Additional category extensions.
3 years ago

I think there may be 3 modes: speedruning the "Tutorial"/story campaign (maybe also the early variants of it), the "Tight spot" campaign, and "Transport belt madness". Also there may be variations: with pre-made loadouts of scheme or not. Also there may be other game modes: PvP (maybe variant with no enemy players - launching rocket to win), team production, wave defense, supply challenge and more. And including what each mode can be in 2 or more categories.

Yeah, I think rocket rush is a very interesting speedrun category. It's the one I'm doing now, with imported blueprints. I was looking at gotlap, but the runners there are pretty impossible to beat. I don't see much slack in those times. The any% looks pretty loose and easy to beat, tho, which is why I'm looking at rocket rush (wube should add a leaderboard)

To be honest, I've sort of given up on this community (except the forums), at least in terms of advocating things to it's admins. The focus, categories and rules are silly, imho. My guess is the admins are over involved in youtube / twitch views and that's pretty much where their mindset is. Optimal factorio for the sake of optimal factorio isn't really a thing around here.

Though, honestly if it's about popularity and views, I'd suggest they try to up their visual entertaining / comic reaction game. Take some cues from markiplier and his millions of factorio views:

Monotonic comments about technique is probably only interesting to a rather niche audience.

Anyways, hopefully we can get some folks here interested in speedrunning for the fun of speedrunning. Be nice if they had a forum on factorio for it, but there's only a scattering of folks talking about it there.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Germany

@Player209 The community usually refrains from adding categories that have no active runners yet. The categories are voted on by all Speedrunners in direct democracy. They usually pass the vote if we find at least 2 active runners in a category. If you want a category to be added, Speedrun it and it may be picked up by others and eventually be added to the leader-boards.

Gaming_64 likes this
Sweden

The comunity desides the categories, currently about 100 runners that get to vote, only prerequisite is to have finished and submitted a single run. Don't listen to much to players like @blazespinnaker that claim it is very easy to beat every record but still have not even managed to complete a single run. We get those from time to time, and so far they have all given up before even submitting a single run.

"claim it is very easy to beat every record"

Come on nefrums, you're better than that.

-> "I was looking at gotlap, but the runners there are pretty impossible to beat. I don't see much slack in those times.

Your statement was self evidently false. Hope you don't apply the same flawed logic in your runs.

Anyways, feel free to share your reasoning why you think your runs are fundamentally optimal. I am very open to being convinced that I'm wrong.

I've shared some reasoning here - https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=92439

The idea is that the search space for optimal deployment in post bots is much more vast than folks are giving credit to. You can reason it out very simply - each bot allows for an increase in APM (actions per minute) which is limited only by its speed, distance to logistic chests and deployed print.

A blueprint can be infinitely (practically speaking) complex. Copy / paste functionality allows for constructing arbitrarily large blueprints in time O(logN).

  • simply put, I can double a blueprint every action.

Pre bots, you are limited by your keystroke speed.

With bots, you can print bot making factories. This + above effectively leads to exponentially increasing APM.

Agreed, there are some rate limiting issues post bots (bot construction time), but I don't see any reason why they can't be overcome. Feel free to explain why though, I may have missed something there. That'd be annoying :)

To continue, the gotlap ubermench can do things that are quite astonishing. You should check it out. To extrapolate that they could hit bots in < 35 minutes is not a stretch. Please explain why that's not possible, though.

Bots at 35 + exponentially increasing APM. Sounds like rocket launch in sub 60 to me.

Edited by the author 3 years ago

I think you need to take a step back and project less. The reason why I (and likely others) don't submit runs, is because I'm more interested in the collaboration and joining with a community in tackling to a very difficult problem rather than the boast of "WR".

Also, nefrums, maybe try thinking about all the folks you've taken ideas from in your runs. It's rather interesting how you think because you memorized the keystrokes, you get to claim credit for it all.

Factorio is a wonderfully complex game. It deserves to be respected as such. One person can not solve this alone.

In fact, it's all a bit reverse of what you implied above. It is actually you who are underestimating the effort required to finding the optimal run by not enjoining more openly collaborative efforts.

Worse, actively discouraging discussion is I think an admin approach that would have been beneath you.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Sweden

Oh, I like the discussion. And it is quite clear that I did not invent most of the current meta. some things sure. but far from most of it.

I agree that Factorio is a wondaful, complex and non linear game. And that it is quite clear that we will never find the most optimal path.

I'll do a reply in the forum thread on were I think you logic fails.

"And that it is quite clear that we will never find the most optimal path."

Nah, it's doable within some reasonable error margin. Far harder problems than this.

If you do respond tho, please stick to the math. APM, resource costs, etc. ad hominems reasoning like the above will just be ignored with an 'lol'.

Edited by the author 3 years ago

Hey, wow, what a great post.

