Wave Defense and Rocket Rush (again)
2 years ago
New Zealand

So I see this has turned up before. Once again a new user with no existing runs appears to discuss new categories, specifically Wave Defense and Rocket Rush. Perhaps this time it goes differently, since I can already show runs of WD - my best so far is just under 90 minutes - these scenarios do some pretty weird stuff, links at the end. I was expecting RR to be fast, but I wasn't really expecting WD to end up a faster rocket than Any%. These are the sorts of surprises I enjoy.

Reading the previous threads, it does seem that WD & RR are already appreciated for their strangeness & strategic variety, just, not actively run. Disadvantages of Wave Defense and Rocket Rush as introductory / gateway categories vs Steelaxe and Gotlap:

  • Not doing research isn't very Factorio
  • No achievements granted in scenarios
  • Freeplay is "the intended way of playing Factorio"
  • Starting with a bunch of free stuff is crazy, the bases end up weird

But also, things that WD and RR do as introductory / gateway categories better than Steelaxe and/or Gotlap:

  • Steelaxe and Gotlap don't teach you to kickstart a base, just burner city (though WD and RR aren't "normal" base kickstarts either)
  • Burner city is necessary but not fun, WD and RR start with the fun (subjective, yes)
  • WD and RR still get a rocket up, teaches buffers & mixed builds, still build petrochem, very Factorio
  • Starting with a bunch of free stuff means wide strategic landscape
  • Wube called it Rocket Rush so probably they want it done fast

So, I reckon they're pretty interesting & accessible, and worthwhile having alongside Steelaxe and Gotlap. All that said, the real question is a/ whether anyone cares enough to run WD or RR, and b/ whether the resulting runs do anything interesting worth watching. For (b) I offer runs of Wave Defense on Normal:

(I'm not currently recording game sound, the 1h 32m run includes some includes retrospective diagnostic narration.) I'm looking at these with a ruleset closely aligned to DS - only 1 player, random seed, no imported blueprints, timer goes from map preview to rocket launch victory message. Normal difficulty for WD, Default Settings for RR, but maybe we loop back to RR in a bit once I (or anyone else) has rockets going up.

These are certainly different to "normal" categories of Factorio runs, maybe they're even interesting.

(With appologies to Bilka and others who might be getting multiple notifications as I read the markdown docs and figure out formatting my lists correctly and making links link instead of embed.)

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Bilka, unique_2, and 4xel like this

I've played a bit of rocket rush recently, played with 100% map rules but without blueprint import. I like that you have to build a large-ish base but runs only take a relatively short time. My pb is 1:15 so far and that's with very light planning and practice because I'm still evaluating strategies.

I think resources at default settings are not a good idea for rocket rush. If you only use the starter patches then you finish when you get all the copper you need out of the starter patch, which would drastically limit the time at which you can possibly finish and limit the depth of the category. But outposting also takes an uncomfortably large amount of time compared to how short the run is so it's not clear wether you'd save any time from it. It'd mostly come down to rerolling until you get a lucky copper patch and I'm opposed to that.

This maybe also applies for wave defense once you get fast enough.

EDIT: I have a replay but I changed my builds after the 1:15 run and haven't done a good run with the changes yet. I can give an outline of what I'm doing.

First goal is the mall, I'm going with two iron belts and half a belt of copper for this at the moment. Mall produces belt, inserters, miners (later changed to assemblers), pipes. Then build one steel smelter. Next goal is the first half of all mixed builds. I'm going with mixed builds that have integrated buffers for circuits and copper so the buffers can fill up a little while I set up oil and the second part of the mixed builds, which is what I do next. The mixed build is otherwise the nefrums mixed build, it outputs lds, blue circuits and modules, just slightly adapted because it has the buffers and I have no steel furnaces. I might change it to output rcus. Then I set up rocket fuel, electric engines, prod2s, rcus, concrete and finally the silo.

On how you determine which items you automate in which order: In general you should automate the one that costs the most to automate first. Which imo should be circuits, rocket fuel (including solid fuel), rcu, lds. If you automate something cheap first then this delays something costly so you have to build it larger to reach the same time and you pay more in total both in build time and mall. Slight tangent but if you compare nefrums any% design to older designs, he does this a lot: don't automate solid fuel until the end of the run, build steel for purple science after the circuit setup, order the rocket components as lds, rocket fuel, rcu in any% (because you need more lds).

This holds in general but there are exceptions of course. I'm still wondering wether it's better to get lds before rocket fuel and rcus in RR because they are more difficult to automate outside of a mixed build and the ratios work out a lot better - I'd have to figure out a way to use the copper otherwise.

There is also the question of which items you take with you. I did dive into how the prices are computed at some point. They first compute what I'll call the value of each item and then determine the price as value / log(value), so more valueable items have a slightly reduced price. The value is computed computed recursively from the ingredients with preset values assigned to raw ores and fluids (plus the logarithm of the crafting time but this almost doesnt matter because it's small). The thing you want to keep in mind is that valuable items are slightly cheaper, in particular items usually cost less than or equal to their ingredients.

I try to take just around enough of the basic items to last me until they are automated and automate basics asap. For example the first things I automate are stone for furnaces, power, an iron belt, transport belts. This cuts down the number of furnaces and belts that I need so I can take more higher tech items with me. I didn't do the calculation but I think that burner inserters are quite useful in this mode as they can be automated earlier and thus we need to buy less electric inserters. Generally I tend to get as much of the basics as I need and fill the rest with mining drills. Maybe when I get faster I'll take a few more robots or some batteries and advanced circuits to craft a second personal roboport but I'm not at the point where I need this yet.

Edited by the author 2 years ago

Yeah, they made WD different with the rocket launching only. I was able to get it done in about 50 minutes or so before by going straight to artillery and taking out spawners. I never bothered with supplementing my defense.

