Warfactory 2 design

Warfactory is a 1.12 Modpack made specifically for large faction server SMPs, based around HBM:NTM and Gregtech, using Modular Warfare Shining and possibly Mcheli for combat. The Modpack features an in-house fork of the Warforge claim mod, adjusted for a more dynamic, fair and exciting faction experience.

General Principles

The pack must be accommodating to both veterans and new players, offering experience that is well documented and easily inferred from context clues. The progression will be tailored towards a much faster and dynamic style, compared to vanilla GT.

Resources will be given very generously and infrastructure will be easy to set up, and in-game challenges will be tailored towards quick-thinking and high performance instead of endurance (grind). Combat balance is very important to us. Every item and system will be designed and improved with more tactical combat experience in mind. We take a hard stance against creative flight, buff stacking, teleportation, insane armor values and other game breaking features that have commonly been seen in other commonly used packs. Guile gives far greater rewards than material advantages.

“Shoulders of Giants” Approach

Having certain “milestone” machines maintain their relevance across several tiers, undergoing only incremental upgrades. This will incentivize staying in one place. Moreover, as long as a team has good risk management, they’ll have backups of these machines to get them up and running easily, making progression faster and more rewarding. Say a ULV reworked blast furnace has no coils. As we progress, we give it coil upgrades and incrementally approve what it can cook.

To encourage different play styles, we will have 3 different win conditions:

• Wonder winner – The team which has the nicest buildings and wonders.
• Domination victory – The team that topples the most bases.
• Progression victory – The most technologically advanced team.

Combat

This is the section for the combat for WF2.

Infantry combat

The most exciting part of the game is perhaps the infantry combat. From our experience, players want a more tactical and grounded combat that still indeed feels like infantry combat. In the past, the traditional packs, which were not made with combat in mind, would give players access to overpowered tools. The combat would be more similar to fights from DragonBall , where the goal is to use the most overpowered and cheaty method of inflicitng damage while causing game to have trouble registering hits on you. In our modpack, players will need to be aware of their positioning, make strategic pushes, build forward operating bases, manage their inventory to avoid slowdowns, like in other conventional shooters

Guns

Just like warfactory 1.0, we will have guns in the pack. Our current mod of choice is modular warfare shining, allowing us to have a framework for constantly expanding arsenal. We will also make use of new and improved HBM guns and turrets. We will integrate the guns with NTM armor system, that will make for interesting combat, devoid of bullet sponges and cheap one-shot tactics.

Weight system

Using likes of Iguana tweaks, we will introduce a simple weight system that prevents players from becoming a walking armory. Those limits will only apply to combat-related things, as to not slow down progression inside of the modpack. Furthermore, we will add inventory limits that will prevent players from stashing too many things such as medicine, to prevent drawn out combat and encourage team play. Vehicles will not be possible for players to pick up either, making them a lot more precious and encourage proper handling of them, instead of it being a pocket weapon of mass destruction. Vehicles will be deployed using special assembling multiblocks, that one will need to deploy on the field.

Medical system

To spice up gameplay, a simple medical system will be introduced. There are 2 types of damage: "Light" damage and "Hard" damage. Light damage will damage player normally, allowing players to use simple healing methods such as bandages, pain killers. Hard damage decreases player's health pool making them unable to recover without use of more sophisticated means. For such cases, more potent drugs will be introduced, such as opiates. Those are very potent, but dangerous drugs, which can heal, but have many drawbacks and should be handled with caution. Reckless use may cause instant death, or strong debuffs. Last class are stimulants, which are the source of buffs. They also can come with drawbacks. The system may grow with time, however this groundwork goes a long way and makes healing a bit more interesting compared to vanilla

Base raiding

Raiding should be as difficult as defending yourself. As veterans of the modded landscape, we have noticed the general meta to be:

You make cobble box underground and push progression mindlessly Make cheapest throwable explosive to destroy claims (if they exist) Use psyops or bruteforce to find other cobble boxes Raid the cobble box to get some loot Hope you won't get found, or you need to move the entire base in about an hour

We completely disagree with this meta, it makes attacking too powerful and impossible to defend against due to the nature of minecraft. Base planning makes no sense when, after your base is found, the entire team will be occupied with defending itself against the lowest tier explosives. The only real way to defend yourself is to never get found, which is not an engaging and fun game loop. Attacking teams also spend most of their time traveling around the map, trying to find the base via bruteforce, which is not a fun experience either. Which encourages cheating, in the form of BlockESP to make the experience bearable. Our mod: Warforge factions will make players rethink the way they play faction servers. Bases will require time demanding strategic sieges that will take strategic effort from the attacker. With extended defensive tooling from mods such as NTM, base design, defenses, and automation will hopefully become an important aspect of the game. The land you will settle down on will also be very significant, giving teams advantages for settling down in resource rich areas. Some exclusive rare materials that will make specific subbranches of military and industry more viable. Those will not be required for progression, but offer tactical resource advantage.

