Progression system and alternate recipes

Question

"please read the whole thing before you panic react after my mere suggestion of removing the recipe from the game, i do make a suggestion besides that"

Hey all,

I just wanted to share my opinion on the killjoy alternate smelted iron recipe. This bad boy takes 1 copper and 1 iron to make smelted iron bars. Couple this with the iron bar to copper wire recipe and you don't need copper anymore.

Good stuff. Only problem is the entire factory up until that point is running on smelters. On top of that, you need the research and space elevator to get the forge. So you thump away like a madman on the table or setup a huge automated setup to get to forge. Now you need coal unless you want to be a part time lumberjack. If you built machines you will have to take them all down to change to the forge recipe. All the lines have to be adjusted and a huge space devoted to this.

I always play like this now, i can't enjoy the beginning of the game because i know this recipe exists. The grind to get to forge and not build a whole base for nothing has me running around in circles practicing parkour on machines while i stay try to decide in my head If it's worth subjecting myself to that grind...again. Just screw the recipe and run the smelters. No one will notice...

I really like this game so i gave it some thought

What if the alternate smelted iron recipe could be done in a normal refinery. The 1 input accepts iron and copper ore on the same belt. I've never had a reason to mix belts before. This could be the start.

The positive to this is that you can have an automated supply chain going from the beginning and plan around the fact that a copper ore chain will intersect with the smelters further down the line. Instead of a planning nightmare it's now something you can plan around.

I'd be curious to hear others opinions, but this is my suggestion.

Thank you

Comments

You can go BIG at start - lots of smelters, genarators, nonstop roling belts. That is fine but for me - this is grinding. You can play different. And small base with smart distributions will give more joy when you decide to explore and just discover alternate recipes. Just a small adjustments and all will work better and use less. With huge base, when you plan all at start, just one alternate recipe can be disaster for your base redesign. Build your megabase at endgame, not at start :) Don't blame alternate recipe. They are fine and give a lot of satis-factory ;).

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or design a smart big base that can handle changes ... :-)

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You don't need to use the alternate recipes. I think they are a waste of time for exactly this reason. Never used them, never will.

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They are in the game, i'm trying to suggest a way to improve them. Ignoring them and bandaging the problem is for a release product.

What if the refinery could process that recipe? Two ores accepted at the same input and at a higher power consumption that would be more than the forge, as balance.

Would you use the recipe then? You'd just have to add copper ore to the iron ore input on your smelters.

Answer 1

With all due respect these are the most horrible suggestions I've ever read. One suggests i use the crafting table and limited production to grind to the end game so i can then build a mega base and not waste time adjusting machines. You're just bandaging the problem with workarounds. This is an EA game we should think of better ways IMO.

The other suggests i design a smart base that will somehow replace refineries with forges.

Yes obviously you can leave some space so you can redesign the front end. It's pretty obvious solution. Is this really necessary? It's not hard or challenging. Just grindy and annoying.

Maybe you both stopped reading after my suggestion to potentially remove the skill. I also suggested the refinery be able to do it. By again, accepting both the iron and copper ingot on the same belt through the same input. The recipe will still exist but you can implement it from the start without having to delete the whole front end. To balance it can you can raise the power consumption of the refinery to not be as efficient as the forge.

Comments

Hello, thank you for your respectful response (love the community this game has)

I did read your full post and sad to say not a fan of either ideas,  second point first about due conveyor belts, for me this ruins the game by removing a lot of conveyor belt issues and isn't actually needed, let's go back to the first point

For me alternative recipes are amazing but no to replace your current setup if you don't want to, but for creating smaller factories to join your main base. An example would be my megabase has 6 builders for each component which is spreading its products were needed around my base. Although heavy frames need lots of resources and would affect my base too much, so decided to create two smaller bases near my coal conveyor, this is where the alternative recipes really show their use, when creating whole mini bases and make adventuring into the wild more interesting to find the hard drives

The power it uses doesn't work to balance unless it was really high, but if you really wanted to use one conveyor would need a super-comupter merger to join the two different items. The conveyor would only ever contain one item at a time, so would need to clear one item before the second could join. But like I mentioned earlier this for me is not needed