Some of the upgrades were gimmes as well, so probably could do it a lot faster. The upgrades now seem less useful.

I should try it again.

Rocket Rush would be awesome, be interested about hearing folks experiences. My strategy was to buy 500 belts, 200 inserters, 100 poles, 200 pipes, 50 bots, 10 logistic, 1 roboport, 45 assemblers, 10 steam engines, 5 pumpjacks, but I'm wondering if that was best. I think if I were to try it again, I'd get more bots maybe.

It really is a great scenario which focuses on robots.

Ideally, these forums would also be on factorio site where I think folks would get less anxious around the video requirement.

I think a lot of people are getting stressed out because this is really the only place to discuss speedruns and there are conflicting views, goals, and priorities that are confusing for some folks here.

Also, for new folks suggesting categories with no videos, perhaps it's because there isn't a category they wish to submit for? That seems like it kind of follows, right?

Adding the obvious ones to misc wouldn't hurt anyone, and it just feels like silliness not to humor folks.

Another idea might be just open a thread for folks to post videos they've done or found. Sort of an any rules any category any video speedrun.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
New Zealand

because I'm still evaluating strategies.

tbh this would be the best time to be sharing & collaborating on this stuff? Have you recorded any of them? (Also: how do you time the RF / LDS builds? I usually have small builds for those I put down immediately after petrochem, and they take longer to get their work done while I'm arranging a larger RCU mixed build that "catches up". It'd be interesting to see what routes other people take when research isn't a prerequisite.)

Rerolling & map luck are already things in other categories, rerolling for copper vs rerolling for peaceful maps is something I don't like, but ... accept. And yeah, outposting almost certainly not worth in RR / WD (except maybe oil, as necessary).

Artillery in WD is an interesting call. Currently in 1.1.32 WD [Normal] you need to destroy ~10 nests in the first ~40 minutes for turret upgrades or be overrun by mediums. Or have some other defensive plan fully online (or a rocket up?) in that 40m. Which is also why I currently like WD more than RR, because there's more to address than just "how quickly can you smelt copper?", more Donkeyspace to explore. WD (unexpectedly) gives you all the non-space science arty upgrade techs too, so sure, I'll try those out. Quite possibly easier than clearing those bases myself.

the video requirement

... Is actually pretty important. It's not just "can you really do the thing?", it's also whether the run shows tactics/mechanics/etc interesting to both spectators and people who are getting better at Factorio. Saying "category rules optimised for youtube / twitch views" is a round-a-bout way of saying "Factorio how people want to see it played", that's what views are. Nefrums noted he didn't create all the strats he runs. The streams / videos are how we can observe skill, collaborate, learn, and get better, both for speedrunners and non-speedrunning Factorio players.

It's probably also related to why most categories don't allow blueprints, since BP imports shift a huge chunk of the skill expression out of the run, away from where it can be appreciated. Videos of runs help a community get better.

with no videos

I didn't say no videos, I linked 4 videos, and my Youtube is right there. They help inform whether WD is sufficiently interesting to warrant recognition (I hope so?). Marathon Deathworld Gotlap is well defined, but probably nothing really new is going to happen there. Too many categories ends up detrimental if everyone is just in their own world, playing their own ruleset. The flipside of "community" is that collaboration requires a critical mass of people working on roughly the same things.

open a thread for folks to post videos

... literally what I did there

I think if I were to try it again, I'd get more bots maybe.

Record & post it here - unique_2 is wondering about their RR strats too. If the conversation and techniques are interesting enough to draw in more attention, that's a great way to get more people voting for, and even competing in, a potentially new category. Anti even said "they usually pass the vote if we find at least 2 active runners in a category" so ... just do that? Problem solved?

blazespinnaker likes this

I'm ok with rerolling, though I'd prefer a community agreed upon seed. I think that would be more interesting, more communal, and we can at least share strategies better.

In terms of WD, yeah, I was thinking of using artillery as defense. It seems like a large distraction though with the new rules. Before, you could win the game by just killing spawners.

An interesting, if cheesy hack is if you kill yourself you can get another 15 robots (or as many as you want if you can put up with the spawn delay). I tested with a train beside the spawn point and it works. Likely get nerfed, so basing strats on that would be temporary I suspect.

The goal of WD is getting your rocket parts per minute up as high as possible as soon as possible. Megapatches would help a lot, of course, but if I think if you get your copper prod up very early, you can use buffered prod.

If you use the simple function K * p * n(n+1)/2 = 100, where K is the amount of rocket part production you add every period(p), you can figure out how long it will take.

Assume for example, you can add 1 rocket part per minute production every minute, than K = 1, period = 1 minute. That's about 10 minutes (period*n), assuming you can actually get to 10 parts per minute and not be bottlenecked by the silo.

If that's too hard, you can change the period to 2 minutes. Now it's 1 * 2 * n(n+1)/2=100, or n is slightly less than 7. However, 7 periods, each 2 minutes, means it will take 14 minutes to get the rockets going.

Some other datapoints:

2 every 3 minutes would be 15 minutes 3 every 4 minutes would be about 12-15 minutes

And so on.

WD is definitely a great map to use incremental blueprints. I talk about my earlier experiences with WD and incremental blueprints here - https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=90012

My feeling with highly optimized incremental blueprints, we could probably do this before biters overwhelm the base at 50 minutes. (Somewhat seed dependent, I guess)

As a data point, waves are every 5 minutes.

On a map with no building, major damage starts to occur on the night of day 6, and day 7 tends to be where a biter starts to eat it's way through as a turret has no ammunition.

This is around 35 minutes in.

By day 8 / 45 minutes, I've lost a bunch of turrets and walls. A biter sneaks through. At 50 minutes another one sneaks through, nothing 3 turrets couldn't keep off.

