to 2 while maintaining a weapon, or even use 3 on an equipment based build.

These require 0 gui implementations and give a use-case and trade-off to weapon slots. With our previous gear, and rings, we could have up to 5 or even 6 potential links to a gear set.

Command Centers

These are a per-force single building that would house a number of "commands". These would provide the force with bonus talents while active. These buildings would produce lots of pollution, threat, depending on the tier.

Encounters

Encounter in this case means more consistent combat that would last longer and serve as a test of endurance.

• High enemy count
• Lasts for long period of time
• Periodic spike in difficulty
• Separated from normal combat

Essentially these would be dungeons. Implemented as well as possible in factorio.

• Corridor style maps
• Smaller then normal
• Themed to added content
• Consistent wave and horde spawning
• Boss heavy
• Strong rewards near the end
• Structure new rewards

A new type of gear or item would need to be created to make the time spent worth while. This would be an endgame piece of content, more grind focused then the rest of the mod.

Exploration

TODO...