Early Combat

The first combat will be done using the Large Metal Press multi, which works similar to the burner press from HBM. This will be used to obtain the first guns. The Gear Foundry will be the way you make armor, weapons and advanced tools. It will be upgradable similar to the Chemplant from GTNH.

Radar

We will feature tools like the radar to make finding bases viable in the early midgame of the tech progression tree. Allowing for base finding to be much more streamlined, and making hiding strategies much less viable. Radar will require computation, power, and be placed relatively high up with access to the skyline. Quite cumbersome and fragile, yet game changing when it comes to recon. It will find an average point of enemy bases and index them according to how big and populous the base is. Meaning, the teams that are more ahead will have more eyes on them.

Factions progression

Factions will be at the heart of your factory, they provide as your source of chunk claiming and chunk loading. However, to expand the area you can control the strength of your defenses. Your factions will have limited possible chunks they can claim, to expand their limit, teams must provide special resources to the faction, in order to increase their claim power.

Suppliers

Special multiblocks called suppliers will allow bases to bolster their defenses. Multiblocks will require a steady supply of quality food to increase the defense factor of a certain area, about 3x3 chunk area (will only work on claimed chunks). For a buff to be applied, it must be done while not under siege. The machine will refuse to buff the base if it was turned on after the siege started. Machines will increase their strength depending on the amount of food supplied. Type of food item will be determined by faction tier, lower tier factions will require lower tier foods, while high tier factions will require high quality foodstuffs. The amount of claimed chunks will also increase the amount of food required.

MC-heli

We want to make use of a custom fork of MCHELI, developed to integrate into our pack. Vehicles will help players to move around the map and conduct sieges. It may not come with WF2, as it will be a challenge to refactor.

Progression

The 2 Main mods carrying progression will be Gregtech and HBM, with focus on Gregtech and HBM filling in with what we theme is the "highlight" content.

Asymmetric progression

To make progression and battles more dynamic, we want to introduce specific branches of progression depending on player's access to resources. For example, player has access to renewable large source of uranium. This allows player to start nuclear research early, giving access things such as early nuclear power, low yield nuclear weapons. Another example would be access to a specific resource that would allow player to produce energy weapons, which while not explicitly better than standard weapons, would be more effective against standard bullet-proof armor. Such design decisions would be sprinkled around the modpack. To enforce uniqueness of those resources, the map would have a limited amount of such resources, regulated by the administrator. This would encourage turf wars, to make players fight over strategic resources across the map.

Faster progression

Our goal is to make progression mesh well with the fast landscape that modded faction wars is. Let's be honest, GregTech's call to fame came from it's "immersive" (slow) gameplay. While we do want to retain the complexity and logistical challenge that GregTech provides, we want to remove the tedious, repetitive parts that are present in the mod. This ranges from large sweeping changes, to small optimizations. Here is a list of things that we want to introduce in order to archive this:

• Early, but limited access to AE2
• Recursive pipe shuttering
• Multiblock blueprints
• Complete rework of early game in order to decrease micro-crafting
• Early centralized power and more streamlined powergrid handling

Powergrid handling

From experience in management of large bases, power management in GregTech is poorly designed. In early game, it is a chore. Low voltages make your expansion limited, it is impossible to have a properly designed, centralized power system that players can expand. Lategame however, it becomes overtly reliant on storing massive amounts of EU inside different kinds of EU storages. By the time you are in lategame, many interesting solutions are presented to the player, which in my opinion is a lost opportunity when it comes to game design. This does not even take into account AE2's EU/RF p2p's which trivialize power grid planning, to a point that all other tools become almost obsolete. We plan to mend this issue, using few simple machines and design choices.

Large transformers

To make power grid managment easier, players will get access to large transformers, which are simple multiblock structures that allow player to place energy hatches and dynamos, that will transform power. They would be tiered, with first tier allowing player to transform power from LV to HV and another one that would be able to tranform power for all of the tiers (up to UV). Goal is to make power grid managment much more streamlined, less reliant on hacky transformer chains or separate power grids.

AC power

To help players transfer power between different points. An "AC" power converter machine would be introduced. "AC" power would be a voltage type that would be unusable with machines, however would not suffer the same per-block loss like the "DC" power. Some kind of loss would still be at play, either passive loss on conversion between voltages or a loss proportional to amount of current drawn through the system. The AC power is there to ease dealing with power transfer in the early game to midgame, having less of an impact as games progresses into lategame.