However, the 10th wave is pretty much unstoppable unless you've supplemented your defense.

Kills/losses graph here - https://imgur.com/a/k73bHIR

Another datapoint, my patches are 1.4M for iron, 1.2M for copper. You need about 49K, and 92K copper to launch a rocket, but ideally you'd have very large patches for mass over production. https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#data=1-1-19&min=3&dbc=6&items=rocket-part:r:100

(ignore earlier edits, misuse of calculator I guess)

You're definitely going to want to get your copper / iron prod up very very early to start buffering immediately, so as you build out the rest you'll have something to draw on.

Using robots to pull coal from rocks and using that to bootstrap coal production is good I think.

GC prod would come next, and perhaps a minimall.

I'd recommend steel and engines so you can build some flame turrets to protect the oil patch, but there are other ways to go there. If you're using imported blueprints you can get this up very fast as you don't need a lot.

I have an oil patch nearby with 2400% production, and that would probably be enough.

Artillery might be a way to go here, so as to take out spawners and grab military upgrades. Only do that if the sub 50 is too hard, I guess.

But otherwise, once oil is set up, I think the clock is ticking on the 10 minutes, whatever rocket prod additional per whatever minutes, as long as kpn(n+1)/2=>100 If you can start that by minute 35-40, it may be possible to make sub 50.

If you don't go artillery to knock out the spawners, speed modules in the miners might be the way to go.

"Is actually pretty important", well, it's definitely important to those who think it's important. But not so important to those who don't.

Personally, the ideas and specifically the math behind speedruns are more interesting to me. Probably because I really suck at learning hotkeys, I guess, and my APM is very low.

I also find the videos lead to a lot of duplication of ideas and less original thinking. More fun might be sharing imported blueprint runs, and the contribution people make is not better execution of keystrokes, but improvements to the blueprints themselves.

I understand though, that some folks prefer practicing keystrokes and playing factorio rather than just thinking about it. Especially for those who are good at that. Completely understandable. It is a video game, after all.

"Literally what I did there."

Where?

Here's my thread - https://www.speedrun.com/factorio/thread/t5igk

I'll put a link to your thread in there as well if you share one. Please don't reference discord tho. I and likely many others have no interest in using discord channels moderated by randos.

edit to add:

I can fit about 67 miners on my copper, which gives about 1.5K p/m unoptimized miners, but redirecting belts can get it up to 2kp/m. Likely necessary to get sub 50 times. Steel, stone bricks, and a minimall will be required here. Your biggest bottleneck are miners and stone furnaces, of the latter you'll need a lot and they take forever to craft. (90 * 3s).

Putting in prod module 3 into the silo, saves 10K copper over pm1. 3 PM1 will cost 2400 copper. Might be worth it. PM2 at a minimum. PM1s in the RCU, I dunno. Doesn't seem worth the added complexity.

The next real bottleneck is red circuits after plates and then RCUs, but it'd be good to get some copper wire going as well before oil. Setting up some GC could be useful as well, and then you could skip some of the extensive wire/gc production and instead go straight to red circuits.

Steel as well for LDS. It doesn't take much, and you can use that for flame turrets. YOu'll need a bunch for infra too (furnaces, asm2)

By the time plastic/RC is done, you can stretch out the GC and wire production as you'll have worked through your reserves by then. I'd hit speed modules, solid fuel production and then the BC oil infra + asms last. The last steps there can be tweaked depending on your layout.

At that point, your 3 PM3s should be done and I'd start the 10 minute count down, adding rocket part production incrementally in waves. Incremental blueprints in particular really shine here.

Beacons might help, but I'm a tad skeptical. They're rather expensive copper wise, your bottleneck in the game.

One beacon has 15 assembler2 worth of copper? It might be a win after TCO/Time/Complexity/PM modules is taken into account, but not a very large one. They could be required on the silo though, in which case if you are already building them, why not.

Maybe if you go down the PM1 in ass2 for RCUs, beacons would be worth it? Seems like a lot of hassle though. I'd rather just put speed modules in the asm2 directly.

as mentioned, the key is to find a way to launch a rocket before biters break through. The distraction of doing any kind of defense is very time consuming.

I'll see if I can summarize this plan more succinctly. It'd be interesting to hear feedback.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
New Zealand

but it'd be good to get some copper wire going as well before oil. Setting up some GC could be useful as well Maybe if you go down the PM1 in ass2 for RCUs, beacons would be worth it?

It doesn't look like you've even watched the run or are familiar with what I'm already doing.

So yeah, I have it down to 1h 24m 56s and now I need to rebalance the petrochem numbers. I'm faster now than I was when I planned that build, and now there isn't time to cache the solid fuel buffers needed for the RCU section. Everyone likes seeing a hard red powergrid as the rocket goes up, it's fine...

Nahhhh, you're making a bizarro knee jerk assumption. You may want to reflect on what drove you to do that.

You see, I watched what you did, but there is no reason to quote me like you have there, as it should be obvious I'm talking about my plan for a run and not yours. The plan is an extension of my earlier wins in WD that I linked to, except instead of artillery I'm going for rocket.

And it should be very clear that my plan obviously doesn't have anything to do with what you did.

That's because you're not doing imported / incremental blueprints, so there is going to be little relation to anything I have in mind and what you've done. The timing of things is going to be absurdly different. Totes apples and oranges runs at every point most likely.

As speedrunning isn't an ego thing for me, I have zero problem conceding that there is no way I could do WD in 50 minutes without imported blueprints. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

But if you want, you can post your blueprints and I'll try to give you some feedback if that's what you're looking for. Honestly, I'm not going to try to reverse engineer a zoomed in video to figure out what you're thinking exactly is.