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=529528#p529528

Thanks Nefrums, much appreciated. I'll put some effort into my reply, so may take some time.

Germany

@blazespinnaker, please edit your posts/post all your thoughts at once instead of making double posts. Every new posts generates a notification (if that is turned on, which it is for me), so you are often generating two notifications for posts that follow each other. I'd rather not have to turn off the notifications for this entire forum just because they get clogged by your double posts. Thank you.

Picture of the recent notifications with your posts highlighted, to make it clear what I mean: https://i.imgur.com/skxil8q.png

I think a part of the issue here is there a huge lack of information on factorio speedrunning in this forum. The guides really only scratch the surface. If everyone could share what they know, it'd probably would help fill in the gaps quickly and you'd see a lot fewer posts from me.

I'll try to use edit more (not getting notifications for that, are you?) so as to keep all my information in one post that doesn't notify.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Centre, France

Blaze, you cannot just say left and right "speedrunners do things wrong" and then shout "ad hominem" every time someone disagrees with you or suggest you do a run.

You have interesting ideas, but don't expect people to listen to you if you present them as more than that, because for now, they aren't more than interesting ideas.

Math is cool, but it's not a science, Physics is. Mathematical models are incredibly powerful to describe and predict the world around us, but they only become useful to physics after being confirmed by experiment.

That's why peope get annoyed (at least I get annoyed) when I read anyone say "speedrunners are doing it wrong", when they only have a bunch of conjectures to present. However valuable they may be, however correct they may be, however mathematically sound they may be, unverrified theory are just conjectures, and shouldn't be used to say "speedrunners are doing it wrong". Thankfully, you do use more sensible wordings usually, but I've read you once saying something close to "speedrunners are doing it wrong", or "admins are more interested in views than in being good", and it does get people off the wrong way, with no redemption possible if you've got nothing substantial to back it up (and you don't).

In any cases, people pointing out you don't have a single speedrun to your name are not attacking you personally for not being a speedrunner, they are playing some of your bold claims down, because a claim unsupported by experience is weaker than a claim which is.

For example, in: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=92439 You use Dave's name and math from: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=521707#p521707 to support the idea that sub 1hour run is possible. It is bogus beacause, Dave's math is wrong and way off-base, and anyway applies to a scenario very remote to actual gameplay, let alone to speedrun.

Having a prototype run on the other hand, would speak more than a thousand formula (even when the thousand formula where necessary to produce the run).

Again I love math and I enjoy following your endeavors, as you can see by my answer to your topic: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=529680#p529680 But: "If you do respond tho, please stick to the math. APM, resource costs, etc. ad hominems reasoning like the above will just be ignored with an 'lol'." simply does not make any sense, there is more to speedrun than just math, intuition often beats non rigorous math, and rigorous math requires amounts of work that approach actually doing a run.

Edited by the author 3 years ago

I'm going to ignore the drama, because it's a tad boring. Also, I really don't wish to poke you as you're contributing in a positive way that I admire.

Let's just say that we agree to disagree on what I've said. Let me also say that none of it was a knee jerk response, but rather one crafted over time and with very very careful consideration. Not sure I can say likewise to some of the responses here.

Let me also be very clear, cause this seems to get very weirdly ignored over and over again - the GOTLAP runners are ubermen. I have no idea on how to significantly improve on what they've done, and I've spent some serious cycles analyzing it.

Yes, obviously Dave's math was off base, but his general ballpark absolutely was not. It most definitely is an exponential production curve when you eliminate reach + walking speed.

As for the rest, I don't disagree, and have said as much in several different places. But just because the solution to f(x) != A but rather f(x) = B/A, doesn't make A any less important or necessary.

I'm glad there are folks here working on B, cause I suck at B, though TAS there will probably be interesting there at some late point.

A, however, I don't think anyone is working on in any serious way that I've seen and I believe it to be very interesting and welcome contributions / refutations / anything serious really.

TBH, I imagine a big disconnect here is that everyone on this forum is overly focused on the record / best time. What's wrong with speedrunning just for speedrunning? I don't really fall for the ego thing I guess (it's a game, people, fun should be the goal), and no interest in youtube views.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
4xel likes this

Actually, there is 2 game modes what is played now what is normal singleplayer and multiplayer, with different settings of world (any%, default and death world) and some other options (yes/no blueprint import, how many players in multiplayer allowed), but there is much more game modes. https://wiki.factorio.com/Game_modes_and_options - list of game modes. Actually, there is 11 of them, including tutorian/campain mode, not including different settings, blueprint restrictions, player count restrictions as separate game modes (it may be different categories, not game modes) and counting singleplayer and multiplayer modes as 1, because they is kinda same, with main difference is players count and the ability to save, load and pause game. If counting singleplayer and multiplayer as different modes - there actually 12 game modes total, when taking only pre-loaded game scenarios and not player-made.