Removal of the power "cheese"

To make power menagment matter in lategame stages. We will curb the amount of EU player can store. We will also restrict ways player can transfer EU, to avoid things such as AE2 completely breaking the game meta.

Steam Age Rework

Steam age is the biggest thorn in GT's design. It suffers from issues that we specifically want to avoid in our modpack. We opt into redesigning the steam age to focus on player to quickly be able to reach LV, while allowing player to make use of extra machines, that will stay relevant well into the midgame.

Chart for the steam age progression, showcasing the flow and key resources required to progress. (May change at any time)

Steam power overhaul

Steam is a rather underutilized power source in later stages of GregTech, due to its unremarkable power density. It is a shame that this power source gets completely outshined by the the time you get to LV. We want to introduce higher density steam types, which paired with high pressure pipes allow for scalable throughput beyond earlygame. With NTM there are also even more interesting way to boil water, using many different reactors.

Other current ideas for new ways to generate steam are:

• The Boiler Tower, a multi which gives higher yields exponentially the taller it is.
• The Heat Exchanger, a multi which turns lava and water into steam.
• A reworked Large Boiler system to overcome its flaws and to make them relevant again.

In a parallel to the real world’s development, petrochemistry is unlocked very early on. High-pressure steam is used to extract oil and refine it. Of course, these early methods are not nearly as successful as more advanced systems, and we cannot refine advanced petrochemicals like HOG this way. Bunker fuel, kerosene, etc is unlocked around this time.

With this, we can construct power systems that will sustain us far into the electrical tiers.

Early Combustion

In alignment with the “shoulders of giants” philosophy, the player will be given crude combustion engines in late ULV. These engines, through incremental upgrade, can sustain them well into the LV-EV tiers. To begin, you will only be able to produce crude kerosene and bunker fuel, and suffer poor efficiency and very crude engines that can only really sustain you for a while.

Early petro fuels won’t produce power, but will power boilers to produce oodles of steam. Direct combustion engines (and steam turbines) are unlocked in LV, but can be made easily by retrofitting your early boiler systems.

Low Voltage

Low voltage will unlock AE2 as we recognize that this mod is inseparable with GT due to its Gregtech’s complexity ramping up as soon as player gets to later stages. Early AE2 will empower the team to produce larger and more complex factories, as they won’t feel they need to wait until they reach AE2 (common issue with GTNH). This may make people think this will kill complexity, which is why we opt to enable keep channels enabled.

Players will unlock plethora of basic self defence guns and infrastructure, such as barbed wire, concrete.

AE2's common pitfall: oversimplification of bases

AE2 is a powerful tool, which can do many many things. This is what makes it great. However, AE2 can actually oversimplify a lot of systems, via its powerful ondemand crafting system. We want to give players access to the powerful tools, though stray away from introducing AE2s full overpowered suite of tools that make game become AE2 trivia simulator.

ZPM Voltage

I doubt we need to go this far, only one team will most likely even make it to ZPM or beyond it

Multi Rework

For WF2 we want to move away from GCYM, as it has some intrinsic problems with it, as well as it doesn’t fit into what we want for a pvp pack.

We will implement new multis, either through an external mod or through WFCore. And the consensus is that the first round of multis will be available in early HV to incentivise the creation of large scale automation early on.

The Parallels will most likely be akin to how GT++ calculates parallels.

NTM Space

Since we are also porting the NTM space content, we are looking into integrating it into Warfactory, and as it's such a major part of the progression it will get it's own section.

Takeaways and lessons from WF1

• All movement options within Warfactory 2, have to be evaluated and checked for if they are too overpowered, not to have a repeat of the hooks situation from Warfactory 1.
• Ensure armor and weapons are tested THOROUGHLY (to prevent a repeat of the redstone arsenal incident)
• Make sure to do small scale tests with testers who are intentionally made to cause as much lag as possible to then make a spark profile to find sources of lag to prevent another visual ores situation.
• We will also be cutting down on the amount of mods to prevent interactions in-between the mods.

The Dev Test

A Dev Test will be orchestrated as a way of engaging the community before WF2, while still using it as a platform to see if the more experimental features work in a event setting.

The devtest will be done as follows, first the top 2 people of each team would be invited to a discord. This is to discuss the rules and to make any last minute alterations to the pack before the devtest takes place.

After everything is sorted out, all the members of each respective team will be added, and if there are still server slots there will be a google form setup for invitations.

The prevailing idea is that once the pack reaches LuV, the devtest will occur. As it is not a traditional event, the server will have very specific win conditions. Those being finishing LuV and obtaining the Crystal Mainframe. This will be akin to the "Science Victory" in Civ6.