I probably won't be much help as I'm sure keystroke talent is a big factor in your run time, something I know little about.

Anyhooooo, here's my plan summary, and in a format you can read in about 60 seconds even without having to sit through an hour long video:

  1. Coal from stone, trees via bots
  2. Power, engines, car
  3. Coal prod
  4. Iron plates
  5. Gears
  6. Stone prod
  7. Copper plates (one challenge that starts around here, is that the bots are solar powered, so when night hits, you need to start manually building)
  8. Wire and GC, miners, underground
  9. Steel
  10. Minimall - belt, inserters, asm2, furnace, pipes, bricks, flame turret?
  11. Iron and Copper prod expansion (see edit 1: 200 miners, 112 furnaces, start with 50 and 20, step should be done by ~ minute 11.)
  12. Wire and GC
  13. Oil
  14. Plastics
  15. RC
  16. PM and SM
  17. Beacons
  18. Solid Fuel
  19. Wire and GC expansion
  20. Sulfuric acid and BC 20.5 PM2/PM3 (edit 1: going to merge this with step 16) 20.6 PM1 in Silo (edit 1: going to remove this step) --- minute 35 --
  21. Rocket Part prod wave 1 (waves may involve intermediate expansion, speed modules)
  22. Upgrade to Silo PM3 or PM2 (Much of the plan may largely revolve around this step)
  23. Rocket part prod wave 2
  24. Silo beacons
  25. Rocket Part prod wave 3
  26. Rocket Part prod wave 4 (if required)

A general technique I'm using here, will be to utilize time buffered intermediates from initial reduced production capability in order to get necessary intermediates built up to proceed and feed downstream production. Later, I expand the intermediate prod as buffer is consumed.

The underlying concept is that time is a resource, just as anything else is in the game. And time is a natural byproduct of merely building out your infra. How you use that byproduct is important.

And so I leverage that time to create buffered intermediates, which serves two purposes: reduced need for end game production capability and intermediates for necessary and/or convergent downstream prod.

If you did just waterfall (not going back and increasing intermediate production), you'd end up wasting resources on unnecessary massive unused over production at the last minute.

This approach is a result of the gaussian formula for production, n(n+1)/2.

You can see this technique used to great effect in the GOTLAP runs. Some of the best runs ever done on this website, IMHO.

I am generally informed by the calculator: https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#data=1-1-19&min=3&dbc=6&items=rocket-part:r:100

For rough cut, I look first at intermediates that require the largest amounts of infra weighted by position in the production stream. Eg: copper plates require the most, and then iron, red circuits, and then wire.

plastics/RC in particular is very key because it's downstream in the chain of production and it branches off to various things. RC also requires significant infra.

Moreover, there is convergent production requirements in terms of PM2/PM3. Ideally I don't start feeding my silo too hard until that is present to save significantly on copper/intermediate production.

I'll take another stab at it the next few days to add some rough numbers beside each one in terms of prod at minute N. At some point, I'll do some prototype runs, and firm up the numbers/order until I can spiral into a solution.

For prototype runs, I like to test backwards, forwards, from the middle, etc - especially parts of the run I'm not sure about and are 'critical path'.

Eg, via /editor I'll paste in an entire blueprint (say everything except rocket part production) and see if there are any issues with getting rockets up in 10 minutes.

Again, feedback always appreciated. Especially feedback which is not ego driven and is mostly numerical.

Here's an initial first draft of what I'll need to build for infra: (apologies for the url shortener, I'm not tracking you, but this site is bugged on long links. messes with the posts display. never click on url shorteners unless you have the appropriate vpn/etc/iOS security mechanisms in place and you know what you're doing.)

shorturl.at/hyGH7

One of the things I'll probably do is go very large on undergrounds as that will reduce the need to manually build / drain robot battery. I may have to still do manually building anyways, but prefer to spend time on blueprint placement as there will be a lot of incremental blueprints in this run. Also, I will need to spend time pulling from chests to resupply.

As mentioned, copper prod is critical path in this plan because it's the largest req. With PM3, you need about 67K. If by step 11 I assume zero prod, that means I need to finish that step by minute 10-13 or so. If we put down all initial 50 miners, say 10/35/5 for iron/copper/coal, than we can 350.560*10, than that's about 10K by minute 10. Staying at max copper 2k/m prod for 35 minutes will probably be difficult, so that seems like good buffer and a good target - finish step 11 by minute 11.

This will give us hopefully enough copper. It will be tight. Rerolling for larger copper patches doesn't seem to be helping, either. 65-68 miners seems to be the max which leads to about 80K production over 50 minutes, though sometimes copper patches are very nearby the walls, but that will add biter pain.

One possibility is speed modules (SM) in the miners, which will add 60% production. Depending on when they get in, they can add amp up copper prod to 3.2Kpm, which gives about another 25k to 30k worth of copper. A chance to get copper off critical path at the very least, but at the cost of greater SM (3*66) / power requirements.

I think it would make sense to complete PM3 prod capability in step 16. It requires very extra little infra as build requirements are mostly in PM1 (60/15/3), and sadly you can't put PM in PM3 :)

Worth noting, we get 8 ASM3 to start with. Using those tactically would be wise. The could be used initially for PM production and then repurposed perhaps for RCUs. 8 of those with RCUs, that's about 40 p/m.

Another idea would be to put PM1 in BC production. This is because BC is used for both PM3 prod and RCU prod. 859 BCs are required for RCU/PM3 production, also fewer BC asm is required than for RCU prod. RCUs are more critical path than BC.

Putting PM1 in RCU additionally wouldn't save much at that point, as PM1 costs about 32 copper per module. Maybe save about 1K copper total, ignoring added PM production requirements, and you'd have to mess with beacons in order to recoup that.

