GregTech vs. EE (My argument *against* the addition of EE)

[superriku11]

Ooooh. Okay, I completely understand your side of things. This is EXACTLY the reason that I think computer craft needs to be more expensive. I've built huge, complex, expensive Forestry farm automated systems using RailCraft and such, only to have someone come along and say "You know I could have done this with a handful of diamonds, some stone, some glass, some redstone, and about half the time, right?"
It makes you feel terrible. Your achievements are under-valued, because someone ELSE does it the easy way. No one puts appropriate value in build complexity, or difficulty. You get your work undervalued, because someone else did the same thing more efficiently. Come to think of it, Superriku, you might be interested in the City of Industry project. I think the City's ideas can be summed up in something I said awhile back (and in fact, it's posted on the thread's OP)
"The point isn't to do things the most efficient way possible. The point is to do things the most awesome way possible." ~Me. I'll talk to the project leader about it, if you're interested.

D: Post merge didn't work this time

Glad someone gets it. It takes away from what you do, especially if it's impressive, if I can say "I can sit and write code that uses a cheap resource item to do this for me".

As I said, every part of Minecraft is the sense of accomplishment. Otherwise, why build things? So you can call it ego if you want. It is slightly in a sense. However it's not one person's problem that they don't feel a sense of accomplishment from something.

Turtles are the same issue. I have one friend that says "The things they CAN do are overpowered, but if you can figure out how to program them it's okay. Programming is hard so it balances it." Where as I think Lua is ridiculously easy to learn and just because you have to spend maybe an hour or so reading up on it doesn't mean Turtles are balanced.

So it comes down to, he takes shortcuts he feels are fair, I avoid the same ones because I think they're overpowered. It really is an opinion, but this is why some sort of line should be drawn on things. Like ComputerCraft. I like it for it's computers and what they're capable of. I wouldn't like it if they removed CC as a whole, but if they just removed Turtles, I'd be okay with that. If they made them a lot more expensive to build I think that'd be a good solution too.

On note of Macerators, when I Macerate most of my ores that I get, with the exception of Iron, I use them almost as fast as I get them. Iron is just so abundant it isn't funny most times. So I feel Macerators, even though they double ores, are fair. Because personally I'd have to spend twice as much time mining without Macerators. For me, not having Macerators works in vanilla. But in FTB, things use ores too fast. So I feel almost like Macerators were added because it was noticed that you use ores faster so the best solution was "Build a pretty easy machine, sacrifice a bit of power, get enough ores so you don't have to spend half your time mining."

As far as the City of Industry project, I don't really know anything about it right now, but I'll look into it. Thanks for the offer.




Dex Luther, I hate to have to tempt mods to lock this topic by responding to you yet again. But I almost feel like you're here to troll me. I'm not the only one who feels a sense of accomplishment from doing complex things, having a good mining run, building awesome stuff. Almost everybody feels that. And I'm surely not the only one that feels it's diminished if you "cheat" along the way.

So it comes down to the opinion of, do you think EE is overpowered or not? EE2 was overpowered, that's commonly agreed upon. So far I'm not sure the developer may fully know how to make it properly balanced. For the good of the pack and all, I really hope he does. Because if it does end up being unbalanced, and I mean actually unbalanced, then I'm sure more people than just me will feel it ruins the game.


I'm about to talk about a way I think might balance EE3 well, in the next post. Max character limit....

 

[superriku11]

The following is a conceptual idea on how I think a good way to balance EE would be. Additional adjustments would also be good, I thought of this on the spot, and I know I'm not the best person to come up with how to balance things. A lot of this talk is how it would programmatically work. Skip it if you want.

What I think the best thing to do for balance is somehow restrict items into initial tiers, maybe three of them. Make it so that there's absolutely no way to turn a tier 1 item into a tier 2 item, for example. But only at first. Once you have a certain item later on, give the ability to go up or down a tier. And if you power up this item somehow, make it so you can go up or down an additional tier.

Basically make it so that you can exchange items, however you can't turn a bunch of Sand to Diamonds for example, because Sand would be tier 1, and Diamonds would be one of the higher tiers, maybe even the top tier. But once you get more end-game and you have the next item transformer down the line rather than the basic starter one, then you're able to go up or down a tier.

I think an enchanting type solution might work. Make it so that to go up or down a tier, you need a special table, like an enchantment table. For every X amount of blocks (which are reasonably hard to obtain) that you surround this table with, you gain the ability to go up or down a tier. And it should be that ultimately, once you surround it by a reasonable number, maybe 30 or so, then you can essentially change any item into any other item assuming you have enough.

In a sense it's like what I consider to be the good part of the GregTech solution. Save the ability to make anything until late-game. GregTech does it by requiring massive amounts of power for the Matterfabricator, but provides a cheaper option to get only some items earlier in the game, with the Industrial Centrifuge.

If EE3 did this by making it so you can change Cobble to Dirt (Tier 1), Iron to Copper (Tier 2 maybe), and so on and so forth, it could make it more balanced. And it has to be so that the enchantment table type device that lets you exchange through tiers is easy enough to get, and so that a few of the blocks you have to surround it can be gotten once you're well off your feet, maybe mid-game. That way, you can get basic tier transformations by a point that's probably fair. And by the time you're mid-game, if you have enough resources for enough of those blocks, you'll be able to break through a tier or two and do Iron to Diamonds for example.



