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. Another idea in the works is the idea of “Time Gated Progression”. This is a measure to nerf large teams and allow smaller teams to survive. This will be executed with the use of RecipeStages, where each passing day unlocks a new voltage tier that people can progress into, Steam Day 1, Lv Day 2, Mv Day 3 Etc.

“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.

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.

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.

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 CEU with the GCYL:CEU add-on The original mod progression will be modified to fit our pack’s principles.

Steam Age Rework

The main idea behind the Steam Age is the idea of “Subtiers”. Within the age which are used to bring new mechanics and ideas to the table to differentiate it from other packs. As the Steam age is notoriously boring and in Warfactory 1 we completely avoided it, opting for a removal of the steam age.

Low pressure

The first Subtier will be “Low Pressure” which are the standard bronze steam machines, and the main goal will be to obtain Steel, which is the material for the next tier.

New Steel line

This features the reworked Blast Furnace, which instead of outputting steel in solid form, outputs it in liquid form. This idea was ripped straight from GT:Mega, as it works quite well there as an early way to incentivize automation.

Strandcaster, which inputs water to cool the ingots and outputs steam, and the way players will transport liquid steel is using the new Brick pipes. The result is a beefy array of large multis that will last the player for a long time. Perhaps it could accept simple incremental upgrades as the tier advances? (Recall, IRL blast furnaces have not changed considerably in the last century.)

*Note: having large multiblocks disincentives moving

New Rubber line

The idea behind this is to make rubber a chain that is done early on in the game, and also works forever with zero inputs other than sulphur. This is needed, as the blast furnace does not have a Gui and needs the hatches to function. [More theory crafting needed]

• Automated Rubber Plantation?
• What tree-interaction systems are added by GT? HBM?
• Is a custom multi needed?
• Perhaps this multi should require a view of the sky.

High pressure

The main goal of this tier is to obtain the Crucible from HBM, which is used to make the mat for the next subtier, “Advanced Alloy”, and it also brings forth the idea of “Hot gas reclaim” for Blast furnaces.

Crucible

It will be based on the HBM Crucible and will be extremely steel heavy, to incentivise people to use the gas preheating system. The crucible will be used to obtain Advanced alloy, which is a staple material through the Steam age and up until late Mv.

Gas Preheating

This system will use Hot Blast Stoves, that will turn air into Preheated Air, that can then be inputted into a Colossal Blast Furnace, to get extra parallels and speed that will remain unrivalled until far later in the game.

Another thing is that the EBF Steel recipe will be removed, as it brings unwanted power creep into the game, and will be replaced with a more involved and interesting way to create steel, other than just inputting oxygen and wrought iron in an EBF.

Pressure Pipes

One of the many power rebalances to steam brought by Warfactory 2, these are pipes that have immense throughput, while only being able to transfer steam. Allowing for the throughput problems that make steam unviable to be rectified.

The first tier ones will be made with steel and advanced alloy.

Mining Explosives

Mining is a tedious process in default GT. Doubly so in vanilla. While big mining vehicles are clearly out of the question, the next best thing is planting explosives and gnawing away at big veins that way.

Ultra High Pressure?? Unsure on the name

The goal of this tier is to obtain electronic circuits, which will be used to progress to Lv. This tier will be very steel heavy in the new multis for creating the circuits. The main concept is that the amount of steps will be increased but the cost of a circuit will go down dramatically to incentivize automation.

New PCB line

Early petrochem equals early plastics. Simple Bakelite and whatnot can be used as an effective base for circuits. Sure, you can make wooden circuits with GT’s base prices. But an ENIAC-style crude plastic circuit is far cheaper if you have the time to automate it.

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.

This isn't confirmed as we haven't thought of a concrete system for it

Main reason for it's inclusion is that It can give players in the time gates more stuff to do, for an easier allocation of tasks while still implementing a genuinely cool system

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.

The question is: how meta do we make steam turbines? Will they sustain us far into higher tiers?

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 GTHN). 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.

Luv-Uhv Tenets

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.

GCYL Balancing

While GCYL does have it's short comings, I do believe that it suites a pvp pack. This is due to the fact that, due to the abundance of lines that are made, it makes it easier for teams to allocate simple tasks.

As in each tier, there are maybe 2-3 large lines and 5-7 smaller lines, that can be allocated quite easily to a large group of people.

Not much has to be changed as, a large chunk of the more insufferable parts of GCYL are in the late game. Most prominent examples of which are things such as Bromine and Indium. Which only become a major concern around the time of Luv+.

A concern when it comes to GCYL is that, due to the large amount of tile-entities present. This will hopefully be addressed in the devtest, which will give further insight on what to do when it comes to conserving tick time.

An idea to solves this would be, after someone makes a line, said line can be done on a single multi akin to what GTNH does with it's Quantum Force Transformer or what GCYL does lategame with it's chemplant.

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.