One of the things I'll do for sure is get rid of the exoskeleton and replace it with batteries at the very earliest. The exoskeleton does not help at all, cause you outrun your robots and without the batteries, your robots do poorly at night. Making more robots is probably a good idea. We are rate limited on copper ore production, but nothing else. More assemblers are fairly cheap to build.

edit 2: rerolled a few more times. Found a map with two copper patches and oil placed well inside the barriers. Good map. That gives 110 miners for copper and 110 miners for iron. Could be enough to run without SM in the miners.

Whups, didn't save it. But found this - 1891162722. Use it, or just reroll until you get a map that dupes your practice run. End result is the same, but one approach is more honest.

edit 3: One way of looking at the run is comparing relative complexity of RCU versus LDS versus Jet Fuel. One score might be 54 versus 11 versus 8. See here - https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=98041&p=544434#p544434

Still, adding prod capability for all three in the last K minutes might still make sense, as you want to get modules ASAP. Buffering LDS / Jetfuel doesn't really help get you there.

The lesson there is leverage time buffering, yes, but also make sure you're buffering something that is priority.

In non-robot runs, this may be somewhat different as it can be easier to keyboard out adding prod capability upfront, rather than incrementally.

edit 4: One thing about this run or any run, is that certain things can easily be hand fed. For example, sulfuric acid requirements are quite small, one iron plate can provide for 10 BC.

Feed about 600 iron plates into a chest inserting directly into one sulfuric acid chem plant should be enough and avoids a lot of building and complexity. Others: Beacon prod, robot prod, flame turret prod.

In theory you could do the same for infra (miners, inserters, etc), but they are rather low on the complexity scale linked to above, so it's not really necessary.

edit 5: Fun fact, you get 50 burners and 50 burner inserters in WD. https://imgur.com/a/CjVpdcx I have a special place in my heart for burner based designs.

In fact, it's worth noting exactly what you start out with:

50 burners, 50 burner inserters, 600 belts, 40 underground, 40 splitters 20 steam engines, 10 boilers, 1 offshorepump 200 pipes, 50 corner pipes 50 power poles, 50 medium pp, 50 BEP, 10 substations 100 yellow inserters, 100 fast, 100 long 35 furnaces, 20 steel furnaces, 8 electric furnaces (great for steel) 50 assemblers, 20 asm2, 8 asm3 10 pumpjack, 5 refineries, 20 chem plants 8 turrets 200 iron plates, 200 copper plates, 200 steel, 250 gears, 200 GC 20 lights!

Other than lack of miners and steel furnaces, this can get you very very far into the run before you need anything. More assemblers, inserters, belts, undergrounds will be required, of course, but not right away.

25 robots can place about 100 entities in 5 seconds, if very close by. There's under 2K entities, there, which is 20 * 5, or 100 seconds, or less than two minutes theoretical minimum to place the entire inventory you are provided.

edit 6: There are two ways to go, bots or miners. Carefully managed by laying out belts, furnaces, assemblers manually, the personal roboport might be doable. Not going straight miners risks turning copper into a bottleneck. If there were megapatches around where you could massively overproduce ore, it might be doable, but there isn't. Best I've seen so far is max about 120 copper miners or so.

edit 7: This is the Rocket Part Plan, using Kpn(n+1)/2> 72 (assuming PM3), where K is the number of added prod and p is the length period in minutes. N is # of periods.

I'd like to do this in about 15 minutes with 3 periods, so n=3 and p=5. Solving for Kx5x3x4/2>72, we get k=2.4 (or 24 RCU/LDS/Jetfuel).

Eg, for RCU

24 rcu per minute * 5 minutes = 120 total over the first 5 minutes 48 * 5 = 240 over the next 5 minutes 72 * 5 = 360 over the last 5 minutes total 720

For the last 5 minutes, I need to average 72pm prod. I will need to go over as I will start out the 5 minutes with less than 102. 100pm is roughly a good target for RCU/LDS/Jetfuel.

edit 8: Buffering oil may be important. According to the calculator, we need about 200K oil to launch a rocket with PM3. That would take 20 minutes with the pumjacks on my map. Speed modules would help there as well.

edit 9: I need to take a bit of break from factorio for a week or two, but I have the final end build mostly roughed in, 100pm LDS/RCU/jetfuel. I see now that coal will be a bit of an issue because of power. Splee's run uses solid fuel, which may be a good way to go. https://snippi.com/s/bismgre

Edited by the author 2 years ago
New Zealand

If you did just waterfall (not going back and increasing intermediate production), you'd end up wasting resources on unnecessary massive unused over production at the last minute

I can't even tell what you're imagining that has this problem. Isn't this part of what buffers can address? You do one build, initially overproducing, then later you expand consumption and now it's underproducing, so you lean on the buffer. There isn't "unnecessary massive unused over production at the last minute", a well paced conclusion is marked by running the buffers to empty.

Also "massive unused over production at the last minute" doesn't even matter if it's the fastest way to get 720 each of RCUs, LDS & RF. If I hit all those numbers as early as possible, I don't really care about production rates 5 minutes later. (Quite possibly slowed to a crawl because buffers are empty.)

Worth noting, we get 8 ASM3 to start with. Using those tactically would be wise ... PM production ... RCUs

If you ignore the module slots, one T3 assembler manufactures at a slower rate than two T2s. You're really thinking of using your only eight assemblers with 4 module slots to assign recipes that can't accept / aren't worth prodmods?

One of the things I'll do for sure is get rid of the exoskeleton and replace it with batteries at the very earliest

I thought I'd need to do that, or at least sometimes turn off the exoskeleton, but I don't. I simply don't BP / C&P the long straight sections of belt in smelter columns or the mixed build. That's ~50% fewer objects for crobots to place, so ~50% less bot energy used, as well as being simply faster to build straight belt lines myself. That's enough.