The easiest way to implement this, even programmatically would be with EMC values. Get EMC of input item. If EMC is greater than X and less than Y, it's a Tier Z (1, 2, 3, whatever you want). Check for surrounding blocks. If enough surrounding blocks, allow +1 or -1 tier exchange. If not, inter-tier exchange not allowed.

Through configs this would also be super easy to change to your liking. If the mod loads the tier definitions and EMC values from config files, you could change them to what you feel is more balanced. So then you can set individual EMC values for block IDs. Something along the lines of this format would be easy for the program to parse and easy for people to read: 4(Cobblestone)=1. There would be a return (parser would look for CR/LF to check for the next block ID definition) between each line. At the beginning, it will look what number is there, and know that is the block ID. Then, the parser will look for the next equals sign, skipping over the name of the item (the name is only for your reading ease, it doesn't help the parsing whatsoever) and finding the number after the equals.




This is a basic type of parser that could load from config files quickly enough. There's probably worse written ones. And in another file you'd have definitions for what amount of EMC defines the next tier. Also, I heard EMC is removed from EE3 without a plan to add it back, but possibly, the EMC could be transparent. For example, you can arrange your Iron to get Gold, but you can't arrange your Gold to get Diamonds without the tier trading table. And of course that would all depend on tier definitions. But basically the mod would check for what item(s) you're putting in and what you're supposed to get out. If what you put in and what you get out are of different tiers, then it won't allow you to do it. And of course the tiers don't have to be hardcoded, they can be loaded by a parser from a config file as well so you can have more or less tiers if you want to configure it that way.









Sorry about all the conceptual development talk, skip that if you want.




And one additional thing I just thought of, transformations of the same tier can take away from your stone durability, but transformations between tiers can take away from your durability plus your levels. Not a lot of levels, just a few. I realize this doesn't really restrict it much, but I feel like it's throwing a nice extra requirement in there that would make it mostly balanced.


If EE did all these things, I think I'd even like it to be added. This actually would make it more than another way besides GregTech to exchange items, and it would make it balanced. It'd be more easily accessible earlier in the game to exchange items, but it wouldn't be overpowered. I think the tiers are a good concept. However once you get to the point of being able to exchange the lowest tier for the highest tier, that should have a significant cost in the surrounding blocks around the table you'd need, and it should have a cost of some of your input items, and a decent cost from some of your levels.

Basically this would then allow you to still do what GregTech does without simply being an easier version of it. GregTech lets you change Cobble to Diamonds (through the process of Scrap and a Matterfabricator) but it makes it hard to do so unless you're very well setup and pretty end-game. EE3 could do what I described above and I feel it would adequately restrict it as well. Then with EE3 you could still change Cobble to Diamonds, but it will have a high resource cost to build the "machine" (the arrangement of the table and the surrounding blocks it requires) to let you exchange all the way from bottom tier all the way up to top tier, and a higher level cost so you can't just use it infinitely. Basically, something just a little like the Fusion Reactor. Very expensive to build, but once built, you get all the Matterfabrication you want really. Except in EE3 it'd be a little better because it wouldn't be a strictly end-game thing. You'd be able to go up or down 1 or 2 tiers when you're mid-game, but you wouldn't be able to do the ultimate Cobble (lowest tier) to Diamonds (highest tier) type of exchange fortunately.

 

[Narcisism]

I do believe Pahimar mentioned something about "circles". If you've seen the anime, they have the transmutation circles that are needed for most transmutations. Right now, those aren't implemented, but I think they will be at some point. So uh.... yeah. There's that.

 

[Hoff]

I do believe Pahimar mentioned something about "circles". If you've seen the anime, they have the transmutation circles that are needed for most transmutations. Right now, those aren't implemented, but I think they will be at some point. So uh.... yeah. There's that.

Also the recipe for the minium stone will be changed to need red water to make it which is extremely toxic to the player and must be handled with care. This version of EE3 will rely a bit more on things that are from the anime, me thinks.

 

[superriku11]

Well I read most of your post, I kind of agree but I'm not jumping to conclusions about EE3 as I haven't touched it yet. But I did read you wanted a machine to craft your UU matter for you so I'd say Merry Christmas but its been here for you the whole time



http://gregtech-addon.wikispaces.com/UUM-Assembler

Oh wow, I completely forgot about that. I looked it up a while ago but never actually used it.

What I more meant though, was remove the ability to use UU-Matter in your regular crafting table. Require this block. It makes more "scientific sense" that a machine is required to turn UU-Matter into stuff. But make it only require a bit of power, not a ton. Enough that 2 or 3 Advanced Solar Panels could run it, I think that would be good. It also just adds to that "GregTech Type Complexity" that myself and some others I'm sure like.

 

[makeshiftwings]

If I were the developer behind gregtech I would remove solar panels, water mills, wind mills, geothermal generators and maybe even generators

LOL... that's pretty much every generator. You think the only generator anyone should be able to build is a Nuclear one? That would be an awfully boring mod. If the only one you want to build is a nuclear reactor, then you could build one, but wishing for a mod that simply deletes entire chunks of IC is silly.

 

[Hoff]

LOL... that's pretty much every generator. You think the only generator anyone should be able to build is a Nuclear one? That would be an awfully boring mod. If the only one you want to build is a nuclear reactor, then you could build one, but wishing for a mod that simply deletes entire chunks of IC is silly.

No way man if there's a way to renew the resource you can't use it as a fuel! that's way too easy! We need to remove lava!

 

[Jadedcat]

I have edited the name-calling out of this thread. Please keep your discussions of opposing view points to a civil tone.