Just responding here to have my voice be heard. Please revert this “Bugfix”. Half my factory isn’t working anymore and I feel that it should be possible to do output-input directly without a conveyor…
I enjoyed butting while it lasted. It made for some very interesting builds…
but I expected this change and it has added some extra complexity that I (now) enjoy. (There’s been some grumbling along the way.) With the payout decreases and being forced to use more space the difficulty level has been raised. So far, that feels like it will be a good thing. Already, mastering the scenarios based on money require more thought. I like it.
Fixing this bug increased the difficulty. I found the game too easy when I discovered it. You could make a 9x change in concentration within a tiny area - Sort of made the mid tier machines not worth the trouble since you need two of them to match the speed.
My gut says that there should be alternate layouts for machines that can be researched (eg swap the autoclave) but I cannot comment on the impact.
I think it just looks better. I played this way before the change (apart from very rare cases when there was no space) and it doesn’t ruin the game or make the Master unachievable. There still is a challenge to use minimum space and there still is the possibility of compact designs, so that’s not really an argument to revert this change. Maybe add a research option for this (maybe have one of the upgrades that makes the machines cheaper also add this option; 3rd or 4th upgrade), so the people who really want it are happy and get a balance penalty.
Taken from the website you linked
“Of course, bugs that break the game balance usually aren’t eligible for this, unless the game is rebalanced to accommodate them. Game Breaking Bugs are never eligible, of course, owing to making the game unwinnable. No-one likes those bugs.”
(Read more: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M … z3d4w8VjU3)
The bug breaks the balance of the game so it was removed. I too was upset when the butting was removed, but I don’t want it back in. It makes it too easy in a mechanics point of view and it looks weird from an aesthetics point of view.
So even though you love the bug, it isn’t some funky graphical glitch it is a glitch that affects gameplay to the point where it makes it easier. Mortal combats combo system is different as you’re fighting someone who could use those same combos against you, and the game then evolves to you trying to not be combo’d.
Whereas in Big Pharma, I’m quite sure the AI have artificial code generated factories and aren’t playing on “physical” factory floors, so they’re programmed without this in mind.
[size=115]So changing this “bug” back isn’t as simple as changing some lines of code back to what they were, Tim will have to go back and change values within the code for the AI to make them balanced for the player being able to butt machines up.[/size]
The feature could be argued balanced if this was a PvP game, where two actual players could compete and use the same facotry tools/layouts against each other.
There is still some challenge to finding the minimum space, but it seems far less. The fact is that there are now more configurations that are close to optimal. It’s easier to stumble on near optimal configurations, and less-considered configurations won’t be much worse than the optimal. I don’t see that anyone has argued that now there is no challenge, but rather that the challenge is reduced, and the reward is less.
I actually found it quite fun to take some time considering the optimal solution. Now I feel I don’t have to. I can just throw things down and cover close to the minimum space possible (i.e. space taken up by machines plus one cell for belt on each and minimal gaps). This aspect of the game just feels less of a challenge now.
Note that butting machines doesn’t automatically save space, seeing as it forces a specific alignment. With the belt, machines are much more flexible in their position, whereas without, you might be locked into a position that actually ends up being less optimal. Figuring out when or when not to butt was fun, I thought.
Mathematically speaking, the machine butting ban removes at least one possible configuration and provides zero new configurations, so it MUST strictly reduce the total number of configurations.
This seems to be overall good for gameplay, encouraging more though.
However, I think that rather than ‘not being allowed to place thing here’ it should just not work. Like putting a maker right up to an output. The game lets you do that, but the output doesn’t take the finished product. I think machines should do the same thing. And explain in the tutorial why this nice neat looking production line doesn’t work.
The new set of configurations is a subset of what they were before, yes, but this does not mean any more thought is required. Quite the opposite; it requires less.
Consider a challenge to “find the closest prime number to one million”. There are many incorrect answers, that is, non-primes. There are many primes, but we could say that one is a better solution than another if it is closer to one million. We can now impose a restriction on this problem analogous to restricting butting, though quite extreme for the sake of clarity: “the solution must be less than 100”.
Mathematically, there are now fewer solutions to the problem, but it is actually easier to find the best solution.
Imposing restrictions can definitely reduce the thought required to solve a problem, and this is a prime example (hurhur).
A machine is a machine and if it gets build, it will have an input and an output.
Can we link machines together? Depends on the input and output and if both are compatible.
I liked the way it was, but probably this was not the way the machines have been build to fit together.
If we would like it complicated, then we should have a research upgrade option to enable this, but this should increase machine cost, as they have to be reconfigured to fit in this combination.
Personally, it felt like not being able to put a machine output right next to the export port was a bug, rather than being able to butt machines together being a bug.
While this change forces us to be able to see chemicals on the belts between every machine, It was more natural for then to be right next to each other, like every other factory system I’ve used (Such as most Minecraft mods).
In order to make the belt requirement more natural, a device should have to extract the ingredient from the machine, much like Factorio, rather than a belt coming out of the machine.
With respect I disagree. It was a planned decision, not “the easy way out”. Reasons:
- People skim over tutorials. If I had done as you suggest, lots of people would be asking “Why does my machine suddenly not work”. In my opinion, it is better to prevent people making the mistake in the first place, telling them why at the point of placing the machine, when their mind is focussed on the task.
- Old production lines in existing save games would be invalidated upon making the change. I’ve essentially giving everybody an amnesty, all existing production lines will continue to work but new ones will not.
With regards to all the other discussion of butting vs non-butting, all your comments are fair. Preference is indeed a thing. And my preference is no butting! That is all. 
I get that. But it’s still the easy way out. You could program it so non-connected machines have a little hazard icon that sits above them until they’re connected, with a tooltip explaining the machine is unconnected and machines must be connected via belt. People would understand this just fine, even on loading older maps, and it would allow you to store unused machines in spare space without concerning yourself with the orientation of the unused machines.