"I can't even tell what you're imagining that has this problem. Isn't this part of what buffers can address? "

yes, absolutely. You are agreeing with me I expect in every sense.

My post is in part trying to explain why we do the things we do, hopefully interesting to someone new to speedrunning in Factorio. I'm more interested in them, then I am in folks who are rather set in their ways.

Also, what is the proof that buffering is optimal? It seems obvious, but not so easy to prove. Lots of math problems are like that. There may be an exception that we're all missing and may be the secret to super fast times. Or maybe there is no secret, and this is the only way.

The only proof I can come up with, is a weak sort of proof by absurdity. If we don't buffer, we end up having to create say, 500 RCU assemblers in the last minute. Not a great proof, really, because if you found a way to generate a lot of robots and assemblers, than that actually might work.

'Also "massive unused over production at the last minute" doesn't even matter if it's the fastest way to get 720 each of RCUs, LDS & RF. If I hit all those numbers as early as possible, I don't really care about production rates 5 minutes later. (Quite possibly slowed to a crawl because buffers are empty.)'

Right! Maybe that is the way. Though your total build will end up being much larger than one that appropriately used buffering. So maybe it is a problem after all. Intuitively, I'm pretty sure appropriate buffering is the only way, but I wish I could be more literally authoritative.

I think a lot of folks around here, don't like talking about factorio, because well, 'math is hard'. That seems silly to my mind. If we develop an appropriate grammar and ways of numerically describing it, there should be a way to reason about how to solve for best times. Like any problem, really.

"If you ignore the module slots, one T3 assembler manufactures at a slower rate than two T2s. You're really thinking of using your only eight assemblers with 4 module slots to assign recipes that can't accept / aren't worth prodmods?"

No, not at all. The question is though, how should they be used? Reducing entities is very important to cut down on robot placement. 2 assemblers require extra inserters, belt, power. Also RCU is critical path, wheras BC is definitely less so. Perhaps the ASM3 should be used for RC, which are the biggest critical path, especially if you put SM in miners or have a map with large copper patches.

Whatever is critical path, we need to shrink down time for that in order to get it off the critical path. A lot of factorio planning is that (any project planning), looking for critical path and getting it off critical path. You never want to be on critical path, because you become the task holding everyone up.

https://hbr.org/1963/09/the-abcs-of-the-critical-path-method

From the link:

In essence, the critical path is the bottleneck route. Only by finding ways to shorten jobs along the critical path can the over-all project time be reduced; the time required to perform noncritical jobs is irrelevant from the viewpoint of total project time.

Of course, at some point, you end up with everyone on critical path, and if that path becomes too long, that's a problem as well.

I think the whole run is basically convergent / critical paths of copper -> oil/RC -> modules -> rocket parts. Copper less so, if you have a two copper patch map like I'm using right now.

". I simply don't BP / C&P"

If I get a few moments, I'll build out some early stuff via imported blueprints and incremental blueprints. It should be obvious, and perhaps it is, but if it isn't - bots and blueprints are basically TAS runs. You can't beat them with a keyboard.

I get the issue with this (note 'theoretical'), but FWIW:

25 robots can place about 100 entities in 5 seconds, if very close by. There's under 2K entities you're provided above (see exact list in previous post), which is 20 * 5, or 100 seconds, or less than two minutes theoretical minimum to place the entire inventory you are provided.

The approach I'm looking at right now is to immediately go for oil after placing down all the miners and as few furnaces/assemblers as possible (just enough to get more miners). I buffer the ore and using burner inserters / burners for coal. https://imgur.com/a/CjVpdcx.

This will allow me to get more bots and batteries/solar panels/roboports. Roboports are probably the way to go, because the personal solar panels are really awful.

This will also allow for logistic chests. Logistics bots are cheap, and we have alllll the tech.

edit to add:

https://factorioprints.com/view/-MZ4LwnjHnVczfQ2v24q

(minus turrets / silo of course)

I can get this done before first night (4.5m). Ironically, I had to remove all (mostly, not tricky stuff) the belts from the BP in order to make it happen and hand do them, which is sort of the opposite of what I normally do.

The problem is those damn solar panels are so weak and don't charge the bots very fast so you quickly run out of power if you push them too hard.

Replacing poles with BIP/Medium helped as well.

The run to pumpjacks is painful and had to practice running with multitasking BPs, hotkey, forestry a little bit. Can't get away from APM. I'll upload the sub BPs as well when I can figure out why the factorioprints.com UI is bugging on me. They basically just partition that BP so that the robots don't do things out of order.

I spend the 41s of night hand feeding the bot boxes to construct 15 bots. Not sure this is the strategy I want to go forth with, might go straight to RC / roboports instead, but it's a useful metric for how fast I can place entities.

Getting logistics bots will be very useful. Not just the simplification in terms of belting, but also you can hand tune / rate limit requester chests and change that tuning as you push more blueprints overtop what you've already done.

As always, suggestions for improvements welcomed. Feel free to steal as much from this for your own runs as well. The more the merrier.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
New Zealand

yes, absolutely. You are agreeing with me I expect in every sense.

Maybe, it's not clear. You were saying this in the context of "you have to increase production of intermediates" and so ... we're agreeing that's incorrect?

Though your total build will end up being much larger than one that appropriately used buffering

Sure, but again, who cares? The metric is speed. Less is faster to build than more, sure, but the important thing isn't the base but whether reaching 720 each of RF / LDS / RCU is net faster.

Ironically, I had to remove all (mostly, not tricky stuff) the belts from the BP in order to make it happen and hand do them, which is sort of the opposite of what I normally do.

I mean, yeah, that's what I said? That's what you'd have seen me do? There's no irony, it's the fastest way, forcing new & unusual decisions is why I wanted to run WD & RR.

Reducing entities is very important to cut down on robot placement. 2 assemblers require extra inserters, belt, power.

We're only talking about eight T3 assemblers vs sixteen T2 assemblers. Thirty extra inserters and half a stack of belt is lost in the weeds compared to what you get from the module slots. I need ~800 blue circuits in all and I save ~2k green circuits making them at 16% productivity. Don't get stuck on the wrong bottleneck.

Getting logistics bots will be very useful

I don't think I'd consider logistics bots. Why have logibots bring you things from a mall when you could just have more crobots taking them straight to the blueprint? Which you'er importing, so you don't even need items on hand to manually place something to C&P. Logibots don't seem fastest, but someone could post a video of a run showing me otherwise.

Speaking of which, I've now got my WD run down to 1h 21m 9s, so I'm pretty happy. The 82 minute mark was my milestone (for now) for pivoting into Rocket Rush. There's gonna be a bunch more tuning, more likely a complete overhaul, I'll actually need a real steel lane this time.

Edited by the author 2 years ago

"Sure, but again, who cares? The metric is speed."

Absolutely, no argument here! And speed, for me, is imported blueprints and optimal factorio. I'm targeting sub 30 minutes now for WD. Anything more is just a function of operator APM and too subjective to be interesting. To me. IMHO!

I've also said much the same as you elsewhere for other runs. In fact, it's the basic premise of my rush to bots strategy for Any% that I've talked about in this forum. Rush to bots, and then massively overproduce late via megapatches and mini bot factories.

The issue with WD is that we are bottlenecked/critical pathed by our small copper patches. If we had megapatches, we'd have a lot more room for such creativity. 110 copper miners is the most I could get going on a WD map, which means we have to conserve copper for LDS/RCU. Speed Modules is a way of taking copper miners off the critical path, but I am skeptical the profit/loss of that approach is enough. Assemblers / inserters / belts are cheap, but they're not that cheap. Pretty soon iron becomes a bottleneck as well.

Also, we only have 15 bots powered by solar panels. Rapid late overproduction will require more than our current bot setup, I am guessing.

TBH, if you read closely, you will see I was still considering going bots and late overproduction and adding an early bot factory, but recently changed my mind because of the copper miner bottleneck.

On top of that, n(n+1)/2 is still the golden rule. Time is an input that must be utilized.

Which all means I am betting that avoiding any unnecessary use of copper is probably a better way to go for WD - but I'm not 100% confident.

Probably we'll eventually have to try both approaches to be sure. It annoys me to no end there isn't a more methodical method of calculating minimax here. That formula is really my meta-agenda in factorio speedrunning.

But for now for WD, it's the initial approach I mentioned and I'm trying (basically), power -> pumpjack -> miner -> minimall -> RC/modules/base production -> miners -> rocket part production.

Pumpjacks are early because it takes a few seconds for coal to find its way into steamers, and the run time can be used to hand craft, set up the hotkey bar and put down BPs. Buffering the raw oil can't hurt, either. Base production here is the start of GC/BC/steel production that is readily expandable.

Any bot down time will likely be spent just manually laying down belts.

I can get up to RC/M/baseprod in about 5 minutes, which is a pretty good start. Another 5 minutes to get the rest of the miners, furnaces, and base rocket part prod. And then the n(n+1)/2 10 minute ticker starts for rocket part production.

Copper will likely once again be the critical path, but speed modules could help. That would be a good sign, as it means it's likely the optimal approach as we are dedicating all copper production very early on.

As an addendum to the critical path analysis method - when an atomic critical path can not be reduced further, it means you're likely looking at minimal plan time.

It also means we're now looking at maybe a 20-30 minute run for WD.

Using imported blueprints of course!

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Northamptonshire, England

Hey!

I tried Wave Defense the other day for the first time off the back of the conversation in Discord.

It was immensely fun, if a little scary at first not knowing how strong the biters would be, if i'd need to attack or just build.

First run i lasted about 40minutes before the biters had me, second run i got over an hour and much more built and was actually feeding the silo, but painfully slow! (RCU's are awful! :D)

I've since watched Splee's best run and i can see how i had the right ideas, just not the scale and refined techniques you need to use to keep everything ticking over.

The grenade setup and pushing biter bases to keep them away for much longer spells of time seems key.

I'm certainly going to try this one again to get a time that could be posted to speedrun.com to aid in the cause of making it an extended category, it was a refreshing change and fun to boot!

New Zealand

I'm targeting sub 30 minutes now for WD

Have you completed a run yet? What's your PB currently?

It annoys me to no end there isn't a more methodical method of calculating minimax here

Bear in mind that solvability is the enemy of gameplay. Large & accessible Donkeyspace is exactly what makes for strategic variety. And yeah that's a PvP reference, but there's a shared sentiment: if you can calculate the "correct" move, the game stops being interesting, because that's all people do.

So WD Hard is a good time for everyone. The copper bottleneck doesn't matter at all, probably not even for BP fixed seed runs, the limiting factor is just defense. And, sure, yeah, that's in the name of the scenario? Good hint. Fair play.

Edit: Cobai! yeah, I'm enjoying WD, and it's fair to say that anyone's first run is pretty rough. Even my first run on Hard, see above. The key seems to be to have an awareness of where the power spikes / points of danger are. If you're actively keeping slightly ahead of the curve it's survivable. When you're surprised about falling behind (unavoidable on anyone's 1st run), distracted from whatever you're building, responding to a potentially lethal breach, that's when you slip further behind and spiral into despair.

Saying "I did another run but wasn't recording" is a bit bullshit, so let's say I'm highly confident that WD Hard will be viable in under two hours with only a few major adjustments to my route.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Cobai likes this
Germany

Hey Splee, you inspired me to do a WD run myself. Now we can bug Anti to add the category :)

I like the rules you laid out above. Went in without watching your run. The car was a big miss on my side :/ Strategy-wise I looked for a map with all resources inside the initial wall, go for oil earlyish and commit to landmies (which I think I overdid). The fact that you can farm upgrades but not research anything gives the scenario a unique twist with a lot of strategic freedom.

Bilka and Cobai like this
Northamptonshire, England

I will endeavour to get a full run done myself, regardless of time to further the WD cause :)

New Zealand

Nice work, Macros! I was secretly hoping that it'd take people a little longer to catch up with me given I worked my time down from 1h 45m over the last two weeks. But, bam! One published run, there you are. Lift your game Splee, or get pushed out of the hot seat.

I liked your on-belt red chips buffer loop, and blue chips build. I think if you'd had the car, and not overcracked light oil, you'd have had this by quite a bit. Interesting that you also ran this entire thing from a powerplant eating just one belt of coal.

I'm still fond of the slow LDS / RF build I do, then a giant RCUs thing that catches up. I am aware, even as I do it, I'm probably overbuilding for beacons and prodmods in the late game. I'll have to look into that, and not cutting the prodmods promptly is a bad time for me. Though what I really want to do is get the copper & chips buffer in place to start the main push on the daytime of 4. That just means me being faster in the early game.

Your walking landmine push was surprisingly quick, but my current strat still commits me to turret pushing since I'm prioritising buffering 2 lanes of copper ASAP instead of oil before the push. But the landmines are definitely in the WD [Hard] strat, maybe they make it into my Normal as well.

I also like that it's tricky to tell who's "ahead" or "behind" at any point in time, as if that even makes sense with such different builds. I can't even easily steal your cool reds / blues build because it has a different role in your wider strategy. Good times. Looking forward to seeing how Cobai does things.

Germany

we added wave defense as a category :)

macros42 and Bilka like this

Splee, no, I have bits and pieces of a run. I'm really not interested in proving I can do the best time - especially because everyone here only seems to care about operator APM of which my runs are devoid of due to use of imported blueprints.

I'm really just interested in new, clever ideas backed by math. If this doesn't interest you, than I can see that my answer is very unsatisfying.

" solvability is the enemy of gameplay", for you maybe, for me it is the essence of gameplay. I see Factorio as just a search for shortest path in a very large and complex graph. You see it as 'donkeyspace'.

It's hard to discuss when our fundamental assumptions and motivations differ so much, but at least we can agree to disagree I guess.

Perhaps if someone likeminded comes along and posts a video that I find interesting from my perspective, I'll feel motivated to join in and post a complete video as well. But honestly, external validation is not a thing for me.

For now, I contribute in the way that I'd wish others would contribute. Ideas and math.

I'm glad you got WD added, though. Well done. I think it's unfortunate it's not a bot specific run, as it's obviously designed that way.

Prioritizing operator APM in a run with bots already researched seems very counterintuitive to me. But I gave up on caring about what the rules and categories are around here awhile ago, so no big deal.

..

For WD hard, I haven't tried it yet, but I'd go straight to mass artillery and immediately farm upgrades if I couldn't get a rocket up before biters overwhelm the base. Given what I can do in 5 minutes when I'm trying to overcome the copper bottleneck, I can imagine I could do the same for artillery in 5 minutes. It would mean fewer miners, and focused artillery set up.

Once artillery is up, like I said, go for mass upgrades. You'll have quite a lot of cash to do so.

..

I think we might be able to agree on one thing, btw. WD Hard is definitely very interesting. Personally, I think it's more interesting than anything else posted in the videos. Good luck getting anyone to seriously run it, however. I kept on suggesting deathworld, but got no takers.

I love deathworld. Deathworld marathon is even more fun.

If this is what you mean by solvability is the enemy of gameplay, I can agree somewhat. But the real solution there is PvP and not speedrunning.

I'd love to play anyone PvP factorio. Rocket Rush / Imported blueprints!

..

Just did a WD Hard run without dropping anything down. First map, it took about 15 minutes before they overwhelmed my base. Artillery rush is definitely how I'd go there.

Comparing it with your video, I think you can see now how imported blueprints dramatically change the game.

5 minutes to basic artillery is not hard at all with BP which not just pushes back the biters but also increases offensive power via mass upgrades (artillery takes out a lot of spawners).

Totally different game than what you played.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Germany

especially because everyone here only seems to care about operator APM.

You have a very unique view on speedruns. I never heard anyone call the runner an operator. APM is not that important in Factorio speedruns. The abillity to come up with a strategy and execute it without too many mistakes is (at least for now) way more important.

Perhaps if someone likeminded comes along and posts a video..

If everyone thinks that way things will never move forward. Sometimes it's on you to make the first step, just like Splee did here.

I think it's unfortunate it's not a bot specific run, as it's obviously designed that way.

Bots are one of many starting irems. I don't see how it's obvious they should be the focus of this scenario. The name is wave defense, so the obvious focus is defense/combat related.

I kept on suggesting deathworld, but got no takers.

Deathworl is a speedrun category for over half a year now. Feel free to play it and don't forget to submit your run ;)

"APM is not that important in Factorio speedruns ... execute it without too many mistakes is (at least for now) way more important."

"Execute it" is literally what APM is. Actions per minute. It's not 'mistakes per minute'.

But, look, proof is the pudding. TAS run doesn't even use bots, and is by far the fastest run around here. Has really great operator APM.. Not sure about the strategy, but who cares when you can do everything with nanosecond speed.

In AI versus human competitions, they specifically have to throttle AI APM, cause if they didn't, it would never be a competition - even if the AI was dead stupid.

Edited by the author